Writing Roads Down: Roman Roads in Documentary Practice

There was a good chance that if you lived and died in post-Roman Britain south of Hadrian's Wall you were likely to be buried close to a Roman road. Roman trackways greatly influenced the man-made geography of the island. Not only settlements, but also a sizable number of cementaries were placed close to the Roman roads. It is then only correct to start with the roads and the transport infrastructure they provided; the focus of this chapter is the study of roads, bridges, and milestones. And to learn more about what they meant for the societies of post-Roman Britain we will use something of an unusual source – charters. Charters provide interesting information about transport infrastructures, as those were also visible landscape elements, and easily used in boundary clauses. The estates themselves and the field system that came with them were also, to different degrees, heirs to the Roman infrastructure. Those roads, even when not used for their primarily function, were the vascular system of Roman infrastructure in post-Roman Britain.

The reason why we can learn so much about roads from charters has little to do with the intent of their compilers. First of all, roads were one of the most visible elements of the Roman landscape left in Britain – they were, quite literally, everywhere. We now start to understand this inherited landscape in a different way – seen less through a perspective of destruction and break and more in terms of abidance and re-use. The constant usability and need to maintain transport links throughout the country greatly influenced their potential for survival in the landscape. Early Medieval settlements often expanded along the major Roman roads, as we can see from both settlement patterns and coin finds. A whole group of Old English place-names ending in ‘–ham’ seems to be connected with this phenomenon. This shows how much of a governance resource they were even to polities that could not fully tap onto their infrastructural potential. There are indications from archaeological records that Roman roads were crucial for the Early Medieval economy and exercise of power. They were used to distribute iron and salt, and control over them was already seen as an important factor for settlement creation in the sixth century.