ST "I
lifc' \,
B STANE STREET
H. BELLOC
THE OLD ROAD
By HILAIRE BELLOC
With a Photogravure Frontispiece and 16 Fttll-
page Illtistrations by William Hyde, a Map
and Route Guides in the Text
Demy 8vo
NEW EDITION
7s. 6d. net
THE ATHBNJSUM says:-
" We welcome the re-appearance of a lively and delightful book oi travel in England which is remark- able for Its power of reconstructing old days and ways."
THE IGKNIELD WAY
BY EDWARD THOMAS ILLUSTRATED BY A. E. COLLINS
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
LONDON CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
THE STANE STREET
THEBTANE STREET
• ;
CON STAB LTD.
THE STANE STREET
A MONOGRAPH
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM HYDE
LONDON CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1913
MAY 1 4 1935
Printed in Great Britain by
BALLANTYNE, HANSON <&-• Co. LTD.
at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
TO <•'"•' LORD LUCAS
CONTENTS
PART I THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN
PAGE
L-IV 3-43
PART II
THE PARTICULAR CASE OF THE STANE STREET
I. THE LINE OP THE ROAD .... 50 II. THE ALIGNMENTS 67
A. THE FIRST LIMB. FROM CHIOHESTER
EAST GATE TO PULBOROUGH BRIDGE 87
B. THE LIMB FROM PULBOROUGH BRIDGE
TO LEITH HILL .... 93
C. THE LIMB FROM LEITH HILL TO JUNIPER
HILL (ALSO CALLED JUNIPER WOOD HILL) . . . . . .100
D. THE FOURTH LIMB, FROM JUNIPER
HILL TO LONDON BRIDGE . 106
vli
viii CONTENTS
PAGE
III. THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES . . . . 114
IV. THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF THE ROAD 140 V. THE MODERN DIVERGENCES . . .163
PART III DETAILS OF THE ROAD
A. FROM CHICHESTER TO HARDHAM CAMP . 211
B. FROM HARDHAM CAMP TO ALFOLDEAN BRIDGE 241
C. FROM ALFOLDEAN BRIDGE TO DORKING . 251
D. FROM DORKING TO MERTON ABBEY . . 266
E. FROM MERTON ABBEY TO LONDON BRIDGE . 280
NOTE A. — ON THE ALIGNMENT FROM LEATHER- HEAD DOWNS TO OLD LONDON BRIDGE . 283 NOTE B.— THE PARALLEL OF THE PORT WAY . 288
INDEX ... 295
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE REDLANDS. MOONRISE . . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
CATHEDRAL AND CROSS, CHICHESTER ... 32
LONDON BRIDGE AND THE THAMES ... 52 THE WEALD OF SUSSEX FROM THE SHOULDER OF
LEITH HILL 70
BIGNOR HILL (GUMBER CORNER) LOOKING TOWARDS
PULBOROUGH 90
THE GRAND STAND, EPSOM RACECOURSE . .110
ALFOLDEAN BRIDGE 128
OCKLEY GREEN AND THE STANE STREET . .154 THE RUINED MILL, HALNACKER DOWN (THE
"SEA PLAIN" BELOW) 176
THE VALE OF DORKING FROM Box HILL . . 200 BOXGROVE ABBEY RUINS AND CHURCH . .216 THE STANE STREET ON LONG DOWN (LOOKING
SOUTH-EAST, WITH " SEA PLAIN " IN DISTANCE) 226
PULBOROUGH BRIDGE AND THE RIVER ARUN . 242
THE TOWER, LEITH HILL 260
THE BANK OF THE WANDLE AT MERTON ABBEY
(WATERCRESS BEDS) 276
HIGH STREET, CLAPHAM 280
x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MAPS
PAGE
Six ROMAN WATS CONVERGING ON CIRENCESTER . 23
SKETCH MAP, FIG. 1 39
„ »i » 2 41
» » » 3 59
,, » * 75
„ „ 5 76
,, „ 6 89
„ „ „ 7 ..... 92
» „ 8 95
„ „ „ 9 ..... 99
„ ,, 10 103
„ „ 11 107
„ „ 12 112
„ „ 13 . . . 131
„ „ 14 . 137
„ ,, 15 179
„ „ 16 182
„ „ 17 193
„ „ 18 197
THE STANE STREET THROUGH DORKING GAP . 199
SKETCH MAP, FIG. 19 ... . 205
„ „ 20 263
MAP OF STANE STREET Folder at end
PART I
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN
THE STANE STREET
PART I
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN
THE foundation of England is a Roman foundation, as is, indeed, the foundation of all the West. Once beyond that fringe of ancient city-states which bordered all the Mediterranean, and whose origins are older than known history, the civilisation of Bar- bary as of Gaul, of Iberia as of the Ger- manies, of Britain as of the Netherlands, is a Roman thing; nor is it possible to prove one institution or one inherited handling of material things to have descended to us from the outer barbarism.
This Roman civilisation was everywhere slowly transformed, and proceeded from what
4 THE STANE STREET
we may call its antique or pagan origins, to what we now have as modern Europe.
It is impossible to point to any date or period which separates the Roman advent of our culture from its present phase, but the chief mark of Europe, which is its religion, dates its origin from the Incarnation of Our Lord : that is, about half a century after the Roman occupation of Gaul, and as much before the Roman occupation of Britain. Coincident, therefore, in the West, with the era by which we date our years, is the universal prevalence of a Roman order, and during all those twenty centuries our things and our ideas throughout all changes have preserved their identity and have remained in substance the same.
Nevertheless, it is historically convenient to speak of certain things in Gaul or Britain, the Germanics or Spain, as in a special and older way " Roman." We talk of a " Roman " road, a " Roman " bridge, " Roman " tiles, &c., and we mean by such a term the work of the first four or five centuries.
The Roman order in the united civilisation of the Western Empire was continually dis- turbed by civil war and occasionally by
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 5
barbaric invasions. More important than either of these as a factor of change was the internal transformation of the army upon which that civilisation reposed. This institution, from originally free and indigen- ous, became as to its personnel largely servile in origin and barbaric in blood. Its most active portion grew to be auxiliaries and later allies or "federates" serving under tribal chiefs, who ultimately assumed local executive powers and developed into kinglets. These, though they continued to regard Rome as their head, at once controlled local Government, and, by their inefficiency, caused it, through no desire of their own, to grow more and more inde- pendent of the central power. To this main cause of disintegration a multitude of other causes — the exhaustion of the mines, perhaps depopulation, certainly disease — contributed. Our civilisation fell on its material side into a phase of decay, and the outward mani- festation of this misfortune took a precise historical form. The central Government of the emperors slowly ceased to be effective. It was never overthrown, it was never denied ; but it faded out of real politics, and slowly, unconsciously, of no set purpose,
6 THE STANE STREET
local Governments took its place. These Governments were administrated, as I have said, very commonly by the chiefs of the auxiliary and " federate " 1 forces in the army (hence the terms "king of the Franks," "of the Goths," &c.) ; but these in turn were socially dependent upon those immensely wealthy landowners, principally Italian, Gallic, Iberian, or British in descent, whose monopoly of the means of production was the mark of the period, and whose power was the outstanding political mark of the Dark Ages.
All this great change, which transformed the originally active and highly centralised civilisation of the early centuries into the local, dulled, autonomous, and aristocratic society of the Dark Ages, had its turning- point in the fifth century.
From the entry, with the sixth century, into the Dark Ages, it is provable that no
Upon the exact meaning of this word . " Foederati n discussion still turns, for it is a principal criterion of the decline. I have no room to examine it in so slight an essay. It must be sufficient to say that the " Federates," though a true part of the Roman army, seem to have been more autonomous and more domestically organised under here- ditary chiefs than the " Auxiliaries."
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 7
more great public works were undertaken in the Gauls. Repairs — sometimes on a great scale — are discoverable in the seventh century, and even in the eighth,1 but Rome no longer ruled or made. Pillaging and savage hordes, seafaring pirates and wanderers from over the border, though few in number, could molest the civilised inhabitants of the frontiers in a manner if not graver, at least more permanent than that of the earlier barbarians. The whole body of civilisation had weakened and grown old.
It is on this account that we distinguish verbally between the Imperial Government of the first four centuries and what survived of it into the fifth, and the half-barbarous Governments succeeding it in the North and West during the next 500 years. The earlier undertakings, which are stamped everywhere with the mark of vigorous, lively, and united administration and of high material powers, we call Roman. Not, I repeat, because any line of division can be established between
1 E.g. the great Roman roads of Northern Gaul appear from tradition to have been thoroughly restored in one great effort more than a century after the disappearance of the Imperial coinage.
8 THE STANE STREET
the origins and the later developments of our civilisation, but as a convenient term whereby to denote the particular type of early public works in question.
II
The material evidences of our common Roman foundation are, in some departments of them, better preserved in the province of Britain than in any other part of the Imperial West.
In the matter of buildings we are less fortunate than Gaul or even the Germanics : far less than Spain or Africa. But in certain matters we have superiority over any other province of the Empire in our relics of Im- perial times, and these are particularly hoards of money and roads.
The reason that this type of " Roman remains" stands out in Britain more than in the other provinces, is the same as that which has destroyed so much of Roman build- ings, and is twofold : it is, in part, the fact that Britain was the remotest province of the West : in part, the fact that the barbaric
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 9
raids which followed the breakdown of cen- tral authority were, if not more severe as wars, at least of more destructive effect here than elsewhere.
Each of these two things is connected with the other. It was the remoteness of Britain and its separation by the sea which caused it to be so early and destructively attacked by the pillage of barbarians — Irish, Caledonian, German, roaming slaves escaped, &c. — and its remoteness also which lessened the import- ance of its Roman buildings. The distance and isolation of Britain presumably left that province with less magnificent monuments than those of the Continent and of Africa, while the same distance and isolation left it open to so many and such ruinous raids.
At any rate, early in the story of the central power's decline, Britain was subjected to incursions from the barbaric inhabitants of Ireland and of Scotland, and even to raids led by pirates from across the sea ; from Frisia and from what is now the junction of Denmark with the German Empire, and from the mouth of the Elbe and from the mouth of the Weser ; with these must cer- tainly have been mixed, as in the case of
10 THE STANE STREET
the Vandals, a very large proportion of the internal wreckage of society, the escaped slaves, the brigands of heath and woodland, the ruined men.
The Roman Empire stretched its authority along the North Sea coast of the Continent as far as the last mouths of the Rhine : Utrecht was perhaps its outpost. North and east of that, the flat and shallow shore man- aged to raise even from the sparse inhabi- tants of its poor soil, crews of pirates who harried Britain in company with the bar- barians from beyond the Irish Channel, the barbarians from beyond the limits of the Empire on the Clyde, and the hungry enemies of society within.
It was in the beginning of the fifth century that certainly the major part of the Roman regulars left Britain for a Continental cam- paign from which perhaps they were scheduled to return, but from which, as a fact, they did not. Of their many departures from this island upon Continental expeditions this was the last. An army had often left Britain before at the summons of the central Govern- ment or a usurper. It may be that such expeditions had often emptied the garrison
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 11
of the island. But hitherto they had come back. After the first years of the fifth cen- tury no Roman regulars returned to this island, though many may have remained in it. A generation later, in the midst of the fifth century, the barbaric raids upon civilised Britain grew serious : somewhere about 450, if tradition (though slight and confused) be any guide, the pressure began to be incessant. What happened during the next 150 years we shall never know. It is blotted out of history, save for a few legends and old fables. If we look for documents, we find exactly one very brief clerical rhapsody contemporary indeed, but little more than a denunciatory sermon in character, and as a guide to what came before it, almost as unreliable as the much later romances of "Hengist" and "Horsa" and the rest.
At any rate, Roman civilisation upon the southern and eastern shores of Britain slowly fell and fell until it had sunk to a depth far lower than was to be discovered in neighbouring Gaul and rather resembling the contemporary state of the Netherlands.
Now, Britain is an island ; and the com- munications between it and the world lay
12 THE STANE STREET
precisely through these southern and eastern shores which the barbarian had ruined. Britain was "cut off" even more thoroughly than Africa. Its moral life quickly starved and its supply of moral sustenance was checked. That the barbarians were few and held but a narrow belt of sea coast was no miti- gation of the disaster, for the little those few held constituted the very gates of the province. Popular dialects, Celtic in the west, Teutonic in the east, replaced the Roman official tongue. We know that the Church survived, though mutilated, in the west of the island: on the eastern shore and even up the Thames valley it seems to have disappeared. The Roman order, the Roman power of building and devising, failed, if not more suddenly, more thoroughly in Britain than in any other province. The towns must have survived ; but, as everywhere, the contemporary record of them is lost, and in general, from the departure of St. Germanus in 447 A.D. to the landing of St. Augustine, precisely 150 years later, the history of Britain is blank.
When positive history and contemporary records return, which is not until the end
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 13
of the sixth or the beginning of the seventh century, we have the impression of a province fallen into an anarchy far more complete than the contemporary societies of Europe, and the Faith itself had to be laboriously reintroduced into the eastern littoral belt, reformed elsewhere, before Britain could take its place again as a member of the European family.
Now, the first effect of all those catas- trophes must have been to destroy more buildings and other easily destroyable things in Britain than on the Continent. But there was to this misfortune a compensating advan- tage for history, and the same barbarism which ruined what was destroyable, fossilised, as it were, what was resistant to mere violence and loot. The evidence for roads, the great system of communications, especially bene- fited by a misfortune that had arrested the continuous activity of civilisation.
In the case of the British roads, there was none of that slow if declining repair, possibly even that extension of the road system, which Gaul seems to have preserved for some time after the fall of the central Government. The Roman roads of Gaul, of Lower and
14 THE STANE STREET
Upper Germany, still more of Italy, are in our day like a palimpsest. Often we cannot be certain of the original Roman direction : more commonly it has been modified or obliterated by continuous use and its accom- panying changes. But in Britain the end of this Roman work was left, as it were, fresh from the workshop : the interruption in its use preserved it by the very accident which destroyed so much other contemporary work around.
Ill
The Roman road, then, has been preserved in this country in a fashion both absolute and peculiar. You find it less changed, more discernible, than elsewhere, when it is in evidence : yet when lost, more utterly lost, and its continuity in repair interrupted.
