It has been assumed in some quarters that, because the main routes of
travel in this country did not have to pass over lofty mountains, as in
Austria and Switzerland, therefore the construction of roads here was, or
should have been, a comparatively easy matter. But this is far from having
been the case, the earliest opening of regular lines of communication by
road having been materially influenced by certain physical conditions of
the land itself.
The original site of London was a vast marsh, extending from where Fulham
stands to-day to Greenwich, a distance of nine or ten miles, with a breadth
in places of two or two and a half miles. The uplands beyond the Thames
marshes were covered with dense forests in which the bear, the wild boar,
and the wild ox roamed at will. Essex was almost entirely forest down to
the date of the conquest. Nearly the whole expanse of what to-day is
Sussex, and, also, considerable portions of Kent and Hampshire, were
covered by a wood--the Andred-Weald, or Andreswald--which in King Alfred's
time is said by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been 120 miles long and
30 miles broad. Here it was that, until even these great supplies were
approaching exhaustion, the iron industry established in Sussex in the
thirteenth century obtained the wood and the charcoal which were
exclusively used as fuel in iron-making until the second half of the
eighteenth century, when coal and coke began to be generally substituted.
Wilts, Dorset and other southern counties had extensive woodlands which
were more or less depleted under like conditions. Warwickshire,
Northamptonshire and Leicestershire all had extensive woods. Sherwood
Forest extended over almost the whole of Nottinghamshire. In Derbyshire, as
shown by the Domesday Survey, five hundreds {5}out of six were heavily
wooded, and nineteen manors out of twenty-three had wood on them. "In
Lancashire," says Charles Pearson, in the notes to his "Historical Maps of
England During the First Thirteen Centuries," "if we distinguish forest
from wood, and assume that the former was only wilderness, we still have
official evidence for believing that a quarter of a million acres of the
land between Mersey and Ribble was covered with a network of separate dense
woods."
Altogether, it is calculated by various authorities that in the earliest
days of our history about one third of the surface of the soil in the
British Isles was covered with wood, thicket, or scrub. Of the remainder a
very large proportion was fen-land, marsh-land or heath-land. "From the
sea-board of Suffolk and Norfolk," says the Rev. W. Denton, in "England in
the Fifteenth Century," "and on the north coast almost to the limits of the
great level, stretched a series of swamps, quagmires, small lakes and
'broads.'" A great fen, 60 miles in length and 40 miles in breadth, covered
a large proportion of the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire,
Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. A great part of
Lancashire, Mr Denton further states, was a region of marshes and quaking
mosses, while "from Norwich to Liverpool, and from the mouth of the Ouse at
Lynn to the Mersey, where it falls into the Irish sea, a line of fen,
uncultivated moors and morasses stretched across England and separated the
northern counties from the midland districts, the old territory of Mercia."
Much of the surface, again, was occupied by hills or mountains separated by
valleys or plains through which some 200 rivers--many of them far more
powerful streams than they are to-day--flowed towards the sea. As for the
nature of much of the soil of England, the early conditions are further
recalled by Daniel Defoe who, in describing the "Tour through the Whole
Isle of Great Britain" which he made in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, speaks of "the soil of all the midland part of England, from sea
to sea," as "a stiff clay or marly earth" for a breadth of 50 miles, at
least, so that it was not possible to go north from London to any part of
Britain without having to pass through "these terrible clays," which were,
he says, "perfectly frightful to travellers."
{6}It was under conditions such as these that Britain obtained her first
roads; and it was, also, conditions such as these that were to affect more
or less the future history of inland communication in England, adding
largely to the practical difficulties experienced in making provision for
adequate transport facilities.
Inasmuch as a great number of chariots were used by the Britons in their
attempt to resist the invasion of Cæsar, it may be assumed that there were
even then in this country roads sufficiently broad and solid on which such
chariots could run; and though evidence both of the use of wattles in the
making of roads over clayey soil and of a knowledge on the part of the
early Britons of the art of paving has been found, the British
chariot-roads were so inefficiently constructed that few traces of them
have remained.
The earliest British roads were, however, probably of the nature of tracks
rather than of durable highways; and they may have been designed less for
the purposes of defence against invasion than in the interests of that
British trade which, even then, was an established institution in the land.
