Obligation and jurisdiction : roads and bridges in medieval England (c. 700-1300)
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H A R V A R D U N IV E R S IT Y T H E GRADUATE SCHOOL O F ARTS AND SCIENCES
THESIS ACCEPTANCE CERTIFICATE
T he undersigned, appointed by the Division Department
o f H is t o r y
Committee
have examined a thesis entitled
"Obligation, and Jurisdiction: Roads and Bridges in Medieval England (c. 700-1300)"
presented by
A la n R alp h Cooper
candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and hereby certify that it is w orthy of acceptance. Signature T yp ed name Signature
Thomas .Bisson Bisson .^Thomas
...................................................
T y p e d name Signature .... T yp ed name
Charles Donahue (Law)
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Obligation and Jurisdiction: Roads and Bridges in Medieval England (c. 700-1300)
A thesis presented
by
Alan Ralph Cooper
to
The Department of History
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 1998
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UMI Number: 9832349
Copyright 1998 by Cooper, Alan Ralph All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9832349 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. AH rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
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© 1998 by Alan Ralph Cooper All rights reserved.
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Alan Ralph Cooper, 'Obligation and Jurisdiction: Roads and Bridges in Medieval England (c. 700-1300)' Abstract The obligation to build bridges and the legal definition of the highway may serve as examples of the limits and ideology of royal law and governance in medieval England. Chapter Two juxtaposes environmental history with the appearance of bridge-work in charters. In the eighth century, there were few bridges and apparently no great need for them. The first appearance of bridge-work was a result of ideas influenced by Continental law about what constituted the Church's "proper liberty." Chapter Three examines the transformation of bridge-work under the pressure of Viking raids into a duty vital to the new West Saxon state. Narrative histories of the period suggest the military importance of bridges; the patterns of the obligations imposed suggest their importance to royal policy; and law codes and charters show bridge-work becoming a settled instrument of governance. As Chapter Four explores, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries legal theory changed so that instead of a duty common to all, bridge-work became a service excusable by the king. Monastic foundation charters and hagiography show the great abbeys taking advantage of this to exempt themselves by forgery. Thus, only fragments of obligations remained into the thirteenth century, when bridge-work became a matter of litigation, compromise and precedent. Chapter Five reconstructs the Anglo-Saxon law of the highway from contemporary law codes and later evidence, supplemented by a comparison with Continental law. The highway was part of tenth-century efforts to establish peaceful order. Subsequently, however, lords sought to abdicate their role in protecting the highway. Chapter Six explores two examples closely: a group of forged writs produced by Westminster Abbey and forgeries connected to the trial of Penenden Heath. Chapter Seven then examines the appearance of the myth of the Four Highways in legal and literary sources and its implications for twelfth-century law. Finally, Chapter Eight examines the thirteenth-century re-assertion of the king's rights over the highway. (Advisor: Thomas Bisson; other readers: Michael McCormick, Charles Donahue)
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For my parents, Mary and Anthony, and my brother, John; with love, respect and gratitude.
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C ontents
Abstract................................................................................................................ iii Contents..................................................................................................................v List of figures....................................................................................................... vi Abbreviations.......................................................................................................vii Preface.................................................................................................................... x
Chapter One: Introduction:.......................................................................................... 1
Part One: Obligation: Bridges
Chapter Two: Bridge-work, but No Bridges: St. Boniface and the Origins of the Common Burdens............................................................................... 20 Chapter Three: Viking Wars, Public Peace: the Evolution of Bridge-work......... 68 Chapter Four: "As free as the king could grant:" the End of Communal Bridge-work................................................................................................. 105
Part Two: Jurisdiction: Roads
Chapter Five: Strangers and Enemies: the Highway in the Anglo-Saxon Period...........................................................................................................133 Chapter Six: Extraordinary Privilege: the Alienation of the King's Highway....................................................................................................... 173 Chapter Seven: The King's Four Highways: Legal Fiction meets Fictional Law...............................................................................................................218
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Chapter Eight: Once a Highway, Always a Highway: the Re-assertion of Royal Right.................................................................................................245
Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 269
Appendix One: the Gumley Charter of 749..................................................... 276 Appendix Two: the Penenden Heath Documents............................................ 278 Appendix Three: the King's Four Highways: Texts and Translations...........282
Bibliography...................................................................................................... 290
L ist o f Figures
Figure One: The King’s Four Highways.................................................................216 Figure Two: The Descent of the Myth of the Four Highways.............................. 217
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vii
A bbreviations
Abt.
Laws of iEthelberht (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I. 3-8).
Af.
Laws of Alfred (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, 1,46-88).
AGu.
Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 126-129).
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle according to the several original a u th o rities, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols. [RS 23] (London, 1861); translation and dating following The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a Revised Translation, eds. and trans. Dorothy Whitelock and David C. Douglas (London, 1961).
As.
Laws of iCthelstan (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 146-183).
Atr.
Laws of ^Ethelred (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, 1,216-270).
B105 (etc.)
Cartularium saxonicum, ed. W. de Gray Birch, 3 vols. (London, 1885-1899), no. 105 (etc.).
BHL 34 (etc.)
Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. 2 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 6 (Brussels, 1898-1901); and Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, Supplementum novum, ed. Henryk Fros, Subsidia Hagiographica 70 (Brussels, 1986), no. 34 (etc).
Bracton, eds. Woodbine and Thome
Bracton, On the Laws and Customs o f England, eds. George E. Woodbine and Samuel E. Thome, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1968-1977).
Cn.
Laws of Cnut (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 278-371).
Cnl020
Cnut's decree o f 1020 (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 273275).
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viii Domesday Book; references by folio and county so that any edition can be consulted (N.B. References to Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk are to Little Domesday, the rest to Great Domesday). Du Cange, Glossarium
Charles du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium medice et infimce latinitatis, new edition, ed. Leopold Favre, 10 vols. (Paris, 1983-1887).
ECf.
Leges Edwardi Confessoris (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 627-672).
Eg-
Laws of Edgar (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 192-215).
EGu.
Laws of Edward and Guthrum (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 128-135).
Em.
Laws of Edmund (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 184-191).
English Lawsuits, ed. Van Caenegem.
English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R.C. van Caenegem, 2 vols.. Publications of the Selden Society 106 and 107 (London, 1990-1991).
Ew.
Laws of Edward (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 138-145).
Gesetze, ed. Liebermann
Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1898-1916).
Glanvill, ed. Hall
Treatise on the Laws and Customs o f England commonly called Glanvill, ed. G.D.G. Hall (London, 1965).
H82 (etc.)
Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. F.E. Harmer (Manchester, 1952), no. 82 (etc.).
HI.
Laws of Hlothaere and Eadric (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 9-11).
Hn.
Leges Henrici Primi, ed. L.J. Downer (Oxford, 1972).
Ine
Laws of Ine (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 88-123).
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IX
K23 (etc.)
Codex diplomaticus aevi saxonici, ed. John M. Kemble. 6 vols. (London, 1839-1848), no. 23 (etc.).
Leis Wl.
Leis Willelme (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, 1,492-520).
MGH
Monumenta Germaniae historica.
PRO
Public Record Office, London.
PRs
Calendar o f the Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (Hm, Henry HI; El, Edward I; EE, Edward H; Effl, Edward HI; RE, Richard E) (see Bibligraphy for full references).
Rect.
Rectitudines singularum personarum
(in
G esetze, ed.
Liebermann, I, 444-453). Regesta
Regesta regum anglo-normannorum (see Bibligraphy for full references).
RS
Rolls Series, i.e. Rerum britannicarum medii cevi scriptores.
S43 (etc.)
P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an annotated list and bibliography (London, 1968), no. 43 (etc.).
Wi.
Laws of Wihtred (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 12-14).
Wl. art.
Willelmi articuli decern (in Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 486488).
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x
Preface
That this thesis was begun at all, and, certainly, that it was ever finished, is a result of contributions from many people. My enthusiasm for history was first nurtured by the wonderful group of history teachers at St. Albans School, particular Geoffrey Brown, Nigel Williams, Tim Martin, Kathy Flicker and Sally Moreton. I remember fondly the satisfaction in being told that my mock O-Level project on the Wars of the Roses had been fought over by the teachers because it was the only one on a medieval topic. As an undergraduate I split my time between medieval and American history. I was again blessed with a number of inspirational teachers including John Stephens, Michael Angold and Alan Day at the University of Edinburgh; Richard Dunn, Drew Faust and Margaret Bowker at the University of Pennsylvania. If it is not invidious to single out one teacher in particular, however, I would like to pay especial thanks to Ian Wei, whose service as a conscientious and enthusiastic teacher I have always striven to emulate. Since my arrival at Harvard, the support of friends has, of course, been of the utmost importance to me. Back in Britain, several friends, in particular, have kept a wary eye on my progress, both towards a Ph. D. and inevitable Americanness. Toby Scott, John Watson, Tara and Douglas McGregor, Douglas AJexander, Moira Dalyell, Ruth Shone, Amahl Smith and Robert Piggott have all given invaluable moral support both on my trips home and in reminders of their continuing concern. In the States, other friends, including Gordon Drummond, Aroon Balani, Abraham Unger, Beth Guthridge, Kurt Miller, Orrin Feingold, Debra Lieberman, Helen-Marie Oravec, Tim Falvey and Ann Tousignant, have made the experience of graduate school bearable by offering a life away from it. Two of this group of American friends have made a special contribution in that they have been going through graduate school at the same time as me. Gilliane Monnier and Rachel Bronson have both offered at one time or another a welcome sympathetic ear.
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At Harvard itself, I was extremely fortunate to arrive at a time when Harvard was flush with medievalists. Innumerable thanks are due to SBM and the community that it has provided over the years: to, in order of seniority (!), Bruce Venarde, Dave Keck, Bob Berkhofer, Jenny Paxton, Nat Taylor, Gregory Pass, Elka Klein, Simon Doubleday, Philip Daileader, Carol Symes, Tom Spence, Rick Adler, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Katie Baughman, Leslie Dossey, Anne Haberkem, Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Josh Millet, Paul Mapp, Charlotte Masemann, Samantha Herrick, Dimiter Angelov, Jonathan Conant and Gregory Smith; not to mention those honorary medievalists, Richard Holme, especially for his tea drinking and unremitting gloom which brought a ray of sunshine to every day, Margaret Menninger, especially for her coffee drinking in the last year, Geoffrey Poole, Randall Rausch and Andrea Troxel. Two names are missing from this list because, as I hope they well know, I would not be writing this but for them. Without the support of Claire Valente and Adam Kosto, I would not have returned after the first year of graduate school. A word of thanks is also due to Arthur Hock, our estimable graduate student co ordinator, who has helped me through the last stages of the experience. Turning to the many academic debts I have incurred in writing this thesis, I would like to thank various people for the advice they have given along the way. These include Bruce O’Brien, Patrick Wormald, John Langdon, Paul Meyvaert, David Harrison and Robin Fleming. I would like to pay especial thanks to Nicholas Brooks, whose enthusiastic encouragement of my work from an early stage was an inspiration. Academic debts at Harvard should start with those who have guided me in my teaching, as it has been teaching which has made this whole process make sense. I have been fortunate, along the way, to teach for a diverse group of talented people, including Thomas Bisson, Michael McCormick, Jim Hankins and Eric McGeer. Thanks is also due, moreover, to all the wonderful students, whom it has been my joy and privilege to teach in the last six years.
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The thesis itself has been guided by Thomas Bisson, Michael McCormick and Charles Donahue. It was a daunting prospect setting out to write a thesis for three people with such different interests and with such high standards. I hope, however, that the final product is better as a result. I know it is better for their hard work in trying to teach me to be a scholar. I think the other two will forgive me if I reserve a special word of thanks for Tom Bisson. Our first meeting was nearly eight years ago now, when he had to deal with a hopelessly confused new graduate student who wanted to switch from American colonial history to medieval history. Poor Tom already had six incoming graduate students. Moreover, little did I realize, another Englishman had made the same switch a year before and there was a suspicion amongst some that this was some kind of ruse that the English had cooked up. To his credit, he let me switch. Since that time he has not only had to put up his me as a graduate student but also as his daughter's boy friend, fiance and husband, and now as father-to-be of his grandchild, as well as perpetual dinner guest over the last year. I doubt an advisor has ever done more. I must also express my thanks to the rest of the Bisson family for welcoming me so kindly and putting up with me. It was Carroll who suspected that the English were up to something as regards admissions, but she seems to have forgiven me. Susan has also been a great source of support over the last few years. Finally, of course, all thanks are due to my wife, Noel. She has put up with my moods, my despair at ever getting this thing finished and recently with being pregnant with a virtually absent husband. I hope that she knows that the thesis would not have been finished without her. This thesis is, however, dedicated to my own family: to my brother John and my parents Mary and Anthony. They started me down the road, always encouraging me in my education, even though it has caused me to be away for longer than they or I would like. I look at this thesis and see that it is full of the interests I acquired as a child, such as a love of maps and a love of the British countryside. This thesis is dedicated to them with gratitude for their patience and support, and with all my love.
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Chapter One: Introduction:
In 1362, the bridge over the Trent at Nottingham collapsed. In response, Edward HI commissioned four men to inquire as to who was liable to repair the bridge "whereby there used to be safe transit for men and carts over the river to the said town and to the North." The answer returned was simple: no one was obliged to repair the bridge. It had been repaired only by alms and through the proceeds from temporary pontage tolls granted by kings over the previous half century. The king had no power to compel anyone to rebuild the bridge, so instead he attempted to prime the pump of charity once again by granting timber from Sherwood Forest. How could it be that the king had no regular manner of ensuring that a bridge of the strategic and geographical significance of the Trent Bridge be kept in decent repair? This was, after all, the site on which Edward Hi's forebear and namesake, Edward the Elder, had ordered a bridge to be built some four and a half centuries before. In the 1250s, Richard of Glaston, a confessed thief, abjured the realm. As he left Northampton on the road southwards towards Newport Pagnell on the first leg of his journey to Dover and overseas, he was followed by some of the sheriffs men. When they were clear of the town, these men seized Richard, dragged him off the king's highway by the feet and beat him until he was near death. When questioned about this subsequently, the sheriff retorted that it was perfectly just to maltreat an abjurer who left the king's highway. What were the origins of so odd a law and what were the boundaries of the highway acknowledged by both Richard and the sheriff?
The history of roads and bridges naturally touches on many aspects of general history. A knowledge of communications is fundamental to a proper understanding of economic history, of military history and indeed of history that involves cultural
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interaction of any kind. The history of the roads and bridges themselves turns out, however, to be two divergent, but initially similar stories. The reason for this is that the repair of the road network of medieval England was largely a matter of two activities, neither of which involved the maintenance of the actual surfaces of highways. The first was the paving of streets in towns, which were in effect the nodes of the transport network and thus the most heavily used points: this activity was orchestrated at the local level, elided in the later Middle Ages by grants of pavage tolls. The second form of road repair was the repair of bridges. Even now, though we are usually less conscious of it, the choice of a route is determined by the choice of river crossings: the traveller from Boston to Philadelphia, for example, will largely set his or her route by the choice of bridges over the Connecticut, Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This was even more true in the Middle Ages when there were fewer choices for the crossing of relatively minor rivers. The route from London to York may serve to illustrate this. From Roman times and throughout the Middle Ages, a variety of solutions were offered to two fundamental questions posed by that route: how to cross the rivers flowing into the Wash, and how to cross those flowing into the Humber. The route least troubled by river crossings swung north-west out of London, up Watling Street, encountering the Ouse only in its most feeble condition, up river at Fenny and Stony Stratford: it then joined the Fosse Way and headed north-east to Lincoln to cut the Gordian Knot of the Humber Basin by crossing the Humber itself by ferry; from there it ran easily into York, crossing the Derwent at Stamford Bridge. The fastest route headed due north on flatter ground; it was, however, dependent on river crossings at Ware, Huntingdon, Wansford, Stamford, Newark, Retford, Doncaster, Wentbridge, Pontefract, Ferrybridge and Tadcaster. The travellers of the Middle Ages mixed and matched between these two basic routes, depending on the urgency of their journey, the state of the weather and, above all, the condition of the bridges.
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The history of bridges is thus really the story of the physical repair of the road network and the obligations for that repair. It has its origins in matters of environmental history, in the simple but necessary question, how to cross a river? Building a bridge to facilitate a river crossing is a difficult, expensive, time consuming and potentially hazardous job. It is not undertaken lightly and, once undertaken, requires repeated attention and effort from that point on, since a bridge neglected will soon be a bridge collapsed. Moreover, a bridge built at an important crossing will attract traffic, damaging the bridge and raising the question of obligation for its repair. The keeping of the roads across country, linking these bridges is, however, in contrast to the physical labour and commitment involved in bridge-building, a matter of doing nothing and, more importantly, making sure no one does anything either. In other words, the highway of the Middle Ages by and large "maintained itself." The passing traffic would wear down and back the plants on and by the route, leaving a path free of obstacles; the simple nature of the traffic meant that it could wade and struggle through even the muckiest conditions. There were, to be sure, obligations for the repair of drainage ditches by the roads, and, in the later Middle Ages, more and more attention was given to repair of the busiest roads, but the sources are much quieter on these subjects. Physical repair of the road was the least of the difficulties; for a road to be an effective route it must be clear of artificial obstructions, of buildings, crops, ditches, fences etc., and also clear of obstruction by bandits, robbers, murderers et al. Maintenance of the road was a matter of keeping the unwelcome off it. The history of the roads is thus the story of legal jurisdiction and of the definition of a distinct space removed from legal order on either side of it. There has been a long tradition, from before the Romans, of associating great rulers with their great building works and with the order they kept. This tradition was strong in the English Middle Ages; writers from Bede to William of Malmesbury, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Ranulf Higden tell stories in which the great kings, historical
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and mythical, provide comfort and security for travellers. This association may loosely be said to bind the origins of the legal status of roads and bridges in the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon kings, in seeking to provide order and security, made provision both for obligations to repair bridges and for the establishment of special jurisdiction over the highway. Both provisions were bound up with the ideology and practical constitution of the public peace in the tenth century. If the stories of roads and bridges may be said to have similar origins, they may also be seen to have gradually diverged afterwards. The essential differences between them keep them from being parallel. The king's rights over the roads remained essentially passive, that is to say, they consisted of the right to jurisdiction over crimes on the roads, in other words the right to safe roads. The king’s rights over bridges were more active, consisting in the right to force people to build bridges. Only the strongest of kings, ruling by force or by real consensus, could expect to extract bridge-work from his subjects; only the weakest of kings would see his rights over the highway disappear. The same difference affects the quality and quantity of evidence concerning both topics. The king's rights over the highway appear less frequently in the sources, are less insisted upon, less contested, but ultimately more enduring, though absorbed into the general expansion of royal jurisdiction. The king's right to bridge-work, proclaimed loudly in the days of royal strength, dissipates rapidly against intransigence, remaining in only the most vestigial ways into the later Middle Ages, when other means of coping with the costly and inescapable collapse of major bridges appear instead. There is consequently much more material on bridges; nevertheless, the nature of the research that has gone into the writing of this thesis has often been in a nature of collecting scraps. There is no one single source devoted in its entirety to the topic at hand, but there is scarcely a source that does not include some passing reference to it. The story to be told from those scraps is not so much that of routes and communications, although naturally the actual roads and bridges must be considered
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alongside the theory associated with them, as it is a story of the origins of law and government. By the end of thirteenth century, doctrines of road and bridge repair, and of highway jurisdiction had been established which were to form the backdrop for the jeremiads about the highways in the late Middle Ages and the early modem period. The appearance of these doctrines resulted not from a straight line of development, but from assertions of royal right and common duty and counter-assertions of seigneurial right and particular exemption. These disputes will be analysed in two parts, the first on bridge-work, the second on highway jurisdiction. Chapter Two considers the paradox of the appearance of the bridge-work obligation in eighth-century charters when there seem to have been few bridges and was apparently no great need for them. Chapter Three identifies the moment when these haphazard and unimportant obligations were transformed under the pressure of Viking raids into duties vital and urgent to the survival of the new West Saxon state. These duties became part of the routine of the public order of the tenth century, but, as Chapter Four explores, this routine was to fall apart in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, leaving a only fragments of obligations to be collected in the legal revolution of the thirteenth century. Chapter Five reconstructs the Anglo-Saxon law of the highway, observing how the highway served as an integral part of the kings’ efforts to establish peace and justice. This Anglo-Saxon ideology of a universal and just order can be seen collapsing in Chapter Six, as competing interests sought to deny their role in protecting the highway. Chapter Seven then examines a peculiar excursus in the story, the appearance of the arcane myth of the Four Highways in legal and literary sources, and asks what that myth has to say about the law of the highway in the twelfth century. Finally, Chapter Eight watches the work of the new breed of lawyers in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, struggling to re-assert both the king's rights over the highway and the importance of the common interest in its preservation.
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The State of the Question: this is not, I regret to say, the place for a lengthy overview of scholarship on roads and bridges in medieval Europe generally; such scholarship will be referred to in the text and the notes where appropriate. Nevertheless, a couple of works merit further discussion here, in part because they represent the more inventive and imaginative work that has been accomplished regarding Continental roads, but also because their approaches were essential in forming the questions to be addressed here.1 The first is Robert-Henri Bautier's synthetic essay on the medieval road system of France.2 Bautier places most emphasis on the changes of the second half of the twelfth century. In that period, the road network was reshaped by the deliberate activities of mlers, laying out new roads and building bridges. Bautier points to the movement of the court of Philip Augustus as being essential in the creation of an extensive road network based on Paris. He suggests, however, that it was the introduction of horse haulage in the same period which was the most important development. The introduction of large horsedrawn vehicles that required well maintained roads and bridges led to the division of the France into three economic regions. The flatter and more prosperous North-East became dominated by these large, fast horse-drawn carts; the centre continued to use ox-drawn wains; while the South-West remained reliant on pack animals. This demonstration of the interplay of the changing demands of traffic and the quality of the road brings into question any simple declaration that the roads of the Middle Ages were good or bad; the question begged by such statements is "good or bad for what?" Bautier goes on to trace
^The bibliography contains references to other works which were helpful in framing the problems addressed here. 2Robert-Henri Bautier, 'La route frangaise et son evolution au cours du moyen age,' Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Academie Royale de Belgique, 5th series, 73 (1987), 70104; for French roads see also Jean Hubert, 'Les routes au moyen age' in Les routes de France depuis leurs origines jusqu'a nos jours, ed. Guy Michaud (Paris, 1959), pp. 25-56. Bautier has also written a number of valuable local studies, which are reprinted, both with his synthetic article, in his Sur I'histoire economique de la France medievale: la route, le fleuve, lafoire (Aldershot, 1991).
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the developments of late medieval France, when regional powers came into competition over lucrative trading routes. Such was the choice offered to merchants that each region vied with one another in the provision of safe, well paved roads, served by adequate bridges. On the negative side, however, lords would demand stiff toils and took measures to prevent merchants from evading these tolls by travelling on side roads. At the same time, the kings of France were able to extend their jurisdiction over crimes committed on public roads across the kingdom. The picture thus drawn by Bautier is of considerable change and competing interests. Similar elements may be found in another work which, for all its flaws, was helpful in the formulation of the questions to be addressed here, namely that of Johan Plesner on the road system of Tuscany.3 Plesner postulates that there was fairly continuous maintenance of the Roman roads around Florence, and thus continuous use of the same network, until a rivoluzione stradale of the thirteenth century reorganized the network around the increasingly powerful Florence. The image of competing forces of commerce, traffic, maintenance obligations and power on the shape of a road network, suggested by both Bautier and Plesner, was what inspired this study. English roads have not attracted studies of this kind. The history of English roads and bridges has, however, attracted an unusual number of authors, determined to write a comprehensive history of the changing roads of England for a popular audience.4 Others
3Johan Plesner, Una rivoluzione stradale del Dugento, Acta Jutlandica, Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet X, 1 (Copenhagen, 1938); see, however, criticisms of Plesner’s findings in Thomas Szabo, Comuni e politico stradale in Toscana e in Italia nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1992), esp. pp. 28-32, 257-269. 4For a collection of medieval sources and scholarship of highly variable quality, see C.W. Scott-Giles, The Road Goes On: a Literary and Historical Account o f the Highways, Byways and Bridges o f Great Britain (London, 1946). Examples of this popularizing group might include: William Addison, The Old Roads o f England (London, 1980); Hilaire Belloc, The Road (London, 1924); Geoffrey Boumphrey, British Roads (London, 1939); Cyril Hughes Hartmann, The Story o f the Roads (London, 1927); Geoffrey Hindley, A History o f Roads (London, 1971); and, although, not covering the whole of history, D.S. Bland, 'The Maintenance of Roads in Medieval England,' Planning Outlook 4 (1957), 5-15.
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have paused briefly in writing a serious book about modem transportation to speculate about medieval antecedents.5 Several themes recur amongst these works: for example, prehistoric man followed tracks first made by animals6 and the Romans built the best roads, but only four great highways. As regards the Middle Ages, the story tends to be the same: the Middle Ages were a regrettable and above all muddy interlude between the rectitude of the Roman roads and the enlightenment of Telford's turnpikes. Nevertheless, simultaneously and without conscious contradiction, there exists the firm belief that medieval roads were better than their Tudor and Stuart successors. This is deduced from a series of anecdotes, this time of bridge repair, especially by charitable efforts. One recurring belief amongst these authors which has worked itself into more serious scholarship is that the so-called Anglo-Saxon trinoda necessitas included the obligation to repair both roads and bridges. Finally, there is the general sense that the medieval road was a colourful and Romantic place, full of troubadors, pedlars, pilgrims, knights errant and all sorts of people on their way to Rome; the Reformation put a stop to all this fanciful or subversively inappropriate behaviour, and, as a consequence, the roads fell to pieces. There are two elements which appear in these popular works which recur in more serious scholarship and which may be traced to their origins. It was James E. Thorold Rogers, whose vast History o f Agriculture and Prices in England included some remarks
5For example, W.T. Jackman, The Development o f Transportation in Modem England, second edition (London, 1962); James E. Thorold Rogers, A History o f Agriculture and Prices in England, I (London, 1886); Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government, 5, The Story o f the King's Highway (London, 1913). 6This is to ignore quite deliberately the infamous theory of Ley Lines which also gets quite a lot of play in these works; the theory works from the observation that numbers of "significant points” may be found on or close to straight lines to postulate a whole heroic class of prehistoric engineer-priests, standing on hill tops with straight poles, mapping out straight roads across the island; Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track; its mounds, beacons, moats, sites, and mark stones (London, 1925); repeated in Boumphrey, British Roads, pp. 9-14.
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about the cost of medieval land and water carriage, who gave rise to the notion that medieval roads were objectively superior to the roads of the early modem period. From a jumble of manorial accounts and such like, he argues that the price of carriage was low, and therefore that "the roads were good."7 He also concludes from the existence of sufficient motive - be it for the smallholder on his way to market, or the monastery with its distant estates - that roads were repaired.8 On the other hand, he asserts, without going into detail, that the roads decayed after the Reformation.9 The second traceable element is the idea that the roads' were full of Romantic characters; it may be traced to J.J. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. On the nostalgic premise that "at the present day there are but few wayfarers,"10 Jusserand discusses the various kinds of people one would encounter on the roads, including "a motley crew, minstrels, buffoons, quacks, messengers, pedlars, pilgrims, wandering preachers, beggars, friars, vagabonds of all sorts, labourers broken loose from the soil, pardoners, knights in search of adventure."11 Jusserand's interest was not in quantification, so the reader is left with the impression that the roads were crowded with eccentric and marvellous characters.
7ThoroId Rogers, History o f Agriculture and Prices, I, 658. 8Thorold Rogers, History o f Agriculture, I, 664; for a vigorous refutation of Thorold Rogers’ logic, see Jackman, Development o f Transportation, p. 28n; Jackman generally accepts the conclusions, however, p. 14. 9ThoroId Rogers, History o f Agriculture, I, 654. 10J.J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, trans. Lucy Toulmin Smith, second edition (London, 1920), p. 11. ^Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life, trans. Toulmin Smith, second edition, p. 241; Jusserand does spend his first chapter on the state of the roads, but it is largely of the style described above; in particular, he suggests that there was an Anglo-Saxon obligation to repair roads, thus leading the Webbs into the same idea.
