Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of essays offers an 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. Setting Britain''s thoroughfares against the backdrop of the extant Roman road system, it argues for a technique of road construction and care that is distinctively medieval and challenges the long-held picture of a medieval Britain lacking in technological sophistication. This accessible collection draws out the imaginative, symbolic and cultural significance of the road. It synthesizes information on medieval road terminology, roads as rights of passage and the road as an idea as much as a physical entity. Individual essays look afresh at sources for the study of the medieval English road system, legal definitions of the
Trade Review‘The editors are to be congratulated on the strength of the essays and the way they complement each other despite the diversity of approaches taken by their authors. The reader also benefits from the clarity and uniformity of presentation, and the generally very high standard of copy editing. More illustrations would have been welcome for a subject that cries out for maps, but this is a small gripe about a book that offers so much to all of those interested in a topic that unites different disciplines.’
The Journal of transport history vol 37 (2), Stephen Mileson, Victoria County History, Oxfordshire
‘‘Roadworks’ represents a major contribution to our understanding of roads in the medieval period. Its thirteen chapters cover a wide range of sources and methodologies, and – considering that much of the major literature on the subject is very old – its revisionist position is very welcome.’
Owen Davies, University of Hertfordshire, Landscapes, June 2017
‘It falls beyond the scope of this review to rehearse the specific arguments made by each of these thirteen fine essays, but each and every one of them sheds important light on British roads (and rivers, bridges, forests and coastlines) and how they ‘inscribe the wayfarer as homo viator in ways often more fundamental than how human technology imposes meaning on roads’ (p.3). Collectively they thus make an important contribution to the emerging field of medieval infrastructures and demonstrate its relevance to numerous subfields and medieval studies more broadly.’
Guy Geltner, Universiteit van Amsterdam, JRG, Vol 131, No 2, 2018
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: Roads and writing – Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans
1. Sources for the English medieval road system – Paul Hindle
2. Once a highway, always a highway: roads and English law, c.1150–1300 – Alan Cooper
3. When things break: mending roads, being social – Valerie Allen
4. The word on the street: Chaucer and the regulation of nuisance in post-plague London – Sarah Rees Jones
5. Getting there: wayfinding in the Middle Ages – Ruth Evans
6. The function of material and spiritual roads in the English eremitic tradition – Michelle M. Sauer
7. The Royal Itinerary and roads in England under Edward I – Michael Prestwich
8. The pilgrimage road in late medieval literature Shayne – Aaron Legassie
9. The romance of the road in Athelston and two late medieval Robin Hood ballads – Chris Chism
10. London: the hub of an English river transport network, 1250–1550 – Claire Martin
11. Conquest, roads and resistance in medieval Wales – Dylan Foster Evans
12. Trackless, impenetrable and under-developed? Roads, colonisation and environmental transformation in the Anglo-Scottish border zone c.1100 to c.1300 – Richard Oram
Index
