This dire superstition is far more primitive than the idol fastened below the parapet of a Chinese bridge; and so, perhaps, we find in these things a parent emotion and its improved offspring. Perhaps: for Superstition rests on dark foundations; we know not precisely where it fades into a belief that is genuinely kinder.
III
We pass on to some important topics that worry a writer because they cannot be arranged in a neat scheme. Some of them are technical, but everybody will be able to understand their bearing on the main subject. We have seen that fords gave place to bridges very slowly, even in some neighbourhoods where the Church was exceedingly active, as at Rochester.[105] Can you explain why? There were a good many reasons, and among them is the fact that it was a long time before bridges won a good reputation among the people. Wood being abundant everywhere, they were timber bridges at first, and rudely built; many of them were carried away by storms, as Matthew Paris related in the thirteenth century. So people set their hearts on the greater safety of stone bridges; but money was difficult to collect, and stonework cost a great deal more than timber; and no bridge could be built until permission had been gained from the King, often after tedious negotiations. Further, the lands through which rivers flowed were owned at times by rival noblemen, who put a veto on the project, either in a spirit of perverse antagonism or because a stone bridge might benefit one landlord more than another. And it was easy for the stronger man to explain his antagonism in a reasonable manner, for he could say that the cofferdams used in grounding piers diverted rivers from their channels, causing inundations. This objection seems to have been raised pretty often, as many piers were grounded in a very primitive fashion, just by throwing down stones and cement till a bed of masonry rose above water-level.
In the Ballad of Abingdon Bridge, written by Richard Fannande Iremonger in the thirty-sixth year of Henry VI (1458), we find most of the difficulties that attended mediæval bridge-building. Till the fourth year of Henry V (1417) the townsfolk of Abingdon and Culham had nothing but a ford, which could not be passed after a storm of rain or after a thaw. Yet Abingdon lived under the shadow of a great monastery, and roads were constructed from her streets to the ancient or Roman highways. Not even a timber bridge preceded the charming stone one that charity built in 1417, the very year in which Henry V sailed from England with 16,000 men and ravaged Normandy. But in the Middle Ages most people regarded bridges as we in our ignorance regard hospitals, as useful and necessary things to be supported by charitable doles, and not by district rates. To beg is a degradation, no matter what the cause may be, and many a small town could have built for itself a bridge but for the ruling custom that taught it to be a mendicant. Culham and Abingdon waited a very long time before almsgiving got rid of their dangerous ford. The Abbot gave his aid, and Geoffrey Barber paid a thousand marks to the workmen, and Sir Peris Besillis, Knight, provided the stone, and “the gode lorde of Abendon left of his londe, for the breed [breadth] of the bridge, twenty-four fote large”:—
It was a greet socour of erthe and of sonde,
And yet he abated the rent of the barge.
An C. Pownde, and xvˡⁱ was truly payed
By the hondes of John Huchyns and Banbery also,
For the waye and the barge, thus it must be sayed.
But I am happy to add that “the Commons of Abendon” had to do something for themselves. It was “set all in one assent that all the brekynges of the brige the town bere schulde.” In other words, charity had produced a free town bridge, leaving the inhabitants to pay for its upkeep.