Ten fascinating facts compiled by the author exclusively for these pages

6  Many of the great bridges of later medieval England were maintained by elaborate Bridge Trusts: charitable foundations that owned land, the rents from which paid for the bridge. The charities at London and Rochester still exist and are now fabulously wealthy. The Rochester trust paid for the new tunnel under the Medway. The London trust built the famous Wobbly Bridge – the footbridge that connects St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. Curiously, however, when the latter project was proposed, the Charity Commission objected to a bridge charity building a bridge, as they didn’t see it as a properly charitable activity – how much our perception of charity has changed since the Middle Ages!

7  In the early Middle Ages, some bridges were maintained by land taxes spread over a wide area. In these provisions, we can see the origins of counties. They also contain echoes of earlier arrangements that are lost to us in other ways. The lands connected to the bridge at Cambridge hark back to a time when the bridge was an armed frontier between two kingdoms. The lands connected to London hint at the exalted status of London in the Dark Ages. And, most intriguingly of all, the lands connected to Rochester suggest administrative provisions dating back to Roman times and thus a strange continuity through the centuries of invasion.
 

8  If bridges were not profitable, ferries were. The owners of ferries made great efforts to protect their rights. At one place in East Yorkshire, a river was drying up, so people were managing to do without the ferry. So the ferrymen dug great holes in the river bed, making the crossing dangerous again.

9  After the Norman Conquest, people found that they could escape from the expense of paying for bridges by claiming royal exemptions. In monastic scriptoria across the nation, monks furiously scribbled away producing dense foundation legends for their houses that included a pious king of yore granting them exemption from bridge-work. Perhaps the most elaborate was concocted at St Albans, where the whole story of the death of St Alban and the finding of his bones by the saintly King Offa in the eighth century was told in order to justify an exemption.

10  When in 1215, the barons of England demanded a charter of liberties from King John, bridges were on their minds. Drawing on the precedent of old laws, some specious, some not, they demanded that they should not be forced to build bridges. And once this liberty was enshrined in Magna Carta, it was quoted again and again in the late Middle Ages to resist any effort to improve bridges. One copy of Magna Carta is now on display in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., next to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, which may explain Americans’ reluctance to pay for transportation.

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