The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (22 page)

Initially, the Church seems to have had no problem with ‘Sunday shopping’: all Stephen’s grants of Sunday markets noted above were for the benefit of a local cathedral or abbey. From the early thirteenth century, however, it led a drive against the practice and also against the holding of markets in churchyards, despite their evident popularity. The Statute of Winchester of 1285, for example, laid down that ‘from henceforth neither fairs nor markets be kept in churchyards, for the honour of Holy Church’. This concern sometimes led to new market places having to be created, as had already happened in Northampton in 1235, when Henry III had ordered that the market in All Saints’ churchyard be moved to ‘an empty and waste place’ to its north; today, the (rebuilt) church duly occupies a site just to the south of the town’s Market Square, where open-air trading continues to thrive. But it was not easy to curb the enthusiasm for buying and selling on the Sabbath. When in 1353 Edward the Black Prince ordered a Sunday market at Malpas (Cheshire) to be switched to a Tuesday – or any weekday other than Monday so as not to compete with neighbouring Whitchurch – he conceded that ‘all men may buy and sell bread, ale, fish and small victuals every Sunday, as they used to do’. In 1368, the Archbishop of Canterbury had to order the closure of a Sunday market held near the church at Sheppey (Kent), the ‘tumult’ from which was disrupting the mass. Similarly, it was alleged in 1416 that a market held on Sundays and feast days in the churchyard of St Michael le Belfry, York – close to the Minster – was causing a nuisance from horse manure and the clamour of ‘those that stand about’.
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As with markets, the grant of the right to hold a fair was normally reserved to the crown. Fairs were annual events, usually held during the summer and typically lasting two or three days, although this should be qualified by saying that some towns held more than one ‘annual fair’ (commemorating different saints) and that some fairs could run for a fortnight or more: in 1136, Winchester’s St Giles fair, for example, was extended to a total of 14 days in all. Among King Stephen’s charters was one for Walden Priory (Essex) which specified that their fair, in this case of two days in late July, was to be held ‘at the church’
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but the same concerns over disturbance as we have already encountered meant that it was more usual to find them in designated market places. This was the case, for example, at Lincoln, where St Botolph’s fair, internationally renowned in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, became established on Newport Green, a cigar-shaped market place in a suburb to the north of the town. It also applied in the case of St Werburgh’s fair at Chester, though here the abbey gatehouse opened onto the market area. It may have been this proximity which led to precision about the opening and closing times and about arrangements for the monks to put up stalls and lease them to traders, all set out in charters of the first half of the twelfth century; these confined activity to the period ‘from nones on the vigil of St Werburgh until vespers on the day following the festival’, that is, mid-afternoon on 20 June to early evening on 22 June.
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Fairs sometimes spilled over into neighbouring streets (as did St Ives fair, Huntingdonshire), or were held on common land on the outskirts of town (like the Midsummer fair at Cambridge which led to the area on which it was held, Greencroft, changing its name to Midsummer Common). But unlike markets which often had their own spaces deliberately created, it is hard to claim that fairs have left a direct imprint on the landscape today. Given that rival claims to a levy on all the wine consumed at Boston fair was worth taking to the king’s court in 1189,
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their immediate impact while they were in full swing would have been a different story.

