The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  In particularly hard winters few bridges anywhere were safe. In the winter of 1281–2, when ‘there was such a frost and snow, as no man living could remember the like’, ‘five arches of London Bridge, and all Rochester Bridge were borne downe, and carried away with the streame, and the like happened to many bridges in England’.18 Always most at risk were those country bridges with no endowments and with insufficient alms to maintain them properly. As the piers of these were gradually worn away and the stones of the parapets were knocked into the river by clumsily driven and heavily laden carts, their passage became an extremely risky undertaking; and frequently on stormy nights a driver and load would crash with the splintering wood or crumbling masonry into the waters beneath.

  Occasionally a rickety bridge might be repaired by royal command. Edward III, for instance, once required the ‘Sheriff of Oxfordshire to declare that all bridges should be repaired and all fords marked out with stakes for the crossing of the King with his falcons during the approaching wintet season’.19 But it was not until 1531 that a statute enabled Justices of the Peace to levy a county rate to pay for the regular maintenance of bridges.20

  While it was difficult enough to get old bridges repaired, it was far more so to get new ones built, even when a royal grant was available – as it was in 1248 to the ‘good men of Doncastre’ who were permitted to take a ‘id on every cart with merchandise’ which crossed the bridge they were required to build there – and even when, as an added inducement, the priest of the bridge’s chapel was asked to pray for the souls of contributors. For whoever built a bridge was, legally, responsible for its upkeep. Bridge construction was, accordingly, not an undertaking that those who could afford it would willingly enter into. So burdensome was it, indeed, that one of the clauses of Magna Carta expressly stipulated that no ‘village or individual shall be compelled to make bridges at river banks except those who from of old were legally bound to do so’. On the Continent an order of bridge friars undertook the task of bridge building; and the Pont St Esprit as well as the bridge at Avignon were the result of their endeavours. But no such order existed in England.21

  Hard as journeys often were, particularly in winter, the medieval wayfarer managed nevertheless to cover long distances and to travel fast when necessary. Everyone who could afford to do so rode a horse. But horses were expensive, a knight’s warhorse in the thirteenth century costing as much as £80, more than a poor man could expect to earn in a lifetime. Even a rouncy, an ordinary riding-horse incapable of carrying the great weights which warhorses were bred to do, might cost over £3 at a time when a cow could be bought for 9s 5d, an ox for 13s, a sheep for is 5a and a fowl for id. Palfreys, the saddle-horses most commonly used, could not be bought for much less than £15 each although at the end of the thirteenth century a brother of the Earl of Gloucester managed to purchase a palfrey and a cart-horse for just over £5 each. Prices clearly varied considerably, depending to a large extent upon the quality of the animal. The cost of horses hired at staging-posts, however, was generally fixed; and in the 1280s on the London to Dover road, where there were regular staging-posts, the charge for hiring a horse, conspicuously branded so that it would be difficult to sell if stolen, was is from Southwark to Rochester, is also from Rochester to Canterbury, and 6d from Canterbury to Dover.22

  On a good horse and a dry road a rider could usually manage about forty miles a day: the Mayor of Exeter, riding in 1447 from his house to London, a distance of 170 miles, allowed himself four to five days for the journey; and a merchant with packhorses travelling from York to London, 200 miles, would expect to take five days. Riders on their own could travel even faster if they wished. When visiting the Praemontarians in his diocese in 1494 Bishop Redman regularly covered fifty miles a day; and a messenger, riding by night as well as by day, could manage sixty. Even a cumbersome household could cover thirty miles a day in the summer, as the Countess of Leicester’s did when she was in a hurry to reach the safety of Dover Castle in 1265, though in winter an average of fifteen miles a day was rarely exceeded by large parties such as hers.23

  Foot messengers could sometimes manage more than thirty miles a day and, if in royal service in the time of Edward II, were allowed 4s 8d a year to buy shoes and paid 3d a day on the road, a meagre sum but often hugely increased for bearers of good news: the queen’s messenger was rewarded with forty marks pension for life when he brought news to King Edward III of the birth of the future Black Prince.24

  All women rode astride until the invention of a woman’s saddle in the fourteenth century allowed them to ride side-saddle instead. Many women preferred to keep to the old style, however. The Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales shows the Prioress riding side-saddle, but the Wife of Bath astride, wearing large spurs and carrying an intimidating whip.

