Part 7

We were unable to prove this by direct examination; the main line of railway has here obliterated much by an embankment, and to this has been added all the new work of the Meon valley line, and the junction. The ground has therefore lost all its original character, and its oldest marks have disappeared. We made no attempt to follow the direct path for this short mile. We descended the high-road round by Chawton to Alton, and the first division of our task, the division in which a greater proportion of uncertainty would exist than in any other, was accomplished.

Comforted by such a thought, we drank mild ale at the 'Three Tuns' for about half an hour.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] The prosperity of the Jews in the early Middle Ages was remarkable. They have been said to have accumulated 46 per cent. of the total personalty of England in little more than the first century of their operations. This is an error, due to overlooking the fact that for the Saladin Tithe the Jew was taxed one fourth and not one-tenth of his goods. The true figure should be about 25½ per cent. But even that is astonishing for perhaps one per cent. of the population. It supposes an average Jewish fortune twenty-five times larger than the average English one.

[9] This is a strong argument, because Headbourne Worthy, the point in dispute, was precisely the most important of these villages. It is given in Domesday (Ordie) as the holding of Mortemer, while King's Worthy was but a hamlet, and Martyrs' Worthy is not mentioned.

[10] Mr. Haverfield in the _Victoria History of Hampshire_ (vol. i. 287) gives the Roman Road as going straight from the North Gate to the King's Worthy church. See also his general map and his description on p. 321. This is surely preferable to the conjecture of the 6-inch Ordnance (Hampshire, XLI.) that it followed the line of Hyde Street and proceeded to Headbourne Worthy.

[11] One would naturally expect Alfred's bones to have been scattered with the rest in the Reformation; they seem to have been spared. It was most probably Alfred's leaden coffin that was dug up unopened in the building of the now vanished prison, and sold in 1788. It fetched two pounds.

[12] Leaving upon our left the first of the archæological discoveries which mark the whole of the Road:--the Roman villa unearthed or explored by Mr. Collier in 1878.

[13] The balance of evidence is certainly against it. In favour of the antiquity of New Alresford we have the phrase _restored_ applied to Bishop Lucy's market, and the three churches attached to Alresford in Domesday, and supposed to show that more than one village was attached to the manor. Against, we have the immediate presence of the artificial head of water established by the Bishop; the name, and the fact that the medieval road from Alton went not to New but to Old Alresford. Again, while there is no special mention of New Alresford in Domesday, there is mention of Sutton, close by, and a Bishop's palace stood there for some centuries.

[14] Their passage is an excellent example of the Reversion of the Pilgrimage to an ancient road. The regular road in the thirteenth century was presumably that by Chawton Wood and Bighton, mentioned by Duthie, who finds it in a charter of Henry III.'s. (This charter, it is only fair to add, was never discovered by his executors.)

[15] Thus West Street and Broad Street near Lenham, Dun Street at the edge of Eastwell, the old name for Albury (Weston Street), etc.

[16] The point where the line leaves the modern road is east of Bury Lane, just past a farm called Dean Farm. The ridge is first noticeable in the field marked 134 in the 1/2500 inch Ordnance Map for Hampshire [XLII. 7, Old Series, 1870, Ropley Parish].

[17] These fields are marked 191, 192, and 194 on 1/2500 inch Ordnance Map, Hampshire, Old Series, 1870, XLII. 8.

[18] The boundary between the fields marked 201, and 202-3 in map cited above. The track is again lost for a short distance in crossing the field marked 205.

[19] The last few yards of the alignment follow the boundary between plots marked 219 and 216 in map already quoted.

[20] Moreover, from this same point the medieval road to Old Alresford mentioned above left Alton.

ALTON TO SHALFORD

_Twenty-one miles_

At Alton, with the green by which one enters the town from the west, begins a stretch of the Old Road, which stands by itself.

It may be roughly called the division between Alton and Farnham, but it stretches for a mile or two beyond Farnham to the pond at Whiteways, where the main road climbs the summit of the Hog's Back, and leaves the Pilgrim's Way a few hundred yards to the south.

This section, just over thirteen miles in length, has several peculiarities which distinguish it from the rest of the Road.

_First_--It follows the river Wey for miles, not as it followed the river Itchen, on a dry ledge above the stream, but right along the low land of the waterside. This is a feature in the Old Road not to be discovered in any other part of its course. It takes care to be within easy reach of water for men and horses, but it avoids the low level of a stream, and thick cover and danger of floods which such a level usually threaten. We had not found it (save for a very few yards) in immediate touch with the Itchen, nor should we find it later on running by the Mole, the Darent, or the Medway. Even the Stour, whose valley it is compelled to follow, it regards from heights well above the river.