The importance of such evidence to the his- tory of Britain and of Europe, it is difficult to exaggerate ; for the roads of Imperial Rome were the very framework of her power.
It is a commonplace of history that the first act of Rome on occupying a district, was to establish her system of municipalities
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 15
and to connect them by an extension of her system of roads. But this, though a common- place in words, has not entered into the visual concept of Europe upon which the historian works. The West is not pictured in the mind of the modern historical writer when he attempts to tell its story as its Roman map would show it. His vision does not include those superb lines of definite purpose, running ruled and accurate, in a strong mechanical system, across the countrysides of Britain, of Spain, and of Gaul. He does not see the landscape of our world pinned to that strict pattern as he should. Did men fully comprehend the historical signification of those rigid lines, that physical comprehension would strongly aid a just comprehension of
our origins.
The reader will see later in this book (and I shall use it as an argument), that, until the resurrection of European culture in the epoch of the Crusades, the Roman roads account for the site of most battles, of most great monasteries, of most marts, of most palaces : for the development of all cam- paigns.
That the Roman roads gradually declined
16 THE STANE STREET
is certain ; but that, for centuries, nothing but water-carriage could take their place, is more certain still ; and until the sudden florescence of the Middle Ages they remained the skeleton of the European organism.
To recover a Boman road, therefore, to establish its exact alignment, even in detail, is not one of those half-futile historic tasks, whose achievement ends in itself. The re- search has indeed its "sporting" side. It presents all the fascination that attaches to any form of hunting, with that element added which comes from the tracking of a trail in the open air ; and if the establishment of a Eoman road had no other excuse but this element of interest, the excuse would be ample for the work involved.
But it has, as I have said, a much wider interest, and a more extended usefulness. To establish in anything like completeness the scheme of roads in a Roman province is to apprehend the physical basis upon which re- posed that old, centralised, Imperial power to which the desperate survival of Europe clung. It is, further, to comprehend the re- lationship of town with town, of garrison with garrison, and of bishopric with bishopric.
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 17
It is an explanation of the passage of armies, of commerce, and of ideas, for just over one thousand years. The advance of a language or its retreat, the rise and the decline of a market, the barriers that could be set against invasion, the limits reached by a raid of barbarians, the propagation of the Faith, the communication of disaster or revival, — all these things are understandable when the Imperial scheme of roads is understood ; and the whole business of the Dark Ages during which our civilisation melted down, as it were, to recrystallise in the Middle Ages, is, on its material side, explicable by a reference to the Roman military ways.
To understand what held out against the Asiatic in Spain and why, the two great roads over the Pyrenees must be clearly seized. One cannot understand what Austrasia was, for instance, and why it had a Roman soul, unless one has followed upon the map (or better, on foot) the paved vise which radiate from Maestricht, Utrecht, Aix, Treves, Cologne, Bavai, Arras, Rheims, Chalons, Toul, Verdun, and Bar.
The error which has regarded Austrasia as fundamentally Germanic (an error typical
B
18 THE STANE STREET
of so many others) could not have arisen had its authors comprehended that intersecting net- work of ways. Austrasia was in frame- work and being a Roman thing.
So with all the other problems and errors attaching to our origins. The Roman road is the chief material mark set by the Empire upon Western Europe.
IV
We have seen that the peculiar fate of Britain, its more complete or more disastrous harrying in the east, and its being cut off, by the ruin of the shore, from the rest of civilisation, gave the Roman roads in it a fate separate from that which fell upon them in other provinces. They were at once more necessary to a more barbaric society, and yet less kept up than in Gaul or in the Germanics.
We find them almost untouched in their trajectory for distances over which we could not follow their parallels abroad. No great system of road-making of a similar kind, in broad and direct lines, nor any over-laying of them by later work (at any rate, upon any
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 19
considerable scale), has obliterated or confused the record.
Apart from this cause, which preserved the Roman roads in their original alignment, other causes are present.
The local autonomy characteristic of the Middle Ages which in most other countries merged at last, with the Renaissance, into a few strong and centralised states, did not so merge in England. On the contrary, after the sixteenth century failure to establish strong central government in Eng- land, the self-governing villages were largely transformed into the separate properties of individual landlords. This great social trans- formation, which England owes in the main to her change of religion at the Reformation, had effects political and social, which various men, according to their temper, praise or deplore. For the purposes of our inquiry in this book, it had one capital effect, which was the preservation of ancient ways and of such ancient monuments as the form of the soil retains. For a great landlord will preserve such things where a peasantry would destroy them ; and this is particularly true of a landed class whose wealth is increasingly
20 THE STANE STREET
derived from sources other than the land, and which can afford to treat its estates as curiosities.
Yet another cause which has preserved the Roman road in England — a cause also attached to the survival, in name at least, of quaint local institutions — is the way in which the modern metalled roads were con- structed here.
Upon the Continent, and especially in Gaul, a new road is, and has been now for some generations, a special undertaking of organised government, specially engineered, at vast expense. Not so in England. In England our road system has not been planned. It has developed in the main by the gradual hardening and metalling and improving of the old green lanes : hence the peculiar narrowness and tortuousness of the English road system as we have it to-day.
Incidentally, this slow and natural de- velopment of a system which is peculiar to this island, has largely helped to preserve the Roman roads. Where these roads had fallen to the state of green lanes over which traffic was still customary and the right of way upon which had never been lost, the
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 21
metalling of the same restored to the eye the aspect of the old Roman military way.
We shall see later on in this book, how, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the Stane Street was thus metalled northward from Slinfold to Alfoldean Bridge. In that public work, which the Duke of Norfolk of the day undertook, the Roman road reappeared. The old Roman crossing over the river was re- stored and the antique line was fixed for the modern eye. But (to take a parallel instance from the Continent) when a modern road was driven from Amiens to Boulogne, the French engineers made no use of the made Roman line. It is nowhere, in all its length, a principal highway, and the road which we now use follows the Valley of the Somme. One may say of the Roman roads in Gaul, that where they have not been kept in con- tinuous use, they have been replaced and therefore ousted by modern lines as straight and strict as they ; whereas, in Britain, dis- connected stretches of the same are preserved by our habit of metalling the old lanes.
There must be noted in this connection, a feature of the Roman roads of Britain which has presented a problem to the antiquarian,
22 THE STANE STREET
and has not always been accurately explained. The dead straight line normal to a Eoman road is, in this country, frequently, or rather generally, modified. We note, as we follow the track of an English Eoman way, perpetual slight divergences from the strict line. Almost any section of Roman roads taken at random will suffice for an example of this : I will choose for mine the roads converging upon Cirencester.
The reader who shall follow this scheme of roads1 may see jive main roads converging on the town, and traces of a sixth : — the two branches of an "Ermine" Street, the two branches of the Fosse Way, and the Akeman Street, with traces of a road from the south- west, approaching Cirencester from the direc- tion of Tetbury.
Now, in all these there is not one clear piece of alignment, save that limb of the "Ermine" Street, somewhat over four miles long, which runs from the cross-roads near Daglingworth up to the summit of Highgate.
1 It is most conveniently grasped on the 2-in. Ordnance Map, Mounted and Coloured Series, Cirencester, sheet 70, 1903, corresponding to the four sheets, 234, 235, 251, 252 of the 1-in. 1893-1896 survey.
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 23
The southern branch of the " Ermine " Street from Cricklade is badly deflected in the neighbourhood of the Sisters' Inn. Over beyond Thames it forms, not a straight line,
S K E TC H MAP
showing the
Six Roman Ways converging on Cirencester & their divergence from true alignments.
SCALE OF MILES O1 2345878
but the arc of a large curve ending at Stratton St. Margaret, and south of that again it is subjected to perpetual small deflections.
The Akeman Street is aligned, pointing at Cirencester from Williamstrip Park (though
24 THE STANE STREET
it wobbles badly as it approaches the town). But east of that park it makes no pretence of being a straight line, and winds con- veniently to the terrain, both before and after the crossing of the river Leach. The Fosse Way has not one strict alignment un- broken by such bends. It is not a straight line, but a sweep southward of North Leach, with an uncertainty at the Fosse Bridge. Beyond Cirencester to the south-west its alignment is doubtful during all the part near Tetbury. Indeed, between the Avon and a point 1|- mile to the north-east of that stream, it is sinuous.
If we consider the other road, of which traces only exist, and which can be followed through eastward and northward, it is no straighter than any one of our lanes. Indeed, it is in many of its parts a modern lane, with no strictness of alignment apparent.
This examination could be paralleled from almost any similar converging-point of Roman roads in England, and it demands an explanation.1
1 Let the reader consider, for instance, out of one hundred instances, the way that can be traced from Dorchester upon the Thames, northward to Alchester and the neighbourhood of Bicester. It is hardly anywhere directly aligned, and it
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 25
This character of irregularity in the Roman roads of Britain, which often differentiates them from those of the Continent, is the effect of two widely separate causes.
First : Encroachment upon the public way has been easier in Britain than in any other province of Europe, because the local power of propertied men has been nearly continu- ously stronger in Britain than the general power of the central Government. A certain amount of encroachment is discovered upon all the old roads throughout Western Europe, but it is a commoner feature in this country than elsewhere, and we owe to it the irregu- larity of the line of our Roman roads, especi- ally in the neighbourhood of buildings. This must not be confused with considered and originally designed divergences from the align- ment, followed by a recovery of the alignment further on. Divergence of a Roman road in this fashion, of set purpose as it were, and on a considerable scale, we shall find to be ascribable to other causes; such as the springing up of a community near the road, the way to and from which replaces the road
is positively sinuous from Beckley to its passage between Cowley and Horsepath.
26 THE STAKE STREET
over a certain section ; the choice of an easy crossing for a river ; the necessity of taking a steep hill at an easy gradient, &c., &c.
Secondly : The imperfection in alignment, the occasional sinuosities, and the erratic short curves in our British Roman roads are also, and more largely, due to the fact that in Britain, the remotest of their provinces, the Romans did not occupy as thoroughly nor engineer their ways at such an expense, or so completely as in other portions of the Empire. They were therefore often content to avail themselves of existing tracks.
Let me not be misunderstood ; the repeated view that Britain was a sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which no one with a care for historical truth will to-day maintain. It arose in that hypo- thetical and North German school of history which prefers to accumulate facts rather than to co-ordinate evidence; which delights to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose that guesswork against the tradition of civilisation. The effects of that spirit have been seen and deplored in too many fields, in the analysis of Scripture, in the presentation of the Middle Ages, in the
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 27
attack upon the religion and institutions of Europe, for any writer with an appreciation of dignity to lend himself to it. Roman Britain was not a sparsely inhabited nor an ill-civilised province of the Empire. The population of Roman Britain was consider- able, its wealth was great ; its produce and its armed force alike of consequence. But there is no doubt that, with the exception of the Great Wall, Rome did not invest in Britain that accumulation of energy which is to be found in Spain, or in most parts of Gaul. The local languages, Teutonic and Celtic, seem to have survived with an uni- versal vigour where, upon the Continent, they retired to the heaths of Brittany, to the marshes of the Netherlands, and to within a day or two's march of the Rhine ; and this lessening si potential in the Roman effort here we may ascribe to the severance of the sea.
It seems certain, then, that in the matter of roads the Imperial power in Britain continu- ally availed itself of pre-existing tracks which were straightened and hardened for the pur- poses of making a Roman and military way. In sections only were they replanned and thoroughly engineered.
28 THE STANE STREET
We shall see that the Stane Street in particular is an exception to this general rule. Part of the great interest attaching to it lies in the fact that it was evidently engineered in every yard of it; deliberately planned for a particular Imperial purpose, and unconnected (save possibly at river crossings) with the barbaric ways which Roman civilis- ation found on reaching the island.
In the course of any inquiry upon a Roman road, the reader will be puzzled to note the survival and the loss of them. This is be- cause the destruction of some portions, coupled with the preservation of others, depends upon social forces spread over so great a length of time that the result appears almost like one of caprice. Roughly speaking, the Roman roads were used, as we have seen, until the twelfth century — butevidently notall of them; nor even the whole length of the principal ones. The bridges of some, where they crossed the chief rivers, had disappeared, others had already failed in the morasses : the use of the road, once broken at several points, and each section left to its own chance of survival, each such section would further tend to disuse at either end : it would " lead nowhere " and be
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 29
of continuous service only within its particular neighbourhood. Hard metalling could no longer reach it from a distance. It only needs to break one such long line in two or three small points specially costly to maintain, and at once great sections of the rest will begin to disappear.
Since the revival of Europe and its arts — since, that is, the spring of the Middle Ages, in the twelfth century, the following causes have led to the decay of portions of all the Roman roads, and of some of those roads in their entirety : —
(1) The hardening of the more devious tracks which led from one new village to another off the road. Of such " loop lines," first rivalling and later supplanting the main line, the map of Europe is full.
(2) The cost of upkeep of the roads where they were expensively engineered : this is particularly the case in mountainous districts, over morasses, and where the road had to make use of great bridges. But it does not apply to cuttings, which, though expensive to make, are not expensive to keep up, but main- tain themselves.
(3) The new political relations of one centre
30 THE STANE STREET
with another. For instance, Windsor as a place of Government was a direct creation of the Conqueror's and it needed a road to London ; only part of the way was served by the old Roman road to Staines.
(4) The growth of forests : —
A piece of woodland, when once it had arisen, was carefully preserved in the Middle Ages for the following reasons : — First, that it was a permanent source of revenue. The Middle Ages burnt nothing but wood, which was also their main material of domestic con- struction. It was at the same time very costly to transport. Further, wood was the pasture of the herds of swine. Secondly, a given unit of wealth production, once established, always tended to crystallise in the Middle Ages on account of the manorial system. Custom preserved it. It was difficult in the face of manorial custom to destroy a wood once estab- lished, to which must be added: Thirdly, the strict feudal interpretation of " waste." The most immediately realisable capital in the hands of the spendthrift or the fraudulent guardian, was the timber upon an estate. For that very reason both public opinion and the law were particularly strict in repressing
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 31
the cutting of timber save in regular annual rotation.
