THE ROADS 21 



Were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted ? 

 Generally speaking, we may say the means of communication 

 were bad and many an estate cut off almost completely from 

 the outside world, yet the manors must often have been con- 

 nected by waterways, and sometimes by good roads, with 

 other manors and with the towns. Rivers in the Middle Ages 



I Here far more used as means of communication than to-day, 

 ^hd many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable 

 according to Domesday. Water carriage was, as always, much 

 cheaper than land carriage, and com could be carried from 

 Henley to London for 2d. or 3<f. a quarter. The roads left by 

 the Romans, owing to the excellence of their construction, 

 remained in use during the Middle Ages, and must have been 

 a great advantage to those living near them; but the other 

 roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in 

 the immediate vicinity of the few large towns. The keeping 

 of the roads in repair, one part of the trinoda necessiias, was 

 imposed on all lands ; but the results often seem to have been 

 very indifferent, and they appear largely to have depended on 

 chance, or the goodwill or devotion of neighbouring land- 

 owners.^ Perhaps they would, except in the case of the 

 Roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the 

 great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered 

 estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads 

 in order. But in those days people were contented with very 

 little, and though Edward I enforced the general improvement 

 of roads in 1 285, in the fourteenth century they were decaying. 

 Parliament adjourned thrice between 1331 and 1380 because 

 the state of the roads kept many of the members away. In 

 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the 

 western limit of London, to Westminster was ' so full of holes 

 and bogs ' that the traffic was dangerous for men and car- 

 riages ; and a little later all the roads near London were so 

 bad, that carriers ' are oftentimes in peril of losing what they 

 * Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life, p. 79. 