_Secondly_--It runs for a part of this division upon clay, a soil which elsewhere it carefully avoids as being about the worst conceivable for a primitive and unmetalled road. Elsewhere (after Wrotham, for instance), it will make a detour rather than attempt any considerable stretch of gault; but here, for several miles along this valley of the Wey, it faces the danger.

_Thirdly_--In every other portion of its long journey it passes along the _edge_ of habitations and tilled land; it was brought to do so by the same economic tendency which makes our railways to-day pass by the edges, not the centre of most towns; but here it must often have run right through whatever cultivation existed; at Alton, at Farnham, and in one village between, Bentley, it forms the high street of the place. A track which carefully just avoids Guildford, Dorking, Reigate, Westerham, Wrotham, Charing, and a dozen smaller places here touches and occasionally passes through the earliest groups of houses, the earliest pastures and ploughed fields.

Finally, there is a correspondence between it and the modern high-road for the _whole_ of this considerable distance of over thirteen miles. In this character, again, the division we were now entering is unique.

We have indeed already found it identical with a modern road. The modern high-road also corresponds with the old way for something like a mile at Otford over the Darent, and for two or three miles beyond; it is a modern road for more than half a mile before you reach the ferry at Snodland, and there is a road in construction which follows its track for some hundreds of yards on Gravelly Hill, near Caterham. For many miles of its course it is identical if not with high-roads at least with metalled lanes, as we had already found between Itchen Stoke and Bishop Sutton, and very commonly with unmetalled tracks or paths. But in all these cases it is broken: there are stretches of it unused. Modern advantages and modern necessities have left the Old Road continually to one side. Here for this very considerable distance it is identical with the great turnpike, and so remains identical up to and beyond its point of junction with the older 'Harrow Way' at Farnham.

Can we discover any explanation for this coincidence of a prehistoric track with the high-road of our own time, which is almost indifferent to soil? for the crossing of the clay? for the neighbourhood of the river?

A little consideration will enable us to do so. The hills which everywhere else afford so even a platform for the prehistoric road are here of a contour which forbids their use. To-day, as a thousand years ago, any road down this valley must have run upon this lowest line.

The contour-lines, of which a rough sketch is here appended, are enough to prove it.

There is a deep combe at Holybourne Down, two more on either side of Froyle, a fourth beyond Bentley, a fifth--smaller--before Farnham. All these gullies cut up into a hopeless tangle what in Surrey and Kent will become one unbroken bank of chalk. Any path attempting these hillsides would either have doubled its length in avoiding the hollows, or would--had it remained direct--have been a succession of steep ascents and falls; all the dry slopes which bound the vale to the north are a succession of steep and isolated projections, thrust out from the distant main chain of the chalk; many of them are crowned with separated summits. The road is therefore compelled to follow the valley floor with all the consequences I have noted.

As far as Froyle, two and a half miles from Alton, it never leaves the river by more than a quarter of a mile, but the valley is here dry, the soil gravelly and sandy, the height considerable (above three hundred feet), and there is no reason why it should go further from the stream than it did in the valley of the Itchen. After Froyle you get the clay, and then right on through Bentley the road does attempt to get away northward from the stream, avoiding the marshy levels and keeping to the 300-feet contour-line. It does not approach the river again till firmer ground is found near the Bull Inn. Thence to within two miles of Farnham it has to negotiate a good deal of clay, but it picks out such patches of gravel as it can find,[21] and it must be remembered that the valley of the Wey, in this early part, drains more rapidly, and has a less supply of water than that of the Itchen. Near Farnham, somewhat beyond Runwick House, it finds the sand again, and can follow along the low level without difficulty.

The Old Road keeps throughout this passage to the sunny northern bank of the river, so that, while it is compelled to keep to the bottom of the valley, it attempts at least to get the driest part of it.

Farnham, at the mouth of this valley, the point of junction between the Old Road and its still older predecessor from Salisbury Plain, was always a place of capital importance, especially in war. The Roman entrenchment, two miles up the valley, the Roman dwellings to the south, tell us only a little of its antiquity; and though our knowledge of the castle extends no further than the eleventh century, the fact that it was the meeting-place of the roads that came from Salisbury Plain, from the Channel, from London, and from the Straits of Dover, necessarily made it a key to southern England.

We have seen how the western roads converge there, first the Harrow Way, then our own road from Southampton Water and Winchester (a road which probably received the traffic of all the south beyond Dorsetshire), then the road from Portsmouth and the Meons, which came in at Chawton.

The accident of the Surrey hills made all men who wished to get to the south-western ports from the Thames valley and the east pass through Farnham. Travellers going west and north from the Weald were equally compelled, if they would avoid the ridge, to pass through Farnham. The former had to come down north of the Hog's Back, the latter from the south of it, and it was ever at Farnham that they met.