Writing in "Archæologia," vol. xlviii (1885), Mr Alfred Tylor expresses the
view that the civilisation of the Britons was of a much higher character in
some respects than has till recently been supposed. From the fact that
Pytheas of Marseilles, a Greek traveller who lived B.C. 330, and visited
Britain, described the British-made chariots, he thinks we may assume that
the Britons had discovered the art of smelting and working tin, lead and
iron, and that they used these materials in the making both of chariots and
of weapons. But they produced for export, as well as for domestic use. Tin,
more especially, was an absolute necessity in Europe in the bronze age for
use in the making of weapons both for the chase and for war, and the
metallurgical wealth of Britain afforded great opportunities for trading,
just as it subsequently gave the country the special importance it
possessed in the eyes of the Roman conquerors.
To the pursuit of such trading the Britons, according to Mr Tylor, were the
more inspired by a desire to obtain, in return for their metals the amber
which, as the favourite ornament of prehistoric times, then constituted a
most important article of commerce, but was obtainable only in the north of
Europe. {7}The early importance of amber in Europe is proved, Mr Tylor
says, by its presence in many parts of Europe throughout the long neolithic
age, and, therefore, long prior to the bronze age; and it was mainly to
facilitate the exchange of metals for this much-desired amber that the
Britons made roads or tracks from the high grounds which they generally
chose for their habitations (thus avoiding alike the forests, the fens and
the marshes), down to the ports from which the metals were to be shipped to
their destination. Mr Tylor says on this point:--
"The first British tin-commerce with the Continent in prehistoric times
moved, either on packhorses or by chariots, in hilly districts, towards
Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, that is, in the direction from west to east;
then by sea from the eastern British shipping ports, of which Camulodunum
on the Stour, close to the Thames (Colchester) is a type, to the Baltic.
Thus at first the 'tin' used to find its way partly by land and partly by
sea from Cornwall to the mouths of the Elbe and Vistula, there to meet the
land caravans of the Baltic amber commerce from the north of Europe to the
south.... When the land route throughout Gaul was established the tin had
to go across the English Channel, not to Brittany, across the rougher and
wider part, but to Normandy. The Isle of Wight was nearer Normandy, and a
suitable entrepôt for the coasters meeting the fleets of ocean trading
ships.[1]...
"Iron and lead were, also, valuable British productions, and could easily
reach the Isle of Wight by coasting steamers or by the British or Roman
roads via Salisbury or Winchester....
"All ancient roads to British shipping ports were, of course, British....
Without roads it would be impossible to get over the low, often clay,
grounds, or to reach the seaports in chariots, as the seaports were
constantly in the clay.... It was impossible to reach the shipping-ports,
which are all at low levels, without roads, as the clay and sand would be
impassable for chariots. Of course packhorses could travel where chariots
could not, but if the main roads were made for chariots they would be
equally good for packhorses."
Mr Tylor thinks there is the greater reason for assuming that a
considerable trade had thus been developed between {8}Britain and the
Continent because Tacitus alludes to a British prince who had amassed great
wealth by transporting metals from the Mendips to the Channel coast; but
our main consideration is the evidence we get of the fact that Britain's
earliest roads appear to have owed their origin to the development of
Britain's earliest trade.
Two, at least, of the four great roads to which the designation "Roman" has
been applied followed, in Mr Tylor's opinion, the line of route already
established by the Britons under the conditions here indicated. Certain it
is that, although the Romans always aimed at building their roads in
straight lines, and troubled little about ascents and descents, they
followed the British plan of keeping the routes to high and dry ground,
whenever practicable, in order to have a better chance of avoiding alike
the woods, the bogs, the clays, the water-courses and the rivers.
Skilled road-builders though they were, the Romans shrank, in several
instances, Pearson tells us, from "the tremendous labour of clearing a road
through a forest where the trees must be felled seventy yards on either
side to secure them from the arrows of a lurking foe." Thus the great
military roads marked in the Itinerary of Antonine always, if possible,
avoided passing through a forest. The roads to Chichester went by
Southampton in order to avoid the Andred-Weald of Sussex, and the road from
London to Bath did not take the direct route to Wallingford because, in
that case, it would have required to pass through twenty miles of forest in
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Later on, however, as the Roman rule
became more firmly established, the making of roads through forests became
unavoidable, and much destruction of timber followed, while the fact that
the trees thus felled were left to rot on the ground alongside the roads
helped to create the quagmires and "mosses" which were to be so great a
source of trouble to road-makers in future generations.