  For those too ill or old to ride, and for delicate ladies, there were litters, tunnel-like structures slung between two horses head to tail and decorated with tapestries and upholstered with cushions. William of Malmesbury relates that the body of William II was brought back in a litter from the New Forest after he had been killed while hunting; and later on in the twelfth century Abbot Hugh of Bury St Edmunds was carried back to Bury by litter, having injured his knee on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. There were also carriages, although these cumbersome machines were scarcely more comfortable than the rough carts which peasants used and in which judges sometimes ordered juries to be rattled about until they had reached a unanimous verdict. Nor did carriages become less uncomfortable as the centuries passed: Queen Elizabeth I once complained to the French ambassador that after a journey in a carriage in London she could not sit down for several days. They were usually drawn by four horses one behind the other, the driver mounted on one of them, wielding a thonged whip. The long body of the carriage was rounded, its wooden sides frequently brightly painted and gilded. The windows were hung with curtains and when these were pulled back a horseman riding by might catch a glimpse of an interior hung with tapestries or a lady reclining on piles of embroidered cushions. An illustration in the Louterell Psalter depicts an elaborately decorated carriage of the fourteenth century with ladies looking out at front and back and the faces of others framed by the windows. Such carriages as these, with carved figures of animals standing on the shafts, were most valued possessions. Edward III paid £1000 for a carriage for Lady Eleanor, as much as he would have had to pay for a herd of 1600 oxen.25

  If carriages like these were rare, carts could be seen rattling along drawn by oxen or horses on every highway, large carts drawn by up to eight horses, and with their wooden wheels rimmed with iron bands and studded with iron nails or spikes to give them a firmer grip, and lighter carts or wains with two wheels only. All manner of goods were transported in these rough conveyances. Manorial court rolls and other records refer to the cartage of lead and stone and sand for building; of limestone and coal, alum and dyes; of ‘stones and cinders from the Park to the Castle for repairing and mending the way from the Hall to the Gate’; of hogsheads of salted venison. Tolls on fish, meat, iron, timber, hay, rushes, faggots and brushwood were all charged ‘by the cartload’. In the twelfth century 265 cartloads of lead were sent from Derbyshire to Boston in Lincolnshire for transshipment to Waltham Abbey by way of London; and in 1333 Edward III ordered various abbots and priors to provide enough carts for carrying his tents and other military supplies for the campaign against the Scots. In 1367, when parts of an alabaster table for St George’s Chapel at Windsor were brought down from Nottingham in ten carts each drawn by eight horses, the journey, a distance of some 120 miles, took seventeen days. And this was considered by no means an excessively slow rate, particularly in winter when the going was so slow that the cost of transporting certain loads, such as casks of wine, doubled. Twenty carts carrying the records of the Exchequer and the Court of Common Pleas took eleven days to reach Westminster from York in 1327, twice the time that a train of packhorses would have taken. Four years before, Edward II had ordered tha
t sumpter-horses should in future be brought on military campaigns in addition to carts which were far too slow.26

  Packhorses were, indeed, always used in preference to carts if speedy delivery were essential and cost was a secondary consideration. A train of packhorses could get to London from York in five days, as quickly as a rider could; and the loads that horses could carry were surprisingly heavy. The thirteenth-century knight, Bogo de Clare, carried his entire wardrobe, his buttery as well as his bedding on three sumpter-horses; the servants of some Lichfield merchants travelling to Stafford market in 1342 required no more than two horses to carry their extremely expensive and weighty supplies of ‘spicery and mercery’; Richard of Gloucester needed only one horse to transport the whole of his supply of spices and dates from Odiham to Kenilworth.27