Finally, of course, one must note the oppor- tunities for hunting which a wood afforded.
Many of the gaps in the Roman roads are due to a wood having grown up upon some poor soil during the Dark Ages, coupled with the impossibility of felling it in the succeed- ing centuries (in spite of their increasing wealth) from the causes I have mentioned.
We have an example of this on the Stane Street itself, in the Nore Wood. This wood covers a couple of miles, through which the road has fallen utterly out of use even for the simplest local purposes. Very old trees are to be found growing upon the Way itself throughout this stretch.
To this interruption of the roads by woods overgrowing them must be added the tendency of existing forests, through which the old roads were cut, to encroach upon the ways.
By the time the woods which arose in the Dark Ages began to be cleared again in modern times the use of the road that once led through them had disappeared.
(5) Many of the great ways appear to have been mainly strategic. When their
32 THE STANE STREET
strategic purpose disappeared, their continuous use throughout their whole length disappeared also.
The Stane Street is an excellent example of this. Great stretches of it were always in use throughout the isolated kingdom of Sussex, but from the sixth century until at least the twelfth, no occasion occurred for organised military communication between Chichester and London, so the part about the county border between the upper Arun and Ockley fell into desuetude. The same is true of the great line from Bavai to Utrecht. It was a necessary thing when Rome was per- petually replenishing her garrisons upon the boundaries of the Empire. When this march- ing ceased, men had little occasion to travel along the whole length of the way. They used it from one neighbouring town to another ; but where there was a gap in their commercial or military necessities, there a gap would come upon the use of the road.1
1 It is this which accounts for the loss of one of the greatest Roman roads: that which led from the Paris district across the Somme at Voyennes to the Frankish district of the north and east. The last army to use the river passage engineered by this road (then in ruins) was that of Henry V. before Agincourt.
CATHEDRAL AND CROSS, CHICHESTER
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 33
(6) A number of quite modern causes must be enumerated as having had a considerable effect upon the fate of the Roman roads. First, the paving or metalling of certain new main ways other than, and alternative to, the Roman roads. Once this was done, there was hardly any choice. Travel would always follow the hard way, and where the Roman road was neglected by the modern improve- ment it became neglected by all travellers. It was no longer used as an alternative.1
Again, the growth of new and modern towns, due to changes in commerce, unmake sections of a Roman road. The growth of Lille, for instance, has helped to obliterate the scheme of Roman roads in its neighbour- hood. Lille has become the centre of a road system of its own, and many as were the Roman roads in its neighbourhood, most of them only survive in sections as local bye- ways.
The same is true of the change in the nature of a stronghold. Steep, isolated hills,
1 The main Brussels road from Paris is an example of this— only when it uses the section of a Koman road has that road survived. Thus it is preserved east and west of Bavai, but lost between Nimy and Jemappes.
C
34 THE STANE STREET
such as the Hill of Cassel, in Flanders, play no leading part in fortification after the seventeenth century. The half-dozen capital Roman roads which all concentrate like spokes of a wheel on Cassel are therefore now all of them interrupted ; in more than half their length they are abandoned, and only one of them is more than a country lane, even in the parts where it is in use.
Finally, the development of railways has of course very considerably affected the old lines of travel. For instance, the shortest way from Rheims into the Barrois was, until the middle of the nineteenth century, by the Roman road across the plain of Chalons.1 This road left Chalons itself con- siderably to the west ; it afforded but bad going, with doubtful water, and in places deep clay ; but it was the direct road from the ecclesiastical capital to the Rhine, and traffic followed it. Since the building of the rail- way great stretches of it have fallen into desuetude, for no one has occasion to walk
1 It is characteristic of the uses of a Roman road that Attila used this way in his retreat. His great camp or u ring " is still to be seen alongside of the road, one of the most enormous things in Europe,
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 35
the whole of that way, and heavy goods go by rail. Those parts of it which are still in use are mainly kept up by the army marching to the Camp of Chalons from the eastern frontiers of France.
With all this there are gaps without number in the system of Roman roads in Western Europe which we cannot explain because we know nothing of the local social accidents which determined them. They occur in the oddest places, where we can least guess at their causes : on open downs, over hard rock, even on ledges of hillside where the track should be imperishable. They vary in length from a few yards to a hundred miles and more.1 But these are the main causes which
1 Too long a list would be tedious : but here are a few cases taken at random that occur to me. Why should the great road from Winchester to Portsmouth Harbour be lost suddenly at Nations Farm, near Bishop's Waltham ? The land is the same in the kept part and the lost. Why does the Ackling Dyke choose to disappear on the high land south of the Ebble, just where it should best survive ? Why does the great road out of Salisbury to the Bristol Channel leave no trace on the chalk west of the Ridge Wood, just where it had the best opportunity for remaining untouched ? Most strange of all, why does the most famous stretch of all Roman roads in the Dark Ages, the artery between Soissons and Noyon that was the short main highway of the Frankish monarchy, wholly perish, not at
36 THE STANE STREET
the reader must bear in mind when we come to analyse the particular case of the Stane Street, though we shall find in that case too one gap, and that by far the most import- ant, the causes of which it is impossible to establish.
When we have appreciated the importance of research into the scheme of Roman roads in this country, and further appreciated the causes which have made for the preservation of our evidence with regard to them and for the loss of certain sections, we must lastly grasp some general idea of the strategic and political scheme upon which they de- pended in this island before we can turn to the peculiar character of the Stane Street.
The Eoman roads of Britain combined two services : they provided communications for
the marshy crossing of the Oise — where it ought to be lost — but on the hill of Choisy beyond, and thence almost all the way to Soissons ? Why does the main road from Rheims to Treves go right and clear to the Aisne and then amuse itself by disappearing for over a hundred miles? Why does the great way from the South to Norwich faint just before that great camp at Caistor where one would most look for it ? It is examples of this kind which make the gap in the Stane Street between Epsom and Merton, which we shall later examine, less improbable than it looks. See further note B at the end of this book.
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 37
the frontier defences, and they linked up the towns upon whose municipal system the whole scheme of Imperial civilisation de- pended.
For the purposes of this little monograph, the roads feeding the northern frontier may be neglected.
In the south of England the Roman roads linked chains of existing towns one with another; they had therefore a purpose com- mercial and civil as well as military, and were not called into being by purely strategic con- siderations; nor were they the single work of military engineering with its direct purpose and simplicity of action. In other words, the roads of the south were not planned to feed with troops and with the munitions of war some centre that was a depot and nothing else. For, whatever we may con- jecture the origin of certain Roman towns in Southern England to have been, we know that all soon became places of civil import- ance and that none remained mere strong- holds.
Now as, for civil purposes, a road will establish itself by custom without too exact a plan, and as the greater part of our centres
38 THE STANE STREET
of population in South England must surely be pre-Roman in their origin, we can under- stand that the roads leading from one to the other would bear traces of that origin as well ; and when, South Britain being the more fertile and inhabitable part of the island, we note the great number of towns which it contained, it will be apparent that the construction of no one of these roads (save in the particular case of the Stane Street, which we are about to examine) required a special feat of military engineering.
From the 52nd parallel to the south of the Isle of Wight, and from longitude 3° west to the extremity of Kent, is a district contained within an oblong not 100 miles by 200.
In that little space we have at least twenty- six Roman towns whose names and sites we can be certain of, and the longest stretch with which a road has to deal between any two of them — such a stretch, for instance, as the run from Bath to Cirencester, or from Gloucester to Caerleon passes through places which we may justly conceive to have been of their nature inhabited from the most ancient times. If we note one of the largest stretches, the fifty miles and more from London to Sil-
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 39
Chester, nowhere in that stretch do we find a day's march passing through land probably deserted in early times.
But to this rule the Stane Street is the one exception : and it is this peculiar char- acter in the Sussex road which gives it its special interest. The Stane Street bears
Sifti
Fia. 1.
throughout its whole course the mark of being specially designed to unite London for military purposes alone, and by the shortest route, with the south-west and the Great Haven, the second entry into Britain from oversea, the alternative route to the Kentish one in the military connection from Rome through London to the frontier.
40 THE STANE STREET
To proceed from the sheltered water within the Isle of Wight, and notably from Ports- mouth Harbour, to London, the way that led from inhabited site to inhabited site was the way round by Winchester. But the short way was the way through Chichester, and that way gave the further alternative advantage of tapping any of the creeks and sheltered tidal waters between Southampton water and Selsey.
But — and this must especially be noted — no track leading from inhabited site to in- habited site, and therefore naturally existing before the advent of civilised engineering, could have lain along the direct line from Chichester to London : no stretch of good, well-watered land corresponds with this north-to-south line.
A belt of good soil and water running east and west formed the plain in which Chichester stood. A narrower belt, isolated from the first by a barren belt of the Downs, ran just to the north of these hills, also east and west.
Then came a barrier : it was formed by the great district of clay, marsh, thickets and brackish water, which, under primitive con-
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 41
ditions, or indeed under any conditions save those of a very active civilisation, must re- main but sparsely inhabited or cultivated ; to this district the Romans gave the name of the Anderidan wood, a name presumably
London
FlG. 2.
much older than their rule, and which we still call by the Saxon name of the Weald. This barrier also ran east and west, and it is to be observed that its width forms an obstacle much more than a day's march across. It was this width of the badly -watered, badly- soiled clay which made the weald the barrier
42 THE STAKE STREET
it was ; and though another narrow belt of early inhabited land lay (east and west again) just under the North Downs, the direct route to London immediately after this would pass through mile after mile of uncultivatable high chalk country, waterless save for deep wells.
The whole scheme of the direct route between the harbours and London forbade it to follow any line of habitation and supply : it cut across three belts of the sort, but they were narrow ; it had to negotiate three belts quite inhospitable — and they were broad, the central and most inhospitable very broad, a day-and-a-half s going.
In general, therefore, we may conclude that no continuous and largely used native track suitable for considerable numbers on the march can have existed before the Romans from the harbours upon the confines of Hampshire and Sussex to the great town upon the Thames. When civilised men needed to march an army back and forth between these points in the most direct manner, that need could only be supplied by the carefully-thought-out work of engineers, who had the implements of civilised men
THE ROMAN ROAD IN BRITAIN 43
behind them. Such men were the first to cross the weald with a great road, and they stamped upon their work the military motive which determined it.
We turn, therefore, to the particular study of the Stane Street with the knowledge that we are approaching an exception to the general scheme of Roman roads in South Britain and one of the two great military works which the Empire created in this island.
PART II
THE PARTICULAR CASE OF THE STANE STREET
PART II
THE PARTICULAR CASE OF THE STANE STREET
WE have just seen that the Stane Street presents an exception to the other Roman roads of Britain, and it is this exceptional character which provides our chief interest in the recovery and study of its course : that alone of the roads it seems to have been engineered at one time and with one purpose by the officials of the Roman Empire, without regard to any older British track, save possibly in its choice of river crossings. These it may have chosen upon the basis of an early barbaric experience. No other road in Britain is so completely designed for the sole use of the army.
It is, again, the only one of the Roman roads upon which we can place no Roman town or village of importance : from Chichester
47
48 THE STANE STREET
to London, from its southern to its northern terminus, no such site is found.
This point is evidently dependent upon its artificial and purely military character, since the absence of inhabited sites upon it is due to the fact that the Stane Street did not link up existing communities, nor serve as a general means of communication between a line of markets or producing centres, but linked up only a great depot with the sea communica- tions of the enemy, and that over land where deserts demanded a particular effort of military engineering. It is probable, as we shall see, that one community (Dorking) sprang up upon its course, and it is possible that another site (Pulborough) may be referred by its name to the barbaric period before the coming of Roman armies. But there was no chain of frequent town, village, and settlement, such as is to be discovered strung along the other Roman roads of the south. In their place set camps mark the stations of a marching road.
This original motive in the construction of the road determines its general characters, which must be described before we examine in detail the trajectory of the Stane Street.
THE STANE STREET 49
These characters are, in their order : —
First: The establishment of its termini, the southern one at Chichester, the northern at London, and what may be called " the Line of the Road"
Secondly: The alignments — that is, the method by which the Stane Street was plotted out, and its arrangement upon four great limbs or sections, each of which can be directly proved to have been planned from one point to another upon a straight line.
Thirdly : The military character of the road, which is especially established by its camps or halting-places at the end of each day's march : the Mansiones.
Fourthly: The historical character of the road, its probable or possible date and con- tinuity in use : to which must be added —
Fifthly : The divergence of modern roads from this ancient way and their connection with it — that is, the partial loss of the Stane Street : a discussion which will involve an examination of the geological formations over which the Stane Street runs.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD
The Stane Street starts from the East Gate of Chichester and is designed with the object of reaching by the shortest road (compatible with the overcoming of natural obstacles) the southern end of London Bridge. The exact distance from one point to the other in a straight line is 55 miles and 3 furlongs.
The choice that was made of Chichester for a starting-point is easily explicable. It was the first town lying in the east of the group of harbours at the mouth of Southamp- ton Water. All these creeks have afforded excellent shelter in the past. Bosham was a considerable point of departure to and from the Continent well into the Middle Ages, and Chichester Harbour itself was in such use until the last century as to merit the building of that canal (uniting it with the Arun and serving the town upon the way) which Turner has made famous.
50
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 51
Chichester, then, was the obvious starting- point, the necessary depot and base for any advance across the Downs and the Weald. But the exact point in connection with London at which the road was aimed, requires more discussion.
An examination of the old roads which seem to have served the neighbourhood of London has led our latest school of anti- quaries to the opinion that the crossing of the river was long effected by two ferries, one crossing to Westminster, over the site of the present Houses of Parliament, the other cros- sing about midway between London Bridge and the Tower, and a little nearer the latter.
With the first of these crossings we are not concerned ; but the second is important to us, because it might establish an alternative northern terminus to the Stane Street.
I shall conclude that the Stane Street pointed, not to this conjectural early ferry, but to old London Bridge.
It is possible to determine the point by taking the last visible alignment of the Stane Street near Epsom Racecourse ; that alignment points directly at London
52 THE STANE STREET
Bridge.1 It cannot possibly be established by the rough indications which the relics of the road have left us : we must be guided by a consideration of probabilities. A military road such as is the Stane Street, crossing with difficulty a wide stretch of ill-inhabited country, was obviously designed for the purpose of immediate military communica- tion. For that purpose the difference between a bridge over the narrow part of a river, and a ferry over its lower tidal part, is a differ- ence of one to ten.