At Farnham, therefore, the first political division of our road may be said to end; and after Farnham the western tracks, now all in one, proceed to the Straits of Dover, or rather to Canterbury, which is the rallying-point of the several Kentish ports.

Just outside the town the road begins to rise: it is an indication that the road is about to take the flank of the hills, a position which it holds uninterruptedly (save for four short gaps occasioned by four river valleys) from this point until the Camp above Canterbury.

Hitherto, for reasons which I have explained, the road has had no opportunity of this kind. The hills of the Itchen valley were not sufficiently conspicuous, those of the upper Wey too tortuous, for the trail to take advantage of a dry, even, and well-drained slope. The height to which it rises between Ropley and Alton is not a height chosen for its own purpose, but a height which had to be overcome of necessity to cross the watershed. Henceforward, until we were within a few miles of Canterbury, there stretched before us, on and on, day after day, the long line of the northern heights, whose escarpment presented everything the Old Road needed for its foundation, and of which I have written at such length in the earlier portion of this book.

The rise continued gently until the inn at Rumbold was passed, and the fork at Whiteways was reached. Here the old flanking road went up along the ridge of the Hog's Back in the shape of the modern turnpike, while our track was left to continue its eastward way, two hundred feet below, upon the side of the hill.

Its soil was here a thin strip of the green-sand which continued to support us, until next day we crossed the Tillingbourne, just above Shere. It runs, therefore, firmly and evenly upon a dry soil, and the villages and the churches mark its ancient progress.

The afternoon was misty, even the telegraph poles, which at first marked the ridge of the Hog's Back above us, disappeared in the first half mile. We went unhappily and in the fog regretting the baker's cart which had taken us along many miles of road so swiftly and so well: a cart of which I have not spoken any more than I have of the good taverns we sat in, or of the curious people we met (as for instance, the warrior at Farnham), because they are not germane to such an historical essay as is this.

We went, I say, regretting the baker's cart, and came to the wonderful church of Seale standing on its little mound. We noted that the track passed to southward of it, not right against its southern porch, but as near as it could get, given the steep accident of the soil just beyond. We noted this (but dully, for we were very tired), and we plodded on to Shoelands.

We were in the thick of the memories which are the last to hang round the Old Road, I mean the memories of those pilgrims, who, after so many thousand years of its existence, had luckily preserved the use and trace of the way.

Seale was built at the expense of Waverley, right in the enthusiasm that followed the first pilgrimages, just after 1200. The names also of the hamlets have been held to record the pilgrimage. How Seale (a name found elsewhere just off the Old Road) may do so I cannot tell. 'Shoelands' has been connected with 'Shooling'--almsgiving. Compton church itself was famous. Even little Puttenham had its pilgrim's market, and Shalford its great fair, called Becket's fair. We left Seale then, and at last, two miles on and very weary, we approached Puttenham, where, for the first time since Alton, something of exploration awaited us.

There was, indeed, just before reaching Puttenham, a small difficulty, but it is not of this that I am writing. The Old Road, which had for miles coincided with the lane, turned a sharp corner, and this, as I have already remarked, is so much against its nature in every known part of it, that I could only ascribe it to a cultivated field[22] which has turned the road. Once tillage had begun, the road would be led round this field, and the old track, crossing it diagonally, would disappear under the plough; the original way must have run much as is suggested at the point marked X upon the map, and the suggestion has the greater force from the presence of a footpath following this line.

But the point is of little importance and is easily settled. In Puttenham itself lay the more interesting problem, to elucidate which this sketch was drawn.

It arises, just before the church is reached, and affords a very interesting example of how the Old Road has been lost and may be recovered.

The present road goes round to the north of the church, outside a high wall, which there forbids any passage. It turns sharp round a corner, and then proceeds due south to the village of Compton. When it has passed through this village, it turns north again, and so reaches St. Catherine's chapel, near which point it is agreed that the passage of the Wey was made.

Not only does the modern road take this circuitous course, but the pilgrims of the later Middle Ages probably followed a direction not very different. Compton church perhaps attracted them.

It is not the only place in which we shall find their leisurely piety misleading our research.

The Pilgrimage and the modern road both tend to make us miss the original track. That track, as a group of independent facts sufficiently show, passed south of Puttenham church, continuing the direction which it had hitherto followed from Seale; it went past the inn miscalled 'The Jolly Farmer,' and so on in a straight line over Puttenham Heath, where it is still marked by a rough cart-track kind of way.

One must here repeat an argument which continually recurs in these pages. Short of a physical obstacle, there is no reason but private property, and property long established and well defined, to give rise to such an unnatural halt in a path as is here made by a sudden turn of a right angle.

We know that the enclosure of this church within the wall was comparatively recent.

