In this chapter, Allen presents the road as a social actor participating in a community traditionally defined exclusively by humans as commuters. Her study centres on when roads are in disrepair or have suffered ‘street-breaking’ (stretbreche), to use the earliest legal wording, whether through the action of wear and tear, weather, vandalism, or neglect. The word ‘break’ offers a conceptually useful critical term for a process that affords environmental reconfiguration and new social grouping even as it refers to rupture within the commuter system. In particular Allen studies the interventions and modifications necessary to maintain paved surfaces and how they were funded—usually through bequests, charitable gifts, and tolls. In this solicitude for surfaces she analyses the interaction of environment with human action: how open fields affect the definition of loitering; how increasing density of urban traffic and enclosed road space structure civic consciousness; and how caring for the road fashions one as a member not only of the local community but also of the realm. The mentalité that emerges out of the collectively shared labour of road care demonstrates how thought organizes itself around and in relation not only to habitual actions but also to the shaped contours of an environment that acts as assertively as humans do.

This chapter opens by noting the growth of towns and trade in England in the medieval period, which required a fully functioning transport system, of which roads must have been the backbone, supplemented by river and sea-borne trade. It then looks at the different sources available to attempt to describe the national medieval transport network. The first step is to see which Roman roads were still in use, and which later Anglo-Saxon and medieval roads had ‘made and maintained themselves’. Documentary evidence is limited and place-names need to be used with care. The best evidence lies in itineraries (notably those of the kings) and maps (principally the Gough Map). Archaeological evidence is also assessed.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries English royal lawyers developed new doctrine to reverse a process that had undermined the status of highways. They sought to preserve the highways' utility and assert their connection to the king. The new doctrine drew from Roman law and allowed the royal government to take practical steps to clear roads of obstructions (known as "purprestures"), dismantle illegal tolls, and require landholders to perform maintenance. These new rules may be traced in such treatises as Glanvill, Bracton and Fleta, in the court rolls, and in statutes. By the end of the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), the idea "once a highway, always a highway" was established as an enduring legal principle.

This chapter addresses writing about the street with a particular focus on the City of London between about 1385 and 1425. Using sources as diverse as the literary works of Chaucer and the proceedings of neighbourhood courts it pursues ideas about the use of the street in the creation of elemental social bonds. In particular it focuses on the window as the porous place of interaction between domestic interiors and the public street. An influential elite discourse showed a particular interest in matters of sexual intimacy. By contrast popular conversation about the street at neighbourhood level was more dynamic and developed around a pragmatic range of interests, which nevertheless provided an opportunity for political criticism of government officials.

This chapter examines the extent and importance of river transport in England as demonstrated by the extensive use of boats to convey goods and people to and from London. It studies the use of the Thames to connect London to the wider countryside and the evolution of passenger services. It also examines the development of boats and the cargo trades, how the industry operated and the price of services. There was extensive regulation, both by the crown and parliament as well as by the mayor and aldermen and this paper considers whether this was constructive or reactionary in nature. It questions whether this changed in the early sixteenth century when the increase in population brought about higher prices, an influx of inexperienced men into the industry and more frequent accidents.

This chapter argues that roads function as the material signifiers of deeply politicized relational networks in three Middle English romances: Athelston, the Gest of Robin Hood and Robin Hood and the Monk. Where Athelston uses roadrunning between jurisdictions to generate more inclusive conceptions of England as nation, the Robin Hood ballads manipulate roads effectively to highjack connective modes of normative nation-building and experiment briefly with much more fluid modes of nation as improvisation. Drawing on historical geographies of the southern and northern branches of the great Roman road known as Watling Street, ultimately, all three of these romances politicize road-running by asking whose roads are being travelled – are they common to all, networks between regions, extensions of civil sanctuary, or are they the king’s to protect and sequester?

This chapter examines the vocation of the hermit in connection to both physical and spiritual roads—that is the actual road system of medieval English as well as the paths of mystical contemplation. As medieval society grew more suspicious of purely contemplative religious practices, the eremitic vocation was deliberately redesigned to provide physical support for the community, particularly through maintenance of roads and bridges. Mobility, always an important part of the vocation, became a central image, and the late Middle Ages witnessed an increased number of ‘road hermits’, who deftly combined community care, charitable work, and spiritual guidance. Thus, hermits provide a new version of the ‘mixed life’, demonstrating the increasing emphasis on labour as a religious expression, and deliberately evoking a sense of progress and mobility.

The reality behind the concept of 'the pilgrimage road' is elusive. Though no single road in medieval England can be said to owe its existence to pilgrim traffic, the pilgrimage road is nevertheless a key feature of literature and polemic in the Middle Ages.

This chapter examines cultural responses to roads in medieval Wales and shows that there is a growing body of evidence that roads were constructed in medieval Wales before the Edwardian conquest, despite a popular belief that roads in pre-modern Wales are scarcely worthy of note. It is argued on the basis of a variety of Welsh-language texts that roads played a significant part in the construction of identity in medieval Wales. The texts examined including native tales, the laws of Hywel Dda, and pre- and post-conquest poetry, including that of Dafydd ap Gwilym. It is argued that the road-building undertaken by Edward I’s armies resulted not only in a changed physical landscape but also in poetic reimaginings of the relationship between the Welsh community and its environment.

In this chapter I address a gap in the study of medieval space, namely that there has been no systematic study by either medievalists or road historians of how European road travellers in the later Middle Ages found their way around: between countries, from one part of a country to another, or within unfamiliar towns and cities. How did travellers plan their journeys? What aids did they use for getting to their destinations? I present some of the evidence for medieval wayfinding, and provide some initial answers to these questions. I consider the use of guides, landmarks, maps, and urban signage, and draws on evidence from English literary texts and English-French phrasebooks. Wayfinding is simultaneously a technology, a memorial practice, and a cognitive competency. I argue that medieval wayfinding is best understood as a form of what Edwin Hutchins calls ‘naturally situated cognition’ or ‘distributed cognition, in that it depends on human co-operation. Moreover, the environment for medieval travellers was divided up into smaller, more manageable pieces and interconnections – what Kevin Lynch describes as paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks – that constitute a hierarchy of spatial knowledge that is significantly different from our understanding and negotiation of space today.

This chapter opens with a consideration of Jacques Derrida’s intersection of the histories of roads and writing as forms of inscription (tracks, traces, or paths, on the landscape and on the page). These shared cultural histories of roads and writing suggest new ways of conceptualizing the study of the medieval road as material object and as difference: just as the road is the imposition of form on matter, so is writing the imposition of form on nature. In the next section, discussion moves to the question of road nomenclature in medieval Britain. Where ‘road’ serves well enough to denote the universal set of modern commuter routes, medieval terminology is more particularized, more in tune with the contours of the material environment. Some caution is thus necessary in treating medieval roads as a ‘system’. The chapter then argues for a consideration of the medieval road less as a physical entity than as a right of passage: as function rather than physical structure. We then turn to consider how the legacy of Roman roads in medieval Britain and the powerful fiction of the king’s four roads served the social imaginary both in law and literature. In the last section, we offer summaries of the individual book chapters of the volume.