Part 5

The pilgrims, therefore, at certain places did not need to follow step by step the ancient way. They sometimes fail to find us the prehistoric ford, for many bridges and ferries would exist in their time. They sometimes bend right out of the original path to visit some notable shrine, and there is more than one point where another stream of their fellows, coming from London or from the Channel, joins and tends to confuse the track. The occasions are but rare,[3] and they are noted here only to explain certain conclusions which will follow in the second part of this book. Taking the pilgrimage as a whole it was the chief factor in the preservation of the Old Road.

Second in the causes of the survival of the Old Road came the turnpikes. The system of turnpike roads served to perpetuate, and in many cases to revive, the use of the old way when the pilgrimage itself was but very vaguely remembered. The tolls chargeable upon these new and firm roads furnished a very powerful motive for drovers and pack-riders to use an alternative route where such charges would not fall upon them. A similar cause was in operation to preserve 'the Welsh road' in the Midlands, and on this southern way of ours there are places when it was in operation, not indeed within living memory, but within the memory of the parents of those now living.

For instance, the road along the summit of the Hog's Back was a better road than the old track which follows the 300-feet contour upon the south side of the hill; but the summit road was a turnpike for many years during which the lower ill-kept lane was free, and hence a track which, since the Reformation, had served only to link up the little villages of Seale and Puttenham was used once more as a thoroughfare between Guildford and Farnham. A new stream had been diverted into the old channel, and this habit of avoiding the turnpike continued till a date so close to our own time as easily to bridge a gap which, but for that diversion, might have proved impassable. It is not without irony that a system whose whole object was to replace by new and more excellent roads the old rough tracks, proved, indirectly, one of the principal sources of their survival.

The chalk, the third cause of that survival, is of such importance, and that importance is so commonly neglected, that it almost merits an essay of its own.

Consider the various characters which make of this soil the best conceivable medium for the preservation of an ancient road.

Like the sandy heaths and rocky uplands through which other primitive trails would naturally lead, it never paid to cultivate and therefore invited the wayfarer who was not permitted to trespass upon tilled land. But unlike other waste soil, it was admirably adapted to retain the trace of his passage. Long usage will wear into chalk a deep impression which marshy land will not retain, and which hard rocky land will never suffer. Compare, for example, the results of continuous travel along certain of the Yorkshire moors with that which will be produced along the Chilterns above the Thames valley. In the first case very marshy land, perpetually changing, alternates with hard rock. Unless some considerable labour were expended, as in the making of a causeway, neither of these would retain any record of the road when once it had fallen into desuetude. But on the chalk some trace would rapidly form, and with every succeeding year would grow more obvious.

Chalk is viscous and spongy when it is wet. It is never so marshy as to lose all impression made upon it. It is never so hard as to resist the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil. The platform of the road is pressed outward, and kneaded, so to speak, into an outer escarpment, which would make such a track, for generations after it was abandoned, quite plain along the hillside. Finally, there are, or were until lately, no forces at work to destroy such a record. The chalk was little built upon; it had no occasion to be largely traversed by modern roads; it stood up in steep hills whereon no one would have dreamt of building, until the torture of our modern cities drove men to contrast.

How these hills invited, and almost compelled, the primitive traveller to use them has been already described. Once he began to use their soil, better than any other soil in England, it would retain his memory.

* * * * *

Now since some considerable portion of the Old Road has been preserved, a basis for knowledge is afforded. Patches aggregating in length to just over eighty miles are certain and fixed. It is possible to work from that known thing to the unknown, and the gaps where the Road is lost can be recovered by the consistent pursuit of a certain method; this method when it is described will be seen to lend to a first vague and tentative examination a greater value than it seemed to promise. It permitted us to establish by converging lines of proof so much of what had been lost, that one may now fairly call the full course of the Road established from the north gate of Winchester, whence it originates, to the west gate of Canterbury, which is its goal.

A description of our method is a necessary preliminary to that of the journey upon which it was put to the test.

The reconstitution of such a road is essentially the filling up of gaps. The task would be impossible if a very large proportion did not remain evident to the eye, or recorded by continuous history. The task would be much more difficult if the gaps in question were of very great length, succeeded by equally long unbroken pieces of the existing road. Luckily, the record or preservation of the Pilgrim's Way has not fallen upon these lines. There is no continuous gap throughout the whole of these 120 miles of greater length than seven miles, and we have in what may be called the 'known portions,' stretches of ten, thirteen, and even fifteen miles, almost unbroken.