The Roman road from Portsmouth to London, round by way of Winchester, though longer than the Stane Street, was provided with a bridge at Staines. It was to make a short cut across this bend that the Stane Street was built. If, as has been pretended, the Thames was too wide at London for the Romans to bridge it, they would have deflected
1 It can be fixed quite accurately from the corner of Mickleham Downs House private grounds to the high land next Tyrrell's Court. By that line we have an exact coincidence with old London Bridge. The error requiring an alignment with the ferry to the east would be one of 300 yards. This error in a trajectory of 18£ miles is one in a hundred (3 in 309'76), and that is a very marked divergence. It would mean in angular measurement over half a degree, an appreciable angle even without instruments of precision.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 53
the Stane Street by a slight angle and struck above London : there would be no difficulty in bridging the river at Richmond. In a word, but for a bridge at London and the serving of that bridge by a road, the Stane Street need never have been built ; but for a bridge at London, the natural way for military pur- poses would have been through Staines, or, when it was desired to establish a shorter communication between the south-western harbours and London, some bridge upriver closer to the town.
In the midst of so much that is conjectural, the reader may well ask what positive proof we have for the existence of a bridge at this point in Roman times ?
We have no positive proof. That is, no material remains have been discovered which are at once certainly the foundations or piles of a bridge, and also certainly of Roman origin. Nor is there any direct contemporary documentary evidence to tell us that a bridge was there.
In the absence of these two forms of evidence, we must repose upon conjecture ; but there is a common sense in history, al- though it is so rarely used : we know that
54 THE STANE STREET
a bridge spanned the river at this spot in the Dark Ages, and the Dark Ages produced no such origins of their own. We know that Eoman London was among the largest of the Koman towns of the West ; we know that one great approach to the river from the Southwark side was along this line, for there is a series of buildings and roadside burials (as we shall see in a later section) to prove it.1
The conclusion, which no sane critic can refuse, that a Roman bridge did cross the river here, is not based, however, upon such evidence taken alone. It is based first upon a conception of what the Roman civilisation was, and next upon a very simple mechanical consideration.
As to the first : The Roman civilisation is the foundation of all Europe. It suffered and was degraded during the Dark Ages, it was transformed in the Middle Ages ; much of its framework has reappeared in our own time, for at the Eenaissance it re-arose. Those
1 See also the Victoria County History: London, vol. i. pp. 109-110. Note the finds of 1756, 1824, and suc- ceeding years (when the new bridge was building) of 1846, &c.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 55
who can imagine that the Dark Ages would have produced a great and necessary work like the Bridge of London, and who can imagine at the same time that Rome would have neglected it, are incapable of judging the history of Europe. To anyone with a sense of that history, the assertion would seem as absurd as the assertion that some tattered fragment of a great picture found in the hand of a child was the creation of that child, or that a lost poem of Catullus written in a hand of the ninth century was a poetical product of the ninth century.
But if this type of argument seems out of place in scientific theory, its mechanical counterpart suffices to clinch the matter.
This second or mechanical argument for a Roman Bridge is as follows : —
A very strong tide sweeps the Thames at London. Any form of ferry would have involved a trajectory of a most uncertain kind. A ford — if there was one — could only have been used just at the few minutes of slack water and only at the lowest point of the tide — once in twelve hours. Nor could anyone who believes that a ford was used for commerce or under the ordinary conditions
56 THE STANE STREET
of the life of so great a town, have himself gone through the experience of fording a deep and rapid stream.
But to return to the ferry : a ferry, I say, must necessarily have had a most various trajectory : the boats pulling far upstream westward in the ebb, far downstream eastward in the flood ; often missing the stage, always uncertain, and free from any one line. Coins and objects dropped from the boats of such a ferry would have been found scattered in- differently over a wide belt up and down the stream. They have been found, as a fact, upon one definite line. The loss or abandonment of material along one line, that line the line of the historic bridge of the Dark and Middle Ages, that line a narrow one and a strict one reaching from shore to shore — conclusively proves in a material manner the Roman or Pre-Eoman origin of the work.
The Stane Street, then, was, we may make certain, designed to run from the East Gate of Chichester to the south end of that Roman bridge of London which stood just where the mediaeval bridge of which it was the parent also stood, and which lay some 50 yards downriver from the modern bridge.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 57
Two such termini being established for a Roman road, if there were no considerable centre of habitation or stronghold to be visited in between, it was in the Roman plan to con- nect the two by a line as straight as possible.
As a fact, the Boman road from Chichester to London does not follow this dead straight line from point to point. Such a line would take it through Petworth Park (cutting the great pond there through its middle), and so going up through Abinger in Surrey (leaving Leith Hill well to the east) ; it would cut through the heart of Epsom just at the cross- roads in the middle of that town.
The road does not do this, and the reason it does not is that the Roman engineers had to consider two obstacles in their way : hills and water, and to pass these with the least expense while still serving as fully as possible the purpose of their task, which was to reach London from Chichester by the shortest tra- jectory.
In order to surmount the hills and to cross the rivers most easily — subject to such a purpose — the road was planned, not in one perfectly straight line, but a broken one con- sisting of four great straight sections whose
58 THE STANE STREET
total length amounts to just over a mile and a half more than the absolute straight line — 56 miles and 7-| furlongs, in place of 55 miles and 3 furlongs. At so slight an ex- pense was secured an easy passage both of the North and of the South Downs and proper crossings of the rivers Arun and Mole.
This length was increased (by sundry slight divergences, which will be dealt with later) to a total distance of 57 miles and 1 furlong, which is the complete mileage of the road from terminus to terminus.
The straight line from the East Gate of Chichester to the southern end of London Bridge lies at an angle to the meridian 30° 25' East of North, but the Stane Street starts out from Chichester for its first section (which terminates at Pulborough Bridge and is somewhat over 14 miles in length) at an angle 52° 45' East of the meridian.
The second limb from Pulborough Bridge to Leith Hill bends round towards the original line and runs but 22° 30' East of the meridian. It is 17J miles in length.1
1 This second limb is slightly broken at its origin, as is shown upon the appended sketch map. The reason of this will appear later upon pp. 96, 97.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 59
London
R. Thames^
Pulboro" Bridge
Chichester
FIG. 3.
60 THE STANE STREET
The third limb, from Leith Hill to the crossing of Juniper Hill,1 is a short one of 6f miles, designed to negotiate Dorking Gap and to avoid the steep edge of Box Hill ; while the fourth limb, not quite 19 miles in length and running from the shoulder of the Box Hill group to the Thames, begins to be straight from a point in Mickleham Downs, is aligned backwards towards Juniper Hill and points straight to London Bridge ; it is driven at an angle under 28° 15' East of the meridian, and therefore converges with the ideal straight line from Chichester to London (which it meets at the foot of the Bridge) on a very fine angle.
It has been suggested that the construc- tion of the Stane Street in these four limbs, each at an angle to its neighbours, and the abandonment of the direct line to London, was due to the difficulty which the engineers of the Empire would have found in striking a direct line of such length. A total tra- jectory of 57 miles, one might imagine (had
1 If we count from one " sighting point " to another, the end of this third limb is a point on Juniper Hill, making the limb 1 mile and more longer : but the point of flexion of the actual road is below this.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 61
one no parallel instances to guide one), was of a magnitude that could hardly have been guaranteed against deflection.
The method by which the Roman engineers presumably plotted out the strict direction of their great highways will be dealt with later ; and it will be seen that this method, though capable of perfect accuracy over such a stretch of country as might be commanded in one great view from a particular height, would possibly tend to inaccuracy over a distance involving several such views. On this account, the suggestion has been made that the Roman engineers in plotting out the Stane Street could not trust themselves to one alignment so prolonged ; they took a general direction only, and " pieced together " more or less hap-hazard exact alignments drawn from one view-point to another.
But we have examples which convince us to the contrary.
The great Roman roads of the north of France are known to preserve their alignment very nearly over spaces equivalent to this great stretch of country. It is true that in the longest of these stretches, in Normandy and Picardy (to take the provinces where
62 THE STANE STREET
they may be best observed), some slight de- flection is observable, and that tbe dead straight line is apparently not obtained over a trajectory superior to some 30 miles.1 But it will be observed in the case of the Stane Street that there has not been even an attempt at such a route. This military way
1 Thus the great road south-west from Bavai runs straight for 15 miles to Forest ; then there is a very slight deflection over the next run of 10 miles. Again, the main road from Amiens to the east runs without a swerve for just over 30 miles, but it has no further task, for at the end of this stretch it joins with the Bavai road. On the other hand, the great road from Amiens south-east is permanently deflected by the hill of Beaucourt, the deflection amount- ing to nearly 2°, and occurring less than 13 miles from the city. The road north-eastward from Bavai, whose ultimate terminus is Aix-la-Chapelle, does not run more than 29 miles without a turn, but the turn here, though slight, is so noticeable that it was probably intended. The great road driven from Paris to Rouen is a better example still, for here we have an alignment from St. Gervais to Ecouis which points directly at the town of Rouen and falls within its Roman walls, and which yet suffers a slight, divergence after the sixteenth mile, a divergence which has to be corrected after the river Andelle is crossed. In general, the attempts of the Roman engineers to drive an absolutely straight line over a stretch of country greater than was commanded by one view, is never perfectly success- ful, but, on the other hand, is always near enough to success to make the angles of deflection very slight, and never so far from success as to account for great breaks of 7° and 19°, such as we have in the Stane Street.
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 63
is deliberately planned in another fashion, and makes first for Pulborough, well off to the east of the direct line ; then at a clear angle of several degrees for the shoulder of Leith Hill, thence at another sharp angle for Burford Bridge and the heights above it, thence at another sharp angle for London Bridge. Had some such attempt been made 1 to drive a road straight from terminus to terminus, we might expect a direction laid first on Petworth, some slight error of alignment perhaps behind Petworth where the view was lost, another caused by the confusion of hills between Leith Hill and the right bank of the Mole, and, in the result, a line nearly but not quite accurately laid would have been obtained.2 But no such one line has been even attempted.
The rationale of the road's construction is a further evidence in the matter. The
1 As was made, for example, in the case of the Rouen- Paris road just quoted, which crosses the Oise and several minor rivers and yet attempts a fairly direct trajectory of no less than 80 miles.
a That is exactly what we have, for instance, in the great Norman road between Pontoise and Fleury. The general direction is nearly obtained with slight deflections due to the masking of each great view as its boundary height is
64 THE STANE STREET
straight line can only have been obtained (as we shall see later) by the fixing of marks, high posts, or whatnot, which could be ob- served at a distance, and the fixing of inter- mediary posts aligned between the more distant ones. Such a method, the absolute accuracy of which could only be tested over one view, might lend itself to a slight varia- tion where two sections of the alignment joined, but it would in no way account for the bold and deliberate angles made one with another by the limbs of the Stane Street.
Another cause for this lack of a direct alignment from Chichester to London might at first sight be found in the broken nature of the country and the difficulty the engineer would have been under — without compass or theodolite — to estimate what the straight line should be over so considerable a distance. He would have (one might wrongly imagine) to "feel his way" more or less; he might know, for instance, from travel or from the experience of the barbarians, that Pulborough was more or less upon the way and was a common crossing-place of the Arun, that Leith Hill was another landmark " more or less," and that his goal upon the Thames
THE LINE OF THE ROAD 65
could be actually discerned upon a clear day from the summit of the Leatherhead Downs, which would be a third landmark.
But a visiting, in good weather, of the view-points in question, proves to one that the Koman engineer — even if we suppose him lacking instruments of precision — was guided by something much more definite than such guesswork. If, for instance, Leith Hill were one of a mere series of popular landmarks on the straight line to London, then he would not have gone round by Pulborough to reach it.
One has but to stand upon the summit of the Downs at Gumber, where the Stane Street crosses them, to see without the aid of any instrument that the straight line from Chichester to Leith Hill, both of which are conspicuous from this point, passes far to the westward of one's position.
In general, we must conclude that the line taken by the Stane Street was so taken deliberately, and that the Roman engineer in choosing to break the space between Chiche- ster and Dorking Gap into two distinct limbs, set at an angle of 30° one to the other, and meeting at Pulborough, had some definite purpose in view.
E
66 THE STANE STREET
What that purpose was, and how similar purposes governed the formation of the other two " limbs," that which negotiates Dorking Gap and that which drives from Leatherhead Downs on to London Bridge, I will next proceed to inquire.
II
THE ALIGNMENTS
We have seen that the Stane Street is, unlike any other Roman road in Britain, arti- ficially planned throughout its whole length, basing itself upon no pre-existing path ; and the proof of this lies in its establishment along four great plotted lines (three running accurately straight, and one1 broken for a discoverable cause), from one determined point to another.
There are, indeed, very many examples in which portions of a British Roman road have been so exactly aligned. I have already quoted on p. 22 that part of the Gloucester- Silchester road which runs to a marked hilltop north-westward from Cirencester. A similar alignment leads directly from the height
1 That from Pulborough Bridge to Leith Hill. This limb, the second counting northwards, is deflected in its first quarter, as I have already said, and for reasons later to be
examined.
87
68 THE STANE STREET
above the Noddon at Stanford to the height on which stood Calleva. A third is the dead straight line through Stowe Park and its neigh- bourhood in Bucks ; another that from Strat- ford, aligned on Plumpark Hill to Towcester ; another that stretch of the Fosse Way from Halford to Compton Verney. There is no need to multiply the examples ; they are to be discovered up and down the island by the dozen. But in no case does the whole road show this character throughout save in the case of the Stane Street. Thus, in the case of the Silchester road just mentioned, there is an uncertain alignment east of the Loddon and a gradual deflection further on at the fords of the Black Water. Upon any Roman road we may choose to take, except the Stane Street, such sinuosities or gradual divergences from the straight are common. We must ascribe them, as I have said, to the advantage taken by Roman engineers in inhabited dis- tricts, of existing ways, and to the necessity or temptation they were under, of visiting existing settlements.1
1 The road coming up from Winchester to Silchester is another example of the same thing. It is aligned be- tween Worting and Beaurepaire Farm in the most precise
THE ALIGNMENTS 69
The Stane Street alone avails itself in no part of its length of older trackways.
