The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (20 page)

Cost is another reason why you can forget about wearing armor. Even at the start of the century you will need a helmet, iron breastplate, full-length hauberk of chain mail, leggings of chain mail, and ailettes (plates protecting the shoulders) as well as a lance, sword, axe, dagger, and shield. Beneath all this you will need a quilted jacket (aketon) and other padding. You can probably buy all of this for £5 or £6. But armor rapidly develops in both form and price. By the 1320s you will need to have greaves (for your shins) and knee coverings, curved ailettes, elbow protectors, gauntlets, and plates of armor covering the arms. As soon as you start to invest in good-quality plate armor, the cost escalates. By 1350 you will need reticulated gauntlets and foot armor, greaves, thigh pieces, plate armor for the arms, a backplate as well as a breastplate, a gorger to protect your throat, and protection for the back of your neck. By 1390 your average knight will be carrying in excess of eighty pounds of armor when he rides into battle. If you do the same, it is unlikely you will have the strength to lift your
sword and fight for an hour or two, even if you do have some skill with a blade.

The cost of a suit of armor is prohibitive. A breastplate and back-plate can easily set you back £3, a shield 18s, and a helmet £2. When you add up the total cost, you will have little change from £20. And then of course you will need to buy a warhorse, plus armor for the horse, and the wages of the boys to tend it, a dozen lances, a better sword—not to mention the costs of the man whom you will need to employ to dress you in your armor . . . And at the end of the day, all this expense is going towards a set of steel “clothes” which are decidedly uncomfortable and which someone is simply going to bash with a sharp implement. Attractive though the joust might look, you would be wise to leave it to the knights.

Having said this, you need to remember that, under the provisions of the Statute of Winchester (1285), every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty must have arms of some sort, for the purpose of keeping the peace. Those with goods worth 20 marks or more, or £10 income from land, must have an iron breastplate, a hauberk (chain-mail shirt), a sword, and a knife. Those with £5 income from land must have a quilted jacket, breastplate, sword, and knife. Even the poorest men must keep some weapons: a sword and knife and a bow and arrows, or—for those who live within forests—a crossbow and bolts.

It is a good idea to invest in a sword. Not only will this allow you to abide by the provisions of the statute, it is reasonable for you to arm yourself, if only to deter the arm-chancing robber from attacking. The swords which peasants use are cheap—you can buy a blade in some places for as little as 6d—but if you are sensible you will wear a weapon that looks as if its owner knows how to use it. A serviceable blade with a leather-bound hilt can be bought for 1s to 2s; a good scabbard and belt will be 1s more. Learn how to wield a blade and you should be relatively safe on the road, especially if you are traveling in company. Bear in mind that there are strict rules about when you may wear a sword. After 1319 you may not wear a sword in London unless you are a knight; you must leave your weapon with your host. The same goes for other towns and cities later in the century. You cannot wear a sword in church, nor in Parliament. If you visit another man’s house or castle, you should unbuckle your weapon and leave it with
the gatekeeper. Although you may read in “The Reeve’s Tale” of students merrily riding along with their swords at their sides, when they get back to their hall of residence in Cambridge they will take off the said weapons. It might all seem slightly bizarre—that you can wear deadly weapons in Trumpington but not in Cambridge—but it all goes to show that, while medieval society might appear brutal and frightening, it is not unsophisticated in its brutality and fear.

Imagine that you are in London and you need to go to Chester. How do you set about it? You might think that you have just two options: riding a horse or taking a ship all around the coast. But when you begin to consider the practicalities, it is not quite that simple. If you have enough money to pay your way by road, you will need protection. If you decide to take a ship you run the risks of wreck and attack, especially in the Irish Sea, where Scottish pirates like Thomas Dun are at large in the reign of Edward II. Long-distance travel is something to be carefully planned. Although many peasants do travel all the way across the country when sent to fight in the Scottish or French wars, no one is going to bother them, especially traveling together in a band, armed with longbows and swords—not for the sake of a few pence anyway. You, on the other hand, sauntering along, whistling an outlandish tune, with enough silver in your purse to attract every scoundrel who saw you at the last inn, are a walking liability.