Moreover, the proportion of the known to the unknown is considerable: 60 per cent. of the total distance of 120 miles is known to 40 per cent. unknown, and it must be understood that throughout this book I speak of those parts as 'known' or 'recognised,' which have been universally admitted since the study of the subject was approached by archæologists.

These two facts, the considerable proportion of the known to the unknown, and the absence of any very long stretch in which the Road is lost, facilitate the task in a manner that can be put best graphically by some such little sketch as the preceding, where the dark line is the known portion of the Road. It is evident that the filling up of the gaps is indicated by the general tendency of the rest.

There is a mass of other indications besides the mere direction to guide one in one's research; and a congeries of these together make up what I have called the method by which we approached the problem.

That method was to collate all the characteristics which could be discovered in the known portions of the Road, and to apply these to the search for traces of the lost portion.

Supporting such a method there are the _a priori_ arguments drawn from geographical and geological conditions.

There are place-names which point out, though only faintly, the history of a village site.

There is the analogy of trails as they exist in savage countries at the present day.

There is the analogy of other portions of prehistoric tracks which still exist in Britain.

All these confirm or weaken a conclusion, but still the most important arguments are found in the characteristics which can be discovered in the known portions of the Road, and which may be presumed, in the absence of contradictory evidence, to attach to the lost portions also.

When a gap was reached, it was necessary to form an hypothesis to guide one in one's next step, and such an hypothesis could best be formed upon a comparison of all these various kinds of knowledge. The indication afforded by any one of them would, as a rule, be slight, but the convergence of a number of such indications would commonly convey a very strong presumption in favour of some particular track.

It was then our business to seek for some remaining evidences, apparent to the eye, whereby the track could be recovered. Such evidences were the well-known fact that a line of very old yews will often mark such a road where it lies upon the chalk; the alignment of some short path with a known portion behind, and a known portion before one; while, of course, the presence of a ridge or platform upon such an alignment we regarded (in the absence of any other lane) as the best guide for our search.

Occasionally, the method by which we brought our conjecture to the test had to be applied to another kind of difficulty, and a choice had to be made between two alternative tracks, each clear and each with something in its favour; in one or two short and rare examples, the Road very plainly went one way, when by every analogy and experience of its general course it should have gone another. But, take the problem as a whole, whether applied to the commonest example, that of forming an hypothesis and then finding whether it could be sustained, or to the most exceptional (as where we found the Road making straight for a point in a river where there was no ford), the general method was always the same: to consider the geographical and geological conditions, the analogy of existing trails of the same sort, the characters we had found in the Road itself throughout its length as our research advanced, and to apply these to the parts where we were in doubt.

The number of 'habits,' if I may so call them, which the Road betrayed, was much larger than would at first have appeared probable, and that we could discover them was in the main the cause of our success, as the reader will see when I come to the relation of the various steps by which we reconstituted, as I hope, the whole of the trail.

The principal characteristics or 'habits' are as follows:--

I. The Road never turns a sharp corner save under such necessity as is presented by a precipitous rock or a sudden bend in a river.

In this it does precisely what all savage trails do to-day, in the absence of cultivated land. When you have a vague open space to walk through at your choice you have no reason for not going straight on.

We found but one apparent exception to this rule in the whole distance: that at the entry to Puttenham; and this exception is due to a recent piece of cultivation.[4] This alignment, however, is not rigid--nothing primitive ever is--the Road was never an absolutely straight line, as a Roman road will be, but it was always direct.

II. The Road always keeps to the southern slope, where it clings to the hills, and to the northern bank (_i.e._ the southward slope) of a stream. The reason of this is obvious; the slope which looks south is dry.

There are but four exceptions to this rule between Winchester and Canterbury, and none of the four are so much as a mile in length.[5]