From the East Gate of Chichester to Pul- borough Bridge one direct alignment has been struck, the accuracy of which is the more remarkable from the fact that it crosses a range of hills between the two points, so that each end of this first limb is hidden from the other.
From Pulborough Bridge, again, to a point on the shoulder of Leith Hill, a second align- ment has been struck, one slight divergence
manner ; but north of the latter point there is a clear deflection, although a slight one. The Port Way, again, in the same neighbourhood, is an excellent example of direct alignment for miles, and one of the clearest in the island, although there is a very slight deflection due probably to a near "sighting" after the summit of Hannington Hill. But west of Andover as far as Quarley Hill local paths earlier than the Roman occupation appear to have baen used, and thus to have interfered with the strict plan, which is not recovered again till a point is reached between Quarley Hill and Sarum.
If I am right in ascribing the lack of a straight road between the two points mentioned, to the use of pre- existing paths, the exception would correspond to the more thickly inhabited country of the Anton Valley. But if local search should establish a straight road in this central section, the whole of the Port Way from Sarum to Silchester would form a parallel case to what I here call the excep- tional case of the Stane Street.
70 THE STANE STREET
in which will be discussed later : it is but an added proof of artificial alignment, and bears no relation to earlier roads.
From the shoulder of Leith Hill, a third line was struck to the height of Juniper Hill above Burford Bridge.
For a space of several miles south of this last point, and for some little way to the north of it, the road is unavoidably deflected from the strictness of its system, by the necessity of turning the very steep flanks of the Box Hill group ; but once these are negotiated, from ft point at the beginning of the grounds of Cherkley Court, the Stane Street, as I shall hope to show later, is aligned upon a fourth great " limb " absolutely straight which reaches its northern terminus at London Bridge.
The road is sometimes compelled, from the steepness of a bank, or from the presence of marshy soil, to desert its direct line de- liberately for some space and to make an " elbow " to one side. But it always recovers the alignment again, and such an arrangement is a further proof of the artificial engineering of the whole of its course and of the absence of reliance upon pre-existing tracks, such as
THE ALIGNMENTS 71
are to be found, I think, upon every other Koman way in the island.
Before examining the course of these " limbs," we must ask how so perfect a series of alignments was effected.
The answer to this can of course be based on nothing but conjecture; but we may confirm our conjecture both by noting certain traditional ways in which an alignment is still taken over long stretches of country, and by a consideration of the limitations under which the Roman engineers presumably worked.
Whether the civilisation of the later Empire possessed instruments which enabled distant observations to be taken, we do not know. But the weight of negative evidence against the existence of such appliances is so strong that everyone has rightly presumed it to be overwhelming.
The vulgar conception that the arts and sciences enjoy a definite progress, and that the civilisation we enjoy has been slowly and regularly evolved through an indefinite past, may be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. An infinity of human instruments, and of human discoveries, an infinity of
72 THE STANE STREET
technical work in text-books and in material, has disappeared under those successful wreck- ings of culture which have undoubtedly marked the history of Europe with regularly recurrent disasters from its unknown begin- nings to our own time.
It would be ridiculous to assert that pre- cision of measurement, the advantages con- ferred by the modern telescope, by the vernier, &c., were necessarily unknown in all periods of antiquity. But in making a particular comparison between two particular periods — our own and the first four centuries of the Empire — we have a right to assume our great superiority in the process of sur- veying.
We know, from their astronomical and geographical speculations, that their observa- tion of angles had nothing of our modern precision ; we may presume that no instru- ment more powerful than the human eye was available for the discerning of distant points.
How, then, was a straight line established by the Roman engineers between two distant points which it was desired to connect by a made way ? There is a process — perhaps
THE ALIGNMENTS 73
fche only practical one where telescopic aid and instruments of precision are absent — which can establish such alignments over distances corresponding to one great view, and even capable of linking up in one line two or more such single stretches. This pro- cess may be watched in practice to-day upon a smaller or larger scale throughout Europe. It is the process used for the alignment of rides through the great forests by our modern woodmen, and for the laying out of any straight course.
This process is one of " sighting," and in its simplest form is as follows. Of two ob- servers, one takes his station at one of the termini and there sets up a mark to which the alignment is to run from the other terminus. At that other terminus a second observer is stationed and a second mark fixed.
Between the two observers, and at some central point observable by both, a third sets up a third movable mark, and shifts it to the right or left as the two observers stationed at either end of the line may signal him, until this stake exactly covers the first terminal mark as seen from the second and the second as seen from the first. In theory, it would
74 THE STANE STREET
be sufficient to have one observer only at one terminus, watching the moving central mark and signalling to it until it was exactly in line with the other terminus. In practice, it is more accurate to have the observations controlled and corrected from either end.
When the central point is settled, the mov- able mark is there fixed. It becomes in its turn a terminus. Parties proceed to establish in the same fashion other intermediate marks between the centre and each terminus ; the shorter sections so formed are again divided by smaller poles observable over the shorter distances ; the intervals are staked ; and at last a line marked to every few yards is plotted out, and finally corrected by sights taken forward to the one terminus and backward again to the other. It is easy in such a fashion with a sufficient body of men to obtain an exact alignment over distances limited only by the possibility of observing a distant mark, and the absence of any inter- ference of high ground on the line between the two termini.
Thus, in the annexed sketch map, an observer at A marks across the intervening plain, a tall, white pole, set up at B, a
THE ALIGNMENTS 75
distance such that it can be clearly observed from A. A party working along C D (between either extremity of which line the alignment would obviously pass), shifts an- other tall, white pole, until the observer at A signals that it is exactly between him and the mark at B. This signal is made when the shifting post is at E, and at that point it is fixed.
This done the process is repeated along
FIG. 4.
the line F G with A and E as terminals, and a new fixed point is established at H. Then along the line K L with E and B as terminals till a new point is established at M, and so forth. A few main points so established, the alignment is finally marked at short distances by a row of stakes along the line A B.
This elementary process of alignment pre- supposes two heights overlooking a plain. In practice, of course, short sections of the
76 THE STANE STREET
trajectory are hidden from their neighbours by the irregularities of the soil. There may even be such high ground between the two termini as completely to shut off the sight of one from the other; the element of complexity thus introduced is resolved as follows :
Let A in the annexed sketch, be one terminus of the alignment, and B the other, while a height the crest of which is marked by the letters F G intervenes between them.
FIG. 5.
Upon this crest two poles are raised, the one moving along H I, the other along J K. An observer accompanying the party which is moving the first pole, manceuvres until he has the second pole in line with B. Mean- while, it is the business of the observer accompanying the second pole to shift it back and forth until the first pole is in a line between him and A. In theory the two might continue to shift indefinitely and make an indefinite number of errors, but in practice,
THE ALIGNMENTS 77
since each party is fairly close to the other, and signalling is constant and easy, the double bearings are very promptly arrived at. The first pole is fixed at M and the second at N, so that M covers the mark A as observed from N, and N in its turn covers the mark B as observed from M. The two "sighting" poles and the two termini are then all four upon one line, and the staking out of each branch of the section on either side of the hill can be exactly proceeded with, although each branch is invisible to the other.
If a double height intervene between the one terminus and the other, the process is somewhat more difficult, but proceeds upon the same lines of double alignment by back- ward and forward sighting. More than two intervening heights will not be discovered, I think, upon any one limb of a Koman road. There will, of course, be many inter- vening folds of land, but no more than two high points, nor more than two great views embraced in any one perfectly straight section of any Imperial military way.
Here a very interesting query suggests itself as to the manner in which these dis-
78 THE STANE STREET
tant observations were effected by the Eoman engineers.
I have spoken of a mark " clearly visible " from a terminus or from a central point between two termini, but the distance over which these long straight lines run are suffi- cient to make a modern observer of their alignment marvel. Take, for example, such a view as that from the top of Gumber Corner to the East Gate of Chichester. Chichester steeple, a great monument narrow and high, standing on an absolutely level plain, makes a fairly conspicuous mark, but without tele- scopic aid a mere pole or standard, such as could be easily set up and taken down again, would be certainly invisible. We must postulate the use of a mark of very consider- able height, of some width (though tapering to a point for the sake of accuracy), and clearly defined against the sky : a scaffolding of at least 150 feet made to such a shape would not be too great, and we are com- pelled to the conclusion that these great ways could only be plotted out at a very great expense in establishing many such marks.
An ingenious suggestion has been made in more than one quarter that these great align-
THE ALIGNMENTS 79
ments were established by smoke signals. I cannot agree with that opinion.
It is true that a column of smoke is seen from a great distance, but it has a fatal defect in the matter of precision. It will require not only a very clear, but what is much rarer a perfectly still day (the coinci- dence of clarity and stillness is rarer still) to do anything with a smoke signal seen from Gumber as far off as the shoulder of Leith Hill. Moreover, a little experience would teach the defenders of this hypothesis how difficult it is to locate the point upon a distant sky-line whence even a perpendicular column of smoke rises. Now, with a scaffold- ing of any sort this is not so, and, for some optical reason or other, a high scaffolding will be clearly observable on a sky-line where a lower one of similar width escapes the eye.
Again, it would be an infinitely long busi- ness to establish fires in place after place half- way between the two termini until one had exactly hit off the medial point. Nor, as this would commonly be much lower-lying than the two terminals, would any column of smoke, save a very tall and perfectly perpen- dicular one, be of the least use.
80 THE STANE STREET
Now, these great alignments are exact to a yard for mile after mile, and it is therefore impossible to believe that any rough-and- ready method such as a smoke- signal was sufficient to direct them.
I am compelled, therefore, to the conclu- sion that movable platforms were used with scaffolding upon them. And these must have been of great magnitude.1
Anyone who stands to-day, upon Pul- borough Hill, and looks towards Leith Hill, even upon the clearest day, will appreciate how considerable a mark would be required for the unaided eye to fix a terminus there. And we must conclude that these enormous align- ments could only be effected by some piece of work of such dimensions as our modern instruments of precision have made us lose the habit of.
The magnitude of the undertaking is in- creased in our judgment when we consider the necessity of establishing the intermediary points by the use of some movable vehicle :
1 Mirrors are a possible suggestion (though only for a segment of the circle), but useless surely without telescopic aid to fix distant reflections. Lights at night would be quite impracticable. I can see no alternative to the engines I have imagined.
THE ALIGNMENTS 81
a thing on wheels for which some sort of short transverse track must usually have been prepared, and which must have been able to carry an erection clearly visible for a distance of at least 10 miles.
Unless we are to admit the hypothesis of very large works of this kind, we have no alternative but to suppose the plotting out of a more or less satisfactory alignment, which should be brought to exactitude at an expense of perpetually corrected error, cease- less readjustment, and the efflux of a con- siderable time. Such methods savour of the "practical," commercial, slipshod races : they are not consonant with the military habit of the Eoman mind.
Over a short distance a number of stakes, set at regular intervals apart, a couple of hundred yards or so one from the other, more or less in the direct line, and the exacti- tude of their direction established by a per- petual correction of backward and forward sighting, would suffice. But to produce such an effect as the plumb between the East Gate of Chichester and Pulborough Bridge, or between Silchester and the crossing of the Anton, or between the passing of the Thames
F
82 THE STANE STREET
at Cricklade and the summit of Highgate Hill, by staking in this fashion, is hardly the way such results could have been arrived at.
I have said that these great alignments upon the Stane Street nowhere use old pass- ages or tracks, unless it be at the crossings of rivers ; and I have pointed out that the exactitude of these long straight limbs was a sufficient proof of that.
The crossings of the rivers at traditional points is an exception to this rule.
It is true that only under barbarous con- ditions is a stream, even with swampy banks, a considerable obstacle to travel. Under civilised conditions a causeway can be made almost anywhere ; a bridge can be thrown over any stream of tolerable width ; and the direction of a main road is more commonly important than the exact point at which it shall cross water. But the rule needs modification. There is, in the first place, the question of cost. The engineer in civilised times will prefer to shorten his causeway as much as possible, in order to avoid ex- pense. Again, an existing settlement upon water and an existing bridge offer him a
THE ALIGNMENTS 83
temptation to use them : old crossing-places with a firm bank upon either side will have been discovered in barbaric times before the civilised engineer comes into play, and places which save one the crossing of several branches of a divided stream will have been established by usage and will save the construction of several bridges.
We may therefore expect a Koman road sometimes to cross a river at its own choice, sometimes to follow the choice offered it by previous conditions of habitation and travel, and our general rule would seem to be that where the crossing of a stream is the terminus of one long straight " limb " and a point of flexion between one section and the next, there presumably (unless we have strong arguments against it) was a pre- Roman passage of which the Roman engineers made use.
Similarly, where a Roman road leaves its alignment for a short space and makes an " elbow " to negotiate the obstacle of a stream, we may admit the same conclusion ; but where its alignment from one distant point to another is undisturbed at the water, we may conclude without hesitation that the
84 THE STANE STREET
crossing formed part of the road and was as novel as the road itself. This is obviously true, for instance, of the Akeman Street, where it crosses the Windrush at Asthall, and probably true of its crossing of the Evenlode, though not as certainly true of its crossing of the Cherwell.1
The original line of the Wiltshire Ermine Way, though it suffers a divergence at the crossing of the Thames,2 seems to have taken that small river where it chose. The Fosse Way is not deflected by the Coin (though it is by the Yeo). The Northern Ermine Street seems to choose its own ferry over the Humber. The Watling Street in its eastern and its western branch must have passed over long causeways at Stratford as at Stretton, though at the former passage a mile or two's deflection to the right would have saved a good deal of time : and in
1 In my judgment, Akeman Street negotiates the Cher- well at Kirtlington in a rather tortuous way, and therefore presumably follows there an old British trail. I take it to follow the spur of high land on the west of the stream and to go up aslant of the steep slope upon the east. But I have given no particular study to the place, and I only offer the suggestion.
