How do you explain traffic to a medieval person?
Today I had to sit in traffic for couple of hours, and in the last days I really got into Daily Medieval an addictive blog that posts sequential daily stories from medieval times, it’s kind of a daily 5 minutes medieval soap opera, and I love it, anyway, while sitting in traffic I wondered:
was there traffic in medievals times?
Odd question I agree, but with nothing more to do than stare at bumbers, the mind finds its own entertainment, and so I got thinking.
For sure crowds and crowded places were not uncommon even back then, and perhaps those narrows lanes sneaking among fields and towns were getting crowded too with carts and animals and people, especially around festivities and markets - so yes, I believe there was traffic in medieval times, but:
was it slowly chipping away at their sanity too?
Ah, to be a fly on one of those carts! We will never truly know (unless there are manuscripts from some monk complaining of being late for a beer delivery or something like that!) but we can guess, and my guess is no, traffic back then wasn’t the soul crushing experience that it is today, mostly, I believe, because it was a shared experience and now is not.
We sit in our cars, alone, not talking, not really doing anything but having to focus on a tedious task that we have not chosen and that will bring us no reward, how can this be anything but soul crashing!
Compare that to waiting in line for a concert or a sport event, back when mobile phones didn’t exist, it is a kind of traffic, you slowly moving to your destination with other strangers, well back then you would eventually listen in to other people conversations, sometimes you would join those conversations, or start new conversations just to kill the time, it was, it was… well I don’t know what it was, but it was something worth preserving.