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A Road Map of the Yorkist Age

In a slight departure from our normal blogposts, here we present a guest post: Dr David Harrison discussing his fascinating new publication, Historic Ways: Road Map of England and Wales in the Late Middle Ages. This authoritative map beautifully presents for the first time all major roads and bridges in England and Wales as they existed in the fifteenth century. Its relevance to the work of the Trust is evident, and here Dr Harrison explains the process that went into researching and producing the map and just some of the interesting ways it can be put to use.

This summer, I published something rather old-fashioned: a paper map. It’s called Road Map of England and Wales in the Late Middle Ages, and it seeks to capture the essence of the Yorkist Age.

Inspired by the medieval Gough Map, the map marks the main highways, bridges, towns and cities, battlefields, inns, and significant sacred and secular buildings of the later fifteenth century. It’s a visual guide to England and Wales, particularly focused on the transport infrastructure, which linked the key destinations. 

From Bridges to Roads
My interest began in the 1970s with bridges. I’ve spent years seeking them out—tramping along riverbanks in wellies, dragging my patient family with me, and admiring the play of light on medieval stone arches. My study of them led to a doctoral thesis, later published by Oxford University Press as The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society 400–1800.

In 2019, Professor Caroline Barron suggested I offer a paper for the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium on Medieval Travel. That prompted a shift in focus—from bridges to the roads they carried. To my surprise, I found that no scholarly map of the main roads of medieval England had ever been made.

Could we even identify the major highways of the period? The answer, as it turned out, was a resounding yes.

Finding the Medieval Highways
The documentary evidence is surprisingly rich. In the fourteenth century, the bridge at Huntingdon was described as “the public passage from north to south.” Edward II wrote of “the high road via Ware, Royston and Huntingdon.” In Devon, the antiquary John Leland called Honiton a “fair, long through fare in the highway to London.”

Consider one major route—the London to Exeter road—which can be traced across centuries. The Gough Map shows it running from London through Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Yeovil, Chard, and Honiton to Exeter. Around 1400, an itinerary made at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire outlined exactly the same route for a journey to Torre Abbey in Devon. In the 1470s, the traveller William Worcester recorded a journey by Thomas Clerk of Ware who followed that same road. Worcester himself rode into Cornwall, noting rather touchingly that his horse stumbled as they crossed Bodmin Moor. The road is recorded again in the earliest list of Highways dating from the 1540s. And today the A30 passes through the same towns west of Shaftesbury. It is notable that the medieval route is completely different from the Roman road to Exeter.

When the same route appears again and again—on maps, in documents, and in travel notes—we can be confident that it was a major highway. And we are not looking at a list of vague directions—the roads were the physical arteries of medieval England, and large sums of money were spent on their maintenance.

Roads and Battlefields
The map also reveals how the great battles of the Wars of the Roses clustered around these roads.

The Great North Road (a term not coined until the 18th century), linking London to York and beyond, saw the bloodiest battle of them all: Towton (1461). Edward IV’s army marched north, crossing the River Aire at Ferrybridge, before meeting and defeating the Lancastrians south of Tadcaster. A few years later, Losecoat Field (1470) was fought on the same route, near Stamford.

Farther south, three key battles—St Albans (1455 and 1461) and Barnet (1471) )—all took place on or near the main highway north-west from London. Armies relied on these roads to move troops, wagons, and artillery. They were the backbone of war as much as trade.

Bridges Along the Way
Where there were roads, there were bridges—and my map marks hundreds of them.

Although many have been demolished, most between 1770 and 1820, around 200 medieval bridges survive, at least in part. Some still carry modern traffic. On the Great North Road, you can still cross the medieval bridges at Huntingdon, Croft (River Tees), Sunderland Bridge, and two in Durham, including Framwellgate Bridge, whose twin spans stretch an astonishing 90 feet each.

Other surviving bridges vary from the mile long causeway across the floodplain at Swarkestone, the estuarine crossings at Barnstaple, Bideford, and Wadebridge, to the tiny packhorse bridge at Fifehead Neville in Devon.

Many were immortalised by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists. Two of my favourites are the bridges at Rochester and York, whose arches were sketched and painted long after the medieval masons had finished their work.

The Towns and Monasteries of the Fifteenth Century
The map also charts the urban network of late medieval England. Only eight towns had populations over 5,000: London, Bristol, Coventry, Exeter, Norwich, Newcastle, York, and Salisbury.

Almost all the 50 biggest towns with populations over 2,000 were linked by the main highways shown on the map. London was as dominant then as it is today, but the rest of the landscape looked very different. The future industrial giants—Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield—were mere villages of under 2,000 people.

Monasteries form another striking feature. Using data from the Valor Ecclesiasticus (Henry VIII’s survey of monastic wealth), I plotted those with annual incomes over £500. What stands out is how many wealthy houses were urban, such as Gloucester and Peterborough which became cathedrals at the Reformation, and how many were concentrated in London.

Castles, Palaces, and Power
Mapping castles and great houses proved trickier. There was no single list of which ones were occupied, fortified, or administrative centres in the late fifteenth century, so I examined them case by case.

Some, like Raglan, were new and magnificent. Others, like Eltham Palace, were transformed by ambitious building projects (Edward IV’s Great Hall still impresses). The map also includes the other royal residences around London—Westminster, the Tower, Windsor, Greenwich, and Richmond (then Sheen)—as well as key properties of the Duchy of Lancaster at Hertford, Kenilworth, Leicester, Pontefract, and of York at Ludlow, Fotheringhay, Sandal. Standing today on the banks of the Nene at Fotheringhay, it’s hard to believe that only a mound and the church tower remain of one of the greatest palaces of the fifteenth century.

The map also plots the far-flung estates of the nobility and bishops: the Nevilles possessed mighty castles at Warwick, Sheriff Hutton, Middleham, Barnard Castle, and Penrith; the Percys’ castles ranged from Sussex to Northumberland; the Dukes of Buckingham’s from Staffordshire to South Wales; and the Bishops of Winchester, whose many properties included Esher, and Farnham provided comfortable waystations on the road to London.

Castles guarded major crossings too. Tonbridge stands by the Medway; Newark by the Trent; Rochester above its great bridge; Alnwick and Warkworth above the rivers Aln and Coquet. 

Seeing the Past Through Roads
On the back of the map, I have included illustrated essays on the map’s features and on the nature of roads and medieval transport—its modes, speeds, and peculiarities. The former Director of the London Transport Museum kindly described the accompanying text as “masterful in its compaction and clarity.”

I hope the same might be said of the map itself—that it reveals how connected, and how sophisticated, this society was. You see a road system, which supported a nation of travellers, administrators, traders, soldiers and pilgrims. 

The map is available for £14.99 from Stanfords in Covent Garden and from various online outlets.