We know that in every case where the Old Road passes directly past a village church, it passes to the south. From the south, as we have already seen, the entry of the traveller was made; for, to repeat the matter, a custom presumably much older than our religion, gave approach to sacred places from the side of the sun.

The face of the Inn, the road before it (ending now abruptly and without meaning at the wall), and the road through Puttenham village are all in the same alignment.

It is an alignment that makes for the passage of the Wey (for Shalford, that is), much in the direction the Old Road has held since Seale.

The alignment is continued on through Puttenham Heath by an existing track, and in all this continuous chain there is no break, save the comparatively modern wall round the church.

Finally, Puttenham Heath had furnished antiquities of every sort, especially of the Neolithic period and of the Bronze: all within a small area, and all in the immediate neighbourhood of this Way.

So many indications were sufficient to make us follow the right-of-way across Puttenham Heath, and our conjecture was confirmed by our finding at the further edge of the heath, a conspicuous embankment marked by an exact line of three very aged trees, which everywhere indicate the track.

Though it was hardly a road, rough and marked only by ruts in the winter soil and by its rank of secular trees, it was most evidently the Old Road. We were glad to have found it.

When we had passed through the hollow to the north of a few cottages, direct evidence of the road disappeared at the boundary of Monk's Hatch Park, but it was not lost for long. 350 yards further on, laid on the same line, a slightly sunken way reappeared; it ran a few yards below the recently made Ash Path, and led directly by the lane along the south of Brixbury Wood, across the Compton Road, and so by a lane called 'Sandy Lane,' beyond, over the crest of the hill, till, as the descent began, it became metalled, grew wider, and merged at last into the regular highway which makes straight for St. Catherine's Hill and the ferry and ford below it.

The Old Road having thus coincided once more with a regular road, we went at a greater pace, observing little of our surroundings (since nothing needed to be discovered), and hoped to make before it was quite dark the passage of the river.

Arrived, however, at that curious platform which supports in such an immense antiquity of consecration the ruins of St. Catherine's chapel, we saw that the exact spot at which the river was crossed was not easily to be determined. The doubt does not concern any considerable space. It hesitates between two points on the river, and leaves unmapped about 800 yards of the road; but that gap is, it must be confessed, unsolved so far as our investigation could be carried.

It is certain that the prehistoric road begins again by the north-western corner of the Chantries Wood. Tradition and the unbroken trail hence to St. Martha's hill-top confirm it. The arguments I have used in the last few pages show equally that the road led, on this side of the way, up to the point below St. Catherine's chapel where we were now standing.

It is, moreover, extremely probable that the platform of St. Catherine's was the look-out from which the first users of this track surveyed their opportunities for passing the river, and near to it undoubtedly their successors must have beaten down the road.

The precipitous face towards the stream, the isolation of the summit and its position, commanding a view up and down the valley, render it just such a place as would, by its value for their journeys and their wars, have made it sacred to a tribe: its sanctity during the Middle Ages gives the guess a further credential. But in framing an hypothesis as to how the valley was taken from the descent of St. Catherine's to the rise at the Chantries beyond the stream, one is met by two sets of facts irreconcilable with one another, and supporting arguments each, unfortunately, of equal weight. These facts are few, simple, and urgent; they are as follows:--

Primitive man we must imagine chose, if he could, a ford, and kept to such a passage rather than to any form of ferry. The ford exists. It has given its name 'The Shallow Ford' to the village which grew up near it. The church stands close by. So far it would seem that the road certainly passed over the crest of St. Catherine's, came down to the south of that hill, crossed at Shalford, and reached the Chantries by that passage.

On the other hand a sunken way of great antiquity leads directly from St. Catherine's Hill down to the river. It follows the only practicable descent of the bank. It is in line with the previous trend of the Old Road; at its foot is a ferry which has had a continuous history at least as old as the pilgrimage, and beyond this ferry, the path over the field, and the avenue beyond the main road, lead immediately and without any diversion to that point at the foot of the Chantries Hill where, as I have said, the Old Road is again evident.

From Shalford no such track is apparent, nor could it be possible for a passage by Shalford to be made, save at the expense of a detour much sharper than the Old Road executes in any other part of its course.

In the face of these alternatives no certain decision could be arrived at. The medieval route was here no guide, for it had already left the road to visit Compton, and was free to use Shalford ford, the ferry, or even Guildford Bridge--all three of which the pilgrims doubtless passed indifferently, for all three were far older than the pilgrimage.

It may be that the ferry stands for an old ford, now deepened. It may be that the passage at Shalford was used first, and soon replaced by that of the ferry. We knew of no discoveries in that immediate neighbourhood which might have helped us to decide; we were compelled, though disappointed, to leave the point open.