_The Three Divisions of the British Pre-Roman Road System--The System
of which Salisbury Plain was the “Hub”: The System Connected with
London: Cross-Country Communications--The Three Factors which Have
Determined Travel in Britain._
i
The origin of the trackways is, of course, unknown, and can only be
guessed at by inference; but their character, and especially the
geographical causes which determined their trace, we can establish on
the largest lines with some accuracy.
We must not lose ourselves in that kind of speculation which has been
so dear to the academies, and which is usually very futile. As to the
order in which the development took place we have no evidence whatever:
for instance, as to the date of the founding of London, or of its size
before the Roman occupation; nor have we similar evidence with regard
to any of the centres of England for the uniting of which roads would
arise. But we have relics of the trackways before us. We have the
geographical conditions almost unchanged, and we have the indication
of Roman roads clearly based upon particular existing trackways, and
therefore suggesting what the scheme was before the Roman engineers set
to work.
Roughly speaking, the British pre-Roman road system fell into three
divisions.
There was, first of all, a division (possibly the earliest to develop
of all) which had for its “hub” Salisbury Plain, and from that centre a
whorl, rather than a wheel, of diverging approaches to the coast.
There was, secondly, the system turning upon the crossing of the Thames
at London as a “hub.” It is this second system which was so largely
developed in the historical period and which still governs our main
roads and railways to-day.
Thirdly, there was the series of cross-communications, of which the
most important by far was the track leaving the Exe and making for the
Humber.
The British trackways formed along these three systems discovered and
used the best passages of the rivers, some of which the Romans changed,
to which they added a certain number, but which, in the main, they
retained. They also indicate, though less certainly, the town centres
which have remained through the centuries the same, and they were also
determined by the main centres of agricultural population and, to a
much less extent, by the presence of mines.
[Illustration: _Part II_, Sketch III, _Probable scheme of_ MAIN ORIGINAL
TRACKWAYS _in_ BARBARIC ENGLAND]
The system of which Salisbury Plain appears to have been the “hub” we
presume to be the earliest because it was dependent almost entirely
upon surface: good going over dry land. It is to be presumed that the
earliest system would be that prevalent when men were less able to
give artificial aid to the Road, to harden it, to construct causeways
or approaches; when they were less able to drain marshes; when they
had not yet cleared forests. Now, of all the soils which make up the
surface of Britain chalk is the best surface for this purpose. It has
two characters which give it this character. In the first place, it is
self-drained and always passable even in our wettest seasons; and, in
the second place, it does not carry tangled undergrowth, and even its
woods (which are not as a rule continuous) are commonly of beech--the
easiest of all woods to pass through in travel, from the absence of
scrub beneath the branches.
It so happens that the chalk is, in this country, distributed in great
continuous lines and compact areas which lend themselves admirably
to the development of an earlier track system. You can follow chalk
with little interruption from the open central space, Salisbury Plain,
south-eastward to the Channel, to the Dorset coast (“Dorset” from the
country of the “Durotriges,” a British tribe whose name survives in
that of the modern county[1]), and the first in order of the tracks
led there. The chalk could equally be followed to the neighbourhood of
Southampton Water. A third line led along the confused Hampshire chalk
to the definite ridge of the Sussex Downs, and so to the harbours of
the Sussex coast and of Kent.
The fourth, with some interruption, led along the north downs to
Canterbury, whence tracks would radiate to the ports of Kent.
A fifth followed the Berkshire Downs and the Chilterns, and so led on
to the Wash and earlier parts of the Norfolk coast, which have now
apparently disappeared in erosion.
The sixth line led with more difficulty (and has been more obliterated
by later Roman work) directly westward to the mines of the Mendips, and
to the borders of the Severn estuary. It could not take advantage of
the chalk beyond Wiltshire, but it had fairly dry going along the ridge
of the Mendips.
The seventh, it must be presumed, though the traces are largely lost,
used the height of the Cotswolds; but here the soil, being oolitic and
not chalk, was much less favourable and the extension northward ceased
earlier.
This system, then, we regard as the earliest of all.
ii
The second system, as I have said, seems to have been connected with
London, but here the later track of the Roman engineers and the
continuous development of nearly twenty centuries has left us little to
go on save conjecture. There are points in that conjecture, however,
which are fairly certain. But there seems to have been, from the
earliest time, communication between north and south on the lowest
crossing of the Thames. Now, the lowest permanent crossing of the
Thames, even before a bridge, was in the neighbourhood of London.
The crossing of a river is determined by the hardness of the land
upon either bank, as we have seen, more than by any other factor. The
lower Thames everywhere had extensive marshes either upon one side or
the other, and usually upon both. At Grays, Tilbury, Erith, etc., the
hard ground approached right up to one bank, but was always countered
by extensive marshes on the other, or by marsh behind gravel, forming
a sort of island of hard land which could not be used for continuous
travel.
