Léxico de las vías de comunicación en la diplomática medieval asturleonesa

Abstract

Each territory's landscape is altered naturally by accidents of the land and artificially by buildings and roads, which are generally the work of man to facilitate movement from one place to another. This work deals with the latter and is carried out upon a corpus of texts made up of the charters and written chronicles of the Kingdom of Asturias & Leon from the eighth century to 1230. The central part of the work analyses the designation of roads in the strict sense of the term; however, a final appendix is added that reviews some other related terms. For the purposes of the study, the roads have been divided into four different categories: important roads, secondary roads, public streets in towns and villages, and bridges. The most important roads are designated in the sources under the following nouns: uia, iter, carrera-karral(e), strata, calzata and caminus. The most used, by far, are carrera-karral(e), with over a thousand occurrences, and the generic uia. The difference between them is not always clear, especially in the cases of carrera-karral(e}, strata and calzata, which are sometimes used together in the same context. The less important roads are called andamio, calelio, carril corredera, scouio, semitario-sendero, trectorio or uereda, although scouio perhaps refers more precisely to the crags rather than the narrow pass between them. Some of these terms (cf. andamio, calelio, carril or corredera) do not appear in other regions of mediaeval Europe. The terms calella, callis,-s, platea, which also means "square", and rua are used for the streets of towns and villages. Then comes the study of the terms referring to bridges, which are pons,-ntis and their derivatives ponticum/pontigo, pontido and ponto,-onis. The conclusion is that the lack of precision observed in some or many of the terms of a single group could have been due to the passage of time and/ or the distance between places, although this said lack of precision does not exist with respect to bridges. The essay is completed with the study of some names referring to crossroads (incrucillata/cruciliata, crux, biforcale) and a brief relation of the terms indicating access to a particular place, such as aditus, exitus, ingressus, intrad/ta, introitus, recesus, regressus..., which can only be included in the study of the vocabulary of roads in its widest sense.