ABSTRACT
The routes along which the letter carriers travelled were based on the surviv ing Roman roads, the older ridgeways, and those which for centuries had linked local communities. There was very little new road building in the Middle Ages though there must have been road improvements to the many new towns that were founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is difficult to reconstruct a medieval roadmap for there are only two main sources: the fourteenth-century Gough Map in the Bodleian Library and a manuscript written about 1400 which describes routes leading to the Praemonstratensian Abbey of Titchfield in Hampshire.1 A mid-thirteenth cen tury map by Matthew Paris provides a little information, including a route from Dover to the north, and there are also numbers of small local maps. None is drawn to scale. The Itineraries of medieval kings and bishops, court cases involving carriers, and fifteenth-century brokage books enable us to build up a picture of journeys taken on roads that were, after the Conquest, in a better state than most of those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
