Part 4

We can regard Winchester, then, and Canterbury, as the point of departure and the termination of the Old Road. We can be certain that it would lie along the upper valleys of the Itchen and the Wey until it struck the Hog's Back, and that thenceforward it would follow the southern slope of the North Downs until these are cut by the river Stour. From that point the last few miles to Canterbury would naturally run parallel with, and in the valley of, the little Kentish river.

But the task which is attempted in this book is more definite than such a general scheme would convey. Many portions of the Old Road have been preserved, many more have been recovered and mapped by the researches of antiquarians; the remaining gaps alone was it our care to explore and settle, until we should, if possible, have reconstituted the whole ancient way, yard for yard, from the capital of Hampshire to the capital of Kent. That was our business, and in order that the reader may follow the more clearly my account of our journey I shall, before beginning that account, set down here, at the end of the present essay, the difficulty which the task presented, how we were aided by certain causes which had conspired to preserve the Old Road, what those causes were, and finally what method we applied to the problem that lay before us.

All archæological research must necessarily repose upon evidence less firm than that of true history, yet a great part of it deals with things lying right to hand.

A barrow is an unmistakable thing. You open it and you find a tomb.

Whatever may be said of paleolithic man, neolithic man has left the most enduring and indubitable evidence. He worked in the most resisting of materials, and he worked well.

A Roman road is a definite thing. Its known dimensions are a guide for our research: the known rules of the Roman engineers. The strata of material, often the embankment, remain. Its long alignments have but to be recovered in a couple of points to establish its direction through a considerable stretch of country. Did a man but know the ridge over Gumber Corner and down Bignor Hill, the Billingshurst Road, the hard foundations through Dorking Churchyard, it would be enough to make him certain of the Stane Street.

But of all the relics of antiquity the prehistoric road is the most difficult to establish.

These old tracks, British, and (if the word has any meaning) pre-British, though they must abound in the island, have become most difficult to reconstitute.

The wild, half-instinctive trail of men who had but just taken on humanity: later a known and common track, but a track still in the hands of savages for countless generations, a road of this kind is preserved by nothing stronger than habit. No mathematical calculation presided at its origin, none can therefore be used to reconstruct it when it has been lost. When (as in the last phase of the road which is the subject of this book) religion may have prolonged its use into historic times, that influence is capable indeed of perpetuating a tradition; but though religion maintains a shrine or a legend it does not add those consistent records of material works which are the best guide for the research of posterity.

The Old Road was not paved; it was not embanked. Wherever the plough has crossed it during the last four hundred years, the mark of it is lost.

From the clay it has often disappeared: from marshy soil, always. On the chalk alone has it preserved an unmistakable outline. Nor can it be doubted that it would have vanished as completely as have so many similar roads upon the Continent and in our own Midlands, had it not been for one general, and three particular, influences which, between them, have preserved a proportion of it sufficient to serve as a basis for the exploration of the remainder.

The general influence was that political sequence by which England has developed a peculiar power for retaining the evidences of her remote past. The three particular influences were, first, the Canterbury pilgrimage; secondly, the establishment of a system of turnpikes in the eighteenth century; thirdly, and most important of all, the chalk.

Consider first the general influence: the effect of English society upon this matter.

This little district of the world is a very museum of such primitive things as lie at the basis of society: of such immaterial things as our existing relics of barbaric polity: of such material things as early systems of defence, the tombs of various forgotten races, the first instruments of iron, bronze and stone; and of my own subject here, the primeval track-ways, in what way has our political history helped to preserve them?

The Empire held this province sufficiently to preserve, but not so thoroughly as to destroy. The districts bounded but untraversed by the great military roads which fed the frontier garrisons must have been left in part autonomous; forbidden indeed to disturb the peace, but not transformed by an ubiquitous administration.

Flourishing as were the very numerous towns, and large as their combined populations must have been, they seem to have remained to the end an archipelago surrounded as it were by a sea of forest and heath, wherein could be found a thin but permanent population, preserving its own language and its tribal system, in touch with the unconquered tribes beyond the Grampians and the Irish Sea, and remaining to the end but half-impressed with the stamp of Latin government.

The picture is but general; exceptions are numerous. Roman estates were cultivated peacefully far from the towns, and certainly nothing dangerous to the ruling man could befall him in the half-conquered tracts of which I speak; but in the rough the picture is true.