2 Indeed one of 9°. From 40° N. of W. to 49° N. of W.
THE ALIGNMENTS 85
general a Roman road must be presumed to have crossed a river at some passage of its own choosing, unless an earlier crossing is clearly indicated.1
Judged by this rule, we may suppose it possible that the crossing at Pulborough was ancient, though there militates against this conjecture the width of the marsh upon the southern side and the suspiciously convenient alignment of Pulborough Bridge with the easy way down Bignor Hill. I will discuss this more fully on a later page.
Similarly, we may be certain that the crossing of the Upper Arun at Alfoldean Bridge is due to the Roman engineers alone, for it comes right upon the exact line which aims from Pulborough Hill to the shoulder of Leith Hill.
The crossing of the Mole, on the other hand, at Burford Bridge, we may still believe to be an aboriginal passage, from the presence of hard land upon either bank, and from that of a "swallow" or lessening of the water (and sometimes its disappearance) at this point, as well as from the fact that crossing
1 As it is, for instance, at Corbridge and at Ebchester, across the Tyne and the Derwent respectively.
86 THE STANE STREET
just at that spot necessitates a turn round the flank of the Mickleham Hill a little sharper than would be the case had the Roman engineers thought themselves free to choose any crossing-place at random.
As to the crossing of the Wandle by the Stane Street, if my judgment upon a later page as to Merton be proved correct, it is an example of a Roman road leaving its alignment, and making an " elbow " in order to use an ancient and secure crossing just off its direct line, which it leaves immediately before the crossing and rejoins immediately after.
The crossing of the Thames itself does not enter into this argument, for we must pre- sume the Stane Street to be pointing at an already existing bridge, if we are to explain its direction.
We are now in a position to determine what considerations decided the Roman en- gineers to plot out the four great "limbs" of the Stane Street in the fashion they did.
THE ALIGNMENTS 87
THE FIRST LIMB. FROM CHICHESTER EAST GATE TO PULBOROUGH BRIDGE
The first limb was set straight from the East Gate of Chichester to Pulborough Bridge ; it pointed, therefore, very considerably to the eastward of the direct road to London, which would have taken a line over Good- wood Hill and towards Petworth.
This westward divergence of the first limb is explained by the difficulty of negotiating the steep northern escarpment of the South Downs, coupled with the advantage of cross- ing the Arun at a point below its junction with the Rother, so that one stream and not two has to be passed. It will be seen that these two advantages coincided in a very exact and curious manner.
If the contours of the South Downs be noted on the accompanying sketch map, it will be seen that there is one place at which the crossing of them by any road driving from Chichester north-eastward to the lower Thames is easiest, and, as we shall see in
88 THE STANE STREET
a moment, that saddle accurately corresponds with the general alignment from Chichester to Pulborough Bridge.
It so happens that a crossing of the Arun in the neighbourhood of Pulborough had ad- vantages of its own which will be presently described. Those advantages corresponded with the advantage of crossing the Downs at the easiest place, and the drawing of the line of the first limb from the East Gate of Chichester to the site of what is now Pul- borough Bridge, afforded a combination of all the most favourable circumstances dis- coverable for the road. There is no better example in Britain, and perhaps none in Europe, of the science and of the eye for country with which these great ways were designed ; and the trajectory of the Stane Street over these obscure fourteen odd miles is a monument to the military genius of Rome.
It will be perceived by the scheme of con- tour lines upon the map that the South Downs, west of the point where the Stane Street crosses them, bifurcate into two great ranges which are marked upon the map A A B and A A C respectively. The southern one, A A B, leads to Goodwood and
THE ALIGNMENTS
89
90 THE STANE STREET
supports near its extremity the famous race- course. The northern, A A C, which is the main ridge, after taking a sharp bend north- wards, runs in its general line a little north of west towards the Hampshire border. It will further be noted from a glance at the con- tours that the escarpment of this main range towards the Weald and the valley of the Rother is exceedingly steep. There are many places where a man walks down it with difficulty, and many more where he must lead his horse. Any planning of the road, there- fore, which would have led it further west- ward than its actual line, would have been confronted with these two difficulties : first, that the road, instead of having to cross the range where it was single, would have had to make a double crossing. It would have had to surmount the Goodwood ridge, dip into the Waltham-Singleton Valley, rise again steeply to the main ridge, and on the further side and escarpment of that, fall precipitously upon the Weald.
By the line actually taken, the Stane Street, after a very gradual rise from the plain and after surmounting two slight elevations, one above Halnacker the other to the west of
THE ALIGNMENTS 91
Eartham, rises, by the most gradual incline traceable in any part of the Downs, to their summit. If the straight dotted arrow drawn on the map from the East Gate of Chichester to Petworth (the direct line for London Bridge) be noted, it will be seen that this line has a steep hill to breast, after travelling barely 3 miles from the city gate. It is com- pelled to a rapid climb in Goodwood Park up to the 400 feet contour. Another mile takes it well over 500 feet ; but so far from having surmounted the Downs, it must drop again suddenly through a steep combe to below 300 feet at K.
This done it must rise again another 400 feet, cross yet another combe, reach a height of over 700 feet just above East Lavington, and there come down by one of the steepest banks in the whole range of the Downs upon the Weald. To what adventures this line would lead it further north I will allude later, but what has just been said is enough to show that the direct line from Chichester to Pet- worth would have been unpractical in the extreme. On the other hand, the line actually taken exactly utilises the greatest advantage possible. The Downs are crossed
92 THE STANE STREET
at a height of no more than 665 feet; a gradual and uniform rise leads to this height, cover- ing less than 400 feet in over 2J miles. On the far side, here as everywhere upon the Downs, the escarpment is precipitous, but a turn in the line of the hills allows the Stane Street to follow the bank sideways and to descend gradually to the Weald ; it
Sea Leuel Sea Leuel
Profiles of the Stane St. & the Direct Line respectively, in their passage ouer the South Downs.
FIG. 7.
meets the contours gradually and upon a slight gradient, instead of meeting them directly, as it would do upon any other align- ment. The difference is shown graphically in the accompanying sketch.
Finally, by continuing this line to Pul- borough Bridge, it takes at its narrowest the marshy land which at one point or another in the Rother or the Arun valleys or both it would have to negotiate. A little to the
THE ALIGNMENTS 93
west and both the Arun and the Kother would have had to be crossed where their streams are numerous and meet in very difficult and wet ground. A little further to the east and the road would have been compelled to a long causeway over the marshes that flank the Arun upon either side. The particular line chosen involved the crossing of this marsh, of course, but the crossing of it at a narrow point ; and we must conclude that the line thus struck from the East Gate of Chichester to the crossing of the first considerable stream which the Stane Street had to deal with, is the very best its engineers could have chosen. The two obstacles which lay before it, the South Downs and the marshy valley of the Arun, are surmounted in that way, which, when all difficulties are considered, combined the greatest economies of effort.
B
THE LIMB FROM PULBOROTJGH BRIDGE TO LEITH HILL
Once at Pulborough, after so considerable an eastward diversion, an attempt had to be
94 THE STANE STREET
made by the Roman engineers to recover the London line by a turn more westerly.
They had also to cross the northern range of hills which bounded the Weald, and which lay between them and London, in the easiest fashion.
To effect this double purpose, a sight taken to the conspicuous point of Leith Hill, and somewhere on its eastern shoulder, would serve ; for Leith Hill is not only the plainest mark northward from the neighbourhood of Pulborough, but also stands at the mouth of the "Dorking Gap," which is sentinelled on its further side by Box Hill.
The road had to find its way between Leith Hill and Box Hill, avoiding as much as possible the steepness of either eleva- tion. The nearest conspicuous point was to be found upon the shoulder of Leith Hill. A direct line could not be drawn so as to pass between these two steep and high hills.
To avoid a climb up the great height of either summit, it was necessary to pass round the eastern shoulder of Leith Hill, and then to pass round the western shoulder of Box Hill, as the contours on the map opposite show.
Leith HU1 900 feet + J
Land over 500 feet.
A Point on Boro' Hill 150 ft. high whence a "sight" was taken to
B the terminus at shoulder of Leith Hill.
FIG. &
96 THE STANE STREET
It was of advantage, therefore, to take the direction from the shoulder of Leith Hill, which could be clearly seen from the heights above Pulborough, to cross that shoulder as low down as possible, consistently with the estab- lishment of a good landmark, and once there to take a new sight towards the cross- ing of the Mole and the passage round the flank of Box Hill.
But in this alignment from Pulborough Bridge to the shoulder of Leith Hill, the Roman engineers were confronted with a difficulty which has perpetuated its memory in the shape the Stane Street has taken along this section. From Pulborough Bridge itself Leith Hill is not visible. Though visible from the ridge height above Pulborough on which the church stands, that height is so incon- spicuous, as seen from Leith Hill, that it would have been very difficult to take a sight from one point to the other. The difficulty was got over apparently in the following way.
Not quite a mile on the way north from Pulborough Bridge there will be noticed upon the right beyond the railway, a rather sharp eminence, which, though it does not form a summit of its group (and is only upon the
THE ALIGNMENTS 97
side of the general slope upwards towards that summit at Kedfold), is so placed as to afford a good view of Leith Hill and to be seen clearly from Leith Hill against the sky. This point is just behind the farmhouse known as New Place, and the eminence in question is known locally as Borough Hill. It was towards this point that the alignment from Leith Hill was taken, and from this point towards Leith Hill that that alignment ran.
Had that alignment been continued, how- ever, without deflection, it would have missed the crossing of the Arun at Pulborough Bridge by some three-quarters of a mile, and would have struck the river at the point where the marsh is at its widest.
So what was done was this. The align- ment Leith Hill to Borough Hill was kept up exactly until it reached a point close enough to Pulborough to permit a new, short sight being taken, which should lead the road directly to Pulborough Bridge. (See pp. 59 and 95.)
This point of flexion occurs at the south wall of a building called Todhurst Farm. It is exactly 3|- miles from the southern end of Pulborough Bridge, and these 3f
98 THE STANE STREET
miles may be regarded as a very short separate limb uniting the first long one, which ends at Pulborough, with the second long one, which ends at Leith Hill. The angle between this short "junction," and the main line, which runs absolutely straight from Todhurst Farm to the shoulder of Leith Hill, is one of 7°, the main line being directed 22° 30' East of North, and the short 3f miles from Pulborough Bridge to Todhurst Farm 29° 30' East of North.1
The precise point upon the shoulder of Leith Hill which was chosen for the terminus of the second limb, was that spot upon the eastern slope of Leith Hill which is just high enough to show clearly above the rolling land of the Weald and yet just low enough to come below the steep part of the slopes.
The Weald rises in great billows up to- wards the county boundary, and a mark set much below the 400-foot contour might be invisible, and would always be doubtfully
1 Similar slight deflections, due to the same cause, are to be found upon many other Roman roads. That running north and east from Vernand, in Picardy, for instance, presents a most interesting point of flexion of the same sort, due to the difficulties of the broken ground west of Bellenglise,
THE ALIGNMENTS
99
observable, from the lower and distant part of the district. On the other hand, Leith Hill is 965 feet high. It was important to save the road at once from too high and
Section along
C.-D. Heights X.5
A'
Section along
A.-B. Heights XtD
Sea Leuel
FIG. 9.
too steep a climb. The slope of Leith Hill towards the east is upon the sections shown above, and it is evident that the road using the platform at X could save the steep bank above yet view the Weald.
100 THE STANE STREET
To all these necessities the Stane Street here conforms.
A house called Moorhurst stands just above the 400-foot contour on this eastern slope of Leith Hill and at the point just below where the slope begins to grow steep ; about 350 yards up from this farm, northward by a little west, and in a field which lies immediately south of a wood called Ryefield Copse, was set up the mark which formed a terminus, a northern terminus for the second limb coming from Borough Hill, near Pulborough, a southern terminus for the third short limb, which was plotted so as to take Dorking Gap. I will further discuss this point when I come to the details of the road.
THE LIMB FROM LEITH HILL TO JUNIPER HILL (ALSO CALLED JUNIPER WOOD HILL).
The third short limb which negotiates the Dorking Gap is the most tricky part of the road and the one that needs the closest ex-
THE ALIGNMENTS 101
animation, if we are to understand how it was plotted out.
From the point close to Moorhurst, where the northern terminus of the second limb was established, if you look forward in the direction of that limb and imagine the Stane Street continuing its old direction unchanged, you will discover that direction to point right at the steepest and highest part of the Box Hill group. It makes for the precipitous slope of Brackham Warren, and for the very highest summit of those heights.
If you take a direct line from the same point to London Bridge it differs by less than one degree from a continuation of the second limb * and the same precipitous slope is met by it.
It was the business of the Roman engineers, of course, to avoid such a difficulty as that, and to turn it.
From where this terminus stood, upon the shoulder of Leith Hill they had a view round the corner of the valley of the Mole and of
1 On which account one might maintain that the whole system from Pulborough Bridge to London Bridge was ultimately based on one great alignment. I doubt it. The coincidence is not absolute.
102 THE STANE STREET
its passage through the North Downs, which is called " Dorking Gap."
They might, of course, have directed the road on to the river valley and followed that valley right round the flank of the hills, but that would have condemned them to a marshy soil in the latter part of the section and would have forbidden themselves that plotting out of a straight alignment, which was essential to their method.
What they did, therefore, was to look for a conspicuous point, not too high, upon the shoulder of the Box Hill group, and this they discovered a little above the 300-foot contour upon the slope of the promontory marked A B upon the accompanying sketch, and they fixed their new terminal at the point C, in which is now Juniper Wood. It stood 5 miles and 6 furlongs from their existing terminal, D, upon the shoulder of Leith Hill. To that point C was their align- ment of the third limb drawn, and from it, as we shall see later, the alignment of the fourth limb was taken, which led that fourth limb from C to London Bridge.
But the point C is not visible from the soil of D, the Leith Hill terminal of the second
THE ALIGNMENTS
103
500
300
D = Term/net/ Point on Leith Hill C= s> " - Juniper Hill
A-B= Spur called Juniper Hill Contour Lines
Alignment of the Stane Street =•— Continuation of the alignment of the second "limb"
SCALE OF MILES
FIG. 10.
