Alan Cooper, Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University, explains the development of his interest in medieval bridges – and the political, legal and economic forces that created or destroyed them.

I first became intrigued by the question of the state of medieval bridges as an academic question: in reading books about the medieval economy I could find precious little reference to them, and particularly to the question of who paid for their upkeep. As I started working my way into the sources, however, I found the question to be more fluid and more curious than I had imagined.
 

Let me give you one example: I was running by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts one day. I had been working on the earliest medieval bridges and particularly on the way they replaced fords, but looking at the river with its steep banks and deep, fast running current, I reflected on the impossibility of fording such a river. As I ran, I realised that the question had to be more than just how people chose to cross a river, it had to be about the river too, how it changed over time.

In other words, what had seemed to be a fairly straightforward question of technological and economic advance became a question of environmental change. I also became caught up in the variety of sources. Medieval England offers up a wonderful treasury of sources, and in order to trace the building of bridges across the centuries, I had to look in very different places. Above all, there was the question of continuity: people were required to build bridges in the late Middle Ages and in the Anglo-Saxon period, but did the one arise out of the other?

The answer turned out to be a twisting path, full of surprises and touching on the great events of English history. There was Alfred the Great, saving England against the Vikings in part by insisting on the building of bridges to limit their movement. There was William the Conqueror and his sons undermining a system of bridge repair as they carved up the riches of their conquest. There was King John, taking a moment out from his utter Badness to set in motion the building of London Bridge.

The greatest joy in writing this book has been the unearthing of the very human moments when the people of the past drew on every aspect of their imagination to find solutions to the oh-so mundane problem of bridge repair. The hazards of the broken-down bridge were a staple of medieval folklore; the solutions to the problem borrowed from the same stock of ideas, in a way that gives us a vivid sense of the medieval legal imagination.