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Turning to scholarship that is more important in its own right, the most eminent name associated with the history of medieval roads is that of Frank Stenton. His article entitled, 'The Road-System of Medieval England'12 is a curiously impressionistic piece, perhaps reflecting the lecture form in which it originated. Stenton tries to ascertain if England could be said to have a consciously conceived national road network in the period between the Romans' network and Ogilby's seventeenth-century road maps. As one of Stenton's criteria is that the network be based on London, the article is really a history of London's importance to the nation. This causes Stenton to downplay the AngloSaxon evidence and to claim that the mobility of the Norman and Angevin courts delayed the appearance of a road system. He does make some useful comments in passing. In particular, he notes that there was little effort at road-building in medieval England, and that the improvement in routes was largely achieved through bridge-building, a phenomenon he associates with an increase in economic activity around 1100. He also suggests that the local networks of roads which allowed the cross-country journeys of the royal court were old by the Middle Ages. Stenton sees the various twelfth-century legal definitions of the king's highway as the earliest hints of a return of a conception of a national road network, but does not see real evidence of it before the fourteenth-century Gough Map, the first map to feature several highways, an analysis of which forms the second half of the article.13 All in all, as Stenton admits, the article is not "a general survey of medieval English roads," although he does conclude that the "road-system...
l2F.M. Stenton, 'The Road System of Medieval England,' Economic History Review 7 (1936), 1-21. 13On the Gough Map, see also R.A. Pelham, The Gough Map,' Geographical Journal 81 (1933), 34-39; Brian Paul Hindle, The Towns and Roads of the Gough Map (c. 1360),' The Manchester Geographer 1 (1980), 35-49. Stenton’s comments were re-printed with additional information obtained through a study of the map under ultra-violet light in EJ.S. Parsons, The Map o f Great Britain, c. A.D. 1360, known as the Gough Map: an introduction to the facsimile (London, 1958).
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proved not inadequate to the requirements of an age of notable economic activity, and... made possible a centralisation of national government."14 Stenton drew in part on C.T. Rower’s collection of documents about fourteenthcentury litigation concerning public works. In his introduction to this collection, Rower sought to sum up the law concerning public works in the later Middle Ages.15 His general conclusions may be stated briefly. He suggests that there was more interest in the repair of bridges than there was in the repair of the highway which "with the exception of the drainage ditches at either side... made and maintained itself.”16 Most of the lawsuits about the highway were about obstructions in the road; most of those about bridges concerned failure of maintenance. The cases in the collection by and large started before the sheriff or occasionally a manorial court, and found their way into the king's courts because of errors or special interest. Some, however, began in specially commissioned inquests into public works. The most common assumption on the part of juries was that those who held the land on either side of a road or bridge were liable for its repair, but the twin defences of exemption by charter or non-liability through precedent both held up in court. The diversity of the evidence suggested to Flower that "the proceedings themselves had throughout the period a fluidity and informality from which it can be inferred that the sole object the court set before it in these cases was the correction of abuse and it was prepared with that end in view to deviate from the rigid lines on which it conducted its ordinary civil and criminal business."17 More recent work on English medieval roads has been done by historical geographers. The best work of this kind is the medieval section in Christopher Taylor's
14Stenton, 'Road System,’ pp. In, 21. 15Public Works in Mediaeval Law, ed. C.T. Flower, II, Publications of the Selden Society 40 (London, 1923), xiii- lix. 16Public Works, ed. Flower, II, xvi. 17Public Works, ed. Flower, II, xxxii.
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Roads and Tracks o f Britain.1* Taylor has an eye for the big picture, especially the way in which the shape of the English communications system had remained basically the same for two millennia before the building of the Motorways,19 as well as a fine eye for detail. Methodologically, he combines a knowledge of the manuscript sources with field archaeology and a sense of the countryside bom of walking the routes. He offers numerous detailed examples of how modem settlement patterns reflect the changing road patterns of the past. His tour de force is a village-by-village account o f the medieval route from Stamford to Kettering.20 He also gives several examples of the planting of new towns and the way that they affected local routes. The repair of roads and bridges is not his subject, however, and he contents himself with some remarks as to how hollow ways suggest the difficulties encountered by medieval travellers, and how medieval bridges must have appeared as a marked contrast in quality to the roads which they served. Brian Hindle represents a more theoretical kind of historical geography.21 Hindle's work has focused on the laudable goal of trying to achieve a complete picture of the shape of the English medieval transportation system. From an analysis of cartographic evidence, which means the Gough Map, supplemented by the one basic route on the maps
^Christopher Taylor, Roads and Tracks o f Britain (London, 1979), pp. 84-152. 19On this subject, see J.H. Appleton, The Geography o f Communications in Great Britain (London, 1962). 20Taylor, Roads and Tracks, pp. 115-119. 21Hindle’s work has appeared in a number of places: Brian Paul Hindle, 'The road network of medieval England and Wales,' Journal o f Historical Geography 2 (1976), 207-221; idem., 'Seasonal Variations in travel in medieval England,' Journal o f Transport History, new series, 4 (1978), 170-178; idem.. Medieval Roads (Princes Risborough, 1982); idem., 'Roads and Tracks,’ in The English Medieval Landscape, ed. Leonard Cantor (London, 1982), pp. 193-217; references will be given to the last of these, as the most recent, concise and hopefully most accessible version; for the fullest explanations of methods, see idem., 'A Geographical Synthesis of the Road Network of Medieval England and Wales,' Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Salford, 1973.
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of Matthew Paris,22 plus royal itineraries, he produces what he calls a "minimum aggregate road network," which essentially consists of a number of routes across central southern England, plus one main route northwards to Scotland. To supplement this, Hindle turns to "a theoretical approach... in the form of a gravity model... following Newtonian physics."23 This is based on taking the largest towns of the country, and calculating the importance of the routes between each of them from their population and the distance between them. By this method we are able to discover that there was a major route running directly from King's Lynn to Boston, from which I can only surmise that King John's baggage train was using Hindle's maps in 1216. Finally, Hindle combines the results of this method with the previous findings to produce a map of the approximate routes of highways across England; this map, unsurprisingly, looks much like a map of modem England. More useful work was done by Hindle in collaboration with his student James Edwards. The centre-piece of Edwards' doctoral thesis24 is an effort to determine how far up stream the rivers of England were navigable in the Middle Ages. This is the result of the dedicated trawling through the printed calendars of Chancery records. His work suffers from a certain lack of chronological subtlety, and does not address the problem of whether a complaint about the blocking of a river should be taken to imply that it was usually open or usually blocked. Edwards' sources also do not allow him to answer with any precision the question, "navigable by what?" These problems do mean that his impressive maps and general conclusion that England was well served by hundreds of
22On the maps of Matthew Paris, see Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 235-241: J.B. Mitchell, The Matthew Paris Maps,’ Geographical Journal 81 (1933), 27-34. 23Hindle, 'Roads and Tracks,' p. 202; the method, with the adjustments made and the justifications for them, is only fully described in idem., 'Geographical Synthesis,’ pp. 113-139. 24James Frederick Edwards, T he Transport System of Medieval England - A Geographical Synthesis,' Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Salford, 1987.
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miles of navigable rivers should be taken with a slight pinch of salt. Nevertheless, he does provide a useful examination of the assumption that river transport was more efficient than road transport in the Middle Ages. Hindle and Edwards collaborated on an article which sought to combine their separate findings;25 this concludes that most major towns were on a major river (the great exception being Coventry, one of the most important towns of later medieval England) and major roads.
The traffic on the roads has been analysed in a number of ways. J.F. Willard approached the subject somewhat anecdotally in a short article on inland transportation in the fourteenth century.26 This brings together numerous references to carts to illustrate the kind of tasks performed with horses, carts, pack horses and boats, concluding, without any great testing of the idea, that carts and boats carried most goods. John Langdon's approach has been much more rigorous. He has studied the introduction of horses in English agriculture and, by extension, their use for road transport.27 His work will be discussed in greater detail below.28 In short, however, Langdon’s extensive study of manorial records indicates the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw the rapid introduction of horses to replace oxen in both ploughing and haulage, especially in the flatter and drier South-East. Langdon explains this change in terms of the advantages to be gained from a faster mode of transport. Although oxen
25James Frederick Edwards and Brian Paul Hindle, The Transportation System of Medieval England,’ Journal o f Historical Geography 17(1991), 123-134. 26James Field Willard, 'Inland Transportation in England during the Fourteenth Century,' Speculum 1 (1926), 361-374; idem., 'The Use of Carts in the Fourteenth Century,' History, new series, 17 (1932), 246-250. The latter article adds little to the first. 27John Langdon, 'Horse Hauling: a Revolution in Vehicle Transport in Twelfth- and Thirteenth England?,’ Past and Present, no. 103 (May 1984), 37-66; idem.. Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: the Use o f Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 (Cambridge, 1986). 28See chapter two.
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could only travel at approximately half the speed, they could haul approximately twice as much, so there was no overall gain in efficiency through the switch to horses; but this switch did make it to possible to make longer trips in a day, thereby increasing the size of the market for agricultural produce.
Turning to the history of bridges, the best synthetic survey of bridge-building in the Middle Ages is that of Nicholas Brooks.29 He draws attention to the twin legacies of Roman stone bridges, many of which still survive in Continental Europe, and early medieval timber bridges, but suggests that the great age of medieval bridge-building was between c. 1050 and c. 1350. He associates this proliferation of bridges to impulses connected with lordly and royal power, charitable spirit and communal action.30 As regards the fabric of bridges, Brooks' work may be supplemented by the work of Donald Hill on medieval engineering.31 He makes two very important points for the history of medieval bridges. The first is that the most important element of any bridge is the foundations: if the builders can achieve a secure foundation for the piles, then the bridge has a good chance of standing whatever the superstructure. This remains the essential problem in bridge-building today. Medieval builders' usual technique was to use coffer dams to remove the water from a part of the river bed, so that workers can drive piles. This was an immensely hazardous process, as the force of the stream could destroy
29Nicholas Brooks, 'Medieval Bridges: a Window onto Changing Concepts of State Power,' The Haskins Society Journal 7 (1995), 11-29; I am grateful to Prof. Brooks for giving me a copy of this paper before its publication. 30For the roles of military necessaity, seigneurial initiative and charitable action in the specific case of France, see Marjorie Nice Boyer, Medieval French Bridges: A History (Cambridge MA, 1976); on medieval French bridges, see also Jean Mesqui, Le pont en France avant le temps des ingenieurs (Paris, 1986). 31Donald Hill, A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times (London, 1984), pp. 61-75.
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the structure at any time: many lives were lost on the building of London Bridge, for example. There were essentially two different approaches used for building of the superstructure: beam bridges and arched bridges. The former is the simplest technique, involving the placing of a straight beam across the divide. The problem with this is that the load on the bridge is not spread out: when the load is midway between piles, the full force runs straight down, causing extreme bending stresses. While this technique can work nowadays with advanced materials such as structural steel, timber beams would soon break under the stress, especially when heavier carts used the bridge. Many early medieval bridges seem to have been formed by timber planks supported by beams between stone piles; in such a bridge the planks and beams would require constant replacement.32 The great advance in building technique was, therefore, the arched bridge, using masonry arches to support the roadway. This design was, of course, used by the Romans; invariably, however, their arches were almost or entirely semi-circular. Many great bridges of the Middle Ages used segmental arches, in which the ratio of rise to half span was considerably less than one. This kind of bridge can use fewer spans to cross a
32The stories of people being able to pick their way between holes in a bridge probably reflect a structure such as this; for a couple of these stories, see Brooks, 'Medieval Bridges,' p. 17; there is also the story of a monk, who, when crossing the bridge across the Thames at Marlow, had the misfortune to have his horse’s hind legs fall through the cracks, fixing the horse in place; passers-by advised him to widen the hole to allow the horse to fall into the river, but eventually he and the horse were saved by the intervention of St. Thomas Becket; Materials fo r the History o f Thomas Becket, archbishop o f Canterbury, ed. James Craigie Robertson [RS 67] (London, 1875), I, 415-416 (from a short letter not listed in BHL). It is also significant in this context that the preambles to the pontage grants of the later Middle Ages do not say that bridges had collapsed, but that they were in such poor repair that travellers could only pass at great danger to themselves.
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distance and is lighter. This latter point is crucial, because most of the weight bom by a solid stone bridge is the weight of the structure itself.33 With regard to English bridges, the most complete work on the subject is that of E. Jervoise, whose four little books on the Ancient Bridges of England and Wales,34 represent an effort to survey the bridges on all the rivers of the country on behalf of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The purpose of this project was to provide information for the preservation of bridges which had managed to survive into the modem period, so, for all his collecting of information from medieval sources, Jervoise's principal interest is not in the bridges of the Middle Ages per se. Moreover, he does not attempt to draw any general conclusions from the assembled evidence. David Harrison's recent work on medieval English bridges is more analytical. The shorter of his two articles on the subject considers the varieties of bridge design among the surviving medieval bridges.35 He concludes that one can perceive regional variations based on construction technique; most strikingly, the bridges of the north of England tend to have wider spans, but whether this results from river characteristics, date of building or mere architectural fashion he does not speculate. In his longer article, he examines the number and quality of medieval bridges and their relationship to inland transportation and
33Hall's general principles may be compared with S.E. Rigold's study of the carpentry of medieval timber bridges across moats, which includes some speculations about how its principles might have been used in the building of bridges across rivers; S.E. Rigold, 'Structural Aspects of Medieval Timber Bridges,' Medieval Archaeology 19 (1975), 48-91 (and addenda, vol. 20 (1976), 152-153). For an example of archaeological evidence of bridge construction techniques, see P J . Huggins, 'Excavation of a Medieval Bridge at Waltham Abbey, Essex, in 1968,' Medieval Archaeology 14 (1970), 126-147, esp. 133-135. 34E. Jervoise, The Ancient Bridges o f the South o f England (London, 1930); idem., The Ancient Bridges o f the North o f England (London, 1931); idem., The Ancient Bridges o f Mid and Eastern England (London, 1932); idem.. The Ancient Bridges o f Wales and Western England (London, 1936). 35David Harrison, 'Medieval Bridges,' Current Archaeology, no. 122 (vol. 11, no. 2) (1990), 73-75.
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economic development.36 He argues that around three quarters of the sites on which bridges were standing in 1750 already had bridges by 1500. His dating within the Middle Ages is more hazy, but he believes that many of those sites had been bridged significantly earlier than 1500. Moreover, he suggests that most bridges were of stone and most were wide enough for carts. His conclusion is that the road system of Medieval England was well served with bridges; that there were no long stretches of river without a bridge, except for the lower reaches of the greatest rivers. This network was thus able to handle the increase in traffic of the period from 1500-1750, and it was only after 1750 that a great number of new bridges were again built on new sites. Other than the work of Jervoise and Harrison, work on medieval English bridges has largely been confined to local studies. The best of these studies are without question those of Nicholas Brooks and others on the subject of Rochester Bridge, which have made use of the unique documentation connected with the bridge and the trust established in the Middle Ages to maintain it.37 The medieval bridge-building obligations connected to Rochester Bridge have long attracted attention, as well as speculation as to what they might imply for other bridges. It is to the question of these bridge-building obligations across the country that it is now time to turn.
36D.F. Harrison, 'Bridges and Economic Development, 1300-1800,' Economic History Review 45 (1992), 240-261. 37Nicholas Brooks, 'Church, Crown and Community: Public Work and Seigneurial Responsibilities at Rochester Bridge' in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays presented to Karl Leyser. ed. T. Reuter (London, 1992), pp. 1-20; idem., 'Rochester Bridge, AD 43 - 1381' in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management o f Rochester Bridge, AD 43 - 1993, eds. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 1-40; R.H. Britnell, 'Rochester Bridge, 1381-1530' in ibid., pp. 41-106. The other bridge which has naturally attracted a lot of interest is London Bridge: see Gordon Home, Old London Bridge (London, 1931); London Bridge: selected accounts and rentals, 1381-1538, eds. Vanessa Harding and Laura Wright, London Record Society Publications 31 (for 1994) (London, 1995); and other references given in chapter three.
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Part One: Obligation: Bridges
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Chapter Two: Bridge-w ork, but N o Bridges: St. B on iface and the O rigins o f the Common Burdens
The obligation to build bridges has a familiar place in the history of Anglo-Saxon governance because of its status as one third of the misnamed trinoda necessitas. A thorough analysis of this obligation has not been performed, however, largely because the obligation has seemed to be such a matter of common sense that its purpose may be taken for granted. In this chapter, I will argue that bridge-work is not as straightforward a phenomenon as has been assumed. An analysis of the obligation in the early AngloSaxon period reveals that there were very few bridges and that the obligation appears sporadically in the charters rather than universally. This necessarily leads to a re examination of the first appearance of bridge-work in the charters. It seems strange that kings insist upon bridge-work, when bridges seem not to have been important at all.
The chronology of bridge building: the obligation to perform bridge-work appears in many Anglo-Saxon charters from the eighth century onwards. On the other hand, apparently paradoxically, the bounds listed in those same charters do not refer to many bridges. Indeed, the weight of evidence from charter bounds, from place names, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the formulae of the bridge-work clauses themselves, suggest that there were not many bridges in England until the tenth century. In ninety-one authentic1 sets of charter bounds from the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, only one bridge2 is mentioned, namely Crediton Bridge in Devon, which
1In all that follows, the authenticity of charters and their bounds will be assessed from the comments collected in P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an annotated list and bibliography (London, 1968); this is obviously far from an ideal process, especially where the comments disagree with one another, and is a process to which Sawyer would object ("The opinions about authenticity are, of course, of varying value, but there has been no attempt here to omit foolish opinions or to grade the worth of the
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appears in the bounds of a charter of /Ethelheard, king of Wessex, dating from 739.3 By contrast, there are fifty fords. The tenth century witnesses a change: the first quarter
commentators," p. x); it seems, however, to be the only feasible way to achieve a sense of change across the whole period. More significant charters have been assessed individually, as noted, but their authenticity has not be judged on the basis of anomalies in their exclusion clauses or bounds, as that would render the analysis circular. All in all, this argument should be taken as what it is: an attempt to determine broad patterns across a number of centuries, not to assess the absolute specifics of each case. 2The excavation of a site in Oxfordshire described in two sets of contiguous charter bounds from the tenth century, in one as a "Stanford" and in the other as a "stan bricge," suggests that the two terms may together imply a stone causeway approaching a paved ford; that the term bricge may stand for a causeway rather than a bridge in certain circumstances would only serve to push the pattern observed here later; John Blair and Andrew Millard, 'An Anglo-Saxon Landmark Rediscovered: the Stanfordi Stan Bricge of the Ducklington and Whitney Charters,' Oxoniensia 57 (1992), 342-348. 3B 1331/2/3 (S255); the bounds of this charter are by no means above suspicion; it also happens to be the largest set of bounds, with "82 landmarks enclosing most of Devon," Oliver Rackham, History o f the Countryside (London, 1986), p. 9. One set of bounds that has been excluded requires comment, since it contains two bridges, which would obviously significantly affect the numbers. It is B219 (S142), the purported grant by King Offa to Bishop Milred of what Grundy calls "a very extensive area, namely, the parish areas of Worcester [west] of the Severn, and o f St. John in Berwardine, Cotheridge, the [south] part of Wichenford, North Hadlow, Grimley, Kenswick, Little Witley and Holt... almost certainly... the 'home' estate." The grant of this approximately sixteen square-mile estate between the Severn and Teme, which would presumably have been of enormous worth to the community, is included in Hemming’s Cartulary; it was, however, inserted into the early eleventh-century half of the cartulary on some spare pages together with documents relating to the Oswaldslow dispute of the 1080s, by one of the scribes of the second half of the cartulary, which dates from c. 1100. It seems unusual that so important a charter should be handled in such a manner. As regards the bounds, there are two versions, one in Latin, one in English. Grundy takes the existence of the Latin bounds as a sign of the bounds' authentic antiquity, since Latin bounds were more common in the earlier period; however, the Latin only occasionally provides equivalents for the English landmarks (i.e. only the prepositions change) and where it does it makes mistakes ("in veterem vallem” for "in 8a ealdan die," "in pulles camp” for "in pulles heafod"). The Latin bounds also include an extra section of land (Little Witley) suggesting that they might be a later emendation of the bounds. Above all, the bounds appear to be a compilation from other sets of bounds in Hemming's Cartulary: in particular, the section including the two bridges is the common boundary with Broadwas, the bounds of which are attached to the spurious charter B233 (S126). See The Early Charters
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produced only nine genuine sets of bounds, which refer to one bridge and twelve fords; the second quarter produced 102 sets, referring to fourteen bridges, sixty-one fords; the third quarter, 173 sets, referring to forty-five bridges, ninety-six fords; the last quarter, forty-seven sets, containing seven bridges, twenty fords. Moreover, the presence of bridges in the bounds is accompanied by the frequent appearance of the term "old ford." This phrase does not appear in a single genuine set of charter bounds before 945, but appears in thirteen sets after that date, suggesting that for the first time some fords which were still used as boundary markers were becoming redundant otherwise.4 Similarly, the descriptions of fords come to reflect a greater sense of the relative quality of the ford, as if that were becoming more important. The ninth century sees the first appearance of words such as Depford ("deep ford"), Bradford ("wide ford"), Shelford ("shallow ford"), Fulford ("muddy ford") and Langford ("long ford"). Indirect confirmation of this pattern may be found in the work of forgers; later fabrications of early charters have a disproportionate number of bridges, reflecting the landscape at the time of forging. Corroboration of this pattern is also found in the very clauses which mention the bridge-work obligation. The usual formula for these exemption clauses is something along the lines of "free from all secular services except the building of bridges and forts and army service." However, in 959 with the accession of Edgar to the whole kingdom, there is a change in the nature of the action. Before that date, the vast majority of the charters use a word meaning "building" (construccio, instructio, coedificatio, etc.); after that date, the charters are split between referring to building and repairing (emendatio,
o f the West Midlands, ed. H.P.R. Finberg (Leicester, 1961), p. 92 (no. 216); G.B. Grundy, Saxon Charters o f Worcestershire (Birmingham, 1931), pp. 12-18, esp. pp. 12-13; N.R. Ker, 'Hemming's Cartulary; A Description of the Two Worcester Cartularies in Cotton Tiberius A. XIII' in Studies in Medieval History presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, eds. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), pp. 49-75 at pp. 53, 57,67-68. 4This is in marked contrast to the use of the word "old" in bounds of all periods in connection with roads; see below, chapter five.
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reparatio etc.). Of the 227 genuine charters to refer to bridge-work before 959, only seven refer to repair, whereas 199 refer to building.5 By contrast, of the 199 genuine charters to mention bridge-work between 959 and 1066, seventy-eight refer to bridge construction, 108 refer to reconstruction. This pattern is also repeated in place-name evidence. Names of settlements, of course, record only the existence of settlements, not the bridges. It must be assumed that at any time there are many bridges which have not given their names to settlements and therefore will not appear in those sources which record only those names. Nevertheless, an examination of the names contained in Domesday Book is instructive, especially when it is compared to the county maps produced by John Speed around 16006 which happily contain about the same level of detail.7 Domesday Book8 contains reference to only fortyfour9 place-names containing the element "-bridge"10 (and explicit reference to only two
5The remaining twenty-one either have no action, e.g. "ab omni jugo vectigalium preter pontem arcem expedicionemque," B750 (S472); or they have a neutral word such as juvamen, e.g. B932 (S590), B952 (S601), B953 (S600); agon, e.g. B815 (S520), B884 (S548), B1023 (S579); or munimen, e.g. B957 (S593), B959 (S606), B925 (S634). ®John Speed's England: a coloured facsimile o f the Maps and Text from the Theatre o f the Empire of Great Britaine, First Edition 1611, ed. John Arlott, 4 vols. (London, 1953-1954). 7The comparison would, of course, be wholly skewed if the illustrated features of the map were taken into account; Speed's maps contain representations of many bridges, which have not been counted here; more importantly, several of Speed's maps (most notably Cornwall, Kent and Somerset) have the names of many bridges which do not seem ever to have given their names to settlements; therefore, only -bridge names which are accompanied by a symbol for a settlement on Speed’s maps are counted here. 8In what follows, except where noted, I am following the identifications given in H.C. Darby and G.R. Versey, Domesday Gazetteer (Cambridge, 1975). 9Not including names of hundreds, wapentakes or counties; also not including the name Ebridge in Berkshire, which Darby and Versey were not able to identify (the Place-Name Society suggests Irish Hill), as it is more likely to have been a -ridge name than a -bridge name. 10Including those containing the element -bruge* which the authors of the Place-Name Society volumes seem content to accept as a -bridge name, its similarity to the Old Norse word for a landing dock (bryggja) notwithstanding; see, for example, the entry for Handbridge, Cheshire (Bruge in Domesday) in
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bridges: Chester and Stamford1}), in comparison to 511 names which contain the element "-ford." By comparison, Speed's maps12 contain eighty-seven -bridge names and 439 -ford names. Of the bridge names that appeared between 1086 and 1600, approximately two-thirds appear in other sources before 1250,13 suggesting (given the conservatism inherent in place names) that the eleventh and twelfth centuries were the major period of bridge building. Moreover, beyond the sheer numerical evidence, there is a great qualitative difference in the names included and excluded. Many of the -bridge names that do not appear in Domesday Book, but appear otherwise before 1250, are names of significant river crossings: for example, Bridgnorth, Trowbridge, Ferrybridge, Uxbridge, Boroughbridge, Exebridge, Stockbridge (Hants.), Brigg (Lincs.), Knightsbridge (Middlesex), Robertsbridge (Sussex), Stamford Bridge, Pontefract and Stourbridge. By contrast, the two places that appear in Domesday with -bridge names, but on Speed's maps under different nam es,14 and the five which appear in Domesday, but not on Speed's maps at all,15 represent wholly insignificant bridges, that might have been a noticeable feature in a time of few bridges, but not when bridges were commonplace.
P.McN. Dodgson, The Place-Names o f Cheshire, V.I.i, English Place-Name Society 48 (Cambridge, 1981), 53-54. 1^ B , 262d [Cheshire], 336d [Lincs.] 12Only for those counties represented by Domesday, i.e. not counting Cumberland (two -fords, one -bridge), Durham (six -fords, one -bridge) or Northumberland (nine -fords, three -bridges); also not including some mistakes which appear to be unique to Speed and nothing more than simple errors: "Kunbridge" for Kimmeridge, Dorset {Cameric in Domesday), "Fawbridge" for Foulridge, Lancashire (not in Domesday), "Dichbridge” for Ditteridge (Digeric in Domesday). 13O f those in counties for which information is available from the Publications o f the English Place-Name Society, vols. 1-72 (1924-1996), supplemented by Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary o f English Place-Names (Oxford, 1940). 14Brigeford, Brushford (Devon); BrigefordlBrucheford, Bushford (Somerset). 15Cobruge, Cowbridge (Essex), Hobruge, Howbridge (Essex), Neutibrige, Newtimber (Hants.), Telbrig/ Telbricg, Ellbridge (Comw.), and Wesbruge, West Briggs (Norfolk).