Trade was of course dependent upon a transport infrastructure. Coastal ports were heavily involved with internal as well as overseas commerce, especially Newcastle-upon-Tyne, King’s Lynn and Southampton which all had thriving seaborne links with London; fairly accurate measurements of the distances between ports all the way from Yorkshire to Cornwall (such as eight miles from Sandwich to Dover, seven miles from Winchelsea to Hastings, equivalent to 12.9 and 11.3 kilometres respectively) were recorded by the end of the twelfth century.
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The economist Adam Smith’s calculation in the
1770s that a ship would take about six weeks to carry 200 tons of goods from London to Edinburgh, while a heavy wagon would carry only four tons by road in roughly the same time, is probably a fair guide to medieval performance as well, and emphasizes the value of coastal shipping. It has also been calculated that bulk transport of grain in the fourteenth century would normally have cost only two pence (under 1p) per ton per mile by sea, against seven pence (3p) by river and at least one shilling (5p) by road – a reminder that the network of navigable rivers was also very important. Most parts of England were within 25 kilometres of a navigable waterway, and there were particularly good connections feeding the Humber, the Trent and the Wash; the Trent itself was navigable inland as far as Burton and was linked via the Foss Dyke to Lincoln and on via the Witham to Boston.
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Considerable efforts were made in places to maintain or improve navigability: there was a canalization scheme at Beverley (Yorkshire) between 1115 and 1130, and the River Nene was kept navigable as far inland as Northampton during the thirteenth century, though this was not the case later on. Urban fortunes were certainly at stake in all this. Shrewsbury prospered from being on the navigable Severn while Ludlow, on the unnavigable Teme, did not. Henley-on-Thames also did well during the thirteenth century as a place where grain from the surrounding countryside was gathered in for shipping downriver to feed London. Isleham, on the fen edge in Cambridgeshire, was another successful inland port, and here there is evidence of an artificial channel having been dug to link the River Lark with a complex of wharves to the north of the town.
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Yet for all this, most movement was by road. The four great highways which in Anglo-Saxon times had come to be known as Ermine Street, Watling Street, the Fosse Way and Icknield Way received special mention from Henry of Huntingdon in his early twelfth century
Historia
and they also appeared schematically in a mid-thirteenth-century map drawn by Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans Abbey; however, neither discussed the road network further.
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The Gough Map, a depiction of England, Scotland and Wales of about 1360, is much fuller, showing some 4,700 kilometres of road in total. These included links from London to Exeter and St Ives (Cornwall); to Reading on to Bristol; to Oxford on to Gloucester and thence to St Davids; to Coventry, Warrington, Lancaster and ultimately Carlisle; to Huntingdon, Stamford, and on to Pontefract and Penrith; and to Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and Norwich. A route is also shown serving the Welsh marches from Worcester to Liverpool, another from Bristol through the midlands to Grantham, another along the south coast from Southampton to Canterbury. Considerable detail is given on local roads around York and Lincoln. But the Gough Map is variable in its coverage, weak on thinly populated areas of the Weald, Hampshire Downs and Chilterns and hazy on the Scottish and Welsh coastlines. The important London to Dover road is missing, and so is the York to Newcastle section
of the road to Scotland, besides the networks which certainly served major ports like King’s Lynn and Lincoln.
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Even the Fosse Way and Icknield Way are absent, although – as cross-country routes – this might reflect a decline in their significance with the growing importance of London as a hub.

It should not be assumed, either, that the presence of a route between two major towns – whether or not indicated by a red line on the Gough Map – means that there was only one road along it: parallel versions might develop. The Great North Road through what is now Cambridgeshire, where it skirts the western edge of the fens, has been shown to have had three roughly parallel branches, one running through Ogerston (duly mentioned on the Gough Map), another forming the main street of a string of villages such as Sawtry and Glatton, a third through Stilton on the line of Ermine Street. It was the latter which was turnpiked and which (bypassing Stilton) eventually became the dual-carriageway A1. This in turn has now been superseded by the A1(M) and B1043, running alongside each other for some 13 kilometres between Alconbury and Norman Cross: an interesting survival to the present day of the concept of parallel routes, since the minor road can still serve as a diversion if the major one is blocked. Similar stories can be told of the London to Norwich route through the Breckland, where there were three different crossing-points of the River Lark in Suffolk (the present A11 crossing at Barton Mills and two more to the south east), and of the route south of Chester towards Malpas, where a meandering trackway now surviving as a long-distance green lane, a former Roman road and the route eventually turnpiked which has become the A41 were all available.
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Some 16,000 kilometres of road are estimated to have been in use in Britain in Roman times; this network survived imperfectly, with much falling into disuse, and the medieval pattern differed considerably from it. Even former Roman towns came to be linked by roads which diverged from the Roman course. A medieval journey to London from Exeter or Gloucester, for example, would follow the old Roman road for a few kilometres east out of town but then take a different route, which in Gloucester’s case was akin to the modern A40. Travellers from Chester to London in Roman times headed south to Whitchurch and Wroxeter before picking up stretches of what is now the A5 in the direction of St Albans; their medieval successors also used the equivalent of the A5 into St Albans but reached it by a more easterly route through Newcastle-under-Lyme and Lichfield.
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Some of this divergence arose from the decay of Roman roads, but most from the fact that the growth of new urban and rural settlements – especially towns such as Oxford and Coventry which were not on Roman routes – necessitated the development of new roads to provide the links between them. And far from avoiding towns, in the manner both of modern motorways and trunk roads and of some long-distance Roman roads like the original Fosse Way, medieval
routeways served the needs of travellers in search of markets and places to stay overnight, by leading them into every town centre along their way.

