The Bridges of Medieval England

The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society, 400–1800, by David Harrison (Oxford: Clarendon P., 2004; pp. xiv + 249. £45). This is an impressive and beautifully written book with a remarkable chronological range. It is a testimony to the fundamental quality of the underlying 1996 doctoral thesis, to the author's ability to remain abreast of scholarship around his subject while employed as a House of Commons clerk and to the wider perceptions he has gained as clerk to parliament's ‘Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee’. In consequence Harrison is able to demonstrate the complex ways in which bridges were fundamental to the road network and to the economy and society of pre-industrial England. This is not a work of limited antiquarian interest, but is rather a major contribution to English economic history and a triumph for proponents of la longue durée. Some radical conclusions are asserted and established. The period from c.750 to 1250 is identified as the great age of English bridge building and that from 1100 to 1500 as the time when most bridges were rebuilt in stone. The early post-Roman centuries had seen rivers crossed predominantly by fords. The period from 750 to the tenth century was the age of timber bridge construction, and that from the later tenth century of timber bridge repair. The English bridge-stock of 1750 was already in existence by 1500 and indeed very largely already by 1350. Both Leland's Itinerary of 1535–43; and the fourteenth-century Gough Map show that the English pre-industrial road- and bridge-network was already in existence by their time. That network owed surprisingly little to the Roman inheritance and should be considered an Anglo-Saxon and medieval achievement, which had involved a massive investment of capital and of labour in the construction and repair of roads and of bridges, both on major routes and secondary ones. Harrison draws fundamental distinctions between footbridges, (pack)horse bridges and those designed to facilitate the passage of horse-drawn carts. He also draws attention to medieval technical advances, which permitted the construction from the twelfth century of arched stone bridges over major rivers and tidal estuaries. Coffer dams were used to construct the abutments and piled timber platforms (‘starlings’) to found stone piers in deep water. He emphasises (and illustrates with superb photographs) the basic difference between the multi-span bridges of lowland England and the massive single-span designs of highland regions, where high quality building stone was available, but which were subject to flash floods. He shows that the medieval history of bridges has been misrepresented as a period of endemic decay and repeated catastrophic collapses—a picture derived from the ‘spin’ of those seeking to raise funds for expensive new bridges. The reality was rather of huge investment from the eighth through to the eighteenth centuries, an investment which first created a network of bridges and then rebuilt them in stone. That network served the needs of the pre-industrial economy and was supported by systems which maintained most bridges in effective repair over many centuries. Harrison analyses the remarkable and changing mix of state provision, private and charitable benefaction, local taxes, corporate endeavour and also of bridge-tolls that underpinned this achievement. In addition to such insights the book abounds with well-documented details, which provide a rich and fascinating supply of examples. Moreover, author and publishers are to be congratulated on the exemplary care with which the whole work has been produced. I spotted no typographical errors and my few criticisms are minor indeed. The bridge mentioned in a charter ‘of 739’ (p. 34, n.18) is in an eleventh-century boundary-clause added to its text (S 255). Well-drawn diagrams would have aided most readers' understanding of the detailed descriptions of constructional and engineering advances. Landscape fieldwork by scholars such as Tom Williamson and Steven Bassett might suggest that much of the road network that was to be transformed by the construction of medieval bridges into a system of major long-distance routes was of pre-Roman, iron-age, origin. It is also unfortunate that the recent articles of Alan Cooper, which largely support and deepen Harrison's analysis, seem to have appeared too late to be included in this fine study. Such points do not detract from the fact that this work should be in every academic library and on the reading-list of every course in English economic history

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