59. Roads neglected, or left to benevolent associations.—The maintenance of the roads was still left to local authorities. We find in the court records of manors that the people reported stretches of road which were in bad condition, and ordered that they should be repaired under penalty of fine; but a road had to be very bad before it attracted attention, and received little care at best. The clergy were the leaders in maintaining the roads, for their estates were scattered and they felt the need of transportation as none other but merchants did. Pious persons also devoted themselves to this object, as a meritorious work like visiting the sick or caring for the poor; they formed associations to keep roads in repair, and left bequests to allow the work to be carried on after their death. The Alpine hospices, which are so familiar to visitors in Switzerland now, were established by religious orders to help travelers and merchants on their way.

60. Difficulties of transportation by road.—A feudal lawyer distinguished in theory five kinds of roads: the path, the wagon road of eight feet, the road of sixteen feet, the highway of thirty-two feet, and the Roman roads of sixty-four feet. There was nothing in reality to correspond to this distinction. The Roman roads were still in use, but they were too much worn and too few in number to raise the general level of transportation. When an English king wanted to transport provisions to Scotland about 1300, he required four horses, or, in the northern counties, eight oxen to a wagon. Transportation by wagon was so difficult that pack animals were still in general use and travelers nearly always went on horseback, both men and women riding astride, and twenty miles being considered a fair day’s journey. The town of Bristol was granted a county court in 1373 to save the townspeople the journey to Gloucester, “distant thirty miles of road, deep, especially in winter time, and dangerous to passengers.” At the very end of this period (1499) a glover traveling to market at Aylesbury was drowned with his horse in a pit which a miller had dug to get clay from the road. A court acquitted the miller on the ground that he had no malicious intent, and really did not know of any other place where he could get the kind of clay he wanted.

61. Lack of bridges.—Bridges were still rare. Those which the Romans had built fell into ruins; they were rebuilt in wood, or replaced by bridges of boats, by simple ferries, or by mere fords. Complaint was made to the English Parliament in 1376 that nobody was bound to maintain the bridge over the Trent near Nottingham; the bridge was “ruinous,” and “oftentimes have several persons been drowned, as well horsemen, as carts, man and harness”: Parliament refused authority to keep the bridge in repair. A large number of towns had grown up on rivers, as is shown, for instance, by the number of English town names ending in -ford, -bridge, -ferry; and the difficulty and danger of crossing the streams were serious obstacles to trade. Pious and public-spirited people took up the work which the government was still unable to undertake, and devoted their time and money to the construction and repair of bridges; the church assisted by the grant of indulgences (remitting church punishments for sins) to those who contributed. Even now the religious character of some of the European bridges is attested by the chapels built on or near them.

62. Advantages of river transportation.—The difficulties of land transport led to the use of river navigation wherever it was practicable. It is said that the flow of many European rivers was more full in the Middle Ages than it is now, and though the course was apt to be obstructed by mill dams and fish-weirs, and little was done to preserve the channel, merchants could transport by rivers bulky articles which would not have paid for their carriage on land. A single boat, it is estimated, carried as much as 500 pack animals would take, and it often paid to go far out of the shortest way to a market to follow navigable water. It was cheaper, for instance, to bring salt from Lüneburg to Brandenburg by way of Lübeck and Stettin, though the direct land route was of course far shorter.

63. Danger of violence on the road.—The physical difficulties of travel were accompanied by danger of violence of which people nowadays have little conception. The church attempted to secure the safety of merchants, and cooperated with the political authorities in maintaining the “Peace of God,” and in repressing disorder. The feudal system had developed into a more efficient system of government in its later period, and something like the modern state rose from it before the close of the Middle Ages. But in spite of all efforts highway robbery and violence were regular and normal occurrences, even in the more advanced countries. In many parts of Europe merchants still traveled in temporary bands or “caravans,” for better protection, and students going to college in England were encouraged to carry arms on the journey.

64. Complicity of feudal lords in robbery.—The King of France tried in vain, in the thirteenth century, to make feudal lords responsible for crimes committed in their territories. The lords were often accomplices in the crimes; the King himself was not always above suspicion; and even dignitaries of the church or heroes of the crusades turned highway robbers on occasion. An indication of the conditions is given by a complaint of the English House of Commons in 1348. “Whereas it is notoriously known throughout all the shires of England that robbers, thieves, and other malefactors on foot and on horseback, go and ride on the highway through all the land in divers places, committing larcenies and robberies; may it please our lord the king to charge the nobility of the land that none such be maintained by them, privately nor openly; but that they help to arrest and take such bad fellows.” A century before, two merchants from the continent had been robbed in Hampshire; the culprits were arrested, but could not be convicted for a long time; finally more than sixty persons were executed for complicity in this and similar crimes, the number including many men of position, numerous royal officials and some even of the king’s household. Shakespeare’s story of Prince Hal’s exploits on the road may not be true, but it is not at all improbable.

65. Tolls imposed by feudal authorities.—It would be a great mistake to suppose that the merchant’s expense comprised only the sums necessary to transport his goods over bad roads and to protect himself against robbers. In addition every merchant had to pay the feudal tolls: tolls for the repair of a road which was not kept up, and tolls for protection which he had to furnish himself. Feudal lords were everywhere, and every feudal lord tried to make money out of the movement of men and goods. As early as the time of Charlemagne (809) we find the central government attempting to keep the ways of commerce open. Charlemagne forbade the compelling of travelers to use bridges when there were short-cuts, or the building of bridges in dry places to extort passage money from travelers, or the stretching of ropes across streams to force ships to pay for the right of passage with money or wares. The attempt was vain. The power of the central government fell into the hands of local lords, and was exercised by them without regard to any but selfish and local interests.