  For heavy and bulky loads like building materials, manure and military supplies, however, carts were indispensable. And because they were so essential and so troublesome to manage, lords of manors still maintained their rights to demand ‘cartage’ of their tenants after most other feudal obligations had disappeared. Lords normally exercised this right in order to get their tenants to cart manure to their fields or brushwood to the manor house; but much longer journeys were also occasionally demanded: the tenants of Romsey Abbey had to undertake journeys to St Albans and London and as far as Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge and Ipswich. And when royal officers requisitioned corn for the king’s use, they had the right to demand cartage as well.28

  For those who had neither subjects nor tenants to call upon, there were both hirers of carts and carriers. The movement of large households usually involved the hiring of carts which in the fourteenth century could be had for 4d a day. Carrying wine, a load that needed special care, was more expensive, but, even so, the Countess of Leicester in 1265 was charged only 18s 6d for the transport of two tuns of wine from London to Kenilworth. From the end of the fourteenth century there were professional carriers on all the main roads, carrying passengers as well as goods, parcels and letters. One of the most successful was named Pickford. The Pastons regularly availed themselves of the services of the Norwich to London carrier; and in 1484 a witness who appeared before the Star Chamber said that he had been a carrier on the Exeter to London route for thirty-five years. For short distances in large towns porters were available. In 1322 twenty-four London porters were paid £1 to carry fifty-two barrels, each containing £500, from the Treasury to Queen’s Bridge and then, having been rowed down the Thames, from the waterfront to a chapel in the Tower.29

  Travel by river was in general easier and cheaper, though a good deal slower, than travel by road. This was clearly demonstrated at Christmas 1319 when the scholars of King’s Hall, Cambridge, were invited to spend the holiday with Edward II at York. The older scholars went by road and arrived in three days. The younger ones, presumably more impoverished, chose to go by boat from Cambridge to Spalding. This took them two days. They then went by horse from Spalding to Boston, their luggage following in carts. From Boston they took another boat which carried them up the Witham to Lincoln, a journey which lasted a further two days. At Lincoln they hired two further boats and went on their way up the Foss Dyke to Torksey where they transferred to a larger boat which took them at last to York. Their whole journey occupied nine days; and they were three days late for Christmas.30

  On their way they would have seen all kinds of boats ferrying both goods and passengers – flat-bottomed towboats, ferry-boats and shells, row-boats, barges with oars and barges with sails, sailing-boats and wherries; and they would have passed all manner of cargoes. Most of the goods required by Ely Cathedral, lead for the roof, tallow, wax and cloth, arrived by river from Boston. And from Boston, as early as 1184, lead from Derbyshire was being shipped out to Rouen.31

  Every major medieval town was on a river; and all had wharfs catering for water-borne traffic. The Trent, the Humber and the Ouse were as busy as any road; and boats were constantly docking by the banks of the Thames in London with goods from all over the country. Oxfordshire wool came to London from Henley, marble from Wareham, reeds from Newcastle, stone from Devon.32 And while these cargoes were being unloaded, passenger boats passed up and down river and from bank to bank, usually charging 2d a head between Westminster and the Tower. The Thames boatmen, a notoriously unruly set, were subject to numerous regulations: in 1391, for example, they were forbidden to carry customers to the brothels of Southwark between sunrise and sunset; and a few years later they were prohibited from crossing the river at all after nightfall.33

  Travellers by water naturally faced as many hazards as those who journeyed by land. Rivers frequently silted up, as the Ouse did in 1399 – boats had to unload at Selby and continue their journey by road – and as the Yare did at Norwich in 1422 when all the town’s citizens were required to turn out between five and seven o’clock in the morning on certain days of the week to help to dredge the river or pay 4d for a deputy to do the work for them. In 1492 the shallows in the Orwell at Ipswich were rendered even more perilous by bargees who carried ballast to throw overboard in an attempt to raise their craft in the water; and it had to be decreed that ‘every ship that shall throw their ballast into the river shall pay 12d for each ton thrown out, and the informer shall have 12d’.34 Rivers also became unnavigable when obstructions were built by those who lived by their banks: grain boats from the east were once prevented from sailing up the Don when the villagers of Barnby Dun in Yorkshire blocked the river with stepping-stones so that they and their sheep could cross from bank to bank.35

