Matthew Paris itinerary, stage by stage

What you are looking at

Fourteen points, one for each stage of the road from London to Otranto as Matthew Paris drew it in the middle of the thirteenth century.

These are not the manuscript’s positions. The itinerary has none. It is a strip diagram: a vertical column of towns with day-marks drawn between them, no scale, no orientation and no coordinates at all. Each point here is the modern location of the town a stage names, supplied so the sequence can be compared with a map.

That comparison is the whole proof. A medieval traveller’s world was a list of days, and turning it into a map is something we are doing, not something Matthew Paris did.

How to read this layer

Every point declares modern_reference as its provenance, because that is exactly what it is.

The evidence is in the properties, not the position: the label as the diagram gives it, the day-marks drawn before the stage, and whether the stage is a road stage, a sea crossing or a mountain pass. The crossing from Dover to Wissant is drawn in the same units as a day’s walk, which is the diagram’s most revealing simplification and worth looking at.

Historical scope

1250 to 1259, the working range for the itinerary witnesses.

Sources and evidence

Four witnesses are in the audit: two manuscripts at the British Library and the Parker Library, one further Chronica volume, and Luard’s edition of the text.

Not one folio has been transcribed and no witness is cleared for publication. Every stage’s folio reference reads pending, and the library terms for the digitised images have not been read, so nothing about presentation may be assumed.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

The day-marks are the manuscript’s claim about the journey. This project does not convert them into a travel time, and no interface should present them as one.

Where witnesses branch, the stage records a variant note rather than picking a reading. Rome is the clearest case: it is both a destination and a stage, and the diagram handles that by drawing it twice as large.

Editorial decisions

The manuscript label and the modern name are separate fields even where they coincide, because the day the corpus finds a stage whose drawn name differs from its modern one, the model has to hold both already.

Data fields

See the Crusades data fields.

Data and downloads

CC BY 4.0 for the compiled records. In review: no folio read, no witness cleared, not citable as established evidence.