66. Variety and number of tolls.—The variety of feudal tolls is almost inconceivable. Attempts by scholars to classify them as we should modern fees and taxes are useless, because no principle underlay the system. A French scholar has made a list of seventeen different kinds of tolls, but this is rough and incomplete. We can say in general that tolls were levied everywhere and on everything. Even a jongleur, the equivalent to the modern organ-grinder, could not pass the gates of Paris without making his monkey show off to pay his own way. A man had to pay toll not only when he went over a bridge; he had to pay a toll when he went under it, and could not escape the toll by going around it.

In the thirteenth century there were on one side of the Rhone four toll-stations on a stretch of little over thirty miles. In the fourteenth century there were 74 tolls on the Loire, from Roanne to Nantes; 12 on the Allier; 10 on the Sarth; 60 on the Rhone and Saone; 70 on the Garonne or on the land-routes between la Reole and Narbonne; 9 on the Seine between the Grand Pont of Paris and the Roche-Guyon. There were 13 toll-stations on the Rhine between Mainz and Cologne. In a few hours’ walk around Nuremberg one passed 10 stations.

The traveler abroad, whose route follows the line of medieval trade, is struck with the number of feudal castles which he passes. He admires the picturesque ruins, perhaps, without realizing that each castle was once a toll station and without reflecting that the Hudson shows a higher stage of civilization than the Rhine.

67. Abuses of the tolls.—The burden of the tolls was aggravated by the fact, already suggested, that the merchant got nothing in return except the right to look out for himself. The merchants were forced to associate to do what the river lords neglected: keep up the tow-paths, drag the river-bed, build warehouses and wharves. The merchant might pay a lord for a safe-conduct which was supposed to assure him protection in a certain territory, and then be robbed by the lord himself.

According to the feudal theory exemption from tolls must be granted in certain cases. Supplies for the army and navy, for the king and higher officials, for churches, hospitals, and monasteries, should pay no toll. Scholars at the universities enjoyed in theory an immunity which they could not secure in fact. The merchant, however, was always regarded as fair prey, and wares of commerce which were supposed to be exempt, as in France, for instance, wares on their way to Lyons fair, enjoyed only partial immunity. A sixteenth-century French writer instances as an example of the oppression of tolls the case of a merchant who shipped to the East some cloth that was wet on the voyage and had to be sent back to Paris to be redyed; all along the road in France the tolls had to be paid over again. The collectors levied toll even on grain that was being taken to mill, on cattle that were to be used as plow animals, on agricultural implements and manure.

68. Development of the toll system.—With the growth of commerce the toll-stations of course increased in value; and the practice grew up of leasing them to contractors, who paid a high sum for the privilege and had to devise, an old author tells us, “ten thousand new and unusual tyrannies, frauds and exactions” to make any profit for themselves. Many kept taverns, and managed to detain the merchant for days on various pretexts, such as absence of the proper official. Some made the merchant pay to be relieved of the necessity of having his wares unpacked and weighed and measured in detail. Many kept the tariff secret, and extorted what they could on every occasion. Some lived far from the highway, and some put their offices by design on impracticable roads, and fined the merchants heavily who went by another route.

On some routes, as along the middle Rhine, Bingen to Coblenz, it was almost impossible for commerce to be carried on except along the river, and very heavy tolls could be levied here without danger of the merchants escaping; but under other conditions the collectors established wings, as they were called, secondary offices on the side-roads to prevent evasion of the toll. Some collectors established regular pools, to use the modern term applied to railroad combination; twenty-five or thirty of them, representing perhaps five or six separate toll-areas, associated and agreed upon their rates; then they pooled and divided their profits.

69. Constraint of trade by tolls.—The establishment of toll-stations put an artificial constraint on trade, which kept it in the paths most convenient for the collectors, not most suitable to the merchants. Lords would not allow new and better roads to be built, for fear that profits on the old roads would be impaired. The compulsion to follow certain routes (German Strassenzwang) became a serious evil as commerce developed and sought new openings; and the loss to the public was far greater than any gain by the toll receiver.

Peculiarly noxious customs clustered around the rights which feudal lords claimed for themselves in the period when the central government was powerless. The right to a wrecked ship, which had once been the prerogative of the king, could be distorted so that the whole cargo of a Regensburg ship was confiscated in 1396 because a single little cask had fallen off into the Danube. It was an accepted rule in Germany that if a wagon broke down so that the axle touched the ground it became a part of the land and belonged to the lord of the territory; break-downs must have been frequent, in view of the wretched condition of the roads, and it has been suggested that lords sought to cause them by traps and pitfalls.

70. Burden of the tolls on trade.—The most evident effect of the tolls was the additional cost of transportation which must be paid, of course, by the consumer. The price of a ware might rise, within a comparatively short distance, so much that it could not be sold at all. It has been estimated that in the fourteenth century the Rhine tolls merely on the stretch between Bingen and Coblenz amounted to two thirds of the value of the wares. Even in the fifteenth century, and after some reform had been effected in the French tolls, the price of goods was doubled by carriage from Nantes to Orleans on the Loire or from Honfleur to Paris on the Seine.

Besides the loss of money there was the loss of time; a merchant might arrive at his destination too late to find a market for his wares, or might find that they had deteriorated on the road. The monks of Beauvais took three pennyworths from each horse load that passed by, and on fast days they spent so much time in selecting their fish that the rest of the load spoiled before it reached Paris.

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