Roadworks

Medieval Britain, medieval roads

Valerie Allen, Ruth Evans, Valerie Allen, Ruth Evans

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719085062
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Roadworks: Medieval Britain, medieval roads is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study of roads and wayfinding in medieval England, Wales and Scotland. It looks afresh at the relationship between the road as a material condition of daily life and the formation of local and national communities, arguing that the business of road maintenance, road travel and wayfinding constitutes social bonds. It challenges the long-held picture of a medieval Britain lacking in technological sophistication, passively inheriting Roman roads and never engineering any of its own. Previous studies of medieval infrastructure tend to be discipline-specific and technical. This accessible collection draws out the imaginative, symbolic, and cultural significance of the road. The key audience for this book is scholars of medieval Britain (early and late) in all disciplines. Its theoretical foundations will also ensure an audience among scholars of cultural studies, especially those in urban studies, transport studies, and economic history.

1

Introduction: roads and writing

Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans

It was the road, wet, rough, and uncertain as it sometimes was, that made the land a kingdom.¹

Roads and writing

In his 1966 discussion of Sigmund Freud’s metaphorical model of the structure of the psychical apparatus as a writing machine (the so-called ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, a wax pad covered with cellophane, on which a child first writes and then lifts the cellophane to erase the words, only for the words to remain imprinted on the wax below), the philosopher Jacques Derrida yokes together two apparently disparate terms: ‘We should have to study together, genetically and structurally, the history of the road and the history of writing.’² He makes a similar comment a year later, this time in the context of a discussion of the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, proposing that ‘writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road’, should be ‘meditated upon’ together.³

Both comments occur in very different contexts (psychoanalysis and writing; anthropology and writing). Each context provides some potentially suggestive ways of thinking about the material (geographical, political, technological) nature of medieval roads as forms of inscription on the landscape. This is not to say that we believe the reality of roads can only be apprehended in terms of a Wittgensteinian ‘language-game’ (the linguistic conditions that make it possible to make well-formulated statements about an object of study). Nor do we think that the reality of the medieval road can be reduced to, or made analogous to, a question about how key thinkers figure the metaphor of the track, trace or path in relation to the traditional binaries of writing, whether speech/writing (in the case of Lévi-Strauss), or memory/writing (in the case of Freud). Rather, Derrida’s intriguing juxtaposition of roads and writing draws our attention to their shared cultural histories. This allows us to think about the history of roads in some unexpected and productively new ways.

Derrida observes how Freud’s model of the reception and storage of sense data figures writing (the inscription of new knowledge, memories, perceptions in the mind) as a breaching and a broaching, the ‘breaking of a path against resistances, rupture and irruption becoming a route (rupta, via rupta), violent inscription of a form, tracing of a difference in a nature or a matter which are conceivable as such only in their opposition to writing’.⁴ The etymology of route, Derrida reminds us, is from classical Latin rupta, from via rupta (broken way). To make inroads, a path must break through resistances; the action of writing, like the action of making a route through nature or matter (ground, wood, forest), is a violent cutting into a surface. The cut of both writing and route-making inscribes difference (there the land, here the path) and creates cultural meaning (the social history of roads; repression and the unconscious).⁵ A necessary wound in the ground, cutting nonetheless preserves the integrity of the land, allowing flora and crops to grow unmolested while feet, wheels and hooves flatten the route.

Derrida returns to this theme a year later, in a discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s famous essay ‘The Writing Lesson’, his meditation on the response of the Nambikwara Amazonian Amerindians to the phenomenon of writing:

One should meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken, beaten, fracta, of the space of reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening, the divergence from, and the violent spacing, of nature, of the natural, savage, salvage, forest. The silva is savage, the via rupta is written, discerned and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hylè [matter, stuff], in the forest, in wood as matter; it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not at the same time access to writing.⁶

Contra Lévi-Strauss, who believes that the Nambikwara would be better off without writing, Derrida’s point is that writing (traditionally seen as secondary to speech) imposes form on nature, just as a road imposes form on the landscape. The road is not just a way into difference but constitutes difference; writing and roads are cultural systems that create meaning. From this it follows that humans do not so much make roads as that roads make humans. Derrida’s entwined analysis of roads and writing suggests that roads themselves make meaning for medieval road goers: directing them along certain paths, taking them on particular journeys, shaping their options even to the very neural pathways along which a train of thought progresses. This compels us to acknowledge how medieval roads inscribe the wayfarer as homo viator in ways often more fundamental than how human technology imposes meaning on roads, which is how the action of making tracks is conventionally understood.