104 THE STA: z STREET
limb. The hfll called Tower HOI, just to the south of Dorking, intervenes and hides C from the view of a spectator on the ground atD.
It is a very close matter.1 From quite a low Bilging upon the site of die Leith Hfll terminus one overlooks the corner of Tower Hill and catches the point C upon the promontory of Juniper Wood. Whatever method they arranged for casting fins align- ment, whether, as is probable, by setting intermediary marks upon Tower Hill, or directly by establishing two low scaffoldings at either end of this limb, one at C on Juniper Hill and the other at D upon the shoulder of Leith Hill, this was the line they plotted out.
But unlike any other of the gnat straight sections of the road, this section was unable to keep to its alignment for more than a small proportion of the whole way. It had hardly started when it had to deflect some- what to the left or west, in order to avoid the isolated steep of Tower HilL The de-
» P is jmt wmdar 500 iuui • j 41D «fc it» IMML CM
THE ALIGNMENTS 105
flection, by the time the road had got to the Pipp Brook, was as much as 600 yards.
It had then to recover the alignment by bending eastward again, and it even had to go a little too much to the east, in order to catch the exact crossing-place at Burford Bridge, which tradition and experience had fixed as the best passage for the river Mole.
When the Stane Street had passed the river at Burford Bridge, it yet could not keep the exact alignment, on account of the steepness of the contours just beyond the river. It had to bend somewhat westward again, until, nearly following the line of the present road, it came to the gardens of what is to-day Juniper Hall. But though at this point the terminal mark stood just above, not 300 yards off, the road could not reach it The hill was here too steep. It had to go round the mark, somewhat below it to the west, in order to take the curve of the pre- cipitous hill ; and thus it is that at the end of the third alignment and the beginning of the fourth the terminal mark from which those alignments were taken does not lie upon the road at alL
106 THE STANE STREET
D
THE FOURTH LIMB, FROM JUNIPER HILL TO LONDON BRIDGE
The beginning of the fourth alignment is but a continuation of this flanking way round the shoulder of the hill for a matter of not quite three-quarters of a mile. The actual road and the beginning of the straight align- ment from Juniper Wood to London Bridge, very nearly correspond with the Lodge in Juniper Hill Wood. But the straight line plotted out crosses immediately afterwards, a deep and precipitous combe, around which the road is compelled to skirt to the east- ward.
The Stane Street and its theoretical align- ment from the terminus in Juniper Hill Wood on to London Bridge, do not coincide until we reach an unmistakable point A just above the 400-foot contour, and exactly 500 yards south-east of Cherkley Court. There the winding way suddenly becomes dead straight for 2 full miles, and exactly coin- cides with the alignment in question.
THE ALIGNMENTS
107
400
Contour Map
to show Stane Street North of
Juniper Hill, with argument
in favour of its original direct
alignment.
• • •• Direction of Road
totvtirds Croydon
Known portion of Koad
-. — ... — — .— Alignment towards
London Bridge
200-^-^ — Contours of 100 feet C — Terminal Point on Juniper Hill
Box Hill
SCALE OF MILES
? ? *
FIG. 11.
108 THE STANE STREET
From that point onwards I have concluded that the Stane Street followed an undeviating straight line to the crossing of the Thames at London Bridge.
This assertion cannot be made without admitting the considerable criticism to which it is subject.
From the point B, 200 yards south of Thirty Acres Barn, in the parish of Ashtead, all trace of the road upon this alignment is probably lost. Some observers think they have discerned portions of it here and there, especially in the parish of Cheam ; but the evidence is too doubtful to be admitted, and until something more certain is available my conviction that the road, though now lost, ran directly for London Bridge from this point must depend upon proof of another type.
Against this theory it must be noted that a way which is traditionally of Roman origin diverges at this point near Thirty Acres Barn from the Stane Street, and points in the direction of Croydon and what was once conjectured to be the site of Noviomagus. This divergent track has survived. It can be followed very nearly to the Grand Stand
THE ALIGNMENTS 109
of Epsom Kacecourse. On the direct line which I suppose for the true Stane Street no relic remains. Many therefore would assert that the Stane Street was not continued on any direct alignment towards London Bridge, after this point near Thirty Acres Barn, and they would bring in support of their con- tention such arguments as the following : —
1. Branching off at this point would lead the road to a main road leading from Shore- ham up to London through Croydon. It would therefore economise expense.
2. Now a road certainly ran — though only two short sections survive — from the mouth of the Adur northward through Croydon, and this road a deflection of the Stane Street by Thirty Acres Barn would ultimately join.
3. It would get rid of the difficulty of crossing the Wandle, whose flat and marshy valley lies just athwart the straight line between Epsom Downs and London Bridge.
4. The diverging road has certainly been in continuous use at some time, since the first part of it survives, while there is no local trace of the straight way pointing towards London Bridge.
110 THE STAKE STREET
Against these arguments I would set the following : —
1. There certainly was a road leading from the Adur mouth through the neighbourhood of Croydon to London,1 though most traces of it have disappeared : but if the Stane Street had been intended to be deflected into it no one would have been at the expense of con- structing the difficult bit through Dorking Gap in order to effect a deflection of this sort north of the Surrey Hills. The obvious thing would have been to drive a straight line from Pul- borough to Reigate, and it would have been folly to have engineered the difficult passage of the Surrey Hills for nothing.
2. The crossing of the Wandle is not so difficult as the first crossing of the Arun, nor more difficult than a hundred river crossings up and down England which the Romans created to serve their military needs. It is not comparable, for instance, to the enormous business of bridging the Mersey marshes, which was done in two separate places.
3. The disappearance of the road northward
1 Only two sections have been found, but though short they are in an exact alignment one with the other, and no degree of pedantry can overlook such evidence.
THE ALIGNMENTS 111
of Epsom Downs is a strong negative argu- ment : but it must be remembered — (a) That the diverging road itself disappears after the first few hundred yards, and that there is no trace of it between Epsom Eacecourse and Croydon ; (6) that, as I shall argue later when I come to the details of the road, absolute disappearances of a Eoman road, and that not on arable land only, but just where a road can best survive, are, over stretches quite as long, a regular feature in the modern topography of Gaul and Britain.
But to these merely rebutting arguments one may bring up much stronger positive ones in aid.
We have the line of burials in Southwark pointing to a south-westerly road.
We have the term Newington Causeway. We have the great foundation of Merton Abbey right on the supposed line, and rooted in origins certainly of the Middle, perhaps of the Dark Ages.
We have the royal use of Merton (a royal villa) during the Dark Ages, and the going to and fro between it and London.
We have, what is very important, the contours involved. The accompanying sketch
112
THE STANE STREET
shows these very plainly ; an alignment from the terminus I have spoken of to London Bridge follows an easy and exact slope. The divergent line, though useful perhaps as a junction line, has to cut across difficult and abrupt contours.
The last and much most weighty argument
— 400 feet above the Sea
t 4 5 6
Scale of Mites Heights multiplied by 50
FIG. 12.
is the fact that for the first 2 miles and more from the terminus, the direct align- ment points not approximately towards, but right at London Bridge ; and this can no more be a concidence than can the direct pointing of the alignment over the South Downs towards Pulborough Bridge. This seems to me an argument so clearly con- vincing that it hardly needs support.
THE ALIGNMENTS 113
With this we conclude the fourth great limb of the Stane Street and the last of its series of alignments.
We have next to consider the military character of the road as shown in its series of camps or fortified halting-places, and established at distances of one day's march each from its neighbour, for which our con- jecture of their use and the titles of antiquity suggest the name of Mansiones. For though this name refers to a civil rather than a military use and is concerned with the posting relays on the great roads of the Empire, yet the size of the works that remain and the chief use of all such ways during peace lean me towards the latter title.
m
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES
The use of the Stane Street as a military way involved a feature not accidental or probable, but necessary : and this feature was a number of stations the distance be- tween which should correspond to a day's march, and in which the troops should rest at the end of each stage.
These stations would presumably be in the form of camps. The size of these fortified points would not limit the marching units : they might be of a much smaller size than could accommodate the occasional arrivals, which might go under canvas outside their ramparts. But they would afford per- manent stations of defence, contain per- manent small garrisons, defend the difficult passages, and stable relays of post horses for civilian use. For all these purposes a small
area would suffice. Such camps would be in
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 115
exactly organised and would contain tem- porary wooden, or permanent brick or stone, buildings.
Now, an average day's march for a con- siderable force is a matter of from 12 to 13 miles.1
1 The comparative shortness of this distance may sur- prise the reader. Men are, of course, capable of very much more, and the feats of endurance which have been accom- plished by troops under special circumstances — especially bodies of small size — abound in military history. But when there is no occasion for haste, the average set here in the text is that which will be found to agree most nearly with experience. The time between the arrival of the head of the column and the moment when its rear- most files reach the appointed halting- place must be con- sidered. If authority may be quoted, we have Schellendorf, who lays it down that a day's march should not exceed, save in emergency, an average of 22 kilometres ; Colley, who estimates from 12 to 15 miles' actual march a day ; Rustow, who considers a considerable body of troops for- tunate if it marches from 15 to 20 kilometres in a day (that is, from a little over 9 to 12£ miles) ; and the regu- lations of modern armies, which all lay down some such unit.
If example be preferred, we have Marlborough's advance to the Danube in 1704 covering, counting rests, only a little over 10 miles a day ; the Fifth German Army Corps in the Franco-Prussian War, averaging in actual day's march- ing under extreme pressure 13£ (with a maximum single day of 21 miles), and, counting rests, only 10£ ; the week's dash of the Turkish Army to Plevna which, for all its necessity for haste, averaged but 14£ miles; and, quite recently, Lord Roberts' advance on Johannesburg, of which
116 THE STANE STREET
We find, accordingly, the first of these halting-places precisely 13 miles from the East Gate of Chichester at Hardham Camp, and the construction of this work upon the south side of the marsh is in part explained by the desire of the Koman authorities not to make the stage between Chichester and the first halt too long a one. Other reasons for choosing a site south of the Arun rather than to the north of it are suggested else- where, but the necessity for not exaggerating the first or last stage of a march, to which allusion will later be made, was undoubtedly predominant.
Had the first camp been designed on the further or northern side of the Arun, it could hardly have been constructed in the midst of the occupied area which the Koman re-
16 days' actual marching averaged 12 miles a day. The Grand Army of Napoleon accomplished perhaps the best piece of marching which the history of war records. Speed was in the campaign of 1805 the principal element necessary to success. The corps which had the longest distance to travel, that which started from Boulogne, covered the first 400 miles, with very few sick, in an average day's march of 14-8 miles ; but the feat was exceptional.
These and an indefinite number of other examples could be quoted to show that the unit mentioned in the text IB a fair average.
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 117
mains at Pulborough, but lately conspicuous, prove to have existed. It would, again, hardly have been constructed in the hollow where the railway now crosses the road north of that place ; the first convenient place for building a camp north of the Arun would have been the hill beyond the railway-crossing, and this point would have been more than 15 miles from Chichester and waterless.
We must look for the second halting-place at some distance north of Hardham, more or less equivalent to the distance which Hardham itself is from the East Gate of Chichester. This second station we find situ- ated somewhat as Hardham is, just south of the second crossing of the Arun at Alfoldean Bridge.
The second stage thus formed is not quite as long as the first one. It is just under the 12 miles ; but, had the camp been con- structed any further north, it would have lacked good water.
Now, in such a series one might think it a fairly easy matter to discover the third and fourth halting-places.
The total distance from the East Gate of Chichester to the Thames at London Bridge,
118 THE STANE STREET
following the line of the Stane Street, is, as we have seen on p. 58, 56 miles and 7-J- furlongs. Five average stages, one of them, the last per- haps, a little short, would account for this dis- tance. We must therefore look for four camps, which will divide the whole line into five more or less equal stages.
The first and second stages we have found remaining in ample evidence till modern times at Hardham and Alfoldean respectively, and, as I have said, it would seem an easy matter to fix, within a comparatively small area, the probable position of the third and the fourth.
As a matter of fact, the task presents certain difficulties. No remains have yet been dis- covered which warrant us in positively fixing the site of either of these two northern camps upon the road, but the absence of positive proof is not unaccountable and it merits discussion.
Let us approach this discussion by postu- lating the existence of these two stations. They once existed as surely as did Hardham and Alfoldean camps. The thing is not hypo- thetical, but certain.
There could have been no organised
THE CAMPS OB MANSIONES 119
military communication along such a road unless such halting-places were regularly established. To move large bodies of civilised men to and fro constantly by a single road, without reliance upon towns or military stations at the end of each stage, is physically impossible. If we do not find such halting- places in positions where we should approxi- mately expect them, it can only be because they have disappeared, if in the open, or because they correspond with some place of long and continuous habitation.
We must not expect any stage, as I have said, to be more than 13 miles. It may be usefully as short as 10 or even 9. An average for the whole distance would give us just under 12 (11-3875).
Now, following up exactly 12 miles from the last of these stations, that of Alfol- dean Bridge, and measuring along the line of the Stane Street, including the bend round the corner of Leith Hill, the twelfth mile takes us well beyond Dorking to a point north, and near to Bradley farm, where the railway crosses a spinney some 200 yards west of the main road from Dorking to London.
But the camp could not have stood at this
120 THE STANE STREET
precise spot. It is not upon water. It is com- manded somewhat from above (even at the low ranges of missile weapons in those days) ; and it is not likely that its circumvallation would have wholly disappeared in the open country, even upon good arable land such as is the land near this spot.
Where, upon the analogy of the other two camps, should we look for this third mansio f Preferably, not far from the crossing of a stream. The camp at Hardham commands the crossing of a stream, and is protected by it. Good water is near at hand, and the marsh defends one approach to the place. Upon such an analogy we might expect the third mansio to lie nearer the thirteenth than the twelfth mile, and to be constructed some- what near the left bank of the Mole, on the south of Burford Bridge. But there is here no trace of it, and even less reason for its dis- appearance than at that point exactly upon the twelfth mile which we have decided to reject.