Your first problem is to establish exactly which route to take. In the modern world, you would look at a map. That is not an option here. There are very few maps of the country and those which do exist are not to scale. Nor are they intended to help travelers. Medieval maps are a means of recording knowledge in a spatial framework—they are reference works for use in libraries, not for consultation on the open road. The best map, the so-called Gough Map, does include roads and towns, but being so large (it is about the size of a door) and made of stiff vellum, it does not lend itself to being folded up and put in a traveler’s pouch. Whoever made it probably drew it up as a reference work to be kept in the office of some great household, probably the royal palace at Westminster.
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As a result of the shortage of maps, you will have no option but to
ask for directions. But how does a Londoner know his way to Chester if he has never been there? The key to navigating is to start off in the right direction. As Chester is in Cheshire, a county in the northwest, it makes sense to set out along the highway which leads northwest. It is not the actual points of the compass which serve as your guide (the compass has yet to be adopted in northern Europe, although it is used in the Mediterranean).
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Rather it is the itinerary—the series of towns between you and the country of your destination—which will guide you. A dialogue book gives the following example:

“Good people; I go to [insert name of town]. At which gate shall I go out? And at which hand shall I take my way?”

“On the right hand, when ye come to a bridge, so go there over; ye shall find a little way on the left hand which shall bring you in a country where you shall see upon a church two high steeples. From thence shall ye have but four miles unto your lodging. There shall ye be well eased for your money.”
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So, if you ask a well-informed Londoner how to get to Cheshire, he will tell you to head out by Aldersgate; go across Smithfield; take the road north towards Islington, Finchley, and Barnet; and from Barnet take the road to St. Albans. Beyond that he probably does not know the way, but when you arrive in St. Albans you can ask again, and then be directed on to Towcester and Daventry, and so on, all the way to Cheshire.

What is amazing is that, even without a compass or map, some people can think spatially about huge areas of the country. Yes, they have certain other techniques: the stars are an important means of navigating, the position of the sun too. But these are of limited use when it comes to maneuvering an army quickly against another army twenty miles away, in the hope of ending up in a strategically better position. Imagine you fall in with the five Lords Appellant in December 1387. Your army is attempting to trap the king’s favorite, Robert de Vere, who is heading southeast along Watling Street, towards London, with a force of about four thousand men. You are approaching from Northampton, marching to intercept him around the Warwickshire/ Oxfordshire border. De Vere hears of your approach and changes course. He heads directly due south, through Oxfordshire. How do
you set about trapping him? Without a map, how do you even know
where
you can trap him, or how long it will take you to get there? The answer lies in a knowledge of the rivers and the places where they can be crossed. In this instance, a large part of your army sweeps around behind de Vere’s force and chases him southward. Another part of your army goes ahead on a forced march, day and night, aiming for the two key bridges over the River Thames in Oxfordshire (New Bridge and Radcot Bridge). In this way de Vere and his men are trapped between the bulk of the army behind them and the small expeditionary force holding the two bridges ahead of them. All this seems an obvious strategy when you look at a detailed map of the area. But when you stand in North Oxfordshire, looking at the hills around you, and try to work out exactly which way to send your men to cut off de Vere’s advance on the Thames, it is very far from straightforward.

It goes without saying that it is unlikely you will lead an army around medieval England yourself, but the principles underlying such generalship are of use in normal day-to-day navigation. If you know the countries through which the major rivers flow, and where those rivers can be crossed, you are well on your way to picturing a region in outline. Some people think of their countries not as a series of roads and towns but as a series of rivers and valleys. If you are in a strange part of the country, or abroad, following the major rivers is one of the most efficient means of long-distance navigation possible. Not only does a major river lead you in a consistent direction, it will also bring you to a trading town, for goods are normally transported by water. There you can find people who have experience of long-distance trading networks. Where there are no rivers, in sparsely populated regions, you might use local guides, paying one each day to take you on to the next town and the next guide. Navigation is thus a mixture of local knowledge; awareness of which town lies in which country; determining the points of the compass by the appearance of the sun and the stars; and familiarity with the rivers, river crossings, hills, and moors.

In the modern world we have different roads for different purposes—motorways for long-distance travel and lanes for access to fields.

