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.

Historical perceptions of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands are dominated by visions of a war-ravaged, ungovernable, economically stunted and culturally retarded zone. This bleak image, reinforced by modern metropolitanism, permeates much discussion of the pre-1300 era but examination of the internal dynamics of the Humber-Forth region reveals a complex road network that served as channels through which flows of people and ideas shaped and reconfigured community identities. Roads were powerful media for cultural change and political reconstruction, forming conduits for colonisation and facilitators of new systems of political domination and dependence. They brought a realignment of settlement patterns and eased into creation sharply defined hierarchies of economic exploitation. This paper explores how the inherited Roman and Anglo-Saxon road networks moulded new political structures in the 12th century, and how the old networks were realigned or superseded to serve a new political prescription. It traces how ‘marchland’ outside established lordship structures was opened up by roads to intensive exploitation regimes by peasant and aristocratic colonists and monastic pioneers, and how they delivered the environmental transformation of the Pennine-Southern Upland hinterland.

Edward I travelled constantly. This was not in order to govern the country, but for reasons such as visits to shrines, and to go hunting, as well as to go on campaign in Wales and Scotland. The king’s itinerary was marked by few ceremonies, such as formal entries to towns, and there was no regular pattern of travel, with plans not made long in advance. The royal household, numbering up to 500 men, required twenty or more wagons as it travelled. Main roads were not always followed; those on lesser routes were quite adequate. Waterways were also used. Speed of travel varied. Over 20 miles a day was possible, but up to 15 miles a day was normal. The king’s itinerary for 1297, a time of political crisis, provides a case study.