III. The road does not climb higher than it needs to.

It is important to insist upon this point, because there is nothing commoner than the statement that our prehistoric roads commonly follow the very tops of the hills. The reason usually given for this statement is, that the tops of the hills were the safest places. One could not be ambushed or rushed from above. But the condition of fear is not the only state of mind in which men live, nor does military necessity, when it arises, force a laden caravan to the labour of reaching and following a high crest. The difficulty can be met by a flanking party following the top of the ridge whose lower slope is the platform for the regular road. In this way the advantage of security is combined with the equally obvious advantage of not taking more trouble than you are compelled to take. There are several excellent examples of the flanking road on this way to Canterbury, notably the ridge-way along the Hog's Back,[6] which has become the modern high-road; but nowhere does the Old Road itself climb to the top of a hill save when it has one of two very obvious reasons: (_a_) the avoidance of a slope too steep to bear the traveller with comfort, or (_b_) the avoidance of the ins and outs presented by a number of projecting ridges. On this account at Colley Hill, before Reigate, and later, above Bletchingly, near Redhill, the Road does climb to the crest: and so it does beyond Boughton Aluph to avoid a very steep ravine. Once on the crest, it will remain there sometimes for a mile or so, especially if by so doing it can take advantage of a descending spur later on: as after Godmersham Park down to Chilham. But, take the Road as a whole, its habit when a convenient southerly bank of hills is present, is to go up some part of the slope only, and there to run along from 50 to 100 feet above the floor of the valley. If it be asked why the earlier traveller should have been at the pains of rising even so much as this, it may be noted that the reason was threefold: it gave the advantage of a view showing what was before one; it put one on the better drained slope where the land would be drier; and it lifted one above the margin of cultivation in later times when men had learned to plough the land. In the particular case of this Road it had the further advantage that it usually put one on the porous chalk and avoided the difficult clay of the lower levels.

IV. Wherever the Road goes right up to the site of a church it passes upon the southern side of that site.

It is necessary to digress here for a moment upon the archæological importance of these sites. They are but an indication, not a proof, of prehistoric sanctity. It would be impossible to say in what proportion the old churches of these islands stand upon spots of immemorial reverence, but it is certain that a sufficient proportion of them do so stand (the church of Bishopstoke, for instance, upon the site of a Druidical circle), as to afford, when a considerable number are in question, a fair presumption that many of the sites have maintained their meaning from an age long prior to Christianity. Apart from the mass of positive evidence upon this matter, we have our general knowledge upon the methods by which the Faith supplemented, and in part supplanted, older and worse rituals; and there is an impression, which no one who has travelled widely in western Europe will deny, that the church of a place has commonly something about it of the central, the unique, or the isolated in position; characters which cannot wholly be accounted for by the subsequent growth of the community around them.

Now, on its way from Winchester to Canterbury, the Old Road passes, not in the mere proximity of, but right up against, thirteen existing or ruined churches. They are, proceeding from west to east, as follows: King's Worthy, Itchen Stoke, Bishop Sutton, Seale, Puttenham, St. Martha's, Shere, Merstham, Titsey, Snodland, Burham, Boughton Aluph, and Chilham.[7] In the case of eight it passes right up against the south porch; in the case of two (Bishop Sutton and Seale) it is compelled to miss them by a few yards. One (St. Martha's) is passed on both sides by a reduplication of the track. One (Chilham) is conjectural, and the last (Shere) is doubtful.

The habit is the more remarkable from the fact that the Road commonly goes north of a village, and therefore should, unless it had some purpose, commonly go north of all churches. And, indeed, it does pass many churches to the north, but it always leaves them (as at Chevening, Lenham, Charing, and the rest) to one side. It never goes close to their site.

The importance of this rule will be apparent when we consider, later on, the spots in which a church stands, or has stood, and where, at the same time, the track is doubtful and has to be determined.

V. In crossing a river-valley, the Road makes invariably for the point where spurs of dry ground and rising ground come closest upon either side, and leave the narrowest gap of marshy land between.

I note this as a characteristic of the Road, quite apart from the more obvious considerations; such as, that primitive man would seek a ford; that he would seek gravel rather than clay; that he would try to pass as high up a river as possible, and that, other things being equal, he would keep to the general alignment of his path as much as possible in crossing a river. All these are self-evident without the test of experience, but this characteristic of which I speak is one that would not occur to a traveller who had not tested it with his own experience. It is so at the crossing of the Itchen, at the crossing of the Wey, at the crossing of the Mole, at the crossing of the Darent, and, as we shall see, it is useful in giving us a clue towards the much more important crossing of the Medway.

VI. Where a hill must be taken, it is taken straight and by the shortest road to the summit, unless that road be too steep for good going.

Here one has something to be found all over England where an old, has been superseded by a modern, way. I have an instance in my mind on the main road westward from Tavistock into Cornwall. It is exactly analogous to what the Indian trails in America do to the present day. It is civilisation or increased opportunities--especially the use of wheeled traffic on a large scale--which leads men to curve round a hill or to zig-zag up it. In the course of the Old Road there are not many examples of this. From the nature of the ground which it traverses the hills to be surmounted are few; but when they do come, the knowledge of this habit will lead one always to prefer the straightest of two ways of reaching the summit.

