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- Author: Valerie Allen x
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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 collection of essays on roads in Britain in the Middle Ages addresses the topic from a cultural, anthropological and literary point of view, as well as a historical and archaeological one. Taking up Jacques Derrida's proposal that 'the history of writing and the history of the road' be 'meditated upon' together, it considers how roads ‘write’ landscapes. The anthology sets Britain’s thoroughfares against the backdrop of the extant Roman road system and argues for a technique of road construction and care that is distinctively medieval. As well as synthesizing information on medieval road terminology, roads as rights of passage and the road as an idea as much as a physical entity, individual essays look afresh at sources for the study of the medieval English road system, legal definitions of the highway, road-breaking and road-mending, wayfinding, the architecture of the street and its role in popular urban government, English hermits and the road as spiritual metaphor, royal itineraries, pilgrimage roads, roads in medieval English romances, English river transport, roads in medieval Wales, and roads in the Anglo-Scottish border zone.
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.