The Earliest Recorded Bridge at Rochester

The earliest recorded bridge at Rochester Colin Flight BAR British Series 252 1997 v Contents Acknowledgements vi List of figures vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Place-names 11 3 Interpretations 23 4 Oblivion 31 5 Reconstruction 36 6 Conclusion 48 APPENDICES 1 The bridgework text 51 2 Commissions of inquiry 52 3 Strength of materials 53 Bibliography 55 Index 57 vi Acknowledgements My thanks, first of all, go to Nicholas Brooks, for the stimulus provided by two recent publications, both of which he was kind enough to let me see in advance, and for his comments on a draft of the present paper. I should also like to express my gratitude to the archivists and librarians whose help I have relied on during the writing of this report, in particular to Dr James M. Gibson (Rochester Bridge Trust), Bernard Nurse (Society of Antiquaries), and Elizabeth A. Walsh (Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.). The report of an official inquiry held at Rochester on 12 June 1355 (below, pp. 52–3) is printed from the transcript in the Thorpe Bequest (MS. 198/1, Part II, fol. 151) by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London. vii List of figures Fig. 1. The topography of Rochester in the mid fourteenth century. (1) Barbican on the bridge, (2) Hospital of Saint Mary called the New Work, (3) Strood church, (4) Hospital of Saint Nicholas called White Ditch, (5) Temple Manor, (6) Saint Margaret’s church, (7) Boley Hill, (8) Castle, (9) Crown Inn, (10) Saint Clement’s church, (11) Cheldegate, (12) Cathedral church and monastery of Saint Andrew, (13) Bishop’s hall, (14) Eastgate, (15) Hospital of Saint Katherine, (16) Hospital of Saint Bartholomew viii Fig. 2. The quire containing the bridgework text (Privilegia, fols. 159–67) 2 Fig. 3. Places named in Layer 3 (not shown: Pinindene) 12 Fig. 4. Places named in Layer 2 (not shown Hæselholt) 14 Fig. 5. Places named in Layer 1 (not shown: ‘the narrow land, Gisleardesland, Lichebundelonde, Ædun) 16 Fig. 6. The arrangement of piles supporting the Strood pier of the modern bridge 33 Fig. 7. The bridge as reconstructed by Essex (1785) 38 Fig. 8. A diagram showing the features associated with the western bridgehead 41 Fig. 9. A diagram showing the features associated with the eastern bridgehead 42 Fig. 10. A reconstruction of the Roman bridge at Rochester 44 Fig. 11. The design envisaged by Essex (1785) for the timber frames carrying the deck 45 viii 1a 1 Introduction Three successive bridges – three that we know about – have carried the main road from east Kent to London across the river Medway between Rochester and Strood (Fig. 1). The earliest recorded bridge, existing in the twelfth century and probably long before, survived until the fourteenth century. It was abandoned in the 1380s and superseded by a new bridge built on a different site, just a short distance upstream. The fourteenth-century bridge survived – not without some important alterations – until the nineteenth century.1 It was abandoned in the 1850s and superseded in its turn by a new bridge built on a different site, just a short distance downstream – almost exactly the same site as that of the earliest bridge. Alongside the new roadbridge, on the downstream side, a railway bridge was constructed, also in the 1850s, by the East Kent Railway Company (which shortly afterwards changed its name to ‘London, Chatham & Dover’); alongside that a second railway bridge was built in the 1880s, by the rival South Eastern company.2 The three nineteenth- century bridges are all in existence today, though two of them have undergone some drastic modifications since they were first built.3 All these bridges – including the railway bridges – have their share of archaeological interest, but here I propose to deal only with the oldest among them, the bridge which reached the end of its useful life in the 1380s. There are no hard facts. Some discoveries made in the 1850s, during the construction of the new roadbridge, were put on record by the engineer responsible (below, pp. 32–4), but their significance is far from clear. With that one doubtful exception, no part of the actual structure has been identified. On the Rochester side at least, some remains of the abutment may quite possibly survive; but if they do they underlie the approach to the modern bridge, and are likely to remain hidden for as long as that bridge continues to exist. In the absence of structural evidence, we have to do the best we can with the information contained in written sources. The ideal evidence, I suppose, would be a set of itemized accounts relating to the repair of some specified portion of the bridge, recording