Ten fascinating facts compiled by the author exclusively for these pages

1 The stone bridge at London was built in the early years of the thirteenth century. It was not, as popular legend has it, built by the London priest, Peter Colechurch, but by a French bridge expert named Isembert, brought in by King John. The bridge lasted until 1831 when it was blown up by vandal engineers. The bridge they built to replace it was sold and shipped stone-by-stone to Arizona, where it now stands in the desert as a tourist attraction. Rumour has it that the Arizonans thought they were getting Tower Bridge or at least the London Bridge of nursery rhyme fame. They have neither. The current London Bridge, built in the 1970s, must be one of the dullest, least romantic bridges in the World.

2  Medieval English bridges were not profitable: they cost too much to maintain, and there were rules about the charging of tolls. Scoundrels did, however, manage to make money by breaking the rules: in the thirteenth century, a sheriff of Cambridge was making money from the bridge of the town by levying money from lands responsible for its repair, running a ferry in its place, and keeping the bridge out of action by having a henchman sneak out at night at pull up the repair work done the previous day.
 

3  Because the repair of bridges was regarded in the late Middle Ages as a charitable act that might speed one’s soul out of Purgatory, many widows became responsible for bridge repair in executing their late husbands’ wills. The most prominent of these was a lady named Alice Palmer who took charge of the bridge over the Trent at Nottingham in the fourteenth century and for twenty years conducted a running battle with the authorities in Nottingham about how it should be done.

4  Bridges were sometimes built for defensive purposes: London Bridge in particular was the site of a battle against the Vikings. On another occasion, however, the Londoners used the vantage point of the bridge for a different kind of resistance: as the unpopular Queen Eleanor of Provence passed underneath in her barge, they pelted her with cabbages. In response to this insult, the queen gained control of the tolls on the bridge and turned them to her own uses, allowing the bridge to decay for years.

5  The broken-down bridge was a staple of medieval literature. The perils of crossing the Sword Bridge could only be dared by the super-human Sir Lancelot. And saints intervened to help lesser mortals on tricky bridges: as a monk crossed the Thames at Great Marlow, his horse’s hind legs fell through a hole, and the horse became stuck. With night falling and no solution at hand, the monk prayed to St Thomas Becket, who offered a solution: the monk should break a bigger hole, allowing his horse to fall into the river, where it could swim to the bank. This solution worked, and the monk made a pilgrimage to Thomas’ shrine as a result. Quite what the result was for other travellers, we are not told.

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