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Another two -bridge names that appear in Domesday, but are absent on Speed’s maps, seem to stand for natural headlands: Briga/ Brige, Weke (Dorset) on Portland Bill and Brigas! Bringas, Bridge (Suffolk) north of Dunwich.16 Similarly, as well as these last two, a number of places in Domesday are known simply as Bridge (or variants) as if this was designation enough: Bruge, Handbridge (Ches.); Birige, Swimbridge (Devon); Brige, Bridgerule (Devon); Bricge! Brigge, Bridge Sobers (Herefs.) and Brugie, Bridgwater (Somerset). There is also a notable change in a few names that suggests the transformation: Ferrybridge is Ferie/ Fereiar, the hundred of Fordingbridge in Hampshire bears the modem name, but the town is simply Forde, suggesting a name in transition.17 Of the counties covered by Domesday, there are no -bridge names at all in Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Middlesex, Rutland, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire or the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire.18 This leaves the central and early settled counties of England without a Domesday -bridge name. The same pattern is shown in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There are only two -bridge names in the Chronicle before the eleventh century: Bridgnorth (Cwatbricge) is mentioned in 895 and 912;19 Cambridge (Grentabricg) in 875 and 917.20 Three new
16There are two other -bridge names in Domesday that disappear: Botulvesbrige in Huntingdonshire which was absorbed into Huntingdon itself and its omission may also have been encouraged by the existence of another Botulvesbrige, Botolph Bridge for Speed, in the northern half of the county (now absorbed into Orton Longueville, according to Darby and Versey); and Denebrige, Dunbridge, Hants, which appears to be marked on Speed's map by a place marker, but lacks a name. 17Darby and Versey only include settlement names, so simply list Forde; however, see Domesday Book: "In Fordingebrige Hundred, [Robert, son of Gerald] holds Forde" DB, 46d [Hants.]. 18Or the poorly covered Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmoreland, or the Isle of Wight. 19Bridgnorth is mentioned again in the Chronicle in 1102 and 1126; the name Cwatbricge is only used in 895 and then only in three of the four versions that contain this passage (A, B and C, not D); in all other passages the name is given as Bricge (and spelling variants thereof); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe,
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English21 -bridge names appear from the second half of the eleventh century on: Bristol (Brycgstowe) first in 1051,22 Stamford Bridge (Stanfordbrycge) in 1066;23 and Tonbridge ('Tonebricge) in 1088.24 Despite all the battles at river crossings, only London Bridge25 and the bridge over the Trent at Nottingham built by Edward the Elder in 920 are explicitly mentioned.26 By contrast, up to the year 900, ten different -ford names are mentioned;27 in the tenth century, there are eleven,28 in the eleventh twelve29 and in the twelfth only three.30
I, 174-175, 186-187, 366, 377. Bridgnorth, strangely, does not appear in Domesday Book, being represented by Quatford. 20And again in 1010; Cambridgeshire is mentioned in 1010 and 1011; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 144-145, 195, 264-265 (Cambridge), 262-263, 266-267 (Cambridgeshire). 21The -bridge name (though probably named for a landing dock rather than a bridge) mentioned most often in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is Bruges (Bricge etc.) which served as a haven for exiles and thus is mentioned in eight annals: 1037 (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 294-295), 1039 (pp. 296-7), 1040 (pp. 296-297), 1044 (p, 303), 1047 (p. 303), 1049 (pp. 308-310), 1051 (pp. 312-315), 1052 (pp. 316-317,320). 22Again in 1063, 1067. 1088, 1126 and 1140; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 314, 330, 342, 356, 377,384. 23D has Steinford brugge; E Stcengfordes brycge; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 336-337, 339. 24Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 357. ^M entioned in 1016, 1052, 1097 and 1114; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 279-281, 318, 363, 370. 26Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 196. -7Crecanford (a. 456; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 22-23), Charford (x2; 508, 519; pp. 26-27), Biedcanford (571; pp. 32-33), Bradford-on-Avon (652; pp. 50-51), Hertford (673; pp. 38-39), Beorhford (752; pp. 80-81), Otford (776; pp. 90-91), Kempsford (802; pp. 104-107), Galford (825; pp. 110-111), Thetford (870; pp. 134-135). 28Tiddingford (a. 906; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 182-183), Oxford (x2; 912, 924; pp. 186-187. 198-199), Hertford (913; pp. 186-187), Stafford (913; pp. 186-187), Bedford (x3; 914, 917, 971; pp. 190191, 194-195, 224), Hereford (914; pp. 188-189), Tempsford (917; pp. 194-195), Stamford (x2; 918; pp. 194-195, 210-211), Castleford (948, p. 213), Thetford (952; p. 215), Lydford (997; pp. 246-247). 29Thetford (x2; a. 1004, 1094; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 254-255, 360), Wallingford (x2; 1006, 1013; pp. 256-257, 270-271), Oxford (x7; 1009, 1013, 1015, 1018, 1035, 1040, 1065; pp. 260-263,
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The Chronicle contains a few stories that suggest a change in the use and nature of river crossings. In 893, the Chronicle states that Alfred put the Danes to flight, so that they fled across the Thames "where there was no ford."31 This annal presumes the existence and use of fords. By contrast, the annal for 1013, describes how many of Swein’s army, advancing on London from Winchester, were drowned in the Thames, "because they did not trouble to find a bridge."32 It might be expected that archaeology would serve to correct the written sources on a question such as this. It should be remarked, however, that archaeology is largely unhelpful when it comes to proving or disproving a putative shift from fords to bridges. The action of the river itself, combined with modem dredging activities, make the evidence of all but the most substantial bridges difficult to find. Furthermore, the tendency of the people of the Middle Ages to continue building bridges on the same site can make it difficult to identify the earliest remains. These remains, even if they are found, may be difficult to date with any precision. Finally, there is the essential logical problem with using archaeology for such a question: material remains can prove the
270-271, 274-275, 285-287, 293, 297, 332; and Oxfordshire: x3; 1010. 1011, 1049; pp. 264-265, 266267, 310), Bedford (1010, pp. 264-265; and Bedfordshire: x2; 1011, 1016; pp. 266-267, 278-279), Hertfordshire (1011; pp. 266-267), Aylesford (1016; pp. 279, 281-283), Brentford (1016; pp. 280-283), Staffordshire (1016; pp. 278-279), Stamford (x2; 1016, 1070; pp. 278-279, 345), Hereford (x3; 1055. 1056, 1088; pp. 324-325, 326-327, 357; and Herefordshire: x3; 1051, 1052, 1060; pp. 315, 316, 328329), Britford (1065; p. 332), Stamford Bridge (1066; p. 345). 30Wallingford (x2; a. 1126, 1140; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 377, 384), Stamford (1127, p. 378), Oxford (x3; 1137, 1140, 1154; pp. 382, 384, 385). 31Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 166-167; there is one other incident at a ford that might merit comment: the very first dated annal (dated 60 B.C.) relates that the Britons were able to resist Julius Caesar’s advance by placing sharpened stakes below the water of a ford across the Thames; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 5; however, this section of the annal was drawn from Orosius and is only found in versions D, E and F, suggesting that it was not part of the original Chronicle (compiled c. 890), but was added later (at the absolute latest 1031, but probably earlier). 32Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 270-271.
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existence of an object, but the lack of material remains does not prove its non-existence. Thus, finding evidence of a new bridge from c. 1000 does not prove that there was not a bridge on the site before it. All this said, archaeology is instructive in that it seems to provide no positive evidence against the chronology suggested above. A number of bridges, notably those at London, Rochester, Cambridge and Chester,33 may have survived in some form from Roman times to the high Middle Ages, but a survey of recent archaeological scholarship has turned up no evidence of Anglo-Saxon bridges built prior to 900. A number of sizeable and significant bridges built after that date have been excavated, such as the bridges of Gloucester, the bridge at Kingston-upon-Thames, and the Fleet bridge in London.34 The most spectacular discovery of recent years is the set of three medieval bridges across the Trent at Hemington in Leicestershire. These presumably served the road from Leicester to Derby in turn: the first having been dated to c. 1096, the other two to the early and late thirteenth century.35 None of these excavations, however, can necessarily disprove the existence of earlier bridges. The evidence from Oxford is more complete. The sequence suggested for the crossing of the Thames there is as follows: a eighth-century paved ford possibly with a clay causeway to facilitate the approach; the possibility of a late Saxon timber bridge, although what evidence exists for it is slight; then, in the late eleventh century, the building of a long stone causeway and the stone Grandpont. This last development finally rendered an already difficult ford unusable.36
33See below, chapter three. ^M edieval Archaeology 18 (1974), 219; 31 (1987), 131; 34 (1990), 178. 35Lynden Cooper, Susan Ripper and Patrick Clay, The Hemington Bridges,’ Current Archaeology, no. 140 (vol. 12, no. 8) (1994), 316-321; the details of the construction of the bridge revealed by the preservation of the timbers in alluvial gravel make this a wonderful discovery; the bridges each had timber superstructures in the form of trestles, resting on stone piles. 36Brian Durham et al.. The Thames Crossing at Oxford: Archaeological Studies, 1979-82,' Oxoniensia 49 (1984), 57-100, esp. 82-95; the Grandpont was on the site of the modem Folly Bridge.
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Beyond these examples, other evidence is more indirect. The lay-outs of Winchester and York suggest a realignment connected with bridge-building. In Winchester, the later traditions which associated the bridge outside the East Gate with St. Swithun (bishop, 852-862/3), the name Newbridge given to the causeway connecting the eastern end of the High Street to the gate and, finally, the realignment of the road outside the gate suggest that the bridge over the Itchen was of tenth-century origin if not slightly earlier.37 The alignment of the roads may suggest, moreover, that before then the eastern entrance to the city was made up-river from the modem crossing and through the Dum Gate.38 At York, the Roman bridge seems to have fallen into disrepair after the Romans’ departure; the bridge which replaced it was slightly down-stream of it, aligned with the tenth-century Danish mercantile settlement, based around Ousegate and Pavement, which suggests that the bridge was built at the earliest in the tenth century.39 Two final observations should serve to secure the general point about the chronology of bridge-building in the early Middle Ages. First, that there was a change from fords to bridges may be shown most obviously by the existence in the high Middle Ages of bridges at places with -ford names. If there were serviceable fords at major river crossings such as Oxford, Wallingford, Quatford, Fordingbridge, Stamford, Wansford, Hereford, Hertford, Stafford and Stratford-upon-Avon, why was there a need to build a bridge at these places at all? Second, in all the immense variety of place names in England, there is not a single place called Stratbridge, a name which would suggest a bridge on a Roman road; in contrast, there are numerous Stratfords, Stretfords, Straffords etc.
37 Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: an Edition and Discussion o f the Winton Domesday, ed. Martin Biddle, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford, 1976), 244, 261-263, 271-272, 283. 38Biddle does not argue this, but the northward swing of the road from the east away from the line of the Roman road is very suggestive. 39Jeffrey Radley, 'Economic Aspects of Anglo-Danish York,' Medieval Archaeology 15 (1971), 37-57 at 39 and fig. 5.
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The conclusion to be drawn from the charter bounds, place names and narrative evidence is that there were few bridges in England before the tenth century, and that the great period of the building of bridges at points previously unbridged was between 900 and 1200.40
This period of bridge-building can be explained by the necessity for a change from fords to bridges. The reason that this necessity arose may be found in changes in the rivers, caused by the effect of development on the environment; and in simultaneous changes in the traffic making the crossings. The first explanation for the provision of bridges to replace fords is that previously serviceable fords were becoming unusable. The disappearance of usable fords was most dramatically illustrated in the 1950s by the eccentric Lord Noel-Buxton, who, in an avowedly futile protest against the changing world, set out to ford the Thames by the Palace of Westminster, where it is thought that the Romans had a ford. Needless to say, this attempt served better as a whimsical protest than as a practical means of crossing the river.41 Nevertheless, his lordship's point may be agreed to stand: in the more sensible moments of his account of the protest,42 he contrasts the modem Thames to the ancient
40It is interesting to note in this context the contrast between the proposed English chronology and that in France; Boyer's study of bridges in French charter bounds suggests a great increase in the number of bridges during the period of Carolingian political authority in the ninth century, but fewer bridges during the disruptions of the tenth century; Marjorie Nice Boyer, Medieval French Bridges: A History (Cambridge MA, 1976), pp. 26-27. 41 "The roads aren’t normal here; the towns aren't normal. It is hysterical... But I must speak. There is something to say. You see what a PROTEST it is, to be interested in Thomey? Anyhow, it's all going on. We are in this Age. Fifty millions of us in Britain. Let's ford a river as a protest;” Rufus Noel-Buxton, Westminster Wader being an estimate o f Westminster in All Ages, by one who longs fo r MUDDY WATER, and the return o f the bittern to London Fen (London, 1957), pp. 39-41. 42See, for example, the map of the old coastline of the isle of Thomey (i.e. Westminster), Noel-Buxton, Westminster Wader, p. 90.
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river, noting in particular the effect of the embankments, calling it the chaining of the river: "such chains are the enemies of all good forders."43 This change in the nature of the rivers,44 and thus the river crossings, was part of what has been called the "second landscape revolution," which occurred between 800 and 1200 45 In this period, rivers were changed by three separate, but mutually re-inforcing aspects of economic development: forest clearance, embanking to drain fields and deliberate canalization to provide for mills. The clearance of forests has been re-interpreted in the last thirty years or so, as new techniques, particularly pollen analysis, have led the correction of the most famous interpretation of English environmental history, that of W.G. Hoskins. His notion of the Saxon settlement of a virgin landscape, followed by the rapid colonization of a still largely empty land after 110046 has been corrected on both counts. It is now evident that there was much more clearance in pre-historic and Roman times, and that the Saxon settlement was far less important than he argued;47 similarly, the changes which Hoskins dated to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been shown to have been substantially
43Noel-Buxton, Westminster Wader, p. 59. ■^For this paragraph and the following ones, see W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape. revised edition with introduction and commentary by Christopher Taylor (London, 1988); this is a re issue of Hoskins’ classic work (first published in 1955) with introductions to each chapter and running glosses by Taylor describing how more recent scholarship (particularly archaeology) has corrected Hoskins’ interpretations. In the citations that follow, I will distinguish between the work of Hoskins and that of Taylor. 45Taylor, 'The English Settlement: Introduction' in Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, pp. 40-42 at p. 42 and Taylor, T he Colonization of Medieval England: Introduction' in ibid., pp. 67-69 at p. 67. 46See, for example, Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, pp. 70-71: "vast areas remained in their natural state, awaiting the sound of a human voice... Over some inner fastnesses there reigned, except for the wind and the rain, an utter silence.” 47Taylor, 'The English Settlement: Introduction' in Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, pp. 40-42.
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underway two centuries before. The great increase in population and the related clearance of woodlands and drainage of fens and marshes were already happening in the tenth century, though they were less dramatic than Hoskins portrayed them, simply because the country was less empty than he suggested. Nevertheless, the clearance of woodland between 800 and 1200 should not be underestimated.48 An increase of the population of both men and livestock implies a
48Cp. H.C. Darby, 'The Clearing of the Woodland in Europe' in Man's Role in Changing the Face o f the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas (Chicago, 1956), pp. 183-216, esp. pp. 190-192, and Rackham, History of the Countryside, esp. pp. 68-85, and idem.. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, revised edition (London, 1990), esp. pp. 39-58. Rackham makes some judicious comments about the need for caution in analysing place names, and the danger of leaping to facile and imaginative conclusions from the scant evidence of a place name (e.g. the name Brentwood, "Burnt Wood," is weak evidence for the wholesale burning of woodlands; Rackham, History o f the Countryside, p. 84). Furthermore, his comparison of "wood" elements in Anglo-Saxon charter bounds, as well as of place names denoting clearings, amply makes the point that the pattern of the density of woodlands was similar during the Anglo-Saxon period to that recorded in Domesday (see his maps in ibid., pp. 82-83). Nevertheless, his analysis of charter bounds is heavily slanted towards the heartland of Wessex and to the period after 950 and thus reflects a landscape quite developed and close to Domesday, not the earliest period that he tries to illuminate. The place-name analysis is dependent largely on Domesday, and, while it again demonstrates the broad outlines to be similar, there are woodland names to be found in all but the wettest fenlands. Indeed, Rackham's figures for Domesday show that "England was not well wooded even by the standards of twentieth-century, let alone eleventh-century Europe" (ibid., p. 76), but they still show that the amount of wooded land was to reduce by a further two-thirds between 1086 and 1895 (Rackham, Trees and Woodlands, pp. 48-54) and that Domesday Book does represent one moment in an on-going story, not the end of it. His conclusion that "the Anglo-Saxons in 600 years probably increased the area of farmland, managed the woodland more intensively, and made many minor alterations. But they did not radically reorganize the wooded landscape" is a good corrective to the older view that "throughout the length and breadth of the countryside, the ax was at work cutting down the trees, and the pick was at work grubbing up the roots” (Darby, T he Clearing of the Woodland in Europe,’ p. 191), but his phrasing downplays the effect of Anglo-Saxon population development after 800 and the work in re-clearing the woodland that had grown back after the collapse of Roman Britain. See also Paul Stamper, 'Woods and Parks' in The Countryside o f Medieval England, eds. Grenville Astill and Annie Grant (Oxford, 1988),
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substantial increase of lands under cultivation and available for pasture. The heavy plough made heavy soils profitable for the first time.49 While the assarting occurred on the margins of existing land, not in untouched forests, the woodland was still reduced. The disappearance of native English woodland creatures such as wolves, boars, beaver, wild cattle and red deer testifies to the diminishment of their habitat;50 the introduction of the rabbit, the pheasant and the fallow deer mark the appearance of a new tamer landscape.51 Deer and sheep can be the most effective agents of clearance, eating away the new growth of young trees and thus killing trees more reliably than humans could without extreme effort.52 In the light of this evidence of environmental change, the Norman introduction of forest law and of enclosed parks may be taken to suggest a contemporary perception of a threat to the products so protected.53
pp. 128-148; and, for the situation in France, Roland Bechmann, Trees and Man: the Forest in the Middle Ages, trans. Katharyn Dunham (New York, 1990), esp. pp. 45-110. 49Darby, The Clearing of the Woodland in Europe,' p. 190. 50Rackham, History o f the Countryside, pp. 34-40; for the effect of beaver on the environment and thus the probable reasons for their eradication, see Bryony Coles, 'Further Thoughts on the impact of Beaver on Temperate Landscapes' in Alluvial Archaeology in Britain, eds. Stuart Needham and Mark G. Macklin (Oxford, 1992), pp. 93-99. 51 Rackham, History o f the Countryside, pp. 47-51. 52For the reduction of woods in deer parks to heaths, see Rackham, History o f the Countryside, pp. 126. 128. 53 Rackham is rightly insistent on distinguishing between forest and woodland: forest in the strict sense in the Middle Ages referred to land, wooded or not, under Forest Law: "to the medievals a Forest was a place of deer, not a place of trees" (see also Bechmann, Trees and Man, pp. 13-14, for a discussion of the etymology of the word "forest"); nevertheless, the need to designate particular areas for deer suggests a reduction of their natural habitat. The first and the only pre-Conquest reference to a park (or at least to a deerhay) occurs in 1045 (Rackham gives the reference as Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930), no. 13; it is correctly no. 31 (S 1531)); Forest Law was introduced by William the Conqueror, Rackham, History o f the Countryside, pp. 65, 123, 130-131.
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Clearance of forests changes the run-off of water.54 As William Cronon describes in his account of the effect of European settlement on the New England environment, even the smallest changes can have a cumulative effect. For a whole variety of mutually re-inforcing reasons, "spring runoff in deforested regions began and peaked at an earlier date; moreover smaller rainstorms at other times of year produced greater amounts of runoff. Watersheds emptied themselves more quickly, with the result that flooding was more common."55 The long-term result could be the drying up of minor streams and springs for the best part of the year. An increase in the amount and force of the water in major rivers would be the scouring of a deeper and more defined bed, and the cutting of the most extreme meanders, producing a straighter bed. The resulting river would be much harder to ford. Moreover, the variation in rivers between the faster spring thaw and the drier summers would make the remaining fords more seasonal. The faster run-off would also lead to greater soil erosion; the soil thus eroded would be washed into rivers. As a result, rivers would become less clear56 and therefore less easy to cross. Indeed, the medieval notion of good hygiene, involving the disposal of human waste directly into running water57 must have made the fording of rivers an unpleasant, if not hazardous, occupation in some areas. The drainage of land for cultivation also affected the shape of rivers. The provision of drainage ditches further accelerated the run-off o f water; the embanking of rivers to protect drained fields directly changed the shape of the rivers, defining them in a
54Modem dramatic examples of this process are the devastating floods in Cambodia that have flooded the temple of Angkor Wat and the recent flash floods in the Pacific North W est of the United States both of which were exacerbated, if not caused, by excessive logging. 55William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology o f New England (New York, L983), p. 124; see also Richard C. Hoffmann, 'Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,’ The American Historical Review 101 (1996), 630-669 at 633. 56Hofftnann, 'Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems,' pp. 633-634, 640. 57Hofftnann, 'Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems,' pp. 643-645.
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set course. Such drainage activity was proceeding in a piecemeal but significant manner from an early date. Drainage activity was underway in the Pevensey Levels in the eighth century; Glastonbury Abbey was working to reclaim fen lands at least as early as the tenth century.58 The annal for 1098 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (written at Peterborough, on the edge of the fens) states that heavy rains caused crops cultivated in the marshes to be destroyed, without any indication that cultivation of crops in marshland was in any way unusual.59 The fifteenth-century Pseudo-Ingulfian Chronicle of Crowland Abbey (just eight miles from Peterborough), which uses earlier materials, talks of the beginnings of cultivation in the tenth century and of vigorous embanking and settlement activities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Reliable and explicit evidence is available elsewhere from the twelfth century: the Black Book of the Exchequer talks of new knight's fees in the marshes around Ely in mid-century and, in 1189, Richard I granted the men of Holland and Kesteven the right to reclaim marshland.60 These examples largely concern the reclamation of marshlands around the coast, but such drainage also occurred along rivers: for instance, the appearance in Domesday Book of place names containing the element "-foss" suggest drainage activities in the Derwent Valley of east Yorkshire well before the Norman Conquest.61 Similarly, the existence of place names ending with "-don," which usually denotes a hill, in flat river valleys suggests that these places were old islands within the marshes, which gradually became integrated into the homogenous reclaimed countryside. Just such a place name confused the thirteenth-century chronicler
58Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, pp. 71-72. 59Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 364. 60For these and further examples, see H.C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 43-52. Evidence of this kind of activity is obviously best preserved by monastic establishments with their continuous institutional memory, but we may presume that similar activities were taking place on a small scale outside the monasteries. 6 Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, p. 71.
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of Abingdon Abbey, causing him to invent a spurious pre-foundation at a nearby hill.62 The wide, flat Thames valley below Oxford must once have been as wet as the Fens. The transformation of the valley into cultivated land would have changed the shape and force of the river: the claiming of fields by the Abbey of Abingdon would, for instance, have had a direct effect on the ancient ford at Wallingford, just down stream. Thus, whereas Wallingford had been the place where the pre-historic Icknield Way crossed the Thames and was the lowest ford that William the Conqueror could find after being unable to cross the Thames at London, it required a bridge by the twelfth century. Embanking took place in towns too, and thus at the actual point of major river crossings. Between 1000 and 1500, the London bank of the Thames moved southwards by up to four hundred feet. From Thames Street, which represents the line of the Roman river wall, the bank was advanced by gradual accretion of wharves and the subsequent filling in of those wharves with river-walls to provide building room.63 A similar process was underway on the opposite side of the river with the development of Southwark. Consequently, the same amount of water was being squeezed into an increasingly constricted space. The final aspect of development that would have contributed to the change in the rivers was the damming and canalization of rivers to provide power for mills. The creation of artificially deep mill ponds and fast mill races made previously fordable rivers
62Chronicon monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Joseph Stevenson [RS 2] (London, 1858), I, 2-3; Frank Stenton, The Early History o f the Abbey o f Abingdon (Reading, 1913), pp. 2-3 and 3n; Stenton comments that "it is not certain" that the suffix "-dun” always meant a hill, suggesting Famdon in Nottinghamshire, "in flat land by the Trent," as another place where the meaning is "impossible;” other examples might also include Famdon, Cheshire, on the banks of the Dee, or Little Farringdon, Oxfordshire, up river from Abingdon. The Chronicler with good medieval historiographical logic, makes the foundation on the dun be by an Irish monk named Abennus. 63Tony Dyson, Documents and Archaeology: The Medieval London Waterfront (London, 1989), pp. 12-24, esp. pp. 18,24 and figures 24-26, p. 15.
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impossible to cross. This process was already well advanced by the eleventh century. As R.A. Holt has demonstrated, the 6,082 mills of Domesday Book represent the saturation of England with them, not an early stage in their dissemination as has often been argued.64 While it is fair to note that not every mill recorded in Domesday was a watermill, and that some may have been powered by animal or human power,65 the distribution of mills shows their clustering around the major rivers of England.66 The transformation of the rivers is demonstrated by the fact that, by 1086, some mills on
^Archaeological evidence now puts the initial invention of the watermill in the third century or before; eight Roman watermills have been found in Britain. Moreover, archaeology has challenged, in this as in most aspects, the notion of wholesale collapse after the decline of Rome. Certainly watermills have been found in Ireland from as early as 630 and a "massive machine" at Old Windsor on the Thames has been dated to the late seventh century. A charter of 762 (B191 (S25) which admittedly survives in no copy earlier than the thirteenth century) records the transfer of half-use o f a mill (not explicitly a watermill) in Kent. Against the background o f this early evidence. Holt convincingly dismisses the notion that Domesday's paucity of references to mills in Devon and Cornwall shows the gradual dissemination of mills from east to west; R.A. Holt, The M ilb o f Medieval England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 1-4, 8-10. John Langdon’s more intensive analysis of mills in the West Midlands suggests that mill numbers were static or even in decline during the twelfth century and that the total number of mills only began to increase again in the thirteenth century with the introduction of the windmill and the use of watermills for such processes as fulling; he further argues that fulling mills were less profitable than com mills and the sporadic distribution of them suggests that they appeared only in those places where the demand for com mills had been entirely met; John Langdon, 'Water-mills and Windmills in the West Midlands, 10861500’ in Economic History Review 44 (1991), 424-444, esp. 430, 433-436. 65Taylor, gloss, in Hoskins, Making o f the English Landscape, revised edition, p. 73; for animal and hand mills, see Holt, Mills, pp. 17-20. 66See the map in Margaret T. Hodgen, 'Domesday Water Mills,' Antiquity 13 (1939), 261-279 at 267, reprinted in Holt, Mills, p. 9; but, as Hodgen observes, "the banks of the three great highway rivers, the Severn, Trent and Thames, were seldom regarded by mill builders as suitable places for milling operations. The lower waters of the Severn, for example, were free of mills as far as Tewkesbury. On the Trent, the first three mill wheels appear at Grassthorpe thirty of forty miles from its junction with the Humber. On the Thames the first mill upstream appeared possibly at Staines but more probably at Basildon," Hodgen, 'Domesday Water Mills,' p. 266.
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lesser streams had fallen into disuse.67 Moreover, some mills on smaller streams are noted as "winter mills," suggesting that their streams did not provide sufficient power in summer.68 The most profitable mills were situated on the major rivers and it seems that inhabitants of manors distant from such a mill would carry their com to these mills.69 The pattern of distribution of mills indicates that there was enormous demand for them; the most populous and well-watered counties had the most, with the rivers of Norfolk and Lincolnshire, in particular being lined with mills.70 The swift adoption of the windmill in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries suggests that the demand had outstripped the rivers' ability to match it.71 Such demand must inevitably have involved the construction of mill-ponds and mill-races to guarantee a reliable water supply.72 An unusually well-documented and dramatic example of the effects of the building of a watermill on the shape of its river may be provided from the later Middle Ages. In 1318, an inquiry was held to determine responsibility for the upkeep of the bridge of Sturry outside Canterbury. The jury found that the abbot of St. Augustine’s should be responsible for the upkeep of the bridge because he had constructed a new watermill which had turned the rivulus that had been crossable by means of a single plank into a larger river. The abbot protested vehemently about this, citing the clause in Magna Carta which states that no free man or community should be required to build a bridge
67Holt, Mills, pp. 13-14. 68Holt, Mills, p. 12. 69Holt, Mills, p. 13. 70Holt, Mills, p. 11. 71There seems to have been no increase in the number of watermills after 1086 in the densely populated parts of the country. Holt, Mills, pp. 13-16; for the introduction of windmills, see Holt, Mills, pp. 17-33, 171-175. 72For an example of the effect of a watermill on the course of a river, see C.R. Salisbury, 'The Archaeological Evidence for Palaeochannels in the Trent Valley' in Alluvial Archaeology in Britain, eds. Stuart Needham and Mark G. Macklin (Oxford, 1992), pp. 155-162; and Patrick Clay, 'A Norman Mill Dam at Hemington Fields, Castle Donnington, Leicestershire' in ibid., pp. 163-168
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where not so required by ancient custom. Thus the jury had to be recalled and another inquiry held. This offered further detail: there had been another mill on much the same site before the abbot built his and afterwards Roger the then abbot constructed another watermill to make a profit for his church on the soil of the said abbot on the other side of the stream. When the mill had been built, he realized that the water of the said stream could not power both the [first] mill and the abbot's mill, so he made a dam between the two mills, where none had previously been built, thus greatly enlarging the mill-pond and raising its level, so that by this raising a great quantity of water was retained and it powerfully sufficed to supply the mills. And [the jurymen] say that after the raising was so performed by Abbot Roger, the aforesaid plank was destroyed and broken by the vehemence and velocity of the stream of water, and that the land adjoining on all sides of the plank was deeply consumed and devastated, and thus the crossing was widened. Subsequently the abbot built a bridge to replace the plank; he claimed, however, that this was merely done out of charity. Thus the jury was asked if the abbot had ever done any work below the mill to enlarge the stream; they said he had not, but repeated that it was the strength of the new stream that had made the crossing impassable. Thus the abbot was ordered either to return the stream to its previous condition or to build a suitable causeway and bridge for people to cross in safety.73 Forest clearance, drainage of fields and the building of mills all combined to cause a faster run-off of water and more defined, faster rivers. These developments would tend to increase the tendency for flooding. Heavy rains or quick thaws could cause damage which might previously have been averted by the retention of water in wetlands. Thus evidence of floods is suggestive that these changes in the nature of rivers has taken place. As Cronon says in his analysis of storm and flood data for early New England,
73PRO, KB 27/257, m. 98; for examples of mills affecting fords, see Public Works in Mediaeval Law, ed. C.T. Flower, 2 vols.. Publications of the Selden Society, 32, 40 (London, 1915, 1923), I, 195-197, II, 199-203.
