Infrastructure

The period between the gradual adaptation of the Roman administrative system into the Early Medieval one and the twelfth century has been seen as a time when infrastructure was of little or no importance to the polities and their rulers, its revival initiated only by the process of centralisation and the increasing role of trade in the High and Late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, as much as a lowering of infrastructural standards is undeniable, ad hoc and low-level maintenance and management strategies had supplanted the Roman administrative system with varying degrees of success already before 800. Both on the Continent (especially in the Frankish and Arab worlds) and in Britain infrastructural maintenance gained gradually a more regular and concrete form, secured by law, even though the evidence we possess has (at least initially) a military feel to it. With time maintenance of infrastrucutre attained a more prominent role. Work on antique roads for example features prominently in Carolingian and Ottonian infrastructural politics.

Infrastructure can be defined as a set of ‘underlying physical networks’. But in the Early Medieval context in Britain this has to be enlarged to include also the disjointed elements of former physical networks – singular elements like fragments of serviceable roads, bridges, and fortifications or mile stations and granaries. Ruins form a crucial part of infrastructure as well, being a ready source of building material, and possessing a highly symbolic value. The power of ruins as useful and powerful elements of infrastructural Medieval networks has been underappreciated.7 Usefulness needs not to be proportional to the state of maintenance. The way ruins could be brought into the realm of infrastructure could also go way beyond the simple use of spolia.

Infrastructure does not necessarily have to be purely physical: ‘Infrastructure is material (roads, pipes, sewers, and grids); it is social (institutions, economic systems, and media forms); and it is philosophical (intellectual trajectories: dreamt up by human ingenuity and nailed down in concrete forms).’ All those kinds of infrastructure can be found in Late Antique and Early Medieval Britain.10 They can coexist and be seen to be on an equal footing.