Medieval England is similar. There are the great highways of the Fosse Way, Ermine Street, Watling Street, and Icknield Way—Roman roads which have remained in use throughout the Saxon and Norman centuries. At the other end of the scale are the unmarked rights of way across open land: routes marked only by the occasional stone cross, with nothing otherwise to reveal the existence of a road at all.

The highway structure of the kingdom—that is to say the network of roads connecting the towns—is based on the network of Roman roads reaching westward to Exeter and northward to the border of Scotland. This amounts to about ten thousand miles of roads. The Gough Map shows about three thousand miles of main roads in use in 1360; close examination reveals that about 40 percent of these are of Roman origin.
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These were almost all constructed before the end of the second century, and so it is not surprising to know that their condition varies. In some places the stones are still in place, deeply rutted where cartwheels have worn away the surface. In other places the stones have been taken away to build something else. Sometimes you find interruptions in the road due to subsidence or a large fallen tree. Even an important road like the Fosse Way can be blocked from time to time. Thus not all Roman roads are now as straight as they once were. In fact, not all Roman roads are still
where
they once were. Where the stones of an old road are at angles and uneven, they may present more of an obstacle than a surface, and in such cases the medieval road tends to run along smoother ground nearby. Also, a large number of towns are off the Roman network. Plymouth, for instance, has no Roman foundation and thus is nowhere near a Roman road. The same goes for every town in Cornwall—the farthest west the Romans built was Exeter. One can say the same for the rich town of Coventry, the university town of Oxford, and most of the towns established on new sites by Edward I. So, although the road system is based on that built by the Romans, do not imagine that this means there are smooth flagstone-covered straight roads emanating from each town in all directions.

The highway network is supplemented by the local networks: the streets and alleys of towns, the lanes between enclosed fields, and the wide paths and drove ways (for driving sheep) across the open fields and common land. In addition there are lanes between manors, lanes connecting farmsteads to the centers of the villages, roads connecting
hamlets to the local churches, cartways, portways (highways between markets and ports), and monastic roads (connecting monks’ churches with their estates). Some of these will be along old Roman roads but most will be medieval constructions—if there is any construction to speak of. A number of old lych ways and packhorse routes are merely tracks and paths across high moorland. The sheer diversity of roads precludes a neat, collective description.

On the whole, the main highways are kept in good repair. They have to be, for the king regularly travels along them. True, he does not travel around the whole kingdom; no fourteenth-century reigning king visits Cornwall or Devon, for example.
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But on the whole any roads found blocked or in a bad state of repair result in a speedy royal writ being dispatched to the manorial lord in charge of their maintenance. Thus kings and lords are able to maintain relatively high speeds. In January 1300 the sixty-year-old Edward I and his whole court are able to trot along at a regular nineteen miles per day, even though there are only nine hours of daylight and at least two of those hours are spent eating. In September 1336 a youthful Edward III, unencumbered by his household, rides to York at an average speed of fifty-five miles per day.
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This would not be possible if the highways were in such a state that he has to worry about his valuable horses stumbling.

Other roads, however, are not so well maintained. Constantly you will hear in manorial courts how so-and-so has let the road outside his house become impassable, blocking it with timber, broken carts, and rubbish. Sometimes too you will find that the offending blockage is the overflow of a latrine pit after heavy rain, which has left feces, sticks, and farmyard debris all over the road. When hillside paths collapse, the packhorse drivers and other travelers simply find a way around the treacherous part and make a new path. The same applies to the drove ways; because these are not Roman roads but medieval rights of way, with no actual marks as to where the road is, the drivers simply move the “road” to the left or right when one part becomes unusable. The most treacherous roads are the lanes and highways connecting manors and small towns. Sometimes the local residents see the opportunity to get some clay cheaply by digging it out of the road. In good weather this makes the road surface uneven, necessitating a detour. In wet weather it creates deep puddles. One notorious spot is
the road between Egham and Staines. In bad weather it will look as if you are heading into a series of flooded stretches of road; there is nothing to warn you that the water is between eight and twelve feet deep. In 1386 a man drowns in one of them. The abbot of Chertsey, who is responsible for keeping the road in good repair, has the audacity to claim the man’s goods, on account of the death occurring on his land.
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