The first good crossing-place was at Lambeth, and it is generally
assumed that the earliest of all the tracks took the stream here,
for the alignment of the main approach from Kent through Canterbury,
Rochester, and Shooters’ Hill does not point at the centre of London,
but at Lambeth. This, it is presumed, was the track followed by what
is now Park Lane, and so ultimately north-westward by the Edgware Road
and its continuations to Chester, with a branch thrown off through
the pass between the marshes of the Mersey and the Pennine range
in the district of Manchester, and so on through Lancashire. But at
some very early stage there was established a crossing below Lambeth
in the neighbourhood of London Bridge, even before that bridge came
into existence. It is true that there is here a belt of marsh on the
right bank, but the considerable gravelly hill on the left, or north,
bank there would give an opportunity not to be lost. It had three
great advantages: it was a large area of dry land for settlement; it
had defences all round it--marshy land to the north, the Fleet to the
west, the Lea to the east; it had a considerable area for the drawing
up of boats, and a steep shore for wharfage. Under these conditions,
whenever men could first construct a causeway it would have been worth
while to have been at that labour across the Southwark marshes in order
to establish a permanent crossing by ferry, and later by a bridge,
upon the site of London Bridge. At any rate, from that centre--London
Bridge--at some very early period you get trackways radiating.
There is the main one, in the first place, through Canterbury to Dover
and the Kentish ports. Next, there is the eastern one to Colchester,
along which the chief Roman invasion marched to the capture of that
town, which was the capital of the enemy.
[Illustration: WELSH SECTION, HOLYHEAD ROAD]
iii
Next, we may presume (for evidence is lost, especially under the later
Roman work) there was a track towards the centre of Norfolk. Next there
was some great road going northward east of the Pennines, following
the dry land which skirts the Fens and reaching the great fertile
plain of York, and so on northward through Durham up to the crossings
of the Tyne. Where this original main track went we cannot say. We
know the trace of the Roman road which followed it. We may presume
that the divagations and modifications of this road of the Dark Ages
and the Middle Ages, which ultimately built up our main road to the
north, reverted in some degree to the original track. But the whole
thing is guess-work. One thing seems fairly certain: this eastern road
to the north (the twin to the great north-western road by Chester to
Lancashire) must have split about half way to York, one branch making
directly to the plain of York itself, the other obviously running along
the inevitable ridge which points right north through Lincolnshire to
the Humber. There is here no bridge possible. It is not too broad for
a ferry. But though the Roman road, superseding the earlier trackway,
went on northward, it is a fair guess that the original trackway
stopped at the river.
Of cross roads we have fragments, of course, in the Pennines, but
we know nothing of their history. It is clear that the main cross
communications between the peopled area of the Yorkshire Plain and that
of the Lancashire Plain must have gone over by Shipley--the obvious gap
in the chain. But more we cannot tell. That is the natural way, and
there was, so to speak, no avoiding it. What was mainly used further
south we cannot tell. It was a tangled land. There is no clear and
certain trace of cross communications which must have existed across
the Midlands south of Trent. We do not know what great patches of
wood may here have determined the windings of an original road. There
are no serious obstacles (it is high land and dry, with no marshes or
large watercourses), but there was less reason for continual traffic
here from east to west than there was for traffic from north to south;
therefore there was less “potential” than was created by the traffic on
cross communications further south.
The original system of tracks radiating from Salisbury Plain was
simple. They led, in radiating lines straight and curved, directly
to the lower Thames, to the ports of the Channel, to the southern
estuaries, to the north-east--that is, to the Wash--and to the north
direct by the Cotswolds. But true cross communication was lacking
to this set, and was provided by the great road from the Exe to the
Humber, which still survives in the form of the Fosse Way. It runs
throughout the whole of our history, from very long before the first
records nearly to the present day, and is to-day traceable throughout,
and used in many places as a hard road. This main track was one of the
dominant factors in the character of English travel. It has decayed
under modern conditions because its “potential” has gone. There is
no driving power to-day urging travel from south-west to north-east,
and it is only in partial experiments and the linking up of separate
lines that even our railway system serves that end. But before modern
times the Fosse Way played a very great part. For some reason there
was a perpetual necessity for passing from the south-west--Devon and
Dorset--to the north-east coast. Two permanent potentials, that between
north and south and that between east and west, help to explain the
Fosse Way.
England has always tended to fall into two cross divisions--a northern
and a southern one, separated at first by climate (the northern more
rude, the southern more gentle), then by agricultural conditions, the
northern far less peopled, the southern more peopled and more wealthy;
and to an eastern and western division separated by type of landscape,
to some extent by climate, always to some extent by soil, difference in
race, emphasized whenever an invasion came from the Welsh lands on the
one side or from the North Sea on the other. The Fosse Way broke both
those cross divisions and was a sort of “reinforcement” (as they say in
modern concrete), taking the strain of cross tension across the island.
iv
In this short sketch of what were in some cases certainly, in others
only presumably, the original British main tracks we have to note three
factors which have always determined travel in Britain: the centres of
internal economic production, the ports, and the Channel crossings.