Naming

Our title, indeed the founding concept of the book – the medieval British road – is a misnomer. We speak of the road system of medieval Britain but the concept is not referenced in medieval documents. Although given to abstract categorizations when so inclined, as when ontologizing into genus and species, medieval writers show little tendency to group all roads into a universal set. Instead the documents record a welter of terms multiplied by three languages (English, French and Latin) along with Old Norse, insular Celtic and numerous dialects. Furthermore, the word ‘road’ in the sense of ‘thoroughfare’ is not even a medieval term, for its first appearance in post-Conquest English occurs in the sixteenth century.⁷ From the late ninth to the sixteenth centuries the most common meanings of ‘road’ were ‘(a) Riding; a ride, journey on horseback …; (b) a riding expedition of a military nature; riding into combat; (c) a raid by mounted men, a foray’, and, from the late tenth century onwards, ‘(a) A voyage; (b) a protected place near shore where ships could lie at anchor’.⁸ It is possible that Old English used rodu in the sense of a way or thoroughfare, and that our modern sense of ‘path’ is the reflex of Old English rodu meaning ‘clearing, probably also linear clearing, track, way, road’, a sense witnessed only in charters and in place names.⁹ For such a common word, the etymology of ‘road’ is complex, as the long note in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attests, stating that, ‘it is not certain that all of the material contained in this entry [road (n.)] shows a single word history. It is also possible that two or more originally distinct words may have merged.’

These points may seem good reasons not to use the word at all, but we employ ‘road system’ knowingly as a pidgin term, that is, as a phrase that simplifies linguistic communication across heterogeneous language systems and that does good theoretical work, enabling the simultaneous difference and similarity of the medieval past to articulate itself. It is a shorthand that allows us to model the past from a distance, knowing that the closer we get to it, the more the category evaporates into local terms that are variously spelled, that do not translate, and that hold only for certain regions, certain conditions and certain periods. We recognize that the term ‘road’ is not precise enough to differentiate the concept sufficiently in accordance with huge fluctuations in physical anatomy and jurisdiction. Yet we still need the particular universality of the term, for its generality allows us to make meaningful, if qualified, comparisons between then and now.

One important terminological distinction still current is that between (rural) road and (urban) street, where a road passes from one place to another while a street is situated within a dwelling area (OED road [n.] III.4a). A secondary assumption underlying the nomenclature is that the street will be paved and the road not.¹⁰ The conceptual distinction is upheld to some degree in late medieval England, but never systematically marked in language, at least until the early modern era, not least because, as already noted, the word ‘road’, understood as a path or way for land traffic, rarely if ever appears in Middle English. Other words must serve. ‘Way’ (Middle English Dictionary (MED) wei [n.1]) has an approximate equivalent generic value to road, except that it was usually further specified by an accompanying adjective, hence a ‘drove-way’ (MED drove [v.] 2a) or ‘high’ way (MED heigh [adj.] 2b.e) or ‘by’ way (MED bi-wei [n.]) or ‘broad’ way (MED brod [adj.] 7c.e) or ‘hollow’ way (MED holwe [adj.] 2b) or ‘common’ way or ‘private’ way. Without some adjectival determiner, wei remains too broad to be fully descriptive. ‘Street’ can indeed specify a main urban thoroughfare (MED strete [n.2] 2a), and is the usual word for referring to a specially surfaced way, although in northern areas, such as York, Danish ‘gate’ is the usual term, as in Micklegate, Goodramgate, Petergate. The semantic specificity of strete, however, like wei, capitulates to more general usage, for example in Watling ‘Street’, the public connector road running through the country between Dover and Wroxeter (MED strete [n.2] 1a).