Now such a state of things would have among other results this: that it would not destroy the habits of the barbarians, it would crystallise them.

Under such conditions a great activity and wealth accentuated the use of a hundred pre-Roman things. The prosperity which the barbarians enjoyed, the markets in the towns which they must have frequented, would multiply their ancient instruments and would put to a continual use their native trails; and these, as I have pointed out, were not to any great extent overlaid by or forgotten in the new civilisation.

Whatever Gaulish track may have led from Paris to Orleans (and it is historically certain that such a trail did run through the woods to the south of Lutetia), or whatever old track-way was carried along the north of the Apennines, both have wholly disappeared. The great straight causeway of Rome cutting across the Beauce has killed the one, the Æmilian Way the other. So it is throughout nearly all the land which Rome developed, with the exception of this province; here the fragments of a score of British track-ways survive.

When the Empire fell the nature of our decline equally preserved our past. Alone of the Roman provinces the eastern half of Britain was really ruined. It had been exposed for two centuries to the attacks of pirates who came from the unconquered and inexhaustible north. Remote, an Island, impoverished, the first of the frontiers to be abandoned, it was at last overwhelmed: to what extent we can only guess, and in what manner we cannot tell at all, but at any rate with sufficient completeness to make us alone lose the Faith which is the chief bond of civilisation.

The interval was short. There is still some glimmering of light in the middle of the fifth century. In little more than a hundred years communication was reestablished with the Continent, and before the sixth century had closed St. Augustine had landed.

The anarchy had covered a gap no greater than the interval which separates us from the Declaration of Independence, but it had been sufficient to restore to the island the atmosphere of barbarism. There was no Palace, nor any such central authority as everywhere else maintained in the provinces the main traditions of Rome. In the west a medley of Celtic, in the east a confusion of Teutonic dialects had drowned the common medium of thought.

Religion itself when it returned was coloured by the simplicity and folly of the ruin. In the west the unity of Christendom was hardly comprehended, in the east the town of Rome became for the Anglo-Saxons the subject of a sort of idolatry. Letters, geography, common history, glass, and the use of half the metals were forgotten. Not till the Latin re-conquest in the eleventh century was the evil overcome and an organisation at last regained.

But this catastrophe, deplorable as it still remains to history, has proved of the highest value to antiquarians. It produced indeed fantastic legends, stories of the landing of the Horse and the Mare, of Cerdic, Port, Cymric and Wightgar, which have disturbed our national tradition, and which an ignorant bias has credited almost to our own day: alone, therefore, of Western nations have we suffered a real gap in our national story. On the other hand, this gap re-created, as I have pointed out in a former page, those conditions under which the primitive values of hill, wood, marsh, and river reappeared.

The sight of such and such a group of ancient habitations, the meaning to unprotected men of such and such a physical opportunity for defence, in a word, all the influence which topography could exercise on the rudest and most remote of our ancestors, grew real again in the welter and breakdown which we call the Anglo-Saxon period. The artifice and clear creative power of the Mediterranean races was gone: it has never wholly returned to these shores; and what this time chose for the building of cities or the use of roads or of places for defence, is ever an excellent indication of what men had also done long before the Romans came.

How our past has further been preserved by the shape and moulding of the land I shall describe more fully in a further page. There remain to be mentioned two political forces equally conservative. The first is that species of lethargy and contempt which has forbidden us, as it has forbidden every other aristocratic community, to destroy the vestiges of its past. The second is a power more especial but closely allied to this, I mean the influence of the few great owners of the soil.

Whatever results of disorder and of public apathy may proceed from the constitution of this class, and whatever historical learning may have suffered from its power over the universities, prehistoric research has secured from it the greatest advantage, for the landlords of our villages have maintained the antiquities of their manors with the force of a religion. The first barrow to be opened in England was examined by the orders of a great landlord; the fine discoveries of Titsey Park were directly due to the initiative of its owner, the inheritor of Gresham's land. Albury preserves and dignifies one of the critical portions of the Old Road; Eastwell another--and these are but a few of the many that might be cited from this one track-way alone.

We may sum up and say that the political development of England has, in a general fashion, preserved antiquity, and that we owe to it very largely the survival of such relics as the Old Road.

But those particular causes, which have already been mentioned, exercised a more powerful influence: the first of these was the Great Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose immediately after his murder in 1174.