Before the modern industrial system the economic centres of
production were the wheat lands, and these were the open land of
which Winchester was the centre, the Dorchester centre, Somerset,
certain separate centres in the Midlands (separated by great woods
which have disappeared and their exact site not certain), the Cheshire
Plain, the Lancashire Plain, the great Yorkshire Plain, and last,
and most important of all, East Anglia--the central Eastern plain
(Essex in particular) was the granary of the early time in England.
Tracks connected all these places: they also connected the centres of
population with the ports. Every one of the tracks makes ultimately
from port to port. You have a connection through London (earlier
perhaps, as we have seen, through Lambeth) between the port of Kent and
the north-western ports (of which Chester is the great original example
and Liverpool the modern); between the north-eastern ports of the
Humber and the Tyne, and the south-western ports at Southampton Water
and Poole (which was of great early importance, and whence we shall
find a Roman road starting). Further west the mouth of the Exe was a
more important approach to Britain in the past than it is now. You have
also the estuary of the Severn, ill provided with natural harbours but
forming in its upper reaches a harbour of its own, with the peculiar
advantage of the lower Avon, with a secure pool at Bristol approached
by the curious and exceptional gorge at Clifton.
Lastly, you have the great port formed by the crossing place at London,
made, as we have seen, by the tendency of early travel, right up to the
appearance of railways, to penetrate a country as far as possible by
its waterways and to carry cargoes well inland, because water carriage
was so much cheaper than land transport.
The third factor--that of river crossing--also has its effect, though a
lesser one, upon the trace of the old British ways. If, for instance,
you carry along any one of the tracks which follow the chalk you
will see how carefully the water crossings were picked. It is the
characteristic of chalk that the rivers lie transverse to it, cutting
gorges through the hills, and each of these crossing places was chosen
where hard land approached from either side. The chalk (and the sand
associated with it) provides at certain points in the valleys twin
spurs approaching the water on either side; hence you have the track
along the north downs crossing the Wey at St. Catherine’s Chapel (and
alternatively by Guildford); and, again, the Mole at Pixham, near
Dorking, and the Medway at Snodland (with an alternative at Rochester).
The southern track along the Hampshire and Sussex Downs takes the Arun
at a similar advantage and opportunity at Houghton, and alternatively
at Arundel. It takes the Adur at Bramber, the Ouse at Lewes.
This vague sketch of the old trackways is all that we can lay down so
far as their main lines are concerned, and it is very imperfect, but we
must bear it in mind in order to understand the Roman system, which was
largely based upon those trackways and which superseded them.
There was one kind of soil, and one only, which could compete with
the chalk as good going for primitive travel, and that was sand. Had
we sand in continuous lines in Britain it would have given a dry
passage for the trackways, and here and there advantage is taken of it
by such trackways. But sand, in point of fact, is not to be found in
these continuous lines. It comes in patches, and hence we cannot talk
of any one of the great trackways as dependent upon a sandy soil. The
chief exception that I can call to mind in this respect is the run
of the old Pilgrims’ Way--a prehistoric track from the neighbourhood
of Farnham to the crossing of the Mole, near Dorking. Though chalk
lay on the main direction, it seems to have preferred the southern
dry sand to the chalk immediately north of it, and it keeps to the
sand until the cessation of that formation a short distance west of
the Mole. There is here a curious piece of political geology which
has been, I think, of great effect upon the history of England. Had
the ridges of sand through the weald of Sussex been _continuous_, the
weald would have been developed early. Its iron industry would have
furnished a basis for export, and it would have become one of the
centres of population. There are ridges of sand which you can trace
all the way through the weald from close by the Hampshire chalk in the
neighbourhood of Midhurst right away to the valley of the Rother. But
they are not continuous, and the interruptions are formed of deep clay,
impossible to pass in winter. The result of that lack of continuity
has been that no such track ever developed through the weald of Sussex.
Sussex, therefore, owing to the stiff clay of its weald, remained cut
off from the rest of England, and that throughout all the Dark Ages.
It falls out of the national history. Indeed, the linking up of Sussex
with the north was only effected by the Romans at the cost of great
labour through the artificial causeway of the Stane Street between
Chichester and London; and after the breakdown of western civilization
in the fifth century there was no regular approach to the southern
coast from the Thames valley in a direct line. The traffic either
went westward down towards Southampton, Hampshire, Dorset, and Devon
or eastward to the Straits of Dover. The Norman Conquest and the rule
of the Angevins restored Sussex to something of its rightful place in
English communications because the coast of that county lay immediately
opposite the centre of the foreign region which then governed England,
but the interlude was not lengthy. In the later Middle Ages and on
to quite modern times (to the middle of the eighteenth century) the
interruption due to the clay made itself felt again, and only the
railway and great increase of population have been able between them to
restore direct and frequent communication between the Thames valley and
this part of the southern coast.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Our shires were _probably_ originally British, and later Roman,
divisions.