The conceptual differentiation between a street that one inhabits and a road along which one passes holds only to a degree, for every street must be passed along and there is no road on which one does not at some point tarry. Not every ‘street’ in the medieval city has architectural structure bordering it or paving and not every rural ‘road’ is without buildings or treated surface. The variousness of language of record and verbal intercourse in medieval England – English, insular French and Latin, not to mention dramatically different dialects – further loosens bonds between general concept and specific word. Certainly, medieval rural commuter roads and populated urban streets are distinguished by nomenclature, surfacing materials, size, geographical terrain and responsibility for maintenance; but the distinction, which presupposes a town/country, sedentary/mobile polarity, loses any categorical pre-eminence in a plethora of nicer considerations – whether the road is a toll road, or a holloway (sunken road), or raised (i.e. a causeway), or common or private, or wide enough for two carts to pass each other, whether only pedestrians and packhorses can use it. The three main languages of record in medieval England had both distinct terms and borrowings from the other languages – hence Latinized English, Anglicized French and so on. Note the overlap between the following commonly used terms in the three languages: Latin calcetum, drova, pavimentum, strata, semita, venella, via, alta via, via regia or strata regia, vicus; English alei,¹¹ bi-path,¹² wei,¹³ hyghe waye,¹⁴ causey,¹⁵ high strete, fare,¹⁶ thurghfare,¹⁷ gate,¹⁸ lane,¹⁹ passage,²⁰ pathe, rute,²¹ strete,²² wynd,²³ venelle²⁴ (these Middle English terms often carrying specific connotations that do not always correspond semantically to their modern counterparts); French sentier, chemin, passage, rue, rute, venele, voie, to mention only the obvious ones. Add to this the localness of dialect, and, in sum, no exact standard of nomenclature was in place.

Without that terminological plenitude as a means of distinction and individuation, a road is just a road. What looks like medieval resistance to theorization is more like a local-level conceptualization that generalizes for the purpose and is alert to physical distinctions in the landscape that are unavailable to a more linguistically restricted perceptual register. The medieval road lexicon indexes its environment to a high degree of accuracy. By a synecdochal substitution between part and whole, terms such as ‘high street’ and ‘salt way’ function both as proper nouns for individual roads, as in York’s Micklegate or Worcestershire’s Salt Way, and as group names, as particular universal terms. This ability to hold ground between particular place and general category is characteristic of medieval road terminology, as if the general concept can be instantiated right here, in this or that particular place.

The road as right of way²⁵

The medieval highways that run through open terrain rather than through towns may be considered a right of way as much if not more than as a physical entity.²⁶ Travellers could ordinarily expect to be able to move around or alongside obstructions even if doing so took them onto private land. This right of way took precedence over a single, designated line of access, used exclusively for the purpose of travel and with a specially prepared surface. The Victorian Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb liken the road as a right of passage to an easement, which is a legal concept that refers to the right of non-possessory use of anot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: roads and writing
• 2 Sources for the English medieval road system
• 3 Once a highway, always a highway: roads and English law, c. 1150–1300
• 4 When things break: mending roads, being social
• 5 The word on the street: Chaucer and the regulation of nuisance in post-plague London
• 6 Getting there: wayfinding in the Middle Ages
• 7 The function of material and spiritual roads in the English eremitic tradition
• 8 The royal itinerary and roads in England under Edward I
• 9 The pilgrimage road in late medieval English literature
• 10 The romance of the road in Athelston and two late medieval Robin Hood ballads
• 11 London: the hub of an English river transport network, 1250–1550
• 12 Conquest, roads and resistance in medieval Wales
• 13 Trackless, impenetrable and underdeveloped? Roads, colonization and environmental transformation in the Anglo-Scottish border zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300
• Bibliography
• Index