Premodern road rage? Yes, absolutely--complete with swearing, rubbernecking, and a murder or two.

First, let's head to Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1565. More specifically, to St. Katherine's gate. Hans Heckpecher, a Frankfurt, is astride his donkey outside the gate and wants to enter the city. Philipp Weiss von Limburg, also from Frankfurt (the "von" is a status symbol here), is inside the city walls and intends to stroll outside.

I start with the present tense because that's how it would have been perceived by the rather large number of people passing by or watching idly, including city guardsmen and some petty city officials. They probably would not, however, have shared Weiss' perception of a traffic jam. Weiss could not take having to wait for Heckpecher to pass through the gate, and tried to pull the other man off his donkey. Heckpecher was furious and started to swear at Weiss. Who responded by brandishing his knife.

You'd think this would be a "that escalated quickly" moment. But the rubberneckers proved to be more than rubberneckers, as a few of the civilians--not the guards--rushed forward to try to separate Weiss and Heckpecher. At least one of the interveners had to draw his own knife in self-defense as he tried to jump in between the two.

In this case, things did end reasonably well--the two men involved in the initial incident were arrested; there was no body count between them or among the rubberneckers and other participants. The situation was much grimmer in London on October 18, 1321. Two men--one of them, esquire Thomas atte Chirche, who was most definitely not at church; the other, identity unknown--were making their way down a crowded street on horseback. But their idea of "making their way" was to ride fast and recklessly, and they nearly trampled a woman carrying a baby. John de Harwe, one of the other passers-by, pleaded with the two riders to be more careful.

At which point Thomas stopped, dismounted, drew his knife, and stabbed John "with a wound two inches long and five inches deep." John died the next morning.

So yes, there are two cases of road-related rage, both of which escalated to physical violence, and both of which involved participants who didn't care how many people saw them fight, and both of which involved civilians rather than officials trying to 'police' the situation.

This is one of those topics, however, where we can't just look at surface-level similarities and say, "Hey, their road-related rage is our concept of road rage." Setting the Frankfurt case in the context of impulsive, interpersonal violence in early modern German cities, Joachim Eibach points out that Weiss' initial offense was actually a defense--but of his honor, not his body. Weiss was of a higher social class than Heckpecher, and even though there was no formal law, he believed his status (in other people's eyes) and sense of his (in his own) would be hurt by, essentially, having to wait at a red light. We might see something similar at work in the medieval London case. Atte Chirche reacted to Harwe's criticism of him--how dare the lowly porter demand a member of the gentry change his actions.

Road rage today doesn't seem to involve social class much (beyond the "at least one person involved has a car" aspect). But considering the importance of offenses against honor and who deserved what in the preindustrial cases of road-related rage might lead us to question what lies underneath our anger at being cut off in traffic or when the car in front of us stops at a yellow light. How dare they.