Bridge-work was one element of the Anglo-Saxon public order. It was a communal obligation which was theoretically inescapable; most other duties might be remitted by the king, but not bridge-work. This theory was either not understood or not respected by the Conqueror and his sons. On the one hand, we see them exploiting the common burdens to their fullest extent. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complains of the grievous burdens imposed in 1097 on the counties whose work was due at London, caused by the building of the Tower of London and Westminster Hall and the repair of London Bridge, so that ‘many men were oppressed thereby’. Similarly, William the Conqueror demanded that the bridge-work, which he had newly imposed on the Isle of Ely after the suppression of the last Anglo-Saxon resistance, be performed ‘without excuse’. On the other hand, William and his sons remitted bridge-work as a mark of favour. It is this use of previously communal and public obligations as an instrument of lordly rule that changed the legal understanding of the common burdens. Once they had chosen to excuse their most favoured monastic institutions from communal public duties, the way was open for every house of any standing to excuse itself from these obligations by forgery. These forgeries betray the changing understanding of bridge-work: in claiming that they had been excused from the obligation by a famous king of yore, the forgers reflect the state of the law under the Norman kings. The possibility that the personal favour of a king should allow such exemption demonstrates the different perception of kingship by the time of the Normans. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon public order was at least theoretically immutable so that the king could not even grant exemptions from bridge-work to his own land, under the Normans, bridge-work was a feudal incident, alienable like any other.

This new understanding of bridge-work will be examined in three separate but contemporaneous manifestations. The first is the forged charters produced by so many monasteries in the twelfth century. The second is the Coronation Charter of Henry I, in which remittance of bridge-work, like that of other dues, is used as a political bargaining chip. The third is the twelfth-century legal compilations, which quietly diluted or omitted bridge-work.