VII. A similar tendency causes the Road to seek, as immediately as possible, when it is passing from one valley to another, the saddle of the watershed, if that watershed be high.

Of this there is but one example in the Old Road, that near Medstead in Hampshire. It therefore affords us no particular clue in dealing with this road alone, but as we know that the same phenomenon is apparent in the remaining prehistoric tracks, and in existing trails in savage countries throughout the world, it is a valuable clue, as will be seen later in the particular instance of the saddle between the valleys of the Itchen and the Wey.

* * * * *

Prepared for such a method; having well marked our maps and read what there was to read; having made certain that the exact starting-point was the site of the North Gate at Winchester, and that the first miles went along the right bank of the Itchen, we two went down from town before December ended, choosing our day to correspond exactly with the dates of the first pilgrimage. When noon was long past, we set out from Winchester without any pack or burden to explore the hundred and twenty miles before us, not knowing what we might find, and very eager.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The points where the pilgrims obviously left the Old Road are Compton (p. 160) and Burford Bridge (p. 181). They probably left it after Merstham (p. 205) and perhaps after Chilham (p. 271), while they certainly confused the record of the passages of the Wey (p. 165), and perhaps of the Medway (p. 242). As for their supposed excursion into the plain near Oxted (p. 213), I can find no proof of it. The places where other tracks coming in impair the Old Road are on either side of the Mole (p. 181), the Darent (p. 222), and the Medway (p. 237), where, along such river valleys, such tributaries would naturally lead.

[4] See note on p. 158.

[5] In the case of three--those of Gatton, Arthur's Seat, and Godmersham--an excellent reason can at once be discovered. The Road goes just north of the crest, in order to avoid the long circuit of a jutting-out spur with its re-entrant curve. For that re-entrant curve, it must be remembered, would be worse going, and wetter, than even the short excursion to the north of the crest. In the fourth case, however, where the Road goes to the north for a few hundred yards behind Weston Wood, I can offer no explanation of the cause. It is sufficiently remarkable that in all this great distance there should be but that one true exception to the rule, and a characteristic so universal permits me, I think, to take it for certain in one doubtful place (Chilham) that the Road has followed the sunny side of the slope.

[6] There is another, less clear, beyond Titsey, another beyond Chevening, and there are traces of another above Lenham.

[7] The 6-inch Ordnance Map would add Albury (see p. 174).

THE EXPLORATION OF THE ROAD

THE EXPLORATION OF THE ROAD

WINCHESTER TO ALTON

_Eighteen miles and a half_

Winchester differs from most other towns which the Romans reorganised in that its main streets, the street north and south and the street east and west, do not divide the city into four equal quarters. The point where the two ways cross is close to the western wall, and this peculiar arrangement was probably made by the first conquerors in order to avoid an exit upon the marshy land beside the Itchen; for that river flowed just against the eastern wall of the city.

Of the four arms of this cross, the northern, a street always given up to commerce, became, in the later Middle Ages, the Jewry. By a process at first perhaps voluntary, but later legal, the Jews were concentrated into one quarter, a sort of Ghetto. It is to be noticed that in nearly every case these Jewish quarters were in the very thick of a city's life, and (as in the Paris of Philippe le Bel) of far greater value than any other equal area of the city.[8] Something of the kind was present at Winchester. The whole stream of traffic which passed out from the capital to the rest of England went through the lane of the moneylenders, and we may say with certitude that the north gate, the limit of that lane, was the starting-point of the Old Road.

The north gate has now disappeared. It lay just south of the grounds now known as North-Gate House. The deflection of the street is comparatively modern; the original exit was undoubtedly (as at Chichester and elsewhere) along the straight line of the Roman road. This passed near the site of the present house, and pointed towards the isolated tree which marks the northern edge of the garden.

From this point it has been commonly imagined that the Old Road must have coincided with the modern Hyde Street, and have followed this line as far as the smithy at Headbourne Worthy. Thence it has been supposed to branch off to King's Worthy.

From the church of that village onwards through Martyrs' Worthy and Itchen Abbas no one questions but that the modern highway is identical with the Old Road; but I think the original track may be shown to have proceeded not along the modern street, but by an interior curve, following up the Monks' Walk, passing under the modern railway embankment near the arch which is just north of the Itchen bridge, and making thence straight for King's Worthy church, thus leaving Headbourne Worthy on the left, and running as the thick line runs in this sketch-map.

The point evidently demands argument, and I will give the arguments upon one side and upon the other, so that the conclusion may recommend itself to my readers.