To appreciate what that pilgrimage did for the preservation of the Old Road one must grasp the twelfth century.

From just before its opening till a generation after its close, from the final conquests of the Normans to the reign of St. Louis, from the organising plan of Gregory VII. to the domination of Innocent III., from the first doubts of the barbaric schools to the united system of the Summa, from the first troubled raising of the round arch in tiers that attempted the effect of height to the full revelation of Notre Dame--in that 120 years or more moved a process such as even our own time has not seen. It was an upheaval like that by which, in the beginnings of terrestrial life, the huge and dull sea-monsters first took to the keen air of the land. Everything was in the turmoil which the few historians who have seen the vision of this thing have called, some an anarchy, and others a brief interlude of liberty in the politics of Europe. It was neither one nor the other: it was the travail of a birth.

When this young life was once started in the boiling energies of the Crusades:--young Louis VI. the fighter, St. Bernard, the man that would put all into order, young Abelard, who again, after so many silent centuries, began to answer the riddle of the sphinx--when this argosy of youth was launched, the first task of the Church was to attempt to steer it. We know that the Church succeeded, as she succeeded in saving all that could be saved of the Mediterranean civilisation when the Roman Empire bowed, and all that could be saved of our common moral tradition when, after the terrors of the fifteenth century, Europe of the sixteenth threatened to fall into dust.

In the twelfth century the Church captured and rode the new energies, but in that storm of creation a very great deal went down. How much we do not know. It is probable that Rome was still Roman until the Normans sacked it at the beginning of this era. It is certain that the walls surrounding our English cities and those of the northern French and the western Germans were unchanged since the Pagan time, until the expansion of the twelfth century came to break them. I say what relics of primeval learning, what verbal inheritance of primeval experience, were lost in the new violence of Europe, cannot be known. It is enough for us that the essence of civilisation was saved; that if we let go the history of the tribal past with one hand we at least beat off Asia with the other; that if the Romanesque gave up its last spark in that gale, at least the Gothic replaced it.

For the purpose of this book one great loss must be noted: most of the prehistoric roads disappeared.

The unity of Europe, a thing hitherto highly conscious, fully existent, but inactive like the soul of a man in a reverie, sprang into expression and permeated outward things. Men travelled. Inter-communication became within fifty years from a pastime a habit, and from a habit a necessity. Not only the Crusades had done this, but something anterior, some passion for new horizons, which of itself had helped to produce the Crusades. The orders and appeals of a united Church began to circulate throughout Christendom. The universities had arisen, and were visited almost as nomads would visit them: the students crowding now Bologna, now Salerno, now Oxford, and fixing themselves at last, like a swarm of bees, in Paris. The Benedictines had already sketched the idea of the representative system--it was beginning to invade political life. The justice of the central kings went touring on assize. Some say that the cathedral builders themselves were like the soul of Europe wandering from place to place.

With all this the cross-roads developed. Every little village was linked up with every other; the main vague ways, older than history, which joined not even towns directly, but followed only the dry and open of the high lands, necessarily decayed. Some few kept their place. The Watling Street was a necessity; it led from the Straits of Dover to London, and from London to the corner which is the triple gate to Ireland, to Wales and to Strathclyde--the only road by which you can outflank Snowdon if you are going west, the Pennines if you are going west and north. It is still, on the whole, the line of our principal railway. But the Fosse Way began to lose its meaning. The Ermine Street maintained some eminence, for Lincoln was a great town, but the Icknield Way fell into broader and broader gaps. A man would with difficulty discover that the Stane Street was still used.

The road of which this book treats would have disappeared more certainly than any of these.

Winchester was decaying (for England was now quite united, and the north counted in a way), London was becoming more and more--for with intercommunication commerce was arising, and with the harsh efforts of the German against the eastern heathen the Baltic was acquiring a civilisation; with travel the sea was becoming familiar to others than to pirates, and with the sea the port was growing in position--London was becoming more and more, and was already almost the capital of England. Henry II. was perhaps the last king who thought of Winchester as his chief town. London was to overawe his son; his great-grandson was to make Westminster the centre of the constitution.