exactly 1b what materials were used, and exactly what they were used for. Though none of the surviving documents come close to that ideal, there are several which provide us with useful information. The bridgework text Of all the available documents, by far the most important is also the earliest. The original was – or so it seems safe to assume – a separate document preserved in the archive of the church of Rochester. It does not survive; but there is one copy in existence. This solitary copy occurs in a cartulary compiled in the 1120s, under the title ‘Privileges granted to the church of Saint Andrew of Rochester’, Priuilegia aecclesiae sancti Andreae Hrofensis concessa.4 The compiler was a member of the monastic community which since the 1080s had been attached to the church of Rochester, and the cartulary mostly consists of documents dating from within the previous forty or fifty years. The opening section, however, which forms a booklet by itself, comprises a series of older documents – some as old as the eighth century – which the monks would have found in the church’s archive when they first arrived. It is here, at the end of this booklet, that the scribe made his copy of the document concerning the bridge. As is true for two other documents included in this booklet (Campbell 1973, nos. 34–5), two version of the text are given: a Latin version and an English version. (The reader will find a line-for-line transcription of both versions in Appendix 1, and may perhaps like to glance through it at this point.) It seems to be a fair assumption, in every case, that the English version was the original one, and that the Latin version was translated from it – at a time, presumably, when documents written in English were at risk of being not understood, or not taken seriously.5 Though we cannot be sure, these Latin versions are likely to have had some prior existence (perhaps in single-sheet form) before they were copied into the cartulary. Though often helpful, they have to be treated cautiously: the translation is 2a sometimes very loose, and sometimes plainly wrong. The Latin version of the bridgework text is certainly something more than a mere translation: a whole paragraph occurs at the end of it which has no counterpart in the English version. Like some other portions of the cartulary, the leaves containing the bridgework text underwent mutilation at the hands of later scribes; and to understand the significance of their actions we need to look more closely at the relationship between the text itself and the leaves on which it is written. When it was being photographed for the purpose of being published in facsimile, the manuscript was disbound+ and disassembled; so we know exactly how the pieces fit together (Sawyer 1962). The leaves containing the bridgework text belong to quire VI, which consists of nine leaves in total (fols. 159–67, Fig. 2).6 Two of the leaves in question are not original, as Ker (1957, p. 447) was the first to point out: two leaves have been excised, and these two have been inserted in their place.7 Briefly, the facts are as follows. The recto of the first inserted leaf (fol. 164) is blank. On the verso we find the beginning of the Latin version of the bridgework text, written by a hand assigned by Ker to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The remainder of the text (beginning with gisleardes lande),8 on the following leaf (fol. 165), is in the main hand. It occupies the whole recto and half of the verso, where it is followed by twelve blank lines. Next is the second inserted leaf (fol. 166), which again is blank on the recto. On the verso we find the beginning of the English version, in a hand of about the same date as that of fol. 164 (though surely 2b not the same hand). Here again the text is continued, on the following leaf (fol. 167), in the main hand (beginning with wroteham). It ends near the bottom of the recto; the verso was left blank. This leaf is the last of its quire, and the last of the booklet (quires I–VI) containing pre-conquest documents. Looking more closely at the rewritten portion of the Latin version (fol. 164v), we can more or less work out what has happened. The first third of the page (as far as supponere at the beginning of line 8) looks like an imitation – clumsily written but passably convincing – of the hand of the main scribe. Up to this point, the later scribe seems to be giving us a facsimile of the page which he is replacing.9 From this point onwards (beginning with an unnecessary capital letter, Et hoc faciet) the writing changes, presumably because the scribe has stopped trying to imitate the earlier script.

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