  There was also the danger of sharing the fate of the forty men, women and their goods who lost their lives in the Yare when an overloaded boat sank in 1343; and there was danger, too, from pirates, even on rivers deep inland. In 1429 the people of Tewkesbury were driven to petition the House of Commons about attacks on navigators on the Severn by ‘rovers of the Forest of Dean’; and the next year an Act had to be passed for the protection of boatmen on their way to ‘Gloucester, Worcester and other places’ who were attacked by ‘many Welshmen and ill-disposed persons [who] were used to assemble in manner of war’, stopping ‘boats and floats or drags with merchandise … and hewing these craft in pieces and beating the sailors’. In the open sea the pirate was an even more deadly peril, ‘one plague the devill hath added to make the sea more terrible than a storme’.

  The pirate’s heart is so hardened in that rugged element that hee cannot repent, though he view his grave before him continually open. He hath so little of his owne that even the house he sleeps in is stoln … His rule is the horriblest tyranny in the world for he gives license to all rape, murder and cruelty. He is a cruell hawke that flies at all but his own kind: and as a whale never comes ashore but when shee is wounded, so he very seldom but for his necessities … He is a perpetual plague to noble traffique, the hurrican of the sea.36

  To pilgrims who sailed regularly from south-coast ports bound for Rome or Santiago de Compost ella, the pirate was certainly a perpetual menace. There was also, as one pilgrim who made the journey to Spain recorded in rhyme, the added unpleasantness of fearful seasickness in a small boat crowded with a hundred passengers; of sickening smells; of the rough manners of the sailors who pushed the landlubbers about the deck under the pretext of working the ship and who bawled out to anyone who appeared particularly ill, ‘Cheer up, be merry! We shall soon be in a storm!’ The captain, as coarse as his men, shouted above the roar of the wind and the splash of the rain:

  ‘Hale the bowelyne! Now, vere the shete!

  Cooke, make redy anoon our mete,

  Our pylgryms have no lust to ete,

  I pray God geve hem rest!’

  ‘Go to the helm! What, howe! No nere?

  Steward, falow! A pot of bere!

  Ye shalle have sir, with good chere,

  Anon alle of the best’ …

  Thys mene whyle the pylgryms ly

  And have theyr bowlys fast theym by,

  And cry after hot malves.37
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  They had all made their wills before they set out and commended themselves to their personal patron saints and to those other saints, St Botolph and St Christopher among them, who were known to keep a kindly eye upon travellers. Nor was it only pilgrims embarking upon adventurous voyages overseas who took these precautions: anyone setting out upon a long journey would be sure to do so, for the dangers of the way were legion and nobody was safe. In 1216 King John himself ‘journeying towards the north, in the river which is called Wellestren, by an unexpected accident,’ in the words of Roger of Wendover, ‘lost all his wagons, carts, and sumpter horses with the treasures, precious vessels and all the other things which he loved with so much care. For the ground was opened in the midst of the waves, and bottomless whirlpools swallowed them all up, with the men and the horses, so that not one foot escaped.’38

  This was an exceptional disaster; but at all times roads were likely to be threatened by floods so that ‘no one could have passed there, nor take any carriage there without danger of losing their lives, goods, chattels and Merchandises’.39 In 1250 several carts, horses and a man of Simon de Montfort’s household were washed away at Dorking; and in 1376 a clerk, carrying a hundred marks for the king, was drowned in the Severn when a bridge collapsed. His body not being found was said to have been dragged ashore and eaten by wolves.