Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 251

David Harrison has produced a very useful book on very important topic. As he argues, bridges provide window for assessing the performance of economies over long periods of time, and he presents a very suasive case for this in examining the English transport system, and especially its bridges, over the period 400–1800. Arguably, only markets and/or urban development could give an equally illuminating portal the functioning of the English economy and society over such a long time span.

As a result, one must applaud from the start Harrison’s courage in taking on an intimidatingly wide-ranging examination. Although I shall be outlining some of flaws in his treatment below, these should not detract from the worthiness of the project or the book’s importance in the historiography of the economy and society of the middle ages (and indeed for preceding and lowing periods). A particularly attractive feature of book is that he lays out its main thesis so clearly. baldly, Harrison claims that the number of bridges, the general bridge infrastructure, reached a level in that it would hold for the next four or five centuries. Certainly this dispels the popular view of a backward middle ages. Indeed, the development of the transport system as a whole to 1300 not only provided the template for the pre-industrial period but also carried on into modern era. England’s current road system, for example, still bears a medieval imprint. If for no other reason, this book will be remembered for this bold statement, which will undoubtedly spur a closer examination of subject.

There is, however, danger in accepting Harrison’s thesis too readily. There are three areas in particular have given me pause. The first is that much of his argument, by his own admission, depends upon being to provide close examination of the number of bridges existing in the period 400–1800 and certainly, given their prominent position in the English landscape, they seem

Reviews a natural object for the sort of counting exercises that have been so popular in medieval historiography since the Second World War. Yet there is surprisingly little of

249 this sort of quantification in the book, and certainly

those familiar with Harrison’s influential 1992 Economic a History Review article might have expected more in this a direction. But, as in 1992, the numerical information he provides for the number of bridges in the medieval

per- period only relates to the early sixteenth century and

that arguably only for a small selection of river systems. Although this exercise of comparing the number of bridges in the early sixteenth century with that later in

into the eighteenth century is clearly worthwhile, it is ofques-

tionable value in trying to relate it to the number of bridges at earlier times. Indeed, Harrison’s argument that the number of bridges c. 1300 was about the sameas that in the early sixteenth century (pp.21–3) is little

the more than supposition. The same applies to his con-

tention that the building of bridges in stone stretched well back into the middle ages (pp.110–14). None ofthese statements about the number and quality of

fol- bridges at various stages in the middle ages is inherently the implausible, but the scattered, somewhat cherry-picked Put evidence he produces does not prove the case incontro- and vertibly. Finally, there is also a certain stinginess in 1300 presenting his evidence to the reader. For example, in an

otherwise very interesting discussion of tolls and pontage grants for bridges, he refers to ‘several hundred pontage grants [being] enrolled on the patent rolls’ (p.209). At the very least, it would have been very use-

the ful for the benefit of future researchers to have these

cases recorded in an appendix; the handful of cases he provides in the text seems very inadequate. My second major reservation is that there is a ten-

the dency to look at medieval economy and society too

narrowly through the prism of bridges. Other aspects of the economy clearly impinged upon the development

that of the transport system, and indeed Harrison’s specula-

tion on the reasons why bridges were built at specific able places seems decidedly thin. The issue of inland water

transport, which had a certain complementarity to bridge building, is scarcely mentioned. Equally ignored are other important structures on rivers such as mills,

252 the agricultural where bridges were often found, sometimes specifically erected to replace a ford washed out by the construction of a mill-weir or millpond (which Harrison only mentions briefly on p.224). In short, bridges were only one element of a series of changes being enacted around rivers during the middle ages and, in a way, all have to be considered in order to arrive at a sufficiently textured view of the development of medieval transport. Harrison does some of this in considering, say, the establishment of fortified burhs in the Anglo-Saxon period and its impact upon bridge building, but his analysis to my mind is still incomplete in its consideration of all the possible variables.

The third problem with the book, and to my mind the most serious, is the tendency to overlook what can be done in future on medieval bridges. Harrison’s work as a whole is based almost solely upon printed sources and overlooks the vast amount of material still available only in manuscript. One of these key sources are manorial accounts, which number in the tens of thousands for the medieval period, a relatively small fraction of which is currently in print. These accounts often mention bridge building, sometimes as a single line about repairs to a bridge or as a long section outlining the complete construction of a bridge. At the very least, this account material gives plenty of indication that landlord responsibility for bridge construction and repair was very prevalent throughout medieval England and might well modify Harrison’s statement about the funding of most medieval bridges coming from donations (see especially pp.193–5). A similarly vast amount of manorial and central government court material from the early thirteenth century onwards, again available for the most part only in manuscript, should throw more light on the legal position of bridges. In short, we have a lot more evidence to consider before the depth of understanding currently available for, say, medieval markets or mills can also be replicated for bridges at the time, but at least Harrison’s book gives us a good start.