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"negative evidence is always dangerous to use,"74 and this is all the more true in relation to the use of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for such analysis, given its composite nature which can skew the data by the whims of the particular author, and the extremely terse nature of the early annals. However, the Chronicle, which, if it has a collective character, could certainly be described as down in the mouth, complains of famines, plagues, murrains, the mortality of birds, comets, shooting stars and other celestial happenings, wild-fires, high winds, thunderstorms, winter storms, frosts and poor harvests. It does not mention a flood until 1014, a tidal flood.75 Then, in 1097 London Bridge is recorded as having been all but swept away, in 1098 heavy rains caused cultivated crops in marshes to be destroyed and in 1099 there was another tidal flood.76 Finally, in 1125 "there was so great a flood on St. Laurence's Day that many villages were flooded and many people drowned, and bridges broken down."77 Thus, as far as the evidence can be taken, it would seem that the environmental change in the rivers had occurred by the early twelfth century. To summarize the whole process crudely, the drying of the lands and the definition of the rivers meant that approximately the same amount of water was concentrated into a smaller area. Rivers were thus deeper and faster, and thus more dangerous or impossible to ford. This process seems to have occurred in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the same period that bridges were built more frequently to replace fords.
74Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 124. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 274-275. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 363-364. 77Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 377.
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The need for these new bridges would have been increased by a change in traffic. This was a two-stage process: from pack animals to ox-drawn wains and from wains to horse-drawn carts.78 Each stage required better roads and river crossings. Pack animals were the predominant method of transporting goods in the early Middle Ages. Manorial customals make clear distinction between carrying service to be performed around the local farm, carriagium, and long-distance carrying to markets or other manors, averagium, which means transport by pack animal.79 The latter is the word used for carrying services in Domesday Book.80 As vehicles came to predominate in the twelfth century, however, pack animals declined in importance, since they could carry only a fraction of the weight that a cart could.81 Nevertheless, in difficult terrain, pack animals remained faster than vehicles, and thus were used for perishable items such as fish even after the introduction of vehicles for other goods.82 Above all, pack animals were reliable, being able to keep going through even the most difficult conditions, and thus less seasonal. They could pick their way through difficult terrain and could manage a fairly deep ford, even swimming if necessary, where wains and carts would be swept
78For some general musings on the subject of the introduction of wheeled transport, see William H. McNeil, The Eccentricity of Wheels, or Eurasian Transportation in Historical Perspective,' The American Historical Review 92 (1987), 1111-1126. 79David Postles, 'Customary Carrying Services,' The Journal o f Transport History, third series, 5 (1984), 115 at 2-3; John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: the Use o f Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 225-227; see also the carrying services to be performed by the Geneat and Gebur in the Rectitudines singularum personarum (c. 1050), Rect. 2, 4. 80See, for example, DB, 132c, 133dx3, 133ax3, 134b, 134cx3, 137b, 140bx2, I41ax2, 141bx4, 141c, 141dx2 [all Herts.]; Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation, pp. 24,225. 81John Langdon, 'Horse Hauling: a Revolution in Vehicle Transport in Twelfth- and Thirteenth England?,' Past and Present, no. 103 (May 1984), 37-66 at 59. 82J.F. Willard, 'Inland Transportation in England during the Fourteenth Century,' Speculum 1 (1926), 361374 at 368-369.
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away. These considerations kept pack animals important throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modem period, especially in the hillier parts of the country.83 The second stage in this process, namely the switch from ox-drawn wains to horse-drawn carts has been studied by John Langdon (particularly with reference to farm work, but also by extension to road haulage).84 His examination of the vocabulary used for vehicles suggests that the second half of the twelfth century was the major period of transition between ox-drawn wains and horse-drawn carts.85 By the thirteenth century, around three quarters of farm haulage was done using the latter.86 Langdon points to flexibility and an increased market range as the motive for a switch from the slower but larger wains to the faster but smaller carts. For these advantages to come into effect, however, the roads and the river crossings must have been easily passable, since horses, while they are faster on easy surfaces, cannot keep trudging along on difficult surfaces in the way oxen can. The appearance in manorial accounts of ox-drawn vehicles (usually plaustra or carrae) versus horse-drawn ones (almost invariably carectae) shows an overwhelming dominance of the latter in the drier, flatter parts of the country (including an absolute exclusivity in East Anglia), but a higher proportion of oxen in the wetter, hillier parts (especially the North and West). The difficulties involved in using horse-drawn vehicles were particularly acute because the wains and carts of the Middle Ages were almost exclusively two-wheeled
83Dorian Gerhold, 'Packhorses and Wheeled Vehicles in England, 1550-1800,' The Journal o f Transport History, third series, 14 (1993), 1-26 at 13-17. 84For the most concise statement of his research with regard to this question see Langdon, 'Horse Hauling,' pp. 37-66; see also James F. Willard, The use of Carts in the Fourteenth Century,' History, new series 17 (1932), 246-250 for some of the tasks performed using the "heavy and clumsy cart.” 85 Langdon,
'Horse Hauling,' pp. 45-46,58
86 Langdon,
'Horse Hauling,’ pp. 49-58.
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vehicles.87 The various pieces of technology required for a practical88 four-wheeled vehicle, especially the swivelling front axle and dished outward slanting wheels were not brought together before the sixteenth century.89 The disadvantages of the two-wheeled vehicle were demonstrated in the complaints which attended the next transformation in traffic, namely the transition from two-wheeled carts to four-wheeled wagons. These new large wagons were introduced from the Continent in the 1560s, but immediately became the subject of prohibition, because of the damage they did to roads and bridges. Wagoners prosecuted in the early seventeenth century complained that they preferred wagons to carts because carts were unstable, especially on hills and in deep fords. Wagons were also easier to pull over obstructions and through mud because their weight was spread over four wheels instead of two.90 Before the introduction of the four-wheeled vehicle, large horse-drawn carts were only a practical mean of transportation in very good conditions. Without good roads and bridges instead of unreliable fords, carts were troublesome vehicles. Indeed, even with four wheels, the heavier wagons tended only to predominate in the same areas where carts had first replaced pack animals and horses replaced oxen, again being most popular in the flat, dry spaces of East Anglia.91 This pattern of early innovation to take advantage of the better road conditions in the South-East, but of slower innovation in the face of more difficult road conditions in the North and West makes England the perfect mirror image of France. Robert-Henri Bautier has shown how by the high Middle Ages, France was divided into three distinct zones of transport: the North-East, the most prosperous as well as flattest area, was the
87 Langdon,
Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation, pp. 142-156, esp. 154-156.
88 Langdon,
Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation, pp. 24-26, 152.
8 9 Langdon,
Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation, p. 155; Gerhold, 'Packhorses and Wheeled
Vehicles,’ pp. 18-19. 90 Gerhold,
'Packhorses and Wheeled Vehicles,' pp. 9-11.
9 Gerhold,
'Packhorses and Wheeled Vehicles,' p. 17.
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zone of large, fast horse-drawn carts; the centre was dominated by ox-drawn wains; in the south and west, pack animals were still the most common.92 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the most efficient method of carrying goods to market was by horse-drawn cart. Nonetheless, as has been noted, these horses and carts needed good roads and easy river crossings. The desire to use the most efficient method of transporting goods therefore created a demand for easily accessible bridges. The town that wanted to attract passing mercantile trade was well advised to build a bridge to replace its increasingly difficult ford.
The Svnod of Gumlev. St. Boniface and the Origins of the Common Burdens: if there were very few bridges in the early Anglo-Saxon period, there is an apparent paradox: why, if there were few bridges, did bridge-work appear at all in early charters and why did kings insist upon it? What, in fact, were the origins of the common burdens? Before embarking on an account of the origins of the common burdens, a word of explanation of the term is in order. In 1914, W.H. Stevenson discredited the term trinoda necessitas by which the burdens still tend to be commonly known.93 Stevenson recounts that the term had its origin in historians' trusting transmission of an error of memory by a renowned scholar. It was first used by John Selden in the early seventeenth century. In works of 1610 and of 1614, he referred to the reservation of the trinoda necessitas in a charter of Caedwalla, king of Wessex. In 1618, he referred to "that trinoda necessitas, whereto all lands whatsoever were subject, although otherwise of a most free tenure."94 By the second edition of the 1614 work, in 1631, the burdens of the originally precise
92 Robert-Henri
Bautier, 'La route fran?aise et son Evolution au cours du moyen age' in Bulletin de la classe
des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Academie Royale de Belgique, 5th series, 73 (1987) (reprinted in Robert-Henri Bautier, Sur I'histoire economique de la France medievale: la route, le fleuve, lafoire (Aldershot, 1991)), 70-104 at 8 6 . 93 W.H.
Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' English Historical Review 29 (1914), 689-703.
94Quoted in Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' p. 690.
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reference had become "that Trinoda Necessitas, as it was sometimes called," and "in some charters in the church of Canterbury trinoda necessitas."95 This apparently authoritative observation led to the term appearing in various legal dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the second edition of Du Cange’s Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (1733-1736),96 and thus entering into the common pool of medievalist vocabulary. This would be all well and good except that the term actually appears only in the single charter originally cited by Selden. Moreover, there the term, instead of the whimsical trinoda necessitas, "three-knotted obligation," is properly read as the more prosaic "three-fold obligation," trimoda necessitas.91 And finally, the charter, while purporting to be from 680, is a late tenth-century forgery,98 the most damning evidence against the charter's authenticity being the anachronistic reference to the common burdens.99 Despite Stevenson's findings, the term trinoda necessitas is still used as convenient, if somewhat misleading, short-hand by some scholars.100 Yet, because the term has no Anglo-Saxon validity, it will be avoided in the account that follows; moreover, while the term trimoda necessitas should be noted as a tenth-century attempt at expressing the indivisibility of the three obligations, the straightforward term "common burdens," which does not owe its origins to a unique forgery, will be preferred here. The first appearance of bridge-work in an authentic charter is in a grant of privileges to the Church by King /Ethelbald of Mercia at the Synod of Gumley in 749.
95Quoted in Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' p. 690. 96 Stevenson,
Trinoda Necessitas,' pp. 690-691.
"Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,’ p. 691. 98B50 (S230). "Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' pp. 692-697. 100See,
for example, H.R. Loyn, The Governance o f Anglo-Saxon England, 500-1087 (London, 1984), pp.
33-34: "there gradually emerged in the written records of the eighth century references to a combination of charges upon estates that were later known as the trimoda or trinoda necessitas, the three necessities."
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This synod and the charter which came out of it were the response of iEthelbald to a campaign for reform led by St. Boniface. The Church was granted the right to hold its lands absolutely free from royal exactions except for the building of bridges and the defence of fortresses against the enemy. Two questions surround this exclusion clause: first, does it represent the imposition of novel obligations on the Church or the definition of previously undefined duties?; second, why was bridge-work one of the obligations excluded? The answers to these two questions will be important in understanding the evolution and function of Anglo-Saxon bridge-work.
0 Did the Church possess a blanket immunity before the 740s?: the first of these two questions has been discussed by W.H. Stevenson, Eric John and Nicholas Brooks. In short, Stevenson believes that the common burdens had always been demanded from ecclesiastical lands and that the 740s marks their first appearance in the written record; John believes that the Gumley charter is evidence of a recent imposition of the burdens; Brooks reads the document as evidence of an effort to define the Church's previously undefined obligations. In his article of 1914, Stevenson seeks to demonstrate that the English Church had possessed a limited immunity of the kind specified at Gumley from the time of the its foundation, but that this immunity had not previously been specified in charters. To prove that the Church's immunity was not new in the 740s, he points to the existence of earlier charters with unlimited immunities. On the other hand, he suggests that the obligations could not have been imposed in the 740s, because there also exist later charters with unlimited immunities. Instead, he suggests that the silence of the charters with regard to exclusion of the common burdens from the immunity was because "their immunities and their limitations were so well known by common law or ecclesiastical law that it was not
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necessary to mention them."101 He asserts that since the Church on the Continent did not enjoy immunity from similar common burdens at the time of Augustine’s mission to England, the missionaries would never have claimed such a blanket immunity from English kings.102 Moreover, he adds that "the liability to military service and to aid in the construction and repair of fortresses are such primitive requirements of any organized state that it is unlikely that they were suddenly imposed."103 Therefore the early silence of the charters may be read as the tacit acquiescence to the three common burdens.104 John in his work on Anglo-Saxon land tenure rejects Stevenson’s arguments for long-standing burdens and argues that the common burdens were imposed on ecclesiastical lands105 for the first time shortly before the Synod of Gumley of 749. The crux of John's argument is the statement: "it cannot be denied that church lands enjoyed immunity before [749]."106 He produces four separate pieces of evidence: 1) a charter of King ^Ethelbald from 742, granting absolute immunity from secular burdens to the churches in Kent in 742, or, as John puts it "more accurately [guarantee of] existing immunities against the constant danger of secular encroachment."107 2) a comparison with Continental immunities: John reads Emile Lesne's Histoire de la propriete ecclesiastique en France as concluding that "it was not until the time of the Carolingians that the lands of the Frankish Church were legally liable for military
101 Stevenson,
Trinoda Necessitas,' p. 699.
102 Stevenson,
Trinoda Necessitas,’ p. 701.
103 Stevenson,
Trinoda Necessitas,’ p. 698.
104 Stevenson,
Trinoda Necessitas,' pp. 699-702.
105 John's
discussion is on the imposition of the common burdens on church lands, but his conclusions
connecting the imposition to the nature of bookland have a wider significance; Eric John, Land Tenure in Early England: a discussion o f some problems (Leicester, 1960), pp. 64-79. I0®John, Land Tenure in Early England, p. 70. 107 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, p. 71; the grant is B 162 and B162A.
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service."108 Moreover, John asserts that a Merovingian attempt to raise an army from church lands (described by Gregory of Tours) was "exceptional, unusual, and probably illegal."109 3) a passage from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica in which, after he had defeated Penda at the Battle of Winwaed in 655, King Oswiu of Northumbria gives twelve small plots of land for monasteries. The grant is made so that "land and means, being relieved of devotion to earthly warfare (ablato studio militiae terrestris) might contribute to the waging of heavenly warfare (militiam caelestem) by the eternal and busy devotion of monks."110 John takes this passage literally, as implying that ecclesiastical estates in Northumbria were not subject to military obligations. 4) a passage from Bede’s letter to Archbishop Egbert, in which Bede urges Egbert to reform his province, by imposing discipline on his subordinates and by setting up new bishoprics to spread the Gospel.111 He suggests that these bishoprics be endowed with land taken from corrupt monasteries which "are useful neither to God nor to men, since in truth the life which is observed in those places is neither according to the rule of God, nor are they possessed by soldiers and nobles of the secular powers who defend our people from the barbarians."112 This re-allocation of land should be done lest "the forces of the secular warriors growing thin, they be absent who should guard our borders from barbarian invasion,"113 a situation which was arising because young men were finding it difficult to find land on reaching manhood and were therefore living corrupt lives or emigrating in search of better prospects. Bede goes on to express his despair at the sight
108 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, p. 6 6 .
109 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, p. 6 6 n.
110 Bede,
Ecclesiastical History o f the English People, eds. Bertram Coigrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford,
1969), pp. 292-293 111 Bede,
Opera historica, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1896), 1,405-423.
112 Bede,
Opera historica, ed. Plummer, 1,414.
113 Bede,
Opera historica, ed. Plummer, 1,415.
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of laymen who bought the right to found monasteries from the king solely for the charter of immunities that they would obtain as abbots of the new foundations, immunities which made them "free from both human and divine service (liberi... a divino simul et humano servitio)."114 John reads these passages together to imply that before Gumley bookland was desirable to noble families both because it was hereditary and because it was free from secular duties. For John, the insistence on bridge- and borough-work by ^Ethelbald, and, subsequently, of army service by Offa was intended to place limits on bookland and thereby to prevent spurious foundations of monasteries by landholders wishing to evade their duties. The consequent limitation of bookland enabled it to become a method of making secular grants from the time of these kings onward, and to be a frequent form of secular grant by the time of Alfred.115 He thus reads the silence of the charters with regard to both immunity and burdens as meaning different things at different times: before 749, the silence may be read as an absence of burdens, and afterwards as tacit acquiescence.116 In contrast, Brooks argues that the Church had not possessed a blanket immunity from labour services before the 740s and that John has erred by reading personal exemptions of ecclesiastical dignitaries as immunities for their estates. Brooks disagrees with John's interpretation of all four pieces of evidence: 1) iJEthelbald's charter of 742 is rejected on the grounds that it would have applied only to Kent, not Mercia, and therefore the grants of 749 and 742 cannot be compared.117
114 Bede,
Opera historica, ed. Plummer, I, 415
115 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, pp. 77-79.
116 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, p. 65.
117Nicholas Brooks, 'The Development o f Military Obligations in eighth- and ninth-century England' in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, eds. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 69-84 at p. 76 and note; he ignores John's
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Moreover, Brooks argues that, in any case, the grant of 742 is a ninth-century forgery created by the monks of Canterbury in their conflict with the kings of Mercia.118 2) Brooks claims that John's interpretation of Emile Lesne’s work is wrong: in the passage cited Lesne was actually writing only about the personal obligations of bishops and abbots to serve in the army.119 Brooks reads the passage from Gregory of Tours to imply that the kings only rarely allowed claims of immunity.120 He notes that on the Continent, the compulsion of service from ecclesiastical tenants was not new in the eighth century. In particular, he mentions the requirement of bridge-work from ecclesiastical tenants in the Theodosian Code of 423, and the recognition that this requirement was called an antiqua consuetudo in Italy in the 780s.121 3) In response to John's interpretation of the story of Oswiu in the Historia ecclesiastica, Brooks concludes that "certainly land which was now to provide food-rent and housing for monks could no longer supply the same needs for warrior lords, but we should not assume that the men on the land had no military obligations" and supports his conclusion that poor tenants had military obligations with the references to other stories from Bede.122
parenthetical remark that "one passage in the record suggests that the privileges were expected to obtain over all England south of the Humber," John, Land Tenure in Early England, p. 70. 118 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,’ p. 76n.
119 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 73n; see Emile Lesne, Histoire de la propriete ecclesiastique en
France II, Fasc. 2 (Lille, 1926), 456-490. 120 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 73n.
121 Brooks,
Military Obligations,’ p. 77n.
122 St.
Cuthbert before entering Melrose interrupted his life as a shepherd with periods serving as a soldier;
Imma survived the Battle of the Trent in 678 by claiming to his captors that he was not a soldier but one of the poor folk who, while not expected to fight, were expected to follow the army with supplies; Brooks, Military Obligations,' p. 74n.
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4) Similarly, Brooks argues that in his letter to Egbert, Bede is referring to the individuals holding the land not to the tenants on the land. That is to say, the abbots or pseudo-abbots were free of the obligations but this does not imply that their lands were exempt.123 Thus Brooks convincingly rejects John's case that the Church had an absolute immunity before the 740s.124 Instead, he proposes a more complicated picture in which the Church enjoyed a muddle of different immunities in need of definition.125 This is supported by his observation that the reservation clauses only appear when immunity clauses appear. The early references are sporadic, inconsistent and ambiguous. The first immunity clause only appears in a charter of 699 in which King Wihtred of Kent granted that churches might be free from the exaction of public tribute, so the Gumley charter is not only one of the first charters to contain an exemption clause, but one of the first to have an immunity from which anything can be exempted.126 The first charter to contain a exemption clause is again from Kent, a charter of /Ethelbald II of 732. It reserves an unspecified ius regium which pertained to all ecclesiastical lands, which Brooks takes to be "some or all of the military obligations which are more precisely reserved and stated to be 'common' or 'general' in later charters."127 He finds support for this position in a Wessex charter of 739 granting land "so that it is immune and forever secure from all fiscal causes and royal matters, except for matters pertaining to military service
123 John,
Land Tenure in Early England, pp. 44-46, 73-74; Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 74nn; Brooks
does not refer explicitly to the first passage from the letter, but his remarks may be taken to apply to both. 124 See,
however, the following of John’s argument in Richard P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation
in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 43-57, esp. pp. 52-53. 125 Brooks, 126399
'Military Obligations,’ p. 77.
(S20); Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 75 and n.
127B148 (S23); Brooks, M ilitary Obligations,' p. 75.
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(expeditionalium rerum)."I28 It is possible that the res expeditionales might be the same or similar to the ius regium in Kent.129 It seems therefore that the Gumley charter of 749 represents one part of a wider process to define the Church's immunity from secular interference. This being the case, the question remains, why would bridge-work be an issue in this process?
ii) the 740s: whv bridge-work?: whilst disagreeing as to whether Aithelbald was responding positively or negatively to Boniface's pressure,130 Brooks and John agree in making St. Boniface the driving force behind the inclusion of the common burdens in the charter of 749. Boniface, since his success in reforming the Frankish Church in the early 740s, had been waging a cross-Channel letter-writing campaign to persuade King /Ethelbald to forego his rapacious and immoral behaviour. As, however, neither Brooks nor John linger over why bridge-work should have been a matter of concern for the king
12^B1331 (S255); quoted in Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 76. 129 Brooks,
"Military Obligations,’ p. 76.
130In John's account, ^Ethelbald defied the criticisms of St. Boniface that he had been abusing the rights of monasteries by granting that monasteries and churches be free from all secular duties, but excluding "the building of bridges and the necessary defence of fortresses against enemies." Because o f his belief in a previously unlimited immunity, John reads this not as a true grant of immunity, but as the imposition of two burdens under the pretext of protecting the churches. Brooks agrees that it was Boniface who prompted the clause, but disagrees with John about the attitude of /Ethelbald at the Synod of Gumley, seeing it as a positive response to the criticism. In Brooks' account, the reservation of bridge-work should not be taken as defiance of Boniface since it was only intended to place limits on the labour services demanded from monastic lands; and, besides, "there is no suggestion that these works were to be performed by the monks,” which had been the essence of Boniface’s complaint; Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 78. I believe that Brooks is entirely right to see the charter as a positive response to Boniface. It would seem, if nothing else, that John's argument flies in the face of the words of the charter. It would be an act of considerable bravado to call a synod in order to defy the most influential holy man o f the day, and to frame that defiance in a charter with the subscribed consent of bishops.
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and the prelates at Gumley, I believe they have overlooked the significance of the saint and the Continental connection he represents in the English origins of bridge-work. In noting the parallels between English and Continental obligations, Brooks suggests that this is an example o f "similar problems... receiving similar solutions... because of contemporary contacts in times of danger and because the origins of these obligations... lay in a common Germanic and Roman past."131 I will argue here these "contemporary contacts" were closer in the 740s than at other times in the early Middle Ages, and that St. Boniface, one of the most extraordinary and influential men of the period, served as a medium for the transmission of institutional and legal ideas through western Europe.132 Bridge-work was, in its English origins, an alien introduction, taken directly from Francia and the archives of the see of Rome and introduced into England through St. Boniface as a means to place a strict definition on the sacred and profane spheres.
In order to understand the introduction of bridge-work in this re-interpretation, it is necessary to make a brief excursus on Boniface's modus operandi. In his two great works, the foundation of the Church of Germany and the reform of the Frankish Church, St. Boniface was always guided by two authorities: the pope and the Church Fathers. Boniface's relationship to the Papacy defined his mission at every stage. Wilhelm Levison describes Boniface's "close connexion and cooperation with the Papacy," which caused him to "[send] reports on the progress of his work and [ask] the pope for information and instruction on problems of ecclesiastical practice arising in a soil new to
13 bro o k s,
'Military Obligations,' p. 69.
132For a similar example of a churchman, namely Theodore of Tarsus, serving as the medium for the transmission of legal ideas, see Martin Brett, 'Theodore and the Latin Canon Law’ in Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence, ed. Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 120-140.
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Christianity."133 Boniface's own visits to Rome were marked not just by submission and reverence to the pope, but by close consultations to plan his missions.134 Boniface was inspired, however, not merely by the Papacy itself,135 but by its connection to the Church Fathers and the apostolic mission that it represented. Sent to minister to the heathen Germans by Pope Gregory II, Boniface saw himself as a new Augustine, commissioned by a new Gregory and thus guided by the example of ancient precedent. Boniface's understanding of this ancient precedent was more than superficial; he repeatedly sought out the authoritative writings of his spiritual forebears. For example, at Boniface's episcopal consecration, the pope "equipped him with a little book in which the most sacred laws of ecclesiastical order made by episcopal synods have been compiled and commanded him that henceforth this norm of episcopal conduct should be kept inviolate and that the people under his jurisdiction should be taught by these examples."136 Similarly, in reforming the Frankish Church and imposing the synodal system, "being a legate of the Roman Church and the Apostolic See, [Boniface] urged that the numerous canons and ordinances decreed by early councils should be preserved so as to improve the health of heavenly doctrine."137 Boniface sought practical guidance
133WilheIm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 72, 74; for example, on one occasion, Boniface sent a messenger from Germany to the pope seeking advice on the everyday needs of the Church, Vitae Sancti Bonifatii archiepiscopi Moguntini, ed. Wilhelm Levison, Scriptores rerum germanicarum (Hanover and Leipzig, 1905), p. 27 (BHL 1400). 134 0 n
the occasion of Boniface's second visit to Rome in 722, during which Gregory II raised him to the
episcopate and gave him the name Boniface, Gregory "brought up many other matters about holy religion and the true faith which were worth examining, and [Boniface and Gregory] they spent almost the whole day talking them over;" Vitae Sancti Bonifatii, ed. Levison, p. 29. 135 As
Boniface's more strained relations with Pope Zacharias demonstrates.
136 Vitae Sancti Bonifatii, ed. Levison, p. 30. 137 Vitae Sancti Bonifatii, ed. Levison, pp. 41-42; there follow brief but specific references to four of the great councils of the early Church.
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from patristic sources and, not surprisingly, his most constant guide was Gregory the Great, whose writings he hungrily sought and used.138 Drawn from the example of St. Gregory, the main themes of Boniface's efforts at reform may be summarized under three headings: an insistence on ecclesiastical hierarchy, particularly recognition of the authority of Rome; the maintenance of church law, especially an insistence on properly sanctioned marriage; and the separation of religious and profane, especially with regard to the discipline of priests and monks. Despite the common themes, however, it would be wrong to view Boniface through the lens of eleventh-century reform. His insistence on properly religious behaviour by those in holy orders did not at any time imply the exclusion of the royal authority. Boniface's mission in Germany and Frankland would have been impossible without the active support of Charles Martel and his sons.139 If his work in England were to proceed along the same lines as his previously successful work on the Continent, Boniface might be expected to have sought an alliance with a powerful secular authority in the arrangement of a proper division between
138This search led him to develop a relationship with the papal archivists: in 735 he wrote to Nothelm. archbishop of Canterbury asking for a copy of the Libellus responsionum of Gregory, which would be of use in his missionary work, because the archivists claimed that they did not have a copy in Rome among the other materials of that pope. Similarly, there survives a letter from a cardinal-deacon of Rome to Boniface apologizing for the delay in sending the copies of Gregory’s letters that he had requested. Boniface also sent transcripts of Gregory’s letters which he had himself made in the Roman archives to friends in England; Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH Epistolae Selectae, I (Berlin, 1955), 57,96-97, 158 (nos. 33,54, 75). 139 As
Wallace-Hadrill has written, "As a firm upholder of the principle of a national church protected by
its ruler, [Boniface] expected the Carolingians to exercise more, not less, authority in the choice of suitable bishops and abbots;" J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ’A Background to St. Boniface's Mission' in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy White lock, eds. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 35-48 at pp. 47-48; see also Levison, England and the Continent, p. 75.
