Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads

摘要

This book is the first collection of essays devoted to medieval roads in Britain, and it sets a high standard. Medieval roads have long been studied, but the subject has rarely achieved much prominence, most often being treated as part of the framework of urban economic history or landscape history. The perspective adopted here is broadly a cultural one: this is a book about the meaning of roads to contemporaries and the way in which the use of routeways created political, economic and social bonds at the local, regional and national levels. Some of the contributors take a documentary approach, others use medieval literature or, to a lesser extent, archaeology and topographical evidence. There is new data here, but the real strength of the volume is in setting an agenda for thinking about why roads mattered to medieval people, rather than supplying case studies of the development of regional road networks. For many readers one or more of the approaches may well be unfamiliar, even unappealing, but in their different ways they all bear fruit. Indeed, the variety of perspectives on a single subject is likely to generate fresh ideas and fertile connections, for scholars and advanced students alike across a range of disciplines.