Roads and the Church 13 



having had a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. 

 Sovereigns or great landowners gave generous gifts for the 

 endowment of such bridges. Although, too, there was no 

 special order of bridge-building friars in England, guilds and 

 lay brotherhoods, animated by the religious spirit, were formed 

 in the reign of Richard II. (1377-1399) for the repair of roads 

 and bridges, just as, in turn, the ordinary trading guilds 

 which were the forerunners of the corporate bodies set up in 

 towns undertook to " maintain and keep in good reparacion " 

 bridges which had become " ruinous," and, also, to attend 

 to the " foul and dangerous highways, the charge whereof the 

 town was not able to maintain." l 



It became customary, also, for hermits to take up their 

 habitation in cells along the main thoroughfares, and to 

 occupy themselves with looking after the roads, trusting to 

 the alms of passers-by for a little worldly recompense. In one 

 instance, at least, a hermit was allowed to put up a toll-bar 

 the first on record in this country and collect compulsory 

 payments from persons using the roads he mended. This was 

 in 1364, when Edward III. made a decree authorising " our 

 well-beloved William Phelippe the hermit " to set up a toll-bar 

 on the lower slope of Highgate Hill, on the north side of 

 London, and levy tolls for the repair of the " Hollow Way " 

 from " our people passing between Heghgate and Smeth- 

 felde." 



Jusserand sums up the situation at this period by saying 

 that " The roads in England would have been entirely im- 

 passable ... if the nobility and the clergy, that is to say, 

 the whole of the landed proprietors, had not had an immediate 

 and daily interest in possessing passable roads." 



There came, however, a period of decline in religious fervour. 

 The laity grew less disposed to give or to bequeath money, 



1 In the Ninth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, 

 page 290, mention is made of a charter, granted by Edward VI., giving 

 a new municipal constitution to the "ancient borough" of Stratford-on- 

 Avon in lieu of the franchise and local government taken away by the 

 suppression of the guild previously existing there ; and in this charter the 

 guild in question is spoken of as having been, in former times, "founded 

 and endowed with divers lands tenements and possessions," the rents, 

 revenues and profits from which were to be devoted to the maintenance 

 of a grammar school, an almshouse, and "a certain great stone bridge, 

 called Stratford Bridge, placed and built over the water and river of the 

 Avon beside the said borough." 