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ecclesiastical and lay spheres, thus allowing the Church to discipline its own members. This appears to have been precisely what he did. First, he sought a working relationship with the most powerful English king, namely King iEthelbald of Mercia. His letter of 745-746 admonishing the king was sent only after first preparing the ground. An earlier letter accompanied with gifts thanks the king for his assistance, but hints at discord present and future by ending with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments."140 The subsequent letter of admonition, co-written with five other bishops, starts with praise of vEthelbald’s alms giving, protection of the Church and maintenance of peace. Only after this mollifying beginning does it turn to scathing criticism of the king’s failure to marry and his seduction of nuns, which sins have led all the English into sin.141 Only after discussion of these other illegalities, does the letter mm to the privileges of monasteries: Furthermore it is reported to us that you have abused many privileges of churches and even carried off some of their properties. And this, if it is true, is considered a great sin... [for] he who embezzles or snatches the properties of Christ and the Church shall be deemed a homicide in the sight of the righteous judge... And it is said that your reeves (prefecti) and ealdormen (comites) inflict greater violence and slavery upon monks and priests than other Christian kings have done before. Truly, since the apostolic pontiff St. Gregory, by means of sending preachers of the catholic faith from the Apostolic See, converted the race of the English to the true God, the privileges of the churches in the realm of the English remained undefiled and inviolate until the times of Ceolred, king of the Mercians, and Osred, king of the Deirans and the Bemicians.142
140 Dic
Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 142 (no. 69); the quotationis fromEcclesiastes
12.13.
141Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 151 (no. 73). 142Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 152 (no. 73); theletter thenrecountsthe grim ends that these two kings received as divine come-uppance.
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A number of points should be emphasized from this letter. The first is that ^Ethelbald is accused of two things with regard to monasteries' privileges: the theft of properties and the forced labour from monks. The second is that Boniface claims that the Church’s privileges go back to the Roman foundation of the English Church by Gregory the Great. At the same time, Boniface sought to bring the English Church to acknowledge proper discipline and authority. The letter of admonition to /Ethelbald was accompanied by other letters to churchmen. These repeat the same themes. One makes clear that the real issue in the disdain of the English for what Boniface deemed to be lawful marriage, was that the English in so doing were "disdaining the custom of other peoples and despising the apostolic command."143 In a letter to Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, Boniface describes the reforming work performed in France and particularly the model of ecclesiastical discipline achieved through regular synods, and moves on to criticize what he saw as decadent aspects of the English Church. He then returns to the theme of lay intrusions into ecclesiastical properties: A layman or emperor or king or any one of the reeves or ealdormen justifying himself by secular power who seizes by violence a monastery from the power of the bishop or abbot or abbess and installs himself in the place of the abbot to rule and have the monks under him and to possess the property, which was provided by the blood of Christ, such a man the ancient fathers used to call a thief and a sacrilegious and a murderer of the poor... Against such men who we find here and there, let us blow the trumpet of God, lest we damned for keeping silent.144 At the end of the letter Boniface returns to the topic of violence against monks: "the forced slavery of monks upon royal works and buildings, which one does not hear of being done anywhere in the whole world except among the race of the English. It is not right that priests consent to it or keep silent about it. It is an evil unheard of in past
143 Boniface's
letter to the priest Herefrid who was charged with carrying the letter to the king; Die Briefe
des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 156 (no. 74). 144 0/e
Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, pp. 169-170 (no. 75).
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ages."145 The themes in his letters to churchmen are clear: the Church must be separate from worldly things; it must be disciplined and strongly led so that it can withstand the immoralities of the world. In particular, it is wrong of the Church to acquiesce tacitly in the violation of the religious life. The result of this two-pronged letter-writing campaign was a pair of synods. The Synod of Clovesho of 747 laid down proper standards of conduct for the religious. The Synod of Gumley of 749 defined the boundaries of the lay and religious spheres. It is only in the context of Boniface’s policies of reform that the first appearance of bridgework in the charter issued at Gumley can be properly understood.
The text of the charter may be found in Appendix One. This charter was the direct result of Boniface's pressure. It represents a deal between the Church and King jEthelbald, designed to allow both to prosper. The deal is most obvious in the structure of the charter. The words of the donation begin in the first person ("ego yEthelbaldus... concedo...") but half-way through it changes to the third person ("i£thelbaldus... donavit"). Moreover, the preamble is briefly repeated: "Quapropter ego /Ethelbaldus... pro amore caelestis patriae, et pro remedio animae maae..." etc. is matched by "Quia /Ethelbaldus rex, pro expiatione delictorum suorum et retributione mercedis setemi..." Finally, the language of the donation changes at the same mid-point: where the first half speaks calmly in the language of secular donation, the second half rings with the language of Boniface's admonitions, speaking of "propriam libertatem," gifts "in saeculare" and "tribulationes... in domo Dei." Most tellingly of all, the donation concludes
145"de violenta quoque monachorum servitute operibus et aedificiis regalibus, quae in toto mundo non auditur facta nisi tantum in gente Anglorum;" Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 17In (no. 78); quoted in Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 77 (with "violentia" for "violenta").
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"quatenus subliraatus regni eius prosperis successibus polleat." The last three words were a favourite formula of Boniface used in a number of his letters.146 The structure of the charter suggests that the first half of the donation is the king's terms; the second is the Church's. Consequently, what is essential to each becomes clear. The king secures military resources from church lands when he chooses to call upon them, for which he gives up all other dues from those lands; the Church secures the freedom to enjoy its lands unmolested. This is the form of the deal between Carlomann, the Carolingian Mayor of the Palace, and the Frankish Church in 743.147 However, the question remains: why is bridge-work included in the charter? In 749, England was not being attacked by river-borne marauders. Neither the sources cited above on the question of the Church's immunity nor the letters of admonition mention bridge-work at any point. Moreover, the words of the charter suggest that what was important to the king: the clause "sed nec hoc praetermittendum est cum necessarium
146This co-incidence of style was noticed by Wilhelm Levison. Levison notes that this formula, which originated in the Actus Silvestri, was popularized in the English Church by Aldhelm; the phrase was also used by Bede and the Lindisfame biographer of St. Cuthbert; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 285-286 and 286n. 14? "We establish, moreover, with the counsel of the servants of God and the Christian people, that, because of the imminent wars and the attacks of other peoples who live around us, we will retain for a time with God's indulgence some part of ecclesiastical property as a charitable gift (precario) and tax (censu) for the help of the army... And, if it is deemed necessary, as the prince orders (ut princeps iubeat) the gift will be renewed again;" Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 102 (no. 56). Here attention may be drawn to the phrase "omnique populo edicto regis facienda jubentur" in the Gumley charter, which both John and Brooks pause over. John takes it to mean that the common burdens had recently been imposed on all the Mercians by royal edict; John, Land Tenure in Early England, pp. 66-67, 70-71. For Brooks it is an ambiguous comment: it may be taken as a reference to a new law, but equally may be taken as one to the strengthening of customary law; Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 78. However, the verb jubentur is in the present tense, thus I would interpret the phrase to refer to the repeated summoning o f help when deemed necessary, and thus the phrase matches the phrase "ut princeps iubeat" in the Frankish document
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constat aecclesiis Dei" in the singular seems to refer only to the defence of fortresses, not to the building of bridges. If borough-work was what was important, the addition of the building of bridges seems an odd one.148 Here the claim in the charter that this represents the Church’s propria libertas and Boniface's assertion that the immunity of the English Church dated back to the time of Gregory the Great deserve more attention. Boniface claimed in his letter that "since the apostolic pontiff St. Gregory... converted the race of the English to the true God, the privileges of the churches in the realm of the English remained undefiled and inviolate.”149 If he had turned to the story of the conversion of the English, at least as it is represented in the Historia ecclesiastica, for evidence of an ecclesiastical immunity at the time of St. Gregory, he would have been disappointed.150 When first-hand guidance from
148 Cp.
"The notion that bridge-building and fortification defense... arose during the eighth century fits well
with the archaeological evidence; the earliest excavated English fortified boroughs are of Mercian provenance and can be dated to the middle of the eighth century;” Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation, p. 53; Abels' evidence does not include bridges. 149Dte Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 152 (no. 73); Stevenson claims that this tradition was one that Boniface probably heard of before leaving England in 718 and cites a charter of King Cenwulf of Mercia of 814 as independent evidence for this tradition; while this is not an impossible surmise, a charter from fifty years after Boniface's death does not seem to be sufficient evidence for an independent tradition; Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' p. 699n, 700-701; the charter is S I77 (B348). 150/Ethelberht is described as endowing the church richly and giving it his protection; the Libellus responsionum (a copy of which Boniface had sought from the archbishop of Canterbury in 735) is full of the separation of the sacred from the profane and issues of proper ecclesiastical law; it, moreover, dictates penalties against the robbers of churches and the allotment of ecclesiastical revenue, but it makes no reference to the Church's immunity from secular dues; Bede, Ecclesiastical History, eds. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 74-75, 78-83, 114-115, 142-143; for a discussion of the text of the libellus and Bede’s use of it, see Paul Meyvaert, 'Les "Responsiones" de S. Gregoire Ie Grand & S. Augustin de Cantorbery: a propos d'un article rdcent,' Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique 54 (1959), 879-894; idem., 'Bede's Text of the Libellus responsionum of Gregory the Great to Augustine of Canterbury' in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, eds. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen
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the Fathers was lacking, however, Boniface took his understanding of Gregory's actions in the contemporary practices of the Continental Church. He consistently sought to ground his assertions of proper church right in, as he expressed it in another context, "the custom of other peoples and apostolic command."151 Most directly, he justified his attack on the labour of monks to Archbishop Cuthbert on the grounds that "one does not hear of [its] being done anywhere in the whole world except among the race of the English."152 In looking to the Continent for a proper model, Boniface would have come across the sordida munera and the exclusions from them.153 In the fourth century, responsibility for public duties had devolved onto local landholders. However, many classes of people, including churchmen, had quickly gained exemptions from "dirty works," including a variety of public duties connected with supply of food, material and transport for the army and the repair of public buildings.154 In response to this, in 423, Emperor Theodosius II decreed that no one should be exempt from responsibility for the upkeep of roads and bridges.155 This decree was repeated again in 441 with the explicit clarification that the obligation rested on land not on the people themselves.156 From the Theodosian Code, the idea of the sordida munera passed into the Breviary of Aiaric in Visigothic
Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 15-33 (reprinted in Paul Meyvaert, Benedict, Gregory, Bede and others (London, 1977)). 15'D/e Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 156 (no. 74). 152 D/e
Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, ed. Tangl, p. 17In (no. 78).
153Nicholas Brooks, 'Medieval Bridges: a Window onto Changing Concepts of State Power,' The Haskins Society Journal 7 (1995), 11-29 at 15. 154Theodosian Code, XI.I0.2 (370), XI.16.15 (382) and XI.16.18 (390); Codex Theodosianus, I, Theodosiani Libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondinis, eds. Th. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Berlin, 1905), 593, 601-602, 602-603 155Theodosian Code, XV.3.6; Codex Theodosianus, I, eds. Krueger and Mommsen, 818. 156Novella Valentiniani, 10 (441); Codex Theodosianus, II, Leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes, eds. Th. Mommsen and Paul Meyer (Berlin, 1905), 91-92.
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Spain,157 and the prohibition of exemptions from the building of bridges and roads into the Lex romana Burgundionum in Gaul158 and Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis in the East.159 The use of the Theodosian Code and the Breviary of Alaric was common in Francia and in the Frankish Church in particular: the Lex Ribuaria stated that the Church lived under Roman law;160 the Church produced many manuscripts o f the two collections;161 clerics were schooled in the codes;162 and ecclesiastics quoted from the laws in their writings.163 As part of this continuation of late Roman law, the immunities of ecclesiastical lands in Francia did not extend to exemption for tenants from the repair of roads and bridges, nor from military service:164 Charlemagne, for instance, continued to insist on taking labour services from church lands.165 Similarly, public works
157The Breviary of Alaric, under the title 'De Extraordinariis sive Sordidis Muneribus’ only repeats one of the earlier prohibitions included in the Theodosian Code’s section o f the same name, that is the one against the levying of extraordinary exactions by officials in the provinces. Lex Romana Visigothorum, ed. Gustav Haenel (Liepzig, 1848), pp. 224-225; the Breviary omits altogether the section (Theodosian Code XV.3) on road repair which includes the prohibition of exemption from bridge-work; the Breviary does repeat a sententia of Paulus which states that "whoever digs up the public road, he alone will be compelled to repair it,” pp. 350-351. 158Lex romana, XVII. 1; Leges Burgundionum, ed. Ludwig Rudolf von Salis, MGH, Leges, I. 2, I (Hanover, 1892), 141; again the obligation is explicitly territorial. 159Codex Justiniani 1.2.7, XI.75.4; Corpus iuris civilis, II, Codex Justinianus, ed. Paul Krueger (Berlin, 1877), 13, 452. 166Lex Ribuaria, 61.1: "secundum legem Romanam, quam ecclesia vivit," Lex Ribuaria, eds. Franz Beyerle and Rudolf Buchner, MGH, Leges, I, 3, II (Hanover, 1954),
109. See IanWood, ’The
Code in
Merovingian Gaul' in The Theodosian Code, eds. Jill Harriesand Ian Wood (Ithaca, 1993), pp.161-177 at p. 166. 161 Wood,
T he Code in Merovingian Gaul,' pp. 164-166.
162 Wood,
T he Code in Merovingian Gaul,' pp. 167-169.
163Dafydd Walters, 'From Benedict to Gratian: the Code in medieval ecclesiastical authors' in Theodosian Code, eds. Harries and Wood, pp. 200-216, esp. p. 200. 164Maurice Kroell, L'lmmunitifranque (Paris, 1910), pp. 111-127.
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continued to be a obligation imposed on church lands in Italy. In the eighth century, churches secured the right to be immune from the intrusion of royal officials to demand the fulfilling of their obligations, but the obligations themselves persisted.166 In the 780s, the new Carolingian king of Italy, Pippin the Short, decreed that "concerning the repair of churches or the making of bridges or the repair of streets, this shall be done by all means just as was the ancient custom (sicut antiqua fitit consuetudo) and immunity shall not be favoured nor any excuse succeed in this matter."167 The antiqua consuetudo here is probably a reference to provincial Roman law,168 and Pippin's decree is re-assertion of the Roman prohibition of exemptions. Thus, as St. Boniface's influence on the Synod of Gumley would have turned English clerics towards the arrangement of their relationship with the king along established Continental lines, it is probable that this led to the introduction of the idea of the sordida munera and the exceptions to them to place proper limits on the rights of the king. The transmission of the idea is not exact, but the outline of the settlement is preserved. Through the example of the ancients and of Continental practice, bridge-work was agreed to be a duty owed by ecclesiastical lands. To summarize: St. Boniface set out in the late 740s to reform the English Church in the same manner that he had established the German Church and reformed the Frankish Church, namely by the separation of the sacred and profane through the establishment of ecclesiastical discipline, the strengthening of this discipline through synods, and a partnership in the maintenance of order and discipline with a strong and
165His son, Louis the Pious, however, exempted several houses from these dues; Lesne, Histoire de la propriete ecclesiastique en France, EE, Fasc. 2, 419-425. 166Katherine Fischer Drew, The Immunity in Carolingian Italy,' Speculum 37 (1962), 182-197 at 184. 167Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH, Leges, H, I, 192, 197 (no. 91, c. 4; no. 93, c. 7); see Drew, 'Immunity in Carolingian Italy,’ p. 185n. 168Cp.
the association of lex Romana and antiqua consuetudo in the seventh-century Angers Formulary;
Wood, 'Code in Merovingian Gaul,’ p. 162.
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virtuous king. In England, this process involved chastising the bishops to impose ecclesiastical order and simultaneously chastising the king to become a virtuous figure himself. The culmination of this activity was the Synod of Gumley at which, as at Carlomann's second synod in 743, proper lines were drawn to ensure that the partnership between king and Church could function to their mutual benefit. The king could use church lands by prior agreement for the defence of the realm, but those lands would remain in the hands of the Church, and the monks themselves would not be forced to labour. This arrangement was established on what were perceived to be proper lines drawn from ancient and Continental usage, and thus the Church conceded the exclusion of bridge-work from its exemption as a symbol of the propriety of its actions.169 This interpretation of the origins of bridge-work helps explain two puzzling aspects in the early history of the obligation. The first problem is the apparent paradox noted above that in charters of the eighth and ninth centuries, even though the obligation is often included, there are very few bridges in the attached bounds. The second problem is that, after Gumley, the obligation appears only sporadically in the charters for the first hundred years; as Brooks observes "it was not apparently of great importance to donor or donee, lay or ecclesiastical, whether the reservation was included or not."170 If the origins of bridge-work are understood as part of a settlement worked out along lines that were both ancient and foreign, it can be seen that the bridge-work was, in a sense, hypothetical, even symbolic. To forge the partnership with a reformed monarch, the Church conceded
169 Cp.
Helen M. Cam, Local Government in Francia and England: a comparison o f the local
administration and jurisdiction o f the Carolingian Empire with that o f the West Saxon Kingdom (London, 1912), pp. 100-120, esp. p. 120: "On the whole, then, we incline to think that whilst the English immunity may very probably have owed something to the Frankish immunity at the outset, the Church here also being a ready means of connection, the later developments of the institution in [England] were independent of foreign influence." 170 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 73. This is in part in response to Eric John's theory of a tenurial
revolution brought about by the transformation of bookland.
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that its lands will be liable for certain obligations just as the Church Fathers had done. Only years later did these obligations become real and onerous. Thus bridge-work may be seen in its origin to have more to do with the proper definition of land tenure than with actual bridges.171 In the century and a half following the Synod of Gumley, bridge-work seems to have remained unimportant. Brooks, having dismissed the idea of a sudden change in the eighth century, paints a picture of relative continuity thereafter, of a gradual process of definition of pre-existing obligations. He traces the appearance of references to the common burdens in the Anglo-Saxon charters, kingdom by kingdom. After the first explicit reference to bridge work and the defence of fortresses at Gumley in 749, similar reservation of these duties appear in charters of the Hwicce in 767 and 779. Between 793 and 796 Offa of Mercia, /Ethelbald's successor granted land at Westbury-on-Trym in Gloucestershire free from all burdens except "expeditionalibus causis et pontium structionum et arcium munimenturn."172 Here at last is the first reference of undoubted authenticity to all three common burdens together, and, indeed, we are told that "it is necessary to all the people, so that no one is excused from it." Moreover, if we accept the evidence of a thirteenth-century cartulary,173 just a short while earlier in 792 Offa had sought to define the liberties of the churches of Kent at the Synod of Clofeshoh, and had
171 Once
this definition of proper tenure was accomplished, it was possible for that tenure to be sought by
laymen, hence the subsequent extension of the use of bookland. As H.R. Loyn describes the development: "Folkland... represents land still subject to the vaguer and more loosely defined burdens of communal obligation associated with early Anglo-Saxon kingship. Bookland itself is further advanced again, exempting from the loosely defined burdens, but ultimately sharpening those that remained. Service at fyrd , burh and bridge came to mean more as kingdoms grew in size and complexity;" H.R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and (he Norman Conquest (Harlow, 1962), p. 175. 172B274 (S139); quoted in Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 78. 173B848 (S134); this charter lacks a witness list, as do all the charters in the cartulary, but Brooks accepts it on the grounds of its historical content, its lack of spurious claims and its consistent formulae. Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 79n.
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granted them freedom from all secular dues except "army service within Kent against sea borne pagans in roving bands or against the South Saxons when it is deemed necessary, and bridge-building and the fortifying of fastnesses against the pagans likewise within the bounds of the Kentishmen."174 Thus, with the explicit reason or justification of the earliest Viking attacks, Offa extended definition of the common burdens to Kent.175 In the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the evidence is later. As Brooks notes, there are no eighth- or ninth- century charters for East Anglia and Northumbria, and "South Saxon charters of this period include neither immunity clauses nor the reservation of the military burdens [but this may be due to] the habits of the Selsey scriptorium.''176 As regards Wessex, the problem is to distinguish authentic from inauthentic charter, but Brooks perceives "a pattern... among the few charters upon which some reliance may be placed."177 The earliest charters (739 and 794) reserve only army service, but in 846 a charter of /Ethelwulf reserved bridge-work too, but not fortress-work.178 Thus, Brooks suggests that it was not until the reign of /Ethelbald from 855 to 860 that fortress work was added. This would be noticeably similar to the sequence of events in Francia, where
174B848 (S134); quoted in Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 79. 175 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' pp. 78-80.
176 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 80, but see p. 80n.
177 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 80.
178 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,’ pp. 80-81; the charters are B1331 (S255; a. 739), The Early Charters o f
Wessex, ed. H.P.R. Finberg (Leicester, 1964), no. 398 (S267; a. 794) and B451 (S298; a. 846). Brooks notes that three charters from before 846 also contain reservations of the common burdens - B282 (S268; a. 801), 389 (S273; a. 825) and 438 (292; a. 842) - but considers them to be of doubtful authenticity. Of the three only the charter o f 842 includes fortress work which Brooks suggests may be a later interpolation as the charter only survives in the fourteenth-century Glastonbury cartulary; Brooks, 'Military Obligations,' p. 81 and n.
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fortress-work was not added to the long-standing army service and bridge-work until the 860s.179 Nevertheless, while the exemption of the common burdens becomes more common through the ninth century, it is also true that many charters of that period also confer general immunity, presumably including freedom from the common burdens. The clause "free from all things, known and unknown, small and large, of king and of noble" appears in a number of charters.180 A few more are more explicit, granting freedom from "all public work on buildings."181 When this pattern is placed against the almost complete lack o f bridges in the charter bounds, there is no indication that the notion of bridge-work as an inescapable common duty has been established as an effective and burdensome element of governance. For that, we must look to the tenth century.
179This suggestion is supported by the evidence of archaeology, which shows the earliest walls of West Saxon boroughs to have been of later construction than those of the Mercian boroughs; Brooks, Military Obligations,' pp. 81-82. 180For example, B343 (S173), B359 (S181), B373 (S187), B432 (S196), B455 (2) (S199). 181B325 (S 161), B341 (S169).
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Chapter Three: V iking Wars. Public Peace: the Evolution o f Bridge-work
Nicholas Brooks postulates that the definition of the common burdens was part of the growth in power and sophistication of royal government; as kings' demands on their people grew, he argues, so they began to grant immunities from secular burdens to churches and favoured individuals, reserving the military obligations necessary for all. To the ancient army-service were added fortress- and bridge-work, the insistence on which gained increasing urgency under the pressure of Viking attacks.1 Indeed, as Brooks concludes, "the development of royal authority in England was directly connected with the successful enforcement of public works and general military obligations so that an adequate defence against the Vikings was provided."2 This "development of royal authority" can be seen through bridge-work in successive generations of the West Saxon dynasty. Alfred appears to have been the first king to insist successfully upon the performance of common burdens, to unite the people to resist the Vikings. Edward and his sister jEthelflaed used the common burdens in their wars of reconquest, imposing the common burdens as they built burhs. jEthe Istan and his half-brother Edmund then turned the policy inwards, making bridge-work part of the new
1It
will be observed, however, that the first definition occurred at Gumley (which is about as far from the
sea as one can get in England!) in 749, before the start of Viking raids. Of course, there were other enemies, including other Englishmen. Brooks explains this with reference to the incursions of the Welsh and the construction of Wat's Dyke and Offa's Dyke, but does this really explain the bridges? In the context of discussing army-service, though, he does also suggest that Offa's increased impositions might be related to the need "to sustain the Mercian military supremacy" and thus might parallel Charlemagne's similar demands; Nicholas Brooks, The Development of Military Obligations in eighth- and ninthcentury England' in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, eds. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 69-84 at p. 83. 2 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,’ p. 84.
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public peace. Under Edgar, this peace reached its apogee in an accepted and uniform order. And under iEthelred, all became disorder again. Before it is possible to analyze this process, however, it is necessary to step back for a moment and re-consider the essential question, what was the purpose of bridgework?
The purpose of bridge-work: authors of general works on Anglo-Saxon governance necessarily mention the three common burdens from which theoretically no-one was exempt, and thus refer to bridge-work in passing. Most, however, never pause to ask why an early medieval king would require all his subjects, who could be exempted from almost everything else, to build bridges. Bridge-work is seemingly too obvious to discuss. Only a scholar of an earlier generation, W.H. Stevenson, came close to stating this outright: the other two obligations, army service and borough-work, he argued, constitute "such primitive requirements of any organized state" that it is not surprising or significant that they are not mentioned in the earliest charters, thus they do not need explanation. However, in this context, even Stevenson omitted bridge-work, as if hesitant to commit himself on it.3 When historians do enlarge their comments, they fall into implicit and unwitting division on the question of what the purpose of bridge-work was. Frank Stenton refers to the duty of "making bridges and strongholds for the defence of the land.”4 In the same vein, Michael Powicke concludes that the description of the three burdens imply that "public service was above all military."5 More expansively, Warren Hollister, in his work on military institutions, discusses Edward the Elder's building of the bridge over the Trent
3 W.H.
Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' English Historical Review 29 (1914), 689-703 at 698.
4 F.M.
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, third edition (Oxford, 1971), p. 289.
5Michael Powicke, Military Obligation in Medieval England: A Study in Liberty and Duty (Oxford, 1962), p. 2 1 .
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at Nottingham to link fortresses on either side, and suggests that such work demonstrates that "all three of the trimoda necessitas could be military in nature."6 The military nature of all three obligations has not been accepted unanimously, however. An alternative view sees bridge-work as being required for the purpose of maintaining the road network. H.R. Loyn sees the obligation as a matter of "the keeping open of communications."7 David Hill agrees that the charters' insistence on bridge-work demonstrates royal interest in communications, arguing that "although these bridges had a defensive role in some cases, it is not possible that works of this complexity, widely scattered over the face of Anglo-Saxon England, connected two muddy lanes and were only part of a system of farm tracks." Hill claims the widespread and complicated obligations attached to Rochester Bridge as a good example "of the widespread responsibility for bridges throughout the countryside."8 James Campbell follows Hill, claiming bridge-work as part of "the maintenance of the communications system as a whole" since "bridges were especially important in this period;" he takes the evidence of the bridge-work obligations at Rochester and Cambridge as evidence of "a wider system."9 Finally, Richard Abels, despite describing at length the struggle of King Alfred to impose the common burdens on his people, does not discuss the nature of bridge-work,
6 C.
Warren Hollister, Anglo-Saxon Military Obligations on the Eve o f the Norman Conquest (Oxford,
1962), p. 72. 7 H.R.
Loyn, The Governance o f Anglo-Saxon England, 500-1087 (London, 1984), p. 155; Loyn also states
that in his law codes /Ethelred instructed the people "to be zealous... about the improvement of the roads everywhere in the country;" Loyn can only be thinking about bridge-work at this point; Loyn, Governance o f Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 163-164. 8David Hill, An Atlas o f Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1981), p. 115. 9James Campbell, 'Was it Infancy in England? Some Questions of Comparison' in England and Her Neighbours, 1066-1453; Essays in Honour o f Pierre Chaplais, eds. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (London, 1989), pp. 1-17 at pp. 3-4.
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except by implication in declaring its imposition in Mercia to be inspired by Continental duties for repairing both bridges and roads.10 It is left once again to the estimable Nicholas Brooks to consider the supposedly military nature of bridge-work seriously. He calls all three burdens "military obligations" and examines the connection between the three: It is worth considering why these three in particular were never remitted. Service in the army and the repair of fortresses were clearly essential for the safety of a kingdom, but bridge-work might seem less vital. Unbridged rivers could seriously delay the efforts of local forces to drive out an enemy army, but if the king's concern had been with the mobility of their armies and with ease of communications, we might expect to hear in the English sources of corvees for the upkeep of roads. The solution may lie in the fact that in England bridges were linked to the fortresses; an early ninth-century charter from Worcester which speaks of bridge-work and fortress-work as a single obligation and phrases such as pontis arcisve coaedificatione suggest that... the same man usually performed the two services in the same place. Bridge and fortress were a single military unit; together they secured the river crossing for the armies of the kingdom and together they prevented the movement of enemy troops either by land or by river.11 Brooks further draws attention to Alfred’s blocking of the River Lea against the Vikings in 895 and the role of the bridges of London and Paris in resistance to Viking attacks.12 Brooks' solution, however, while alluring, turns out to be founded on somewhat shaky evidence: the two Worcester charters in question13 survive only in Hemming's Cartulary; in both the exception clause reads "preter tamen his d uobus causis arcis et pontis constructione et expeditione." One charter was, however, forged on the basis of the
10Richard P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 5253. 1 b ro o k s,
'Military Obligations,' pp. 71-72.