As for the condition of these roads, it is easy to point to shortcomings since – outside the towns – their maintenance was largely reliant on the fulfilment of manorial obligations. Medieval roads were rarely ‘made’ in the sense of being laid with stone or gravel, although there were rudimentary efforts to fill in the ruts: one method of repair seems to have been to lay planks or branches across wet areas and to fill the potholes with sand. Essentially these roads were earthen tracks, which from heavy use (especially from livestock being driven to market or between manors) could easily become ‘hollow ways’. As we have seen, in some circumstances such as wet or open countryside, these roads might branch out into several alternatives running roughly parallel to each other. Around 1520, a Lollard critic of the late-medieval practice of pilgrimage – itself responsible for plenty of traffic, especially to and from famous shrines such as those at Walsingham and Canterbury – said that journeys were undertaken ‘more for the green way than for any devotion’, an interesting comment on the appearance of the roads.
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Inevitably there were complaints, such as those which prompted Edward I in 1285 to order the Prior of Dunstable to repair the high roads through his vill which are ‘so broken up and deep by the frequent passage of carts that dangerous injuries continuously threaten’; in 1339 parliament had to be suspended because members found a spell of bad weather had made roads impassable.

This does, however, give a misleading impression of a road network which, however imperfectly, stood up reasonably well to the demands placed upon it. There was occasional government interest, such as a decree of Henry I that major highways should be wide enough to allow two wagons to pass each other and for 16 knights to ride side by side; the Statute of Winchester of 1285 required any hedges and ditches (where ‘a man may lurk to do hurt’) to be set back 200 feet (61 metres) from major roads – so allowing for detours around ruts – and specifically authorized travellers to divert over neighbouring land if the beaten track was impassable. By the late fourteenth century, royal grants of pavage were allowing tolls to be levied for limited terms of years to be spent on the upkeep of some major roads, mostly those running north and west of London: an anticipation of the turnpike trusts of the early modern period, even to the extent that the same roads were involved, such as the 11 kilometres of Watling Street (the A5) between Fenny Stratford and Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire), which featured both in pavage authorized by Edward III and in one of the earliest turnpike acts of 1706. Charitable giving also played an important role, like Sir Gerard Braybrooke’s bequest in 1427, leaving £100 ‘to foule ways in Bedfordshyr and Buckinghamshir and also in Essex’. Haphazard though all this might appear, in general terms it seems fair to say that medieval roads were just about sufficient to cope with the
volume of traffic; most of the evidence points to travellers of all sorts, from tradesmen to the royal household, moving about with some frequency without major impediment, at all times of year. By the mid-fifteenth century professional hauliers with horse-drawn carts were routinely plying their trade between London, the midlands, Oxford, Bristol, Salisbury and Southampton; indeed, over 1,600 carts per annum were passing through Southampton’s gates by this time, all year round, with the peak activity in February and March.
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The success of the roads rested, of course, on there being effective means of traversing rivers and streams, and at the very end of our period the traveller John Leland recognized as much by repeatedly celebrating the crossings he encountered. In the course of what he calculated as a two-mile (3.2 kilometre) journey from Kettering to Geddington (Northamptonshire), for example, ‘I rode over another bridge of tymbre wher rennith a broke’ then ‘passid over a broke that cummith from Ardingworth’ (presumably by a ford), then on arriving at Geddington ‘I passid agayne in the middle of the toun over Ardingworth water, that there rennith under a stone bridge’. This bridge, built in the middle of the thirteenth century, is still in place, though ironically with a ford beside it still used by vehicles too wide for the bridge. Then as now, bridges had the capacity to inspire awe as feats of design as well as of engineering, and Leland was prone to break off his accounts of progress by road to enumerate the various examples along major rivers. Some of his observations are of real significance, such as his comments on a three-arched bridge over the River Ure at Bridge Hewick near Ripon (Yorkshire), which is the only record of its existence, and his mention of another three-arched bridge crossing the Tees at Piercebridge near Darlington (County Durham), the earliest datable reference to a magnificent structure which survives to this day.
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