There was a map as part of an Anglo-Saxon history podcast that showed Dumnonia. It was cut off from the rest of England. Not only was it not clear where it was in relation to London, you couldn't even guess in Portsmouth unless you had a lot of that coastline memorised. The Isle of Wight was visible, but the whole section including Cornwall and Devon looked like an island itself. There wasn't the fainest indication of a road.
What was there were lines in the ocean showing trading routes. We don't think like that. We grew up with the idea of nations, largely part of a change in mentality based on roads, canals, and railroads. Even in the American colonial enterprise, grants were made to states to extend westward not because there was particular insight into the vast territories and riches in-between, but in the hopes of them reaching the opposite shore so they could take their ships on and trade with China, and especially India. It's a very modern conception. Regions, city-states, areas of influence, and natural boundaries were the norm, not ideas of A People tied to the ground.
It's part of what made Steppe invaders so devastating. No one even thought like that, they had no real defenses. Invaders came up rivers or over seas, so you had forts to defend against that. Hill forts and the like were small internal affairs, defending against the next tribe over.
Transportation costs were everything. Even in the map above, you likely weren't even going to ship goods up or down the rivers at that (modern) border and take them overland to the rivers on the other side. You are getting on a boat and going around the coast. Boats on water have very little friction. You can put a lot more weight on a boat that you can on a lot of horses or oxcarts. There was no real drive to build roads. Roads were for moving troops as much as trade goods.
1 comment:
Good insight. It is always an interesting exercise, to me, to try to imagine what it was like to think of the world that way. In a sense it's like it was when we were children, and we'd get in the big car and Dad would drive it until it came out at Grandma's house. There were important places in the world that were connected, as it were, by getting in the car; you didn't necessarily have a clear idea of exactly how the movement happened, but it did. (And then, when you were old enough to drive, how hard it was to find the way to a place you'd been a hundred times, navigating only by what you could remember of the landmarks).
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