12 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,' p. 72.
13B360 (S I81); B357, Ms. C (S180, Ms. 2).
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other.14 The one that was the basis also survives in earlier manuscripts. In the earlier versions15 the exemption clause is the conventional "liber... ab omnibus aliis saecularibus rebus durisque servitutibus modicis et magnis notis ignotis preter tamen his tribus causis arcis et pontis constructione et expeditione atque a pascua regis et principis vel subditomm eorum." Clearly, the land was intended to be free from the pascua regis - the exception clause ends with "expeditione" - but Hemming misread the clause and, in removing what he took to be an unwelcome burden, changed the three to a two. Thus, the understanding of bridge- and borough-work as a single obligation arose solely from the error of one monk. Moreover, in contrast to these two charters referring to two obligations, stand over two hundred and fifty charters referring to three obligations, not to mention two charters referring to four obligations with the inclusion of compensation for theft,16 and one charter referring to two obligations with the omission of bridge-work.17 Furthermore, the other evidence is also a little shaky: the passage of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which describes Alfred's blocking of the Lea makes no mention of a bridge and states only that Alfred blocked the Vikings' escape down the river by building fortresses on either side.18 Brooks' final piece of evidence, the use of words such as coedificare, is something of a slender reed on which to base an argument. The word appears in the Vulgate version of St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians ("vos coaedificamini in habitaculum Dei in Spiritu")19
14See F.M. Stenton, 'The Supremacy of the Mercian Kings,’ English Historical Review 33 (1918), 433-452 at 445n. 15B357,
Mss. A and B (S180, Mss. 1,4); Ms. A/4 is a seventeenth-century transcript of the lost original.
16B370 (SI 8 6 ), B487 (S206). 17B426 (S287). 18Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 172-173; cp. Hertford (912), Buckingham (914), Bedford (915),
Stamford (918) and, finally, Nottingham (920), the exception which proves the rule since the building of the bridge is specified; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 186-187, 190-192, 195-196. 19Ephesians 2.22.
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and the North African Old Latin translation o f the first letter of St. Peter ("vos frates tanquam lapides vivi coaedificamini domus spiritualis")20 to mean the building together of the faithful into the Church of God. From these two verses, the word passed into Christian scholarship, the latter citation being a favourite of St. Augustine.21 The word just seems to be a stronger version of cedificare, just as construere derives from struere. Indeed, if the choice of the word implies anything in the bridge-work formulae, I would suggest that the co- refers not bridges and fortresses being built together, but to the people coming together to do the work. That this should be the preferred reading of the word is suggested by its use. The word coedificatio appears in forty-one charters; in twenty-two of those charters, army service and the coedificatio of bridges and forts are referred to as three duties.22 In another eighteen, the three are called the communis labor.13 This leaves only one charter in which coedificatio of bridges and forts is not either counted as two tasks or described as common work; that is a charter of somewhat doubtful authenticity included in the twelfth-century Abingdon chronicle.24 In that charter, the common formula "liberum ab omni mundiali obstaculo... excepto istis tribus expeditione pontis arcisve coedificatione" is used, but the "tribus" is omitted. There are,
20I Peter 2.5;Vetus Latina: die Reste der Altlateinischen Bibel, new edition, 26.1, Epistulae Catholicae, ed. Walter Thiele (Freiburg, 1956-1969), 100. 21A search of the Patrologia Latina database for "coaedific-” turns up 117 uses, 20 by St. Augustine. 22B740 (S351; a twelfth-century forgery), B742 (S446), B744 (S445), B749 (S462), B752 (S464), B753 (S464), B758 (S463), B762 (S46I), B764 (S467), B777 (S480), B828 (S524), B951 (S628), B1068 (S699), K638 (S846), K648 (S856), K652 (S857), K689 (S882), K743 (S962; possibly a twelfth-century forgery), K783 (S1013), K1282 (S855), K1283 (S858), Liber monasterii de Hyda, ed. Edward Edwards [RS 45] (London, 1866), pp. 242-243 (S877). 23B748 (S470), B763 (S465), B786 (S488), B796 (S502), B824 (S526), B 8 6 8 (S534), B945 (S587), B946 (S588), B948 (S585), B988 (S641), B1043 (S674), B1044 (S679), B1045 (S660), B1077 (S693), B1138 (S730), B1211 (S768), K749 (S968), K1281 (S852). 24B996 (S665).
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furthermore, a few charters which describe works in general as regalis coactio25 Finally, while it is true that the word coedificatio never refers to the building of only bridges or only forts, this should be put in the context that of 506 Anglo-Saxon exemption clauses, forged and genuine, that use a word describing the action to be performed26 428 use only one word against seventy-eight that use two; in other words, the words restauratio, constructio, edificatio etc. are all used with "pontis arcisve," suggesting that the combining of the two action was more a matter of scribal efficiency than statement of practice. One final point argues against the conclusion that the bridges were simply supposed to block rivers. There are seven charters in which the elements of exemption clauses are qualified by adjectives: in these, the expeditio is popular is, the arx is regalis and the pons is viaticus 21 To these seven may be added three peculiar charters the exemption clause of which contain fuller descriptions of the required tasks; these describe bridge-work as the duty to build bridges when they are necessitated by the turbulence of fords.28 Nevertheless, even if the evidence for Brooks’ assertion does not stand up, the logic of his assertion is sound. The Viking campaigns of the late ninth and early tenth centuries had the character of guerrilla raids, involving spectacular mobility.29 The
■^13714 (S438), B998 (S647), B 1127 (S727). 26The formula "preter arcem pontem expeditionem" is also quite common; e.g. Bl 164 (S735). 27B581 (S355; a. 892X899), B885 (S545; 949), B1227 (S761; 968), K762 (S993; supposedly 1042, but a twelfth-century forgery), K767 (S999; 1043), K800 (S1025; supposedly 1054, but a twelfth-century forgery), K1305 (S918; 1008). 28K673 (S874), K772 (S1004), Liber monasterii de Hyda, ed. Edwards, pp. 238-242 (S869). 29For example, the movement of the Viking army from East Anglia to Chester, into Wales, across Northumbria and back to East Anglia (893-894); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 170-173.
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response of Alfred and his successors was to make efforts to trap the Vikings30 and bring them to battle. Thus, in the reconquest of England in the early tenth century, Alfred’s descendants built their boroughs in a methodical manner at major river crossings, securing both the river and the road. In all but one case, there is no indication in the Chronicle that a bridge was built to link the fortresses, but, as Brooks rightly points out, it would make perfect sense, given the known utility of the bridges of Paris and London in fighting the invaders.31 There is no reason, however, to suppose that the blocking of the river was the sole motive for insisting on bridge-work, nor, indeed, that the motive stayed the same throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. With these considerations in mind, it is possible to return to the period in which bridge-work, introduced as a symbol of righteous governance by St. Boniface, intermittently ignored, insisted upon and waived through the ninth century, became an onerous and supposedly inescapable burden.
Asser tells us that By gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding, and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every
30For example, on the Lea (895) and in an estuary in Devon (896); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 172-173, 176-177; in a similar fashion the Battle of Maldon may be seen as a failed effort to bring a Viking army to ground: the famous and apparently foolhardy invitation to the Vikings to cross the bridge unopposed appears perfectly rational if considered against the alternative of having the Vikings keep moving unhindered. 31 For
the building of bridges against the Vikings in the Frankish Empire, see Marjorie Nice Boyer,
Medieval French Bridges: a History (Cambridge MA, 1976), pp. 21-26; for the suggestion that Alfred was consciously following Carolingian practices and that the Vikings themselves recognized the tactic, see Richard P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation, pp. 72-73 and n80; cp. Helen M. Cam, Local Government in Francia and England: a comparison o f the local administration and jurisdiction o f the Carolingian Empire with that o f the West Saxon Kingdom (London, 1912), pp. 146-147, 150-151 and, esp., 152-153 and 153n.
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way, [King Alfred] carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns most dear to him, and reeves as well... to his own will and to the general advantage of the whole realm {ad communem totius regni utilitatem). But if, during the course of these royal admonitions, the commands were not fulfilled because of the people’s laziness, or else (having been too late in a time of necessity) were not finished in time to be of use to those working on them (I am speaking here of fortifications (castellis) commanded by the king which have not yet been begun, or else, having been begun late in the day, have not been brought to completion) and enemy forces burst in by land and sea (or, as frequently happens, by both!), then those who had opposed the royal commands were humiliated... and are sorry that they had negligently scorned the royal commands; now they loudly applaud the king's foresight and promise to make every effort to do what they had previously refused that is, with respect to constructing fortresses and to the other things of general advantage to the whole kingdom {de arcibus construendis et ceteris communibus communis regni utilitatibus).32 This passage marks the turning point from the casual and sporadic insistence on the common burdens, which is characteristic of the ninth century, to the vigorous and universal insistence upon them in the tenth. The common burdens, first amongst them, of course, being fyrd service, became fundamental in the resistance to the Vikings. As regards bridge-work, the traces of a consistent policy of requiring bridge-work as part of the reconquest may be found in the study of the obligations connected to six great bridges.
The "Countv Bridges" and the Origins of Obligations: in the vast majority of cases, it is impossible to determine whether there was any continuity between the Anglo-Saxon and
3 2 Asser,
Life o f King Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), pp. 78-79; translation from
Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 101-102. For Alfred's difficulties in insisting on the common burdens, see Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation, pp. 75-78.
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late medieval bridge-work obligations. The Anglo-Saxon charters do not specify particular bridges to be maintained, only the existence of the duty; the late medieval litigation usually concerns the duties of a single landholder or community to maintain a single local bridge, but does not specify the origins of the obligation. There are, however, a number of cases that may be open to more analysis. There is evidence of bridge-work obligations spread over a wide area connected to the bridges of Rochester, Chester, London, Huntingdon, Nottingham and Cambridge. These bridges are bound together by three similarities; first, by the very existence of this evidence of bridge-work, which is evidence of wide responsibility quite unlike that for other bridges; second, by their size and importance; and third, by their antiquity, since they stand out as being quite the earliest major bridges of England. If any one of the six bridges were to be taken out of context (as, indeed, they generally have been in the few studies published to date) the evidence for bridge-work might be considered a local peculiarity, not worthy of further comment. If, however, the similarities between the examples are kept in mind, when the six examples are placed side-by-side the accumulated weight of evidence may be sufficient to support more substantial conclusions about the origin and nature of Anglo-Saxon bridge-work. The general question of these obligations and their survival into a later period was discussed by Maitland and Round in the midst of a wider debate on the question of feudal tenure. Maitland, in discussing borough-work, used the example of bridge-work in Cambridgeshire to demonstrate the existence of county-wide obligations, distributed by the hide, connected to the county town; he speculated that this could be taken as paradigmatic of the connection of county to borough, a paradigm that found its truest expression in the counties of the Midlands. For Maitland, there was a well defined system of bridge- and wall-building obligations from the tenth century on. Round responded by questioning Maitland's evidence: first, for Round, the Cambridgeshire obligations were levied on particular estates, not the whole county; second, no other county could be
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shown to have such a county-wide system that dated from the Anglo-Saxon period. Thus, for Round, neither borough-work nor bridge-work should be understood as systematic, county-wide obligations.33 Round's criticisms of Maitland will be bome in mind in the discussion that follows, serving as a reminder to keep the local circumstances in mind as well as the broader trends.
i) The Antiquity of the Six Bridges: the six bridges for which evidence exists of widely distributed bridge-work can be traced back to around the year 900. As noted above, this makes them very unusual; bridges were rare until the tenth century and these bridges were great bridges at major river crossings. The bridge over the Medway at Rochester34 is one of the most important river crossings in all of England. It carries Watling Street and thus links not only London to Canterbury, but London to Dover and therefore to the Continent. That there was a bridge at Rochester in Roman times, and possibly before, is demonstrated by the Romans' name for Rochester: Durobrivis, which is a compound of two Celtic words meaning "walled town by the bridge(s).''35 The bridge which stood there in the early and high Middle Ages
33Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, Three Essays in the Early History o f England (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 186-189; idem.. Township and Borough being the "Ford" Lectures delivered in the University o f Oxford in the October Term o f 1897, together with an appendix o f notes relating to the history o f the town o f Cambridge (Cambridge, 1898), pp. 37-38; J.H. Round, ’"Burh-bot” and "Brig-bot"’ in Family Origins and Other Studies (London, 1930), pp. 252-262. 34Nicholas Brooks, 'Church, Crown and Community: Public Work and Seigneurial Responsibilities at Rochester Bridge' in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays presented to Karl Leyser. ed. T. Reuter (London, 1992), pp. 1-20; idem., 'Rochester Bridge, AD 43 - 1381’ in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management o f Rochester Bridge, AD 43 - 1993, eds. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 1-40. 33Brooks, ’Church, Crown and Community,’ pp. 10-11; Margaret Gelling, Signposts to the Past: PlaceNames and the History o f England (London, 1978), p. 45; Ivan D. Margary, Roman Roads in Britain, third edition (London, 1973), p. 528 (the Antonine Itinerary).
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was itself Roman in origin, being similar in construction to the first Roman bridge over the Mosel at Trier; until the total reconstruction of the bridge in the 1380s, the Roman stone piers were used to support a timber road way.36 Indeed, it is perfectly conceivable that the bridge remained intact in some shape or form continuously from the late Roman period until the floods and increased traffic of the late Middle Ages destroyed it. The bridge at Chester was also Roman. The Roman fort that was the basis for all subsequent settlement at Chester was deliberately placed to guard the lowest possible river crossing at which an approach was possible down the steep gorge of the Dee.37 Remains have been found of a causeway built by the Romans to facilitate access to the river crossing38 and masonry of a Roman bridge has been found strewn on the river bed.39 In the high Middle Ages, this bridge was of the same sort found at Rochester and at Trier (stone piers supporting a timber superstructure) and was in use until it was entirely replaced in the 1350s.40 There was also a bridge at London in Roman times and again it is probable that the Anglo-Saxon bridge used the same stone piles as the late Roman bridge.41 The first
36 Brooks,
'Church, Crown and Community,' p. 11; Brooks suggests that it cannot be established whether
this was the original form of the bridge or whether the Roman bridge was originally made fully of stone and the timber was only substituted for it when the arches collapsed. 3 7 D.
Mason, 'Chester: The Evolution and Adaptation of its Landscape,' Journal o f the Chester
Archaeological Society 59 (1976), 14-23 at 18. 3 8 F.H.
Thompson, 'Roman Wall in Lower Bridge Street,' Journal o f the Chester and North Wales
Architectural, Archaeological, and Historic Society 47 (1960), 34-35. 39 T.J.
Strickland, 'The Roman Heritage of Chester: the Survival of the Buildings of Deva after the Roman
Period,' Journal o f the Chester Archaeological Society 67 (1984), 17-36 at 25 and plate 1. ^Strickland, The Roman Heritage of Chester,’ pp. 25, 27; the place-name Handbridge (Domesday Book, Bruge), at the south end of the Dee Bridge may also refer to it, which would provide further evidence of the existence of the bridge in the Anglo-Saxon period; P.McN. Dodgson, The Place-Names o f Cheshire, VI A, English Place-Name Society 48 (Cambridge, 1981), 53-54. 41 For
various opinions on the site of the Roman and early medieval bridges, see Gordon Home, Old
London Bridge (London, 1931), pp. 2-6; Marjorie B. Honeyboume, The Pre-Norman Bridge of London’
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written reference to the bridge comes from a charter dating from the second half of the tenth century42 and the bridge was an important defensive structure in the Danish wars of the eleventh century. The bridge at Cambridge was also Roman in origin. On the northern side of the Cam, near the site of the medieval castle, there was a Roman fort, guarding the lowest crossing of the Cam where two Roman roads converged.43 The Antonine Itinerary calls this place D uriloponte, which suggests the existence of a bridge.44 Moreover, Cambridge, a rare Anglo-Saxon -bridge name, appears (as Grantebrycge) as early as the
in Studies in London History presented to Philip Edmund Jones, eds. A.E.J. HoIIaender and William Kellaway (London, 1969), pp. 17-39, esp. pp. 35-39; Graham Dawson, 'Roman London Bridge,’ The London Archaeologist 1, no. 5 (Winter 1969), 114-117; idem , 'Roman London Bridge, Part 2: its location,' The London Archaeologist 1, no. 7 (Summer 1970), 156-160; Ralph Merrifield, 'Roman London Bridge: Further Observations on its Site,’ The London Archaeologist 1, no.
8
(Autumn 1970),
186-187; Graham Dawson, 'London Bridge - a rejoinder,' The London Archaeologist 1, no. 10 (Spring 1971), 224-225; idem. The Saxon London Bridge,’ The London Archaeologist 1, no. 14 (Spring 1972), 330-332; Ralph Merrifield and Harvey Sheldon, 'Roman London Bridge: a view from both banks,' The London Archaeologist 2, no.
8
(Autumn 1974), 183-191; Gustav Milne, 'Further Evidence for London
Bridge?,' Britannia 13 (1982), 271-276, esp. 276; Nick Bateman, 'Bridgehead Revisited,' The London Archaeologist 5, no. 9 (Winter 1986), 233-241. 42B 1131 (SI 377); the charter refers to the drowning of a supposed witch at Lundene brigce 43 0ne
running from the south-east towards Ely, the other from Colchester towards Godmanchester and the
Midlands; see Arthur Gray, "The Ford and Bridge of Cambridge,' Proceedings o f the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 14 (1909-10), 126-139, at 130-133 for strategic importance of Cambridge; see Margary, Roman Roads in Britain, third edition, pp. 208-213 for the course of the roads. ^G elling, Signposts to the Past, p. 46; A.L.F. Rivet and Kenneth Jackson, "The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary with an appendix on place names,' Britannia 1 (1970), 34-82; Jackson argues that the name cannot have meant "fort at the bridge," because that will not account for the element "-li" in the middle; he suggests instead that the name might have meant "fort on the wet river (uliponti)," but concedes that the Romans might have taken this to be a bridge name (p. 73); Jackson also notes that the Latin word pons was adopted into the British language (cp. Welsh pont), p. 79.
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ninth century.45 There is no reason not to suppose that, once again, the Roman bridge survived in some form through to the High Middle Ages. The evidence is less clear for the bridge at Huntingdon. The bridge does not appear in records until the late twelfth century and there is no useful place-name or archaeological evidence. Thus, in comparison to the first four bridges, any conclusions must be much more speculative. The importance and placement of the Roman crossing suggest, however, that there was a Roman bridge at Huntingdon 46 Three major roads converge from the South: from Cambridge, Royston and Baldock. After the crossing, the road divides again on the northern side: one road heading north towards the Roman crossing of the Nene at Durobrivae, the other heading for Leicester 47 Furthermore, the meeting of these five roads is at the confluence of several rivers, a location consistent with the building of a bridge over the narrowest stretch of the river, in contrast with fording the shallower wider divided river.48 On the other hand, it is likely that the bridge did not survive in serviceable condition throughout the first millennium. As it runs through Huntingdonshire, the Nene is a fairly shallow river and there are many places with -ford names on the Nene in the stretch of a few miles.49 Moreover, the pattern of
45In an interpolation to a manuscript of Felix of Crowland's Life of St. Guthlac, and in the annal for 875, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Helen Maud Cam, The City of Cambridge' in Victoria County History o f Cambridgeshire and the Isle o f Ely, HI, The City and University o f Cambridge, ed. J.P.C. Roach (London, 1959), 1-149 at 2; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 144-145. ^W illiam Page and S. Inskip Ladds, 'Huntingdon Borough' in Victoria County History o f Huntingdonshire, eds. William Page, Granville Proby, S. Inskip Ladds, II (London, 1932), 125; Margary, Roman Roads in Britain, third edition p. 205. 47 Margary,
Roman Roads in Britain, third edition. Maps 7a and 7b, pp. 192-193.
48Dymond does not, however, include Huntingdon in his list of sites for which there is evidence of Roman bridges: D.P. Dymond, 'Roman Bridges on Dere Street, County Durham, with a General Appendix on the Evidence for Bridges in Roman Britain,' The Archaeological Journal 118 (1961), 136-164. 49Two are of particular interest: Hartford, a small settlement just down river from Huntingdon, and the Hemmingfords, another mile or so down stream. Hartford appears in Domesday Book as Hereforde (DB,
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modem roads suggests that, at some point in the Anglo-Saxon period, the crossing of the Nene was made at wider marshier places rather than at the shorter crossing which would require a bridge. However, the appearance of the borough of Huntingdon as a fortified place for the Danes, for Edward the Elder and subsequently for William the Conqueror suggest that the road again ran through Huntingdon, and thus over the bridge, by 900. The bridge at Nottingham is the exception to the pattern, in that it is certain that it was not Roman. Nottingham was not a Roman site and no Roman road crossed the Trent there. The other exceptional element is that in the case of Nottingham, dateable evidence of bridge-building exists: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that Edward the Elder built the bridge over the Trent at Nottingham in 920. The Nottingham bridge-building obligations were, however, to maintain the Leen Bridge not the Trent Bridge. The Leen is a small river that joins the Trent just below Nottingham;50 the medieval borough of Nottingham stood on the northern bank of the Leen, separated from the Trent by half a mile or so of marshy land. There is no evidence for the origins of the Leen Bridge except for the possibility that the passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which describes the building of the Trent Bridge51 implies that the Leen Bridge pre-dates the Trent Bridge. The building of a bridge across the Trent at Nottingham, that is to say above the
203c [Hunts.]), which means "army ford," an equivalent to herepaQ, "army road," which was one AngloSaxon word for highway; the names Hereford and Hartford appear in a number of places around the country at major river crossings (but Hertford, Herts., should not be counted here: it first appears in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica as Herutford, "Hart/ Stag Ford;" Bede, Ecclesiastical History o f the English People, eds. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 348). The Hemmingfords appear in Domesday Book as Emingforde (DB, 204c, 204d, 206c, 207a, 207b, 208ax2 [Hunts.]), which may be a mistake for "Emingforde," that is to say the ford associated with Eming Street. 5 0 However,
the Leen was subsumed into the Nottingham Canal in the Industrial Revolution and cannot
even be seen on modem road maps of the city. 51 "King
Edward went with the army to Nottingham, and ordered to be built the borough on the south side
of the river, opposite the other, and the bridge over the Trent between the two boroughs," Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 196.
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confluence with the Leen, certainly suggests that the crossing of the Leen was already in use, but this might equally have been by a ford. The six bridges for which there is evidence of far-flung bridge-building obligations may all have been in existence in some shape or form by around 900. Those at Rochester, Chester, London, Cambridge and, probably, Huntingdon were originally Roman; the bridge at Nottingham was of Anglo-Saxon construction, possibly some time before 920.
ii) Bridge-Building Obligations - evidence, nature and origins: the survival of the Roman bridge at Rochester into the fourteenth century was due to the system of local obligations to repair it. These obligations are the best documented of all the six cases and have attracted the best scholarship. Nicholas Brooks has demonstrated that the obligations to maintain the bridge at Rochester did not fall on a random assemblage of Kentish manors, but rather reflect the distribution of labour across the Anglo-Saxon lathe, in a manner that may reflect Roman arrangements. Brooks' arguments may be summarized briefly here. The distribution of obligations is first recorded in the Textus Roffensis, the early twelfth-century cartulary of Rochester Cathedral Priory, in both an English and a Latin version.52 While the text has been dated to the late tenth century, Brooks rejects the calculations behind this date as relying too greatly on interpretations of the impossibly muddled tenurial history of the Kentish manors, and accepts instead an early eleventhcentury date on the basis of linguistic evidence.53 The date of the manuscript itself is from around 1120, but its first half, in both versions, has been replaced with leaves from
52The Old English version of the document is printed with a translation in Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 106-109; the Anglo-Saxon text and both the Rochester and Canterbury versions of the Latin text may be found in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management o f Rochester Bridge, AD 43 - 1993, eds. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 362369. 5 3 Brooks,
'Church, Crown and Community,' p. 5 and n.
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the late twelfth century.54 Brooks concludes, however, that the changes made in the obligations were limited to a minor re-allocation of the obligations between estates belonging to the bishop of Rochester.55 The obligations were repeated unchanged in numerous royal inquests into the fourteenth century. The document ascribes responsibility for the nine piers of the bridge, detailing a certain amount of timber to link them. Two of the piers are described as being of the bishop of Rochester, two of the archbishop of Canterbury and one of the king. The bishop, archbishop and king cannot be shown to have ever held some of the estates listed with the piers, so Brooks suggests that they were merely supposed to organize the obligations.56 Brooks demonstrates that the land being assessed for the bridge repairs were the lands of the lathe of Aylesford. Only five estates break this rule. Four, namely Southfleet, Stone, Pinden and Fawkham, were lands of the bishop of Rochester and may have been included as part of the tenurial rationalization of the obligations between the c. 1120 manuscript and the later version. This was not the case with the other exception, Westerham, which is well away from the bridge, on Kent's western border. As Brooks notes, this was the one place where there is known to have been opposition to the obligations: in 1311 the people of the manor attacked the king's bailiff who was attempting to distrain upon them for the repair of the bridge.57 Having demonstrated that the obligations were in origin based upon the lathe of Aylesford, Brooks allows himself some "heady conjecture" about the origins of these obligations, musing as to a possible Roman origin for obligations. Whether this Roman
54 Brooks,
’Church, Crown and Community,' pp. 3-6.
55 Brooks,
'Church, Crown and Community,’ pp. 4-5, 7-8.
56 Brooks,
'Church, Crown and Community,' pp. 6 - 8 ; this is another reason why the dating of the document
by means of an examination of the holding of the estates is a flawed approach. 57 Brooks,
'Church, Crown and Community,' p. 15.
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connection is believed or not, it may be stated that the bridge-building obligations on the estates of the lathe of Aylesford, which were enforced vigorously until late in the fourteenth century, represent pre-Conquest arrangements. The medieval obligations to maintain the Dee Bridge at Chester are not as well documented as those of Rochester. The evidence begins with Domesday Book which states that "For the re-building of the city wall and bridge, the reeve used to call up one man from each group of five hides of the county. For each man who did not come, his lord would pay forty shillings to the king and the earl. This fine was not part of the farm.”58 The description of the obligations in Domesday Book as pre-existing dues demonstrates that they pre-dated the Conquest. The same county-wide obligations59 were enforced again from the thirteenth century, when they were revived on the basis of the Domesday entry,60 until the building of a new bridge to replace the Roman bridge in the 1350s.
58 DB, 5 9 R.
262d [Cheshire].
Stewart-Brown, ’"Bridge-Work" at Chester,' English Historical Review 54 (1939), 83-87; Stewart-
Brown demonstrates that the obligations were the same, despite slight differences in the hidage; an agreement of 1288 (to settle a dispute over the repair of the bridge after it was damaged in a flood in 1279) assessed the city at only 52 hides rather than the previous 53 1/2. Stewart-Brown shows that the 52 hides represent the same 53 1/2 minus the lands given to Chester Abbey in 1093 which were made free of unspecified works. The abbey was able to use this immunity to free itself from the efforts of the sheriff to have it contribute to the bridge repair again in 1346 and 1355. One other exception from the county-wide nature of the obligations should be noted: in 1355, the poor men of the forest of Macclesfield petitioned Edward m that they should not contribute to the bridge because as inhabitants of the ancient forest their lands were not geldable and were therefore not liable to pay for the repair; R. Stewart-Brown, The Dee Bridge,’ The Cheshire Sheaf, iii, XVI for June 1919 (1921), 27-28. 60 Stewart-Brown,
'The Dee Bridge,' pp. 27-28; an inquest of 1255-1256 had to consult Domesday Book:
Alan de la Zouche when justiciar had spent £20 19s. 2 1/2 d. on the repair of the bridge and wanted to have it subtracted from his farm; the inquest consulted Domesday Book, decided that this should be allowed since the county was liable and ordered the sum to be extracted from the county.