From Southampton to London the road would remain; the roads from London to Canterbury and to the ports of Kent would grow in importance; but our road, the base of that triangle, would necessarily have decayed: there was less traffic than ever before from west to east, from the Mendips and Cornwall to the Straits. The metals of the Devonian peninsula, and of the Severn valley had lost their economic position, the iron of the Sussex Weald had taken their place. The expeditions to Ireland and the new Scottish problem had removed to Chester and to Lancaster the centres of strategical importance; the same commerce which was giving London its hegemony--I mean the commerce of the Baltic and the North Sea--was developing Orford and King's Lynn, and all East Anglia, and, to a lesser degree, the Humber. The Germanic states had spread so eastward as to draw the life of Gaul also eastward, and to bleed its western promontory; the crossing of the sea between the Cornwalls had lost its old political importance: all combined to kill Winchester, and with Winchester the road from that old capital to Canterbury, when an accident came to preserve that way.

This accident was the murder of Thomas à Becket.

I will not deny that an effect always mingles with its cause; for things that happen are realities, whereas time is not real at all. Not only does the saint make the shrine, but the shrine also the saint. A saint must have come to Canterbury. A primeval site will sooner or later bring to fruit a primeval sacredness. But a study of this kind cannot lose itself in such mysteries. It must confine itself to definite history. In that moment, when the spiritual vision of Europe was at its keenest, when stone itself was to be moulded like clay by the intense vision of things beyond the world, when Suger had conceived the pointed arch at St. Denis, and the gem upon St. Michael's Hill was being cut into its facets, when the Church was most determined to fashion the new world, and to give it a philosophy, and when that task was at its most difficult, from the necessary quarrel between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal--when the world was fully engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens and Christians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling match, there fell this blow. For the first time in all these centuries (and at what a time) violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket's tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom.

Ireland of the saints, South Wales still tribal, still in a way unfixed, lending its population to far adventures and to the attraction of distant places, all the south-western peninsula of England, Brittany for ever mystic, the mountain masses of the Asturias which had themselves preserved an original sanctity, the western ports from Vigo to recently conquered Lisbon--the only ports by which the Christian enthusiasm of the Spaniards conquering Islam could take to the newly opened sea and to the north--all these sent their hordes to converge on Winchester, and thence to find their way to Canterbury.

The whole year came at last to see the passing and re-passing of such men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struck down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the pilgrims: the same weather in which we ourselves traversed it during the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work.

With the jubilee the body was translated in the flush of early summer, and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new and more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the habit of such a journey had now grown so general that every season saw some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer, the winter as we know from the traditional dates preserved upon the Continent, the summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough of the autumn.

It was not only the directness of the Old Road between Winchester and Canterbury that reconstituted its use for the purpose of these pilgrimages: it was also that peculiar association of antiquity and of religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.

The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by that well,' he heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb that isolated hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it and were banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.' ... 'It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' ... 'The church you will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch sunward by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since custom began.'

From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the oldest of paths. The same force of antique usage and affection which, in a past beyond all record, had lent their meaning to rocks and springs upon a public way, re-flourished; and once again, to the great pleasure of myself who write of it now, and of all my readers who love to see tradition destroying calculated things, the momentum of generations overcame.

The pilgrimage saved the road. But once started it developed new sanctities of its own, as a tree transplanted will strike roots and take a bend this way or that different from the exact intention of the gardener. In the main it did nothing but preserve the immemorial sites: the cliff above the river Wey, the lonely peaked hill of St. Martha's that answers it from beyond the stream, the cross-roads on the crest of the Downs above Reigate, the ford of the Medway, the entry into the valley of the Stour, it transformed and fixed as Christian things. Our remote ancestry was baptized again, and that good habit of the faith, whereby it refuses to break with any chain of human development, marked and retained for history the oldest things. Upon that rock St. Catherine's was built, upon that hill the Martyrs' Chapel; twin churches in line pointed to the ford of the Medway, the old and dim great battle of the valley was dominated not only by the rude monuments of those who had fallen in it, but by the abbey of Boxley. Charing worshipped the block on which the Baptist had suffered, and the church of Chilham rose on the flank of the hills which had first disputed the invasion of the Romans. What Canterbury became we know.

But this influence, though it was in the main highly conservative, may here and there mislead us.

The new civilisation was well settled before the pilgrimage began. The Normans had governed and ordered for a century; the new taxes, the new system of justice, the new central kingship, had been well founded for over a generation.