Bridges are and were complex constructions, not least because they were often either in or adjacent to water, and because structural failure had spectacular and disastrous consequences. The proximity of water virtually guaranteed a constant maintenance problem. At the same time, bridges were political, military, commercial and economic assets, since they could be used for defensive purposes as well as for the collection of tolls and rents. They are thus relatively well documented. On the one hand there are various ‘high-level’ documents (for example in the Ancient Petitions, SC 8, series in TNA) where, for example, the burgesses of towns or local magnates solicit royal assistance or royal permission to levy tolls and so forth. These, typically, are monolingual. But those documents regarding more immediate, practical matters like construction and repairs are routinely multilingual, both in England and elsewhere in those numerous regions of medieval Europe where more than one language was in use (cf. for example Coutant 1994). Precise technical instructions needed to be given to local, probably monolingual workmen, but often on the authority of their social superiors who were themselves doubtless either multilingual, or monolingual but in a different and more prestigious language. Except in the case of London Bridge (Wright 1996), very little attention has been given to these texts by linguists (cf. Trotter 2006). This paper will look at a sample of documents concerning the construction and repair of medieval bridges in Exeter, Rochester and Leicester. Analysis may enable us to draw conclusions about the respective roles of the languages concerned, of how they interact and of how they were deployed to produce practical, effective documents.

Bridges, unlike castles and cathedrals, were typically in the hands of municipalities, looked after by the bourgeoisie, not the aristocracy; and unlike cathedrals or other ecclesiastical buildings, their custodians were laymen. These may perhaps seem to be obvious points, but they do have a linguistic and sociolinguistic significance. Bridges constructed, maintained and taxed by municipalities were at one remove from the higher level of language use in the form of medieval church Latin; the activities which went on around and on them involved all sorts of different social classes, and thus, probably, a number of different languages.