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Just as at Chester, it is thanks to the activities of the Normans in the years after the Conquest that we have our only real evidence for the Anglo-Saxon bridge-building obligations connected to London. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1097 states that this was in every respect a very severe year, and over-oppressive with bad weather, when cultivation was due to be done or crops to be got in, and with excessive taxes that never ceased. Also, many shires whose labour was due at London were hard pressed because of the wall that they built about the Tower, and because of the bridge that was nearly all carried away by a flood, and because of the work on the king's hall, that was being built at Westminster, and many men were oppressed thereby.61 It is difficult from this scant reference to know much, if anything, about the nature of these obligations. They may be assumed to be pre-Norman, since they are accepted as not being an innovation by an Anglo-Saxon source as early as 1097. They were assessed as far afield as Alciston and Limpsfield in Sussex62 and on all the estates of St. Paul's scattered throughout the Home Counties.63 It is impossible to know more about the obligations because the replacement of the bridge in its entirety in the twelfth century brought them to a relatively early end. Nevertheless, again at London, we find AngloSaxon bridge-building obligations. The essential difference that can be established between these obligations and the other similar examples is that the London obligations were assessed on "many shires," not on a single county or part of a county. The evidence for the obligations for repairing the bridge at Huntingdon first appears in 1194, when the abbot of Thomey brought suit against William of Chesterton, who was presumably one of the abbey's tenants, for failure to contribute towards the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 363. 62Regesta, II, no. 1060 (Faedera, conventiones, litterce et cujuscunque generis acta publica inter reges Anglia et alios quosvis imperatores, reges, pontifices, principes, vel communitates, eds. Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson, new edition, I (London, 1816), eds. Adam Clarke and Fred. Holbrooke, I, 8 ), Regesta, II, no. 1717 (appendix, no. cclviii), Regesta, II, no. 1718 (appendix, no. cclix). 63 Honey bourne,
The Pre-Norman Bridge of London,' p. 20.
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repair of the bridge.64 Evidence on the extent of the obligations comes from a case heard by Hugh Bigod in 1259. The county complained that the burgesses of Huntingdon were driving heavy cartloads of dung and com across the bridge, damaging the bridge in the process, but were not contributing to the bridge's repair. The burgesses responded that they had always done so and that the whole county was quit of the toll given towards the repair of the bridge. It was ruled that, since there was no reason that the burgesses should be quit of toll unless they actually contributed to the bridge and they had not, those who had been carting dung and com across the bridge should pay the toll.65 Round read this evidence as suggesting that the men of the county repaired the bridge in order to be quit of a pre-existing toll. This seems unlikely. Rather than the county agreeing to contribute to the repair in return for quittance, it appears that the county was exempt from a newly established toll because it was already paying for the bridge directly.66 Thus, Huntingdon Bridge, contrary to Round's assertion, provides another example of county-wide obligations.
64Rotuli curiae Regis: Rolls and Records o f the Court held before the King's Justiciars or Justices, ed. Francis Palgrave (London, 1835), I, 132. 65Placitorum in Domo Capitulari Westmonasteriensi asservatorum abbreviatio, temporibus Regum Ricardi I, Henrici III, Edwardi I, Edwardi II (London, 1811), p. 148. 66Round claims this case as definitive evidence that such obligations were not Anglo-Saxon in origin, reading the case as implying that the people of the county were liable to repair the bridge at Huntingdon only in return for being exempt from the tolls levied on the bridge. The key phrase here (quoted by Round, '"Burh-bot" and "Brig-bot,"' p. 264n) is "Dicunt enim quod totus comitatus Huntedeon' quietus est teleoneo dando in villa de Huntedon' pro reparacione pontis predicti;" Round reads this as "the whole county is quit of the toll given in the town of Huntingdon in return for repairing the bridge;” I would read it as "the whole county is quit of the toll given in the town of Huntingdon for the purpose of repairing the bridge." It is further stated that "the burgesses cannot show that they should be quit of repairing the bridge except by reason of the toll from which the county is quit by reason of repairing the bridge (quia predicti burgenses non possunt ostendere quod quieti esse debeant de reparacione predicti pontis nisi racione predicti theoloneis de quo predictus comitatus est quietus racione reparacionis predicti pontis)," this explanation is entirely neutral as to the question of which came first, the toll or the obligation.
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The exact apportionment of the obligations on the men of the county cannot be known; however, we do know that they were apportioned by hundred: the jurors at the eyre of 1286 declared that "the bridge should be repaired by the community of the whole county, that is to say by the four hundreds of Toseland, Leightonstone, Normancross and Hurstingstone, so that each hundred is obliged to make its share of the bridge at its own expense."67 However, this need not imply that within the hundreds the load fell equally: for example, in 1377 the Countess of Norfolk successfully claimed that her lands in the county were non-geldable and thus quit of contributions towards Huntingdon Bridge.68 So, while there is no definitive information on the origins of the obligations for the bridge at Huntingdon, it is possible to see that they existed by the late twelfth century and were of the county-wide arrangement found elsewhere, with exceptions made for non-geldable land, implying that the obligations fell on only certain estates. There were arrangements for the repair of the bridge over the River Leen in Nottingham which amply fulfilled Maitland's notion of the "county bridge;" the evidence here, however, was dismissed by Round as being "late." The evidence is the record of an inquiry into the county-wide obligations to maintain the bridge after it was destroyed in floods in January 1458.69 The inquest found that the men of the town of Nottingham and from each o f the six wapentakes of the county "should repair and maintain, and from time out of mind have repaired and maintained" specified sections of the bridge.70
67Royal Justice and the Medieval English Countryside: The Huntingdonshire Eyre of 1286, the Ramsey Abbey Banlieu Court o f 1287, and the Assizes o f 1287-8, eds. Anne Reiber DeWindt and Edwin Brezette DeWindt (Toronto, 1981), I, 403, no. 661. 68Maud E. Simkins, 'Fen Stanton' in Victoria County History o f Huntingdonshire, eds. William Page, Granville Proby and S. Inskip Ladds, H (London, 1932), 282. 69Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, II, King Henry IV to King Richard III, 1399-1485, ed. W.H. Stevenson (London, 1883), 222-241. 70Down the length of the bridge, north to south: the men of Nottingham were responsible for the northern head of the bridge and the northern-most two arches, a length of 46.5 ft.; the wapentake of Broxtow was responsible for the next three arches, or 81.5 f t; Thurgarton and Lythe five arches, 135.5 ft.; Bassetlaw
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There are a number of pieces of evidence which suggest that the obligations were not the creation of the 1450s. First, there are the relatively heavy obligations on the wapentakes of Thurgarton and Lythe, and of Bassetlaw. Thurgarton and Lythe had originally been separate wapentakes, and Bassetlaw had absorbed the northern wapentake of Oswaldbeck. These changes took place in the late Middle Ages, but the obligations clearly preceded them, since if the obligations on the new amalgamated wapentakes are halved they are of the approximate magnitude of the others. Similarly, the statement about the change in the number of piers suggests that the obligations were not new. Another indication that the obligations were old by the mid-fifteenth century is the acceptance by the county of its obligations. Not only did the jurors of the wapentakes freely admit their obligations, but there do not seem to have been any opposition to the principle that the men of the county, however distant from the bridge, should do their part. Several wapentakes did not at once contribute, but there is no indication that they doubted their obligation.71 The most revealing piece of evidence that the Leen Bridge obligations may not simply be dismissed as "late" is the contrast between the county-wide obligations to repair the Leen Bridge and the recurrent efforts to raise the funds for the repair of the greater bridge of Nottingham, that over the Trent, which was known as the Hethbeth Bridge. A bridge had been built on this site by Edward the Elder in 920; whether a bridge existed continuously from that point on cannot be known. Nevertheless, Hethbeth Bridge was damaged or entirely destroyed on a number of occasions in the high Middle Ages
five arches, 169.5 ft.; Newark three arches, 69 ft.; Bingham is responsible for a 105 ft. "partem sive parcellam;" and finally, Radcliffe two arches and the southern head, 57 ft. The piers between the sections were to be jointly repaired. This makes a total of twenty arches, plus Bingham's part or parcel, 664 ft. in all. In addition, it was recorded that the five arches of the Bassetlaw section had previously been six arches. This presumably means that one of the middle arches had been widened to make the passage easier for boats. 71 Records
o f the Borough o f Nottingham, II, ed. Stevenson, 234-239, 420-421.
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and on each occasion new provisions had to be made for its repair because of the lack of long-standing obligations. These ad hoc provisions for Hethbeth Bridge relied on charity from the Church, from passers-by and from kings. During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was help towards the financing repair from episcopal indulgences,72 royal gifts,73 grants of pontage tolls,74 bequests,75 profits of a ferry which replaced the bridge when necessary76 and, above all, fund raising activities on the part of burgesses77 and bridge wardens.78 The burgesses summed up these efforts in 1467 when,
72In 1231, the archbishop of York granted a twelve-day indulgence to those contributing to the repair of the bridge. Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, H, ed. Stevenson, 439-440. 73In 1362, Edward m commissioned an inquest to discover who was bound to repair the bridge and, finding there was no one so obliged, he appointed the sheriff and four other men to collect "masons, carpenters, sawyers and other workmen" to repair the bridge and allowed the inhabitants of Sherwood Forest to bring wood to give or sell for the reconstruction; PRs, EIII, XII, 289, 314-315. He also took the initiative in seeking a more permanent solution, sending the sheriff and others to inquire of "masons, carpenters and other good men of the county of Nottingham... whether it will be more expedient to repair the bridge or build a new one in a safer place, and, whether the bridge should be repaired or a new bridge built with stone or timber;" PRs, EDI, XII, 365. 7 4 PRs,
EH, H, 344, ffl, 191, V, 62, Em , I, 102, 318, m , 95, 167, VIE, 295. In 1347, the pontage grant was
extended for the repair o f the bridges and causeways across the meadows between the Trent and the Leen (but not, significantly, for the Leen Bridge), PRs, E m , VH, 267. 7 5 PRs,
E m , XH, 365; Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, H, ed. Stevenson, 82-83, 89-90.
7 6 PRs,
Em , XH, 419; reprinted in full in Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, I, King Henry II to King
Richard II, 1155-1399, ed. W.H. Stevenson], 182-183. 77By the early years of the fourteenth century, the supervision of the rebuilding of the Hethbeth Bridge had been taken over by Alice le Palmer, whom Edward H granted protection on a number o f occasions; PRs, EH, H, 169, 344, m , 378, IV, 129. Edward m also granted her an exemption from taxation, PRs, Em, I, 188. 78The first evidence is from the winter of 1251-1252; Henry m granted the wardens protection adding that "it is the king's will that alms be bestowed upon them for the remaking of the bridge;” PRs, Hm, IV, 120, 125. The wardens accounts from 1457-1458 have survived; Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, H, ed. Stevenson, 220-223 for the Latin summary, and 364-368, for extracts from the itemized expenditures in English; for further accounts from the less spectacular years of 1458-1461, see ibid., H, 244-247; the
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as they once more sent out representatives to seek alms for the bridge, they declared that alms were especially worthy for "the bridge o f Hethbeth over the Trent, for which nothing is owned from which it can be maintained, unless only by charitable gifts."79 All in all, the vicissitudes of Hethbeth Bridge reveal the stark contrast between it and the Leen Bridge. While the Leen Bridge hardly appears in the record, the Trent Bridge is never out of it for more than a few years. The Leen Bridge did not necessitate complicated provisions because the county was obliged to repair it; in other words, although the evidence at Nottingham is indeed "late," the obligations were not. Indeed, it may be suggested that just as the Leen Bridge probably pre-dated the Trent Bridge, so the obligations pre-dated the Trent Bridge and thus dated from before 920. The set of obligations for the repair of bridge over the Cam in Cambridge is the example which is at the heart of the argument between Maitland and Round. The evidence for the obligations is in the form of records of inquests taken as early as 1339 and as late as 1752 to ascertain obligations for the repair of Cambridge Bridge. They show a remarkable consistency of obligation, and were still being calculated by hides in 1752. The obligations were not county-wide; they fell on particular estates.80 The origins of the Cambridgeshire obligations are not immediately obvious. The earliest reference to them is in the Hundred Rolls of 1278, in which it is recorded that the bridge was in disrepair and that "the repair and reconstruction of the Great Bridge of Cambridge pertain to the county of Cambridge and to certain people of the county who
1458-1459 accounts are the first records of the bridge wardens to survive. The accounts include income from rents, a ferry, bequests and alms. 79Records o f the Borough o f Nottingham, n, ed. W.H. Stevenson, 264-267. 80They were attached to the land and not to the individuals holding it, as can be seen by the plea of one alleged defaulter, that "ipse non tenet aliqua terras seu tenementa in comitatu predicto per quern ipse pontem predictum reparare tenetur" and by the words of the 1339 indictment that certain individuals hold "terras per hidas... oneratas ad reparandum pontem;” Public Works in Mediaeval Law, ed. C.T. Flower, I, Publications of the Selden Society 32 (London, 1915), 34, 35.
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hold geldable lands (terras geldabiles) which should repair the bridge."81 While there were complaints about the malicious actions of the sheriff,82 there were no complaints at all about the idea of the levy and it may be assumed that these were the same geldable hides that were obliged to contribute from 1339 onwards. By 1278 the obligations were well known and accepted by those obliged to pay. A study of the geographical distribution of the estates to be assessed for bridge maintenance is more revealing. The estates in question all lie in a fairly contained area of the south-west of the county, in the hundreds of Longstow, Papworth, Whittlesford, Chesterton, Northstow and Wetherley. The reason for the uneven distribution of pontage lands is that the lands which were to become Cambridgeshire were divided between the kingdoms of Mercia and East Anglia. The boundary between the two passed right through Cambridge, along the Cam and then followed the West River up to Whittlesford and Duxford.83 The pontage lands all lay in what had been Mercian territory, as, indeed, did the lands owing ward-penny at Cambridge Castle,84 which suggests that the obligations go back to a time when Mercia and East Anglia were separate entities.
81 Rotuli
hundredorum temp. Hen. HI & Edw. I in Turr' Lond' et in Curia Receptae Scaccarii Westm.
asservati, (London, 1812-1818), n, 392. 82The reason the bridge was in such a state was that the sheriff was taking both the profit of a ferry which had replaced the bridge and the money from the pontage lands and was putting them to his own uses: moreover, a henchman of his was sneaking out and tearing up planks from the bridge to ensure that it was never usable; the sheriff was also accused of taking forty shillings' worth of timber from poor people at Barnwell fair and only paying them one mark, only using a mark's worth of timber on the bridge and keeping the rest for his own uses and of taking stone for the bridge and not paying for it; Rotuli hundredorum, I, 49, 50, 53, II, 55, 407. 83Arthur Gray, The Dual Origin o f the Town o f Cambridge, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Quarto Publications, new series, 1 (Cambridge, 1908), esp. 1-16. See also Helen Maud Cam, The Origin of the Borough of Cambridge: A Consideration of Professor Carl Stephenson's Theories,' Proceedings o f the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 35 (1933-1934), 33-53. ^ G ray, Dual Origin, pp. 26-28.
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iiD the six bridges and the Anglo-Saxon reconquest: the six bridges and the obligations to build them do not follow identical patterns; nevertheless, a number of observations can be made. First, these systems of far-flung obligations are unusual: we do not have evidence for such arrangements in any other county, nor for any other bridge. Second, the bridges are unusual: all the bridges may be said to have existed by the early tenth century. In the cases o f Chester, Rochester, London and maybe at Huntingdon, the bridge may have survived in some form from Roman times through to the time of the Normans. Third, the obligations were onerous and becoming more onerous as time passed: the repair of bridges on the main roads of England was an expensive undertaking. Fourth, the obligations were understood and accepted: the only opposition to the levies that goes beyond simple non-payment was on the grounds that the obligations were being applied to lands they should not, not that the claim of obligations itself was illicit. Medieval man was very conscious of right and of precedent; he was not likely to accept an innovation, especially an onerous one, lightly. Fifth, the patterns of obligations are consistent with an Anglo-Saxon origin; in the cases of Chester, London and Rochester, the evidence refers directly to that period; and at Cambridge the pattern is highly suggestive of an AngloSaxon origin. The collected evidence suggests therefore an Anglo-Saxon origin for these bridgebuilding obligations. And indeed the story of the Anglo-Danish wars supports this idea. All the bridges studied may be described as having been on the disputed border between Danes and English. All were at boroughs; all were fought over and required restoration at one time or another.85 Moreover, there are common elements in the descriptions of the
85 Rochester.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 118-119 (a. 842), 152-153 (a. 885); Chester: pp. 170-
171 (a. 893), 182-183 (a. 907); London: pp. 118-119, (a. 842) 120, 122 (a. 851), 152-153 (a. 883), 156157 (a.
8 8 6 ):
Huntingdon: pp. 194-195 (a. 917): Nottingham, pp. 134-135 (a.
8 6 8 ),
195 (a. 918), 196 (a.
920) 210-211 (a. 942); Cambridge: 144-145 (a. 895), 195 (a. 917).
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restorations: in 886, "King Alfred occupied London; and all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him;"86 at Huntingdon in 917, after Edward the Elder had restored the borough "all the people of the district who had survived submitted to King Edward and asked for his peace and protection;"87 in the same year, "the army which belonged (hierde) to Cambridge chose [Edward] especially as its lord and protector, and established it with oaths ju st as he decreed;"88 at Nottingham, the following year, he "manned [the restored borough] both with Englishmen and Danes. And all the people, who had settled in Mercia, both English and Danes, submitted to him."89 Let me suggest that in these submissions and oaths was included the promise to maintain the borough, including the bridge. This suggestion may be supported by observing the close connection between borough restoration and oath, and, especially in the case of Cambridge, the emphasis on the king's initiative in setting terms for the oath.90 Thus, when AJfred and his successors pursued a policy of borough-building to turn back the Vikings, they may have organized the extant bridge- and wall-building obligations around the repair of the boroughs. The connection of the bridge-work obligations to these particular events is supported by three points. First, the one bridge mentioned as being built in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, namely the Trent Bridge in Nottingham, postdates the submission of the people of the town and had no obligations attached to it; it seems the older bridge was the one about which oaths were made. Second, when the army which belonged at Cambridge swore its oath, a distinction is made in the Chronicle between that army and the army of East Anglia which swore at the
86 Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 156-157.
87 Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 194-195.
88 Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 195.
89 Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 195.
9°Cp. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation, pp. 78-96.
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same time; this distinction perfectly matches the pattern of pontage lands connected to Cambridge. Third, the word "to belong," hieran, (and its Latin equivalent pertinere) recurs over and over again in descriptions of obligations.91 It is, for example, the word used in Burghal Hidage to describe the allocation of hides to borough-work.92 It is the same word that is used to describe the relationship of armies and lands that "belonged" to boroughs.93 Most significantly, it is the word used in the preamble of VI /Ethelstan, the law code agreed by "bishops and reeves who belong to London;" this suggestion of representatives of more than one county "belonging to London" fits with the AngloSaxon Chronicle's account of the many shires being oppressed by work at London in 1097,94 and by the existence of bridge-work obligations connected to London Bridge in Sussex.95 In conclusion, the apparent coincidence of six unusually old bridges, all with unusual bridge-work obligations of a pre-Conquest origin and all with similar experiences
9 1 H.P.R.
Finberg, 'The Ancient Shire of Winchcombe' in The Early Charters o f the West Midlands
(Leicester, 1961), pp. 228-235 at pp. 228-229. 92 Anglo-Saxon
Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 246-249; or now 'An edition and
translation of the Burghal Hidage, together with Recension C of the Tribal Hidage,’ ed. Alexander R. Rumble in The Defence o f Wessex: the Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, eds. David Hill and Alexander R. Rumble (Manchester, 1996), pp. 14-35. For an attempt to reconstruct the work of organization that lay behind the Burghal Hidage, see Nicholas P. Brooks, The administrative background to the Burghal Hidage’ in ibid., pp. 128-150, esp. pp. 141-144. 9 3 London:
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 186-187 (a. 911); Oxford: pp. 186-187 (a. 911); Bedford:
190-191 (a. 914); Northampton: pp. 190-191 (a. 914); Derby: pp. 190-193 (a. 917); Cambridge: p. 195 (a. 917); Stamford: p. 195 (a. 918). See also II As. 20.1, 20.4: ’’the chief men who belong (hironf hyron) to the borough.” 94The word used in describing the shires whose work belonged to London in 1097 is, however, "belumpon;" Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 363. 95Not to mention the Londoners’ claim to hunting rights in the Chiltems, Surrey and Middlesex in the probably spurious charter of privileges of Henry I; Hn. Lond. 15, Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 526; on its authenticity, see C.N.L. Brooke, G. Keir and S. Reynolds, 'Henry I's charter for the City of London,' Journal o f the Society o f Archivists, vol. 4, no. 7 (April 1973), 558-578.
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in the wars of c. 900, suggests that Alfred and his descendants not only pursued a deliberate policy of borough-building, but accompanied this policy with the establishment of concomitant obligations for the repair of the restored borough, and, if there was one, a bridge. If this is indeed the case, it may be remarked that we have come a long way to get back surprisingly close to Maitland's idea of a deliberate connection of borough to shire. Under this explanation, however, this connection may be seen to have arisen from specific historical circumstances, and, as such, may not be extended to other bridges, boroughs and counties for which evidence does not exist.96
The creation of the West Saxon public order: as noted above, Nicholas Brooks has observed that "In the century from 750 to 850 less than one fifth of the extant royal diplomas reserve any or all of the three military obligations. It was not apparently of great importance to donor or donee, lay or ecclesiastical, whether the reservation was included or not. A scribe might reserve the common burdens in one charter, and omit them in the next."97 The great change between sporadic and unimportant exclusions and the appearance of almost uniform exclusion occurred in the first half of the tenth century. Of ninety-five genuine98 ninth-century charters, eighty contain general immunities, of which only thirty-three exclude bridge-work; of 234 genuine charters from between 901 and 958, 210 contain general immunities, of which 185 exclude bridge-work; of 168 genuine charters from between 959 and 1000, 158 include general immunities, of which 143 exclude bridge-work.
96It is interesting in the light of this argument to notice that when Notker the Stammerer describes how even the greatest of Charlemagne's subjects were not excused from the great building projects, he cites as an example, the arches (archce) of the bridge of Mainz, which may be a hint of bridge-building obligations allocated by arches in a manner reminiscent of Rochester; Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli Magni imperatoris, ed. Hans F. Haefele, MGH Scriptores, new series 12 (Berlin, 1962), 40-41. 97 Brooks,
'Military Obligations,’ p. 73.
98See above, p. 20n.
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That this is more than just a meaningless change in formulae is suggested by the language of the charters of the 930s. There is a group of charters that include apparently unqualified immunities: these refer to freedom from "the yoke of detestable (exosae, detestande) servitude."99 This is the last significant group of exemptions which do not exclude the common burdens. From the 930s, the language of servility becomes more intense: the phrase "ab omni servili iugo libera"100 appears, and the works being excluded are routinely referred to as a yoke (iugum)101 or obstacle (obstaculum).102 At the same
99B674 (S412), B675 (S4I3), B677 (S416), B689 (S417), B692 (S4I8), B691 (S419), B695 (S422), B696 (S423), B702 (S425), B704 (S426). 100B728 (S442), B730 (S441), B752 (S466), B775 (S485), B777 (S480), B796 (S503), B814 (S508), B1068 (S699), K783 (1013). 101116 genuine charters: B587 (S221), B426 (S287),B491 (S317), B674 (S412), B675 (S413). B677 (S416), B689 (S417), B692 (S418),
B691 (S419),B695 (S422), B696 (S423), B702 (S425), B704
(S426), B728 (S442), B730 (S441),
B742 (S446),B744 (S445), B745 (S458), B750 (S472), B752
(S466), B775 (S485), B777 (S480),
B796 (S503),B800 (S504), B814 (S508), B895 (S559), B938
(S589), B957 (S593), B965 (S618), B981 (583), B1051 (S680), B1052 (S681), B1053 (S685), B1054 (S683), B1058 (S682), B1066 (S690), B1067 (S6 8 8 ), B1068 (S699), B1071 (S696), B1075 (S698), B1076 (S695), B1080 (S689), B1082 (S703), B1083 (S706), B1085 (S702), BI096 (S833), B1099 (S711), B1100 (S720), B1101 (S717), B II13 (S716), B1114 (S718), B1115 (S710), B1116 (S709), B1120 (S719), B1123 (S722), B1124 (S708), B1125 (S714), B1142 (S724), BI152 (S824), B 1153 (S826), B 1155 (S815), B1156 (S822), B1158 (S827), B1169 (S734), B1171 (S732), B1172 (S733), B1176 (S738), B 1186 (S744), B1189 (S737), B1191 (S746), B1196 (S747), B1199 (S748), B1200 (S754), B1214 (S764), B1215 (S765), B1216 (S767), B 1218 (S762), B1229 (S772), B1234 (S773), B1257 (S777), B1259 (S775), B1268 (S780), B1269 (S781), B1270 (S782), B1283 (S749), B1286 (S789), B1305 (S794), B1309 (S805), B1312 (S801), B1316 (S800), B1319 (S811), K622 (S835), K624 (S837), K626 (S836), K629 (S838), K633 (S840), K632 (S841), K655 (S861), K6 8 8 (S885) K698 (S891), K703 (S896), K714 (S911), K725 (S919), K744 (S963), K751 (S967), K778 (S1010), K783 (1013), K1277 (S829), K1279 (S843), K1289 (S883), K1291 (S 8 8 8 ), K1292 (S887), K1305 (S918), K1312 (S937); W.G. Searle, Ingulf and the Historia Croylandensis: an Investigation Attempted, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Octavo Publications 27 (Cambridge, 1894), 211-213 (S766), The Early Charters o f the West Midlands, ed. H.P.R. Finberg (Leicester, 1961), no. 419 (S932).
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time, the charters refer frequently to the three burdens as the "common work" and explain that it cannot be waived. Of the sixty-five charters that explain that the three burdens are common to all,103 forty-three occur date from between 930 and 958 (and a further twenty from after 958); of the fifteen charters that state that the three burdens cannot be waived for anyone, ten date from between 930 and 958 (and another four from after 958). The language of the charters gives the impression that a kind of propaganda campaign was underway, justifying the universal demand for the common burdens against considerable hostility. The charters also provide a sense of what bridge-work was supposed to be both through the categories from which it was excluded and through the descriptions of its
10258 genuine charters: B734 (S449), B741 (S447), B748 (S470), B749 (S462),
B753 (S464), B756
(S468), B757 (B469), B758 (S463), B759 (S460), B762 (S461), B764 (S467),
B767 (S476), B781
(S490), B789 (S491), B808 (S507), B821/2 (S527), B833 (S529), B8 8 8 (S578), B902 (S575). B927 (S610), B966 (S611), B967 (S584), B975 (S581), B977 (S603),
B979 (S604), B982 (S619), B992
(S642), B994 (S645), B996 (S665), B999 (S646), B1003 (S649), B1022 (S577), B1023 (S579), B1027 (S653), B1028 (S654), B1029 (S659), B1035 (S65I), B1077 (S693), B1093 (S705), BI138 (S730), B 1211 (S768), B1226 (S769), K648 (S856), K657 (S864), K658 (S867), K664 (S8 6 8 ), K673 (S874), K689 (S882), K692 (S8 8 6 ), K772 (S1004), K775 (S1001), K1282 (S855), K1283 (S858), K1296 (S902), K1301 (S910), K1303 (S915), Liber monasterii de Hyda, ed. Edwards, pp. 231-236 (S865), 238-242 (S869). 103B348 (S177), B438 (S292), B763 (S465), B748 (S470), B768 (S474), B770 (S475), B774 (S483), B780 (S512), B776 (S481), B786 (S488), B787 (S487), B788 (S486), B793 (S502), (S496), B817 (S513), B821/2 (S527), B824 (S526),
B831 (S52I),
B799 (S498), B801
B8 6 6
(S542),B8 6 8 (S534),B870
(S531), B875 (S547), B878 (S551), B877 (S552), B887 (S553),
B 8 8 8 (S578), B892 (S558), B894
(S516), B931 (S571), B945 (S587), B946 (S588), B948 (S585),
B963 (S622), B973 (S627), B988
(S641), B998 (S647), B999 (S646), B1001 (S643), B1022 (S577), B1034 (S657), B1035 (S651), B1043 (S674), B1044 (S679), B1045 (S660), B1074 (S692), B1077 (S693), B1118 (S715), B1127 (S727), B1138 (S730), B 1211 (S768), K706 (S899), K719 (S926), K730 (S955), K749 (S968), K752 (S970), K753 (S976), K775 (S1001), K776 (S1012), K778 (S1010), K1278 (S839), K1281 (S852), K1307 (S927), K1318 (S969), K1322 (S975); the phrase communis labor appears for the first time in a charter of 940, B763 (S465).
