English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century)

J. J. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century) is an illustrated account of travel in medieval England. Its plates include English knights travelling in August 1399, from a manuscript painted about A.D. 1400, and a common cart. Chapter II, The Ordinary Traveller and the Casual Passer-By, begins with the roads and the heavy carts that creaked along them, some square timbrels made of planks on two wheels and others of slats latticed with a willow trellis.

Elsewhere Jusserand describes where travellers stayed. Only people of high rank were admitted into the monastery proper, while pilgrims and others were housed in a separate guest-house, as at Battle Abbey, and beds stood in the hall of the Maison-Dieu at Dover. Castles and manors received the travelling knight as a courtesy. Another passage quotes Walsingham on the unbelief of some barons, and a passage on a bridge names Peter Colechurch, King John and a list of donors in the bridge chapel.