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importance. Bridge-work was a earthly tax (mundialis census),104 a royal tax (census regalis, regale tributum),105 an impost (vectigal),106 a royal burden (regalis sarcina),101 a royal service (regale servitium),108 which was most necessary from all regions,109 was known to all,110 constituted from ancient times,111 should be provided by all people,112 was necessary to the royal dignity113 and was observed by the common usage.114 These descriptions of bridge-work accord well with the information on the performing of bridge-work provided by the law codes. It is worth noting first, however, the silence of the early law codes on the subject. No code before the time of vEthelred mentions bridges. This silence is all the more deafening because some of the codes deal with subjects that were usually attached to bridge-work by context. For instance, Ine’s laws refer to the penalty for failing to serve in the arm y.115 While this silence in the seventh-century codes should not be seen as surprising since they pre-date the first appearance of the obligations in charters, the absence of a reference to bridge-work in iEthelstan's laws is more surprising. His second code makes provisions for borough-work, but does not mention bridges.116
104B601 (S369), B642 (S395). 105B969 (S608); B243 (S38), B1121 (S713). 106B750 (S472). 107B887 (S553), B936 (S664). 108K636 (S848). 109B971 (S614). 110B1103 (S669). i n B1285 (S784). ll2 K810 (S1033). 113B769 (S478). 114K772 (S I004). 115Ine 51. 116II As. 13.
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The later Anglo-Saxon law codes make clear that bridge-work was considered to be one fundamental aspect of the maintenance of the public order. The related codes V and VI jEthelred and II Cnut include bridge-work in sections dealing with those matters related to the public order. Each code begins with a section on ecclesiastical crimes, which ends with a general statement urging the observance of God's law.117 Then follows a section on the peace (fiid), which begins in each code with a general statement urging everyone to work to improve the peace118 and ends with an admonition that injustice should cease and righteousness flourish.119 Between these introductory and concluding clauses the codes contain various measures of common concern. V £sthelred includes coinage, borough-work, bridge-work,120 military service, the building of ships, desertion from the army, outlawry, plots against the king and obstruction of the law of the king or Christ, plus a section on specific injustices that the king had worked to stamp out.121 VI /Ethelred omits this specific list; it adds weights and measures, the penalty for damaging naval vessels and for violence to widows and nuns.122 This list is shortened and simplified in II Cnut: only the coinage, weights and measures, borough- and bridge-work, the building of ships and the military service are included.123 Together these constitute a fairly conventional list of matters pertaining to the king under the early medieval public order. This public context is reinforced by II Cnut which emphasizes that the duties are to performed whenever necessary "for maenelicre neode," or, as the Quadripartitus version
117V Atr. 26; VI Atr. 30; H Cn. 7.1. 118V Atr. 26.1; VI Atr. 31; H Cn. 8. 119V Atr. 33.1; VI Atr. 40.1; II Cn. 11.1. 120Bridge-work is omitted in Manuscript G (which is a hand of c. 1060 according to Liebermann); there does not seem to be any significance to this. 121V Atr. 26.1 to 32.5. 122VI Atr. 31-39; all but coinage, weights and measures, borough- and bridge-work, the building of ships and the military service are omitted in manuscript D (i.e. cc. 33-39 omitted), reducing the list to the simplest form as it appears in II Cnut. 123HCn. 8-10.
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o f the same clause (with a characteristic royalist twist) has it, "ad commune regni nostri commodum."124 That the public obligation to repair bridges was to be undertaken communally is confirmed by the details of the penalty for non-participation specified in the law codes. II Cnut specifies that the fine for neglect of borough-work, bridge-work or army service is 120 shillings under English law and as custom dictates under the Danelaw.125 If this neglect were denied fourteen compurgators would be named of whom eleven would have to support the denial. The Leges Henrici Primi repeat this provision,126 but add that neighbours should usually be appointed as compurgators because it is impossible that even a single member of the community could be present at the muster and not be noticed.127 All of which suggests that a community would come together to perform its common borough-work, bridge-work or army service. One other text suggests the inescapability of the common burdens. The Rectitudines singularum personarum of c. 1050 states that "the law of thegns is, that if he is to be worthy of bookright, he should do three things for his land: army service, borough-work and bridge-work (fyrdfcereld 7 burhbote 7 brycgeweorc)."128 The exemption clauses in the charters suggest some further details on the changing performance of bridge-work. Two changes to the formulae occur during the reign of Edgar. The first has been noted above:129 with the accession of Edgar in 959, there is a change in the words used for the work connected to bridges and forts. Whereas previously, the words used had been almost exclusively ones meaning building (e.g.
124n Cn. 10; for Quadripartitus version, see Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 315. l25n Cn. 65. l26Hn. 66.6, 66.6a. 127Hn. 66.6b; the Latin is somewhat cryptic: "quia solus non potuit tantis efficientiis invisibilis affuisse.” 12^Rect. 1; the Quadripartitus translates this as "Taini lex est, ut sit dignus rectitudine testamenti sui et ut tria faciat pro terra sua, scilicet expeditionem, burhbotam et brigbotam." 129See above, chapter two.
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constructio, instructio, coedificatio), after that date, the words are split between ones meaning building and ones meaning repair (e.g. emendatio, reparatio). The second change is the appearance in common formulae of the word rata, "proportionate,” especially in the formula "tribus his exceptis rata videlicet expeditione pontis arcisve restauratione."130 The word appears in only two charters from before 959,131 but in eighty-nine after that date. The appearance of the word suggests the existence of settled and agreed obligations, shared in common. These changes in formula during the reign of Edgar suggest an evolution in the nature of bridge-work and the other obligations. In earlier years, the obligations had been ones to be performed, "when deemed necessary,"132 "by royal command,"133 and the army service performed in a "most prompt" manner;134 Asser describes Alfred as being vexed because his people would not respond quickly enough to his summonses, so that the necessary work on fortresses would be too late. The requirement for communal repair of bridges and fortresses by settled proportions suggests a more settled situation and the adaptation of the obligations of military emergency to the routine needs of peacetime.135 This, of course, agrees absolutely with what we know of the reign of Edgar the Peaceable; this regular and routine cooperation of all people in common obligations is reminiscent o f the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's description that Edgar "improved the peace of the people (folcesfrid) more than the kings who were before him in the memory of man. And God also supported him so that kings and earls willingly submitted to him and
130For example, B1054 (S683), B1058 (S682). 13 ^ 8 9 5 (S559), B981 (S583). 132B201 (S106), B202 (S58), B203 (S59), B204 (S60), B848 (S134). 133B178 (S92). 134B780 (S512). 135This change is also suggested by the provision in II £:thelstan that all borough-work should be finished by a fortnight after Rogation Days; II As. 13.
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were subjected to whatever he wished. And without battle he brought under his sway all that he wished.”136 One final point should be mentioned about bridge-work in the tenth century. As has been noted, from the 930s, it is insisted that no one can be exempted from the common burdens. Several charters demonstrate that this was at least theoretically true even of the king and his family. A charter of 943, in which Edmund granted land on the Isle of Thanet to his mother reserves the three burdens "which it seems to us are to be demanded communally from everyone."137 Shortly afterwards, the same king granted some lands to his wife, again reserving the common burdens, with the explanation that they were "common to everyone."138 In 953, Eadred granted land to his mother reserving the common burdens without explanation.139 Edgar went one better: in two charters of 963 and 964, he granted estates to himself, whilst still reserving the common burdens.140 Of course, our evidence does not permit the examination of actual cases of the obligations being performed, but it seems that in this period, the heyday of the Anglo-Saxon public order, the theory was maintained with absolute consistency: no one could be excused from the common burdens, no matter in what degree of favour they were held. Even the king was below the law.141
136Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 217. 137B784 (S489). 138B817 (S513). 139B898 (S562). 140B1118 (S715), B1127 (S727). 141 This is not to say that the king and his family were expected to erect bridges personally: we must assume that all lords were delegating the actual physical labour to their peasants (as, indeed, is suggested by the levying of the fine for a failure to peform bridge-work at Chester on the man's lord; DB, 262d [Cheshire]).
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All that was to change. A sign of things to come may be found in the documents relating to the messuage called "Goodbegot" in Winchester. According to a charter of 1012 in which King jEthelred granted this land to his wife Emma, it is declared to be beyond the taxation of our majesty (ex censoria eminentiae nostrae ditione), so that this liberty from my aforesaid demands will be firm and inviolable, but moreover let it stay secure from every yoke of worldly servitude as long as the torch of faith shines its light upon the land of the English and indeed from these three matters, namely, the repair of bridges and walls and the adding to the warlike multitude.142 This liberty was confirmed subsequently by /Ethelred and Emma's son, Edward the Confessor.143 Both the language of the grant and the subsequent confirmation suggest that this was seen as an extraordinary grant,144 but the very idea that the king could by his own authority grant immunity from the three common burdens was the beginning of the end.145
142K720 (S925). 143H l l l (SI 153). I44The place continued to enjoy an exceptional status until the time of Henry VIE; Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. F.E. Harmer (Manchester, 1952), p. 383. 145Cp. the examples of "beneficial hidation;" Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. Harmer, pp. 375-377.
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Chapter Four: "As free as the king could grant:" The End o f Communal Bridge-w ork
Bridge-work was one element of the Anglo-Saxon public order; it was a communal obligation which was theoretically inescapable: most other duties might be remitted by the king, but not bridge-work. This theory was either not understood or not respected by the Conqueror and his sons. On the one hand, we see them exploiting the common burdens to their fullest extent. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complains of the grievous burdens imposed in 1097 on the counties whose work was due at London, caused by the building of the Tower of London and Westminster Hall and the repair of London Bridge, so that "many men were oppressed thereby."1 Similarly, William the Conqueror demanded that the bridge-work, which he had newly imposed on the Isle of Ely after the suppression of the last Anglo-Saxon resistance, be performed "without excuse."2 On the other hand, William and his sons remitted bridge-work as a mark of favour. It is this use of previously communal and public obligations as an instrument of lordly rule that changed the legal understanding of the common burdens. Once they had chosen to excuse their most favoured monastic institutions from communal public duties, the way was open for every house of any standing to excuse itself from these obligations by forgery. These forgeries betray the changing understanding of bridge-work: in claiming that they had been excused from the obligation by a famous king of yore, the forgers reflect the state of the law under the Norman kings. The possibility that the personal favour of a king should allow such exemption demonstrates the different perception of kingship introduced by the Normans. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon public order was at least theoretically immutable and the king could not even grant exemptions
1Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 363. 2English Lawsuits, ed. Van Caenegem, I, 48, 50; cp. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 346-347.
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from bridge-work to his own land, under the Normans, bridge-work was a feudal incident, alienable like any other. This new understanding of bridge-work will be examined in three separate but contemporaneous manifestations. The first is the forged charters produced by so many monasteries in the twelfth century. The second is the coronation charter of Henry I, in which remittance of bridge-work, like that of other dues, is used as a political bargaining chip. The third is the twelfth-century legal compilations which quietly diluted or omitted bridge-work.
i) Monastic Exemptions: Battle Abbey was the first institution or individual to secure immunity from the common burdens after the Conquest; it secured genuine and unique privileges as a result of William I's notion of the foundation as, to use Eleanor Searle's phrase, his Eigenkloster? Subsequently, the great monasteries of England all sought to ape these privileges largely by means of forgery. It was, however, Battle's connection to the king and the privileges that the connection came to entail which set the pattern for all subsequent exemptions. The story of Battle Abbey's struggle to preserve its exceptional ecclesiastical exemptions against the influence of the bishop of Chichester is well known; the parallel story of the fight for secular immunities is less known, largely because it was accomplished before the period of interest for the house’s chronicler and without the need of forgeries. Eleanor Searle in her work on the abbey and its lordship retells the story of the ecclesiastical litigation4 and of the achievement of secular jurisdictional independence
3For the foundation of privileged abbeys by the dukes of Normandy, see David Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London, 1982), pp. 193-194,205. 4Eleanor Searle, Lordship and Community: Battle Abbey and its Banlieu, 1066-1538, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts 26 (Toronto, 1974), 21-35.
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from neighbouring lords.5 As regards the freedoms granted by the Conqueror and his sons, however, she concludes "these are great privileges, but not unusual for a royal foundation."6 This conclusion cannot stand; not only did the privileges include freedom from opera castellorum et parcorum et pontium as well as from the murder fine,7 freedoms hitherto allowed to no foundation, but the freedoms from the communal obligations were contested by the abbey's neighbours. There survive numerous writs issued by the Conqueror's sons to aid the abbey in its defence of its rights; these writs include ones on the subject of the abbey's freedom from bridge- and castle-work. The writs were necessary because the local authorities did not take this unprecedented freedom lying down. Henry I had to send one writ to his officers8 and another to his barons9 in Sussex reminding them that the lands of Battle were exempt from bridge-work, and that, in particular, the manor of Alciston was to be free of bridgework owing at London Bridge and castle-work owing at Pevensey Castle. Failure to
5SearIe, Lordship and Community, pp. 197-218. 6 Searle, Lordship and Community, p. 206n. 7The abbey never received a formal foundation charter from William I because he died before the abbey was consecrated; however, a writ of the Conqueror establishing of the privileges of the house was confirmed by Henry II, and these same freedoms can be seen in writs concerning the abbey's properties outside Sussex, as well as in all the succeeding confirmations, forged and otherwise, of later kings. Henry II’s confirmation of William I’s writ is printed in V.H. Galbraith, 'A New Charter of Henry II to Battle Abbey,' English Historical Review 52 (1937), 67-73 at 73. The writs repeating the freedoms are Regesta, I, nos. 58, 290, 314a (appendix, no. 1 a), 348b (appendix, no. Ivi a), 426a (appendix, no. lxxvi a) [N.B. all of these except nos. 58 and 290 are printed among the addenda to volume I at the back of volume H]; Regesta, H, 827 (appendix, no. xlvii), 894, 1238, 1404, 1717-1718 (appendix, nos. cclviii-cclix), 1804; for the privileges forged after 1154, see Eleanor Searle, 'Battle Abbey and Exemption: the forged charters,' English Historical Review 83 (1968), 449-480 at 469-480. 8Regesta, H, no. 1060 (Foedera, conventiones, litterce et cujuscunque generis acta publica inter reges Anglia et alios quosvis imperatores, reges, pontifices, principes, vel communitates, eds. Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson, new edition, I (London, 1816), eds. Adam Clarke and Fred. Holbrooke, I, 8). 9Regesta, H, no. 1717 (appendix, no. cclviii).
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observe this order was to be punished by forfeiture. A similar writ specified the manor of Limpsfield was to be free of work at London Bridge.10 In all things, especially the dispute with Chichester, but in secular matters too, Battle based its claim on the notion that its lands had been given "by royal authority,"11 "as the king's owns alms"12 to "his demesne chapel"13 which was "a symbol of the royal crown,"14 and thus the lands were held "with royal privileges,"15 "as free and quit as [the king] held them"16 and "as free as the king could grant."17 That is to say, freedom from bridge-work was predicated on the notion that bridge-work was a feudal obligation like any other owed to the lord king, and that the king, having no earthly lord, did not owe it. This understanding is quite different from the tenth-century theory that bridge-work was one of the public and common obligations from which no man could be exempt, not even the king.
10Regesta, n, no. 1718 (appendix, no. cclix). 1Wegali auctoritate," The Chronicle o f Battle Abbey, ed. Eleanor Searle (Oxford, 1980), p. 69; Regesta, n, no. 1060 (Faedera, eds. Rymer et al., new edition. I, 8). 12"sicut dominica elemosina mea," Regesta, I, nos. 58, 59, H, no. 662; printed in Monasticon diocesis Exoniensis, ed. George Oliver (Exeter, 1846), pp. 117-118. There is a cruelly ironic end to the tale of the exemptions enjoyed by the priory of St. Nicholas in Exeter, a cell of Battle to which these charters relate; the cell was included in the exemption from bridge-work, but after the dissolution of the priory in 1536. some stones from the priory buildings were used to repair the Exe bridge; ibid., pp. 115-116. 13"sicut mea dominica capella libera sit" in the second spurious foundation charter of 1155-1157 (Regesta, I, no. 262) printed in Searle, 'Battle Abbey and Exemption,' pp. 473-474 (nos. 4, 10); cp. the requirement that the king's officers were "not to meddle in Battle's leuga any more than they would in the King’s own demesne,” Regesta, n, nos. 859 (PRs, HVI, n , 173), 1670. 14"regie signum corone,” Chronicle o f Battle Abbey, ed. Searle, p. 47. 15"regiis dignatibus," Chronicle o f Battle Abbey, ed. Searle, p. 69. ^Regesta, II, no. 1060 (Faedera, eds. Rymer et al., new edition, I, 8). 17"ita liberum et quietum sicut liberius quietius tenui vel ut Rex dare potui" in the first spurious foundation charter of 1155-1157 (Regesta, I, no. 62), printed in Searle, 'Battle Abbey and Exemption,' pp. 469-470 (no. 1).
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Henry I followed his father's lead. When he founded Reading Abbey in 1121, he endowed it with privileges as exceptional as Battle's. Although the various foundation charters have all come under close scrutiny as regards their authenticity,18 the privileges are consistent throughout and similar to the Conqueror's foundation. The privileges include freedom from army service and the building of castles and bridges.19 In two portable charters "to be taken before courts and other authorities whenever the abbey’s liberties were in question,"20 it is stated that Henry’s intention was to give the abbey "all immunity and power, quittance and liberty that the royal authority can confer on any abbey."21 Whether this clause is genuine or not, this certainly seems to have been both Henry I's intention and the abbey's subsequent understanding of their founder's actions.22 The post-Conquest royal foundations were thus able to secure genuine immunities.23 For the great pre-Conquest monasteries, the easiest way to attempt to achieve their own immunities was by forgery. W.H. Stevenson suggested that this was a relatively easy task to accomplish, merely by "suppressing the exception clauses or by changing a preposition"24 in a genuine Anglo-Saxon charter. One example of this kind of
18Reading Abbey Cartularies, British Library Manuscripts: Egerton 3031, Harley 1708 and Cotton Vespasian E xxv, ed. B.R. Kemp, I, Camden Fourth Series 31 (London, 1986), introduction, 19-22; see also Charles Johnson, 'Some Charters of Henry I' in Historical Essays in Honour o f James Tait, eds. J.G. Edwards, V.H Galbraith and E.F. Jacob (Manchester, 1933), pp. 137-142. 19See, for example, Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. Kemp, I, 33 (no. I). 20Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. Kemp, I, 38. 21Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. Kemp, I, 37,52 (nos. 2, 21). 22The editor of the cartularies, Brian Kemp, feels that the clause is a late-twelfth-century "improvement," but it is "not impossible as an epitome of the king's intentions... and may have been broadly true in practice," Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. Kemp, introduction. I, 20-21. 23Stephen also granted secular immunity to his foundation at Faversham (founded in 1148), however by then it seems that bridge-work was not an important enough issue to gain explicit mention, presumably because it had already gone the way of all royal authority; "in perpetuam elemosinam, soluta et quieta omni seculari exactione,” Regesta, m , no. 302. 24W.H. Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' English Historical Review 29 (1914), 689-703 at 702.
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110 alteration suggests that the matter was not as straight-forward as Stevenson believed. The charter of King Edgar to St. Werburgh’s, Chester, as it is preserved in the abbey's fourteenth-century cartulary,25 follows the form of another grant of Edgar to the thegn W u lfric.26 Where the latter has the absolutely conventional "liberum ab omni aggravatione secularis servitii et ab omni censu preter expeditionis profectione pontisque constructione et arcis munitione," the Chester charter replaces "preter" with "et," thus reversing the sense of the exclusion clause.27 However, this simple change was not enough for the compiler of the charter, who felt the need to add a clause specifying that the grant was made not only for the expiation of Edgar’s sins but also for the expiation of the sins of "my predecessors, namely Edmund renowned king of the English and my father, and also of /Ethelstan of blessed memory most noble king of the same people."28 This clause would be extraordinary in a tenth-century charter29 and was probably added in order to make the immunity plausible. In truth, what the Chester charter demonstrates is that the task of securing fabricated immunities was harder than Stevenson supposed, since it was well known that immunities were not lighdy granted.30 Instead of the simple
The Chartulary or Register o f the Abbey o f St. Werburgh, Chester, ed. James Tait, Remains Historical and Literary connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester printed for the Chetham Society, new series 79 (Manchester, 1920), 8-10. James Tait argues this charter had a genuine basis, ibid., pp. xvii-xviii, 10-13; I find Tait's acceptance of the substance of the charter to be a little too whole hearted; he asserts that with regard to this charter, "there is no motive for forgery,” (p. 12) but elsewhere he uses the charter as the clinching proof of the abbey’s Anglo-Saxon origins(pp. xvii-xviii), something the medieval monks would have been equally eager to prove. 26B 1119 (S723). 27Tait, in defending the charter, suggests that "it is possible... that some copyist carelessly or unscrupulously altered the abbreviation of 'preter'... into the sign for 'et;'" Chartulary or Register o f the Abbey o f St. Werburgh, ed. Tait, p. 11. 2%Chartulary or Register o f the Abbey o f St. Werburgh, ed. Tait, p. 9. 29Chartulary or Register o f the Abbey o f St. Werburgh, ed. Tait, p. 11.
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substitution of prepositions, forged charters were usually accompanied by accounts of special royal favour to match that of William I, Henry I and Stephen in respect to their foundations. Matthew Paris' series of illustrations of the foundation of St. Albans Abbey, beginning with the martyrdom of the saint, continuing through the discovery of the saint's relics by King Offa and the construction of the abbey, is a striking, if late, example of the kind of propaganda being produced in monasteries across England in the twelfth century.31 The final illustration runs across two folios; it shows Offa, watched by his nobles, kneeling to place his foundation charter on the altar before the abbot, while a servant furiously rings the bells of new abbey. Immediately below this illustration is copied the spurious foundation charter on which St. Albans based its claim to extraordinary immunity.32 This claim that would have been impossible without the hagiographic preamble. In this way, the abbeys which claimed exemption from bridge-
30One other charter should be remarked upon in this context; in his article on the common burdens, Stevenson notes one pre-Conquest exception to the otherwise consistent rule against explicit exemptions, namely the charter of Credition Abbey granted by /Ethelstan in 930, which grants the land "sine expeditionis profectione arcis pontis constructione omnique regalium vel secularium tributorum servitutis exactione," B1343 (S405); Stevenson's puzzling response to this was "exceptio probat regulam” although it seems to do nothing of the sort. Subsequent work by Pierre Chaplais has, however, shown this charter to be an early eleventh-century forgery, making this the only pre-Conquest forged exemption and thus making good on Stevenson's claim: here is the one exception to the rule of no explicit pre-Conquest exemptions to bridge-work, and the one example of a forgery simply "changing a preposition" as Stevenson suggests. That only one example of the kind exists suggests that it was not a successful tactic; Stevenson, Trinoda Necessitas,' p. 702; Pierre Chaplais, 'The authenticity of the royal Anglo-Saxon diplomas of Exeter,' The Bulletin o f the Institute o f Historical Research 39 (1966), 1-34 at 10-11 (no. 9). There is, I think, a pleasing symmetry in the fact that Credition thus has both the first bridge in a set of charter bounds and the first forged bridge-work exemption. 31Illustrations to the Life of St. Alban in Trin. Coll. Dublin Ms. E. i 40, eds. W.R.L. Lowe, E.F. Jacob and M.R. James (Oxford, 1924) (BHL 215-216); the illustrations are now available on a range of tee shirts, coasters, mugs and tea towels in the abbey's gift shop. 32Illustrations, eds. Lowe, Jacob and James, nos. 53, 54 (ff. 62b, 63a).
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112 work all sought to put the exemption in the context of praise of a king of the past, and assertion of his particular favour towards the house. Only in that context would the grant of such a privilege be credible. A few examples of this practice should suffice to make the point, especially since there are too many examples for them all to be included here. The great advantage which forgeries offer is that, in a sense, they are the most honest documents of the Middle Ages: their authors tend to be wonderfully straight-forward in stating exactly what it is they are interested in. The greatest problem, of course, in dealing with these forgeries is to get an exact sense of the date of their composition. The Chester charter, cited above, is a good illustration of the problems. It purports to be a charter of King Edgar, granted in 963; however, the earliest copy was added in a later hand onto a blank folio in the abbey's cartulary, which dates from the early years of the fourteenth century.33 Bridge-work was still a live issue in the fourteenth century, especially in Chester, where the abbey was involved in long-running litigation to secure immunity from obligations to repair the bridge across the Dee.34 It is perfectly possible to imagine that this charter was invented and inserted into the cartulary in the fourteenth century to bolster the abbey's claim to immunity. All cartulary copies offer these kinds of problems, especially when one is dealing with matters of detail. An intriguing counter-example in this context is that of the eleventh-century cartulary of Christ Church, Canterbury, in which all the charters were doctored at the time of compilation to include a standard immunity clause with the exclusion of the three common burdens. In this case, bridge-work obligations were made explicit in a usual formula, so as to remove any question as to the house's rightful claim which might arise otherwise from the apparent irregularity in the charters.35 Nevertheless,
33Chartulary or Register o f the Abbey o f St. Werburgh, ed. Tait, pp. xxxii-xxxiii. 34See above, chapter three. 35Robin Fleming, Law and Custom in Domesday England (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, forthcoming).
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between cartularies and house chronicles, a consistent pattern emerges of forged bridgework exemptions becoming common for the first time in the first half of the twelfth century, at the precise point that bridge-work was both becoming more burdensome and being undermined elsewhere by royal grant and legal compilations. The first example is that of St. Albans Abbey, to which reference was made above. The claim of St. Albans to privileges, including an exemption from bridge-work, was based on a number of forged twelfth-century charters. The first two were supposedly granted by Offa, king of the Mercians. This king was the subject of a hagiographic propaganda campaign conducted by the school of historians at the house at the same time that the charters were being written. This campaign can be detected in the differences between the accounts o f Offa's foundation of the monastery given by William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the 1120s, and by Roger of Wendover, a historian of St. Albans, writing in the early years of the thirteenth century.36 It has been demonstrated that William and Henry were working independently from an early account of the abbey's foundation.37 Both follow the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle38 in describing how Offa had King (and later Saint) ^Ethelberht of East Anglia beheaded39 and recount how he founded the abbey and endowed it with many lands.40 William adds the full story of
36Roger, who was building on the work of predecessors of a previous generation, was himself only one link in the chain; his work was in turn adapted by Matthew Paris, who was to magnify the royal connection to St. Albans by the creation o f another Offa, king of Angeln, in the fourth century, whose original promise to found a monastery in honour of Saint Alban provides the inspiration for the actual foundation by the historical Offa; Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 41-48, 189-195. 37Vaughan, Matthew Paris, p. 191. 38Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Thorpe, I, 98-99. 39William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. William Stubbs [RS 90] I (London 1887), 84; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 256-257. 40William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, ed. N.E.S.A. Hamilton [RS 52] (London, 1870), pp. 316-317; William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, ed. Stubbs, I, 87; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, pp. 246-247, 624-625.
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how the king was led to discover Alban's relics and build the church by a vision in a dream.41 Henry adds that because of the sanctity of Alban the church is held in such honour that it enjoys immunity from Romescot "from which no king, earl, archbishop, bishop, abbot, or anyone else is exempt."42 Roger of Wendover's account not only entirely changes the account of the king's personality, so that he refuses the opportunity to kill King jEthelberht (a deed that is instead performed by Offa’s evil queen Quendritha43) but makes Offa travel to Rome personally to secure privileges for the house, including immunity from episcopal oversight.44 In this context, Roger repeatedly emphasizes that Offa gave the house great privileges, and, especially, that the king gave the house "all royal rights (omnia jura regalia)."45 This grant was made at a council of bishops and nobles, and was repeated by his son, Egfrid.46 In all these aspects, Roger's account matches the provisions of the forged charters. There are charters of Offa, one of which is witnessed by Offa’s son, plus nine other kings, two archbishops, thirteen bishops and ten duces, and grants freedom from all works, from expedicio and "omni edicto publico,"47 the other of which grants freedom from works, including the repair of bridges.48 These two charters are matched by two supposedly granted by Offa's son, which grant a general
41William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, ed. Hamilton, pp. 316-317; Henry, by contrast, by juxtaposing Offa's foundation of the abbey with St. Germanus' visit to the shrine, gives the impression that the relics were never lost; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, pp. 622-625. 42Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Greenway, pp. 624-625. 43Roger of Wendover, Chronica sive flores historiarum, ed. Henry O. Coxe (London, 1841), I. 249-251. ^ R o g e r of Wendover, Chronica sive flores historiarum, ed. Coxe, I, 251-257 43Roger of Wendover, Chronica sive flores historiarum, ed. Coxe, I, 257,259. 4