Moreover, to take a longer rather than a shorter stage at this point of the road would have been an error in organisation, for the two first stages were already over the average, and, with a third so advanced, the remaining
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 121
distance to London Bridge would have been hardly sufficient to afford two full stages. The only other water available is the Pipp Brook, which would be amply sufficient for the supply of such a station, and which afforded, with the help of certain wells, the water supply of Dorking for centuries, though not affording any serious defence.
The conclusion is forced upon us that the third camp upon the road lay within the limits of Dorking itself, and may very probably have been the origin from which Dorking sprang.
Such a site would account for the dis- appearance of the Vallum, for nothing de- stroys old earthwork like building and continued rebuilding upon a thickly in- habited site. Nay, not only does the presence of a human community tend to obliterate regular earthworks, but even substantial buildings are lost in such spots, because they are more thoroughly quarried there than else- where when they begin to fall into ruin, and the traces of them more completely disappear in continuous towns than in wild districts.1
1 Thus it is remarkable that the camp at Hardham has yielded no stone or brick, standing as it does close to the
122 THE STANE STREET
This lesson in archaeology is deeply im- pressed upon any man who has studied the remains of Rome in North Africa.
There deserted cities, such as Timgad, stand in their entirety. Cities where the popula- tion dwindled, such as Csesarea, are less pre- served. Sites where human habitation has long been the rule, and where population has been dense, obliterate all but the great public monuments, and occasionally even these are wholly destroyed. Lambsesis was a continu- ous settlement ; it has far less to show than Timgad, near by. As for Hippo, that great city of St. Augustine, not a trace even of its foundations now remains, but Bone has arisen at its expense.
It is to be presumed, therefore, that this third station, which must have existed some- where between Mickleham Hill and Holm- wood, has been obliterated by the perpetual turning and re-turning of the inhabited earth at Dorking ; and that either some four acres in Dorking (for of such extent were these small
site of the Priory with its numerous buildings in the Middle Ages and within easy hauling distance of the popu- lated bank of the Arun at Pulborough, while Alfoldean, in the depths of the Weald, and in a spot deserted by men, has yielded ample relics of buildings.
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 123
camps) bore quadrilateral earthworks which sheltered the marching troops ; or that a small town, of which Dorking is the descendant to- day, received them.
Now, on the analogy of the two other camps which this Roman road directly tra- verses, and with our knowledge of the Stane Street having been discovered by digging in the north-west corner of the old churchyard at Dorking, one might suggest a site to the south of the west end of the High Street, and perhaps including part of that thorough- fare ; but the suggestion would remain mere conjecture had we not other reasoning to guide us.
We have such reasoning available. The point is one only to be arrived at by converging lines of proof ; but it is of interest to establish it, and to show why the writer regards it as a matter historically certain that Dorking is of Roman origin, and was the third mansio upon the road from Chichester to London.
Arguing from stations that are known to this unknown station, we find attaching to the two known stations the following characters.
(1) Each is, as might be expected of a Roman work, quadrilateral and nearly square
124 THE STANE STREET
(2) The road passes through each.
(3) Each measured somewhat over 450 feet square.
(4) Each was in the close proximity of running water : Hardham within 200 yards, Alfoldean closer still. Alfoldean is right on the stream; Hardham is as close to the stream as it was possible to build, consider- ing the nature of the 200 yards of ground between the river and the hard ledge which supports the camp.
(5) Each stands to the south (or thither side, looking from London) of the stream upon which it is built. If we knew the reason of this last feature, we might use it further in our argument. As it is, we can only note the fact and suppose it to have some reason other than mere accident. We must suppose that the military or police plan, to serve which the Stane Street was built, regarded the presence of an obstacle towards the north or London side, as more useful in preserving a station from attack, than an obstacle upon the Chichester or south side.
Now, to these analogies add certain other known or obvious facts and probabilities.
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 125
We know that most towns growing up round an old Roman settlement of any sort have the centre of their lives at the original Roman centre. The exceptions (such as Manchester and Huntingdon and Cambridge) probably represent settlements which grew up outside the entrenchment of the fort.
Next we must remember that the disap- pearance of Roman earthwork in a district of permanent habitation will only coincide with the built ground ; where the earthwork ran into fields or open space it would remain, whether Roman or pre-Roman or post- Roman ; or at least it is much more likely to remain in such places than where there has been continual building and rebuilding.
We can further be certain that the station would be traced upon a fairly level piece of ground, and upon a dry one.
Finally, we have old but uncontradicted and valuable testimony to the effect that the Stane Street was seen when graves were dug in the north-west corner of the old churchyard at Dorking,1 as at B in the sketch map on p. 131.
1 Both Campden and Aubrey testify to this. See also the article in Surrey Archceologia, vol. x. pp. 104, 107.
126 THE STAISTE STREET
Now, let us put all these together and see the limits wherein we can not but determine the Dorking station to have lain.
We must look for it close to its water supply, and therefore somewhere to the south of the Pipp or Mill Brook, and fairly close to that supply of running water.
Now, we cannot put the camp on the brook to the north of the church and regard the traces of the road in the churchyard as the entry towards the south gate of the camp. We cannot put it thus north of the church- yard and between the church and the brook, for there is not room there for an entrench- ment between 400 and 500 feet square.
We must look for it, therefore, somewhere to the west or east or south of the churchyard.
It could not lie right on the brook to the west of the churchyard, for not only would its northern entrenchment then have lain upon somewhat marshy ground (and, what is more, on open ground still remaining, and ground which has been still more open until recent times, which would surely bear traces of its wall and ditch), but (what is convincing) no line drawn through the centre of such a
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 127
position towards Burford Bridge could possibly have taken the road out of the camp through Dorking churchyard.
It could not lie to the east of the church for exactly the same reason, and also be- cause such a position would have involved a sharp, extraordinary, and quite useless bend in the road.
On the other hand, we cannot put it very far to the south of the churchyard, because a square of 500 feet every way would only just fit in between the south of the church- yard and the abrupt slope of Eose Hill.
All this would lead us to expect the station to have lain somewhere to the south, or nearly to the south of Dorking churchyard, and quite close to it on that side.
But we can find surer ground for this spot. We get further indications from the line of the road at this part.
The Stane Street, after it turns the corner at the shoulder of Leith Hill, points straight for Burford Bridge, where we know that, as a fact, it crossed. As we have seen, in speak- ing of the alignment here, it was not able to go right across the broken ground of Eose Hill and Tower Hill, to which it points. It
128 THE STANE STREET
had to be deflected somewhat to the left, or west, in order to pass round the base of these steep knolls ; but it would, when it had passed round their base, try to get back as quickly as possible, for the sake of economy, to its main alignment. That is what we find it doing, for instance, between Bignor and Pul- borough. Every unnecessary yard to the west would be a loss or extra expense of labour and material, very unlike Eoman workmanship and, as a fact, without parallel in any one of the many great Roman roads which we can study.
In connection with all these considerations, it is impossible to place the station in any position such that its centre should have been more than 100 yards south of the point where the High Street and West Street meet, or more than 100 yards west of the same point. We have, therefore, at that point a very good approximation to what must have been the centre of the work. Put it further west and you find yourself out of the alignment of the road as it comes in from the south, while you also make it impossible for the road leaving the camp towards the north and Burford Bridge to touch the corner of the old church-
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 129
yard. Take it further south, and you infringe upon the abrupt slope of Rose Hill. Further east, as I have said, you cannot put it with- out presupposing useless divergence and ex- pense, as well as making impossible its passage through the churchyard. Further north the brook stops you. Finally, this point, where West Street and High Street meet, exactly corresponds to the oldest and most con- tinuously occupied portion of the town.
Add to all this the recent discovery of the road crossing West Street at the point A in the accompanying map, and you can hardly put the camp elsewhere than in the angle between West Street and South Street, and just where they meet.
Such are my reasons for believing that the third station upon the Stane Street was a quadrilateral, including the present meeting of the Three Ways at Dorking, and mainly in the angle between South Street and West Street, and it is to this point that I shall count the third march of the road to have lain from Alfoldean northward.
This third day's march along the road from the south of Alfoldean Bridge to this point in Dorking town is, measured along
I
130 THE STANE STKEET
the road itself, exactly 10 miles and 1155 yards. This is a shorter distance than the first two stages, but one of them is a trifle long, and it is obviously designed on the same plan for a day's march as these first two sections. Moreover, it leaves two reason- able stages for the remaining distance to London.
The site of the fourth mansio is even more difficult to establish ; or rather our conjec- tures with regard to it (for we can do no more than conjecture) cannot even be as precise as the suggestion made with regard to the supposed mansio at Dorking.
There are two reasons for this : the first is that, as we approach London, we come to districts where the earth has been turned and re-turned in full confusion for centuries, and where modern building has obliterated every ancient landmark.
The second reason is, that the track of the road itself is only conjectural after the neighbourhood of Thirty Acres Barn at Epsom Downs.
There are further difficulties. The dis- tance between Dorking and the southern extremity of London Bridge, following along
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 131
J
Conjectural limits of f/ie [Camp
.—Alignment from terminal at Leith Hill to terminal on Juniper Hill
lfn/Vg>-n streets of DorMLng Contours in feet Old Limits of Ckurch Yard
nown portions of Stane [Street
— — — Conjectural portions of LStane Street
FIG. 13.
132 THE STANE STREET
the line, first actual and later conjectural, of the Stane Street, is no more than 22 miles ; so that, with the third camp situated within the limits of Dorking, a stage exactly bisect- ing the distance would yield two sections of 11 miles each. If, as is more probable, a long stage were plotted out from Dorking, with the object of making the last march into London designedly short (on the analogy of similar approach to large cities throughout the Empire), l then this means that the mansio for which we are looking must be sought yet further and will perhaps bring us into the hopeless maze of the South London suburbs.
Let us examine the evidence and see what we can make of it.
So far as the discovery of positive evidence goes, that is perhaps no longer obtainable.
One must never be quite certain of such matters, for the negative argument in history is always a weak one, and, in the case of a Roman road in particular, the spade brings
1 The first or last stage in arid out of a great city was always short. The longer time required under the conditions of a halt in such a place or of departure from it, the exit or entry through traffic, the hour required for finding or leaving scattered billets, account for this.
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 133
up unexpected testimony year by year. Meanwhile, it seems unlikely that in so frequented a neighbourhood as that between Epsom and the London suburbs, cut recently — that is, during the wide development of archaeological research — by so many railways and other works, some past evidences of a Roman military station should fail us unless that station were situated on a spot inhabited throughout the Dark and Middle Ages.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that the route of the Stane Street from Epsom Downs to London Bridge is necessarily conjectural, and that authorities will even be found (I have argued against these on a preceding page) who believe that the road was deflected eastward towards Croydon. Supposing, however, that the road followed, as I maintain, its normal straight line to London Bridge, the straight line along which it points where it is last visible upon the Leatherhead and Epsom Downs, we may, following that road, make certain conjectures as to the site of the fourth station upon the analogy of the other three, and upon the analogy of other Roman military ways throughout Europe.
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In the first place, we have the normal maximum for a march of 13 miles, or, at the very most, of 14 and this takes us, counting from the junction of West Street and High Street in Dorking, to the crossing of the Kiver Wandle in the neighbourhood of what was for centuries Merton Abbey.
This is the extreme site northwards at which we can place the fourth mansio. It leaves for the last day's march along the conjectural line of the Stane Street to London Bridge rather more than 8 miles.
Next let us observe that a point exactly equidistant from Dorking and from London Bridge (a point which there is no particular reason to fix on as the station, but which gives us a measurement) takes us into Non- such Park, near Cheam.
In the third place, let us remember that the station must have had water ; and finally, that, in the absence of remaining and traceable earthworks, the probability always inclines towards a long-inhabited site.
The first thing we note is that there is not along this great stretch of way any such earthwork remaining. At a point on the Eoman road half-way between the fifth and sixth
THE CAMPS OR MANSIONES 135
mile from Dorking, and at right angles from the road down the hill north-west towards the church in Ashtead Park, you do indeed come, at a distance of about half a mile, upon a camp that is probably Roman. Of what service this bit of earthwork was, we cannot now tell, but we can be certain that it was not the station for which we are looking.
Suppose even there were no station at Dorking, and imagine for a moment this camp at Ashtead to be the station next after the Alfoldean one, and you have a march of 18 miles between camp and camp. No such distance would have been laid down for the ordinary march of troops passing up and down a military road in time of peace. If we admit the station at Dorking, the camp at Ashtead is of course a great deal too close to correspond to the next station northward. Moreover, the road did not point at it or pass through it, as it certainly did through the two known stations at Hardham and Alfoldean and the conjec- tural one at Dorking ; it leaves it no less than half a mile to one side. We may there- fore neglect the work at Ashtead.
In all the run from what would have been
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the sixth milestone from Dorking, right away to the Wandle at Merton Abbey — a run of 8 miles — the road is lost, as we shall see when we come to the special discussion of that section. Following the straight line which points accurately to London Bridge, it passes through no continuously inhabited spot. Epsom and Ewell it leaves to the left, Cheam and Sutton to the right. It is, of course, possible that either in Cheam or in Ewell, and especially the latter, upon land continually inhabited and still provided with water, a station, which continuous habita- tion has caused to disappear, was situated ; but we have no proof of it in any form, nor any ground for inference ; and upon the analogy of Koman stations in other parts of the Empire where the road approaches a great city, we should not look for a station at such a distance from that city. A mansio at this point would leave a march of full 14 miles on to London or out of London; and 14 miles for the first mansio or first day's march out of London is not to be thought of. If a long march must be premised somewhere, the last march but one would obviously bear it in any thought-
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Contour Lines Later Valley Road Line of Stane Street Ashiead Camp
SCALE OF MILES ? ?
aDorking
FIG. 14.
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out system; 14 miles from Dorking is a far more likely point, and that gives roughly the crossing of the Wandle in the neighbour- hood of Merton Abbey.
This last site has the further argument to recommend it that it is situated, as is each of the two known sites, Hardham and Alfoldean, upon a considerable stream, defend- ing the crossing of that stream and guarantee- ing communication across it. Next we have noted that the neighbourhood was used during the early Middle Ages for the establishment of a great monastic institution and one with origins earlier still. This is an argument of some importance. The early monasteries were nearly all of them situated upon these Roman ways, which, until the thirteenth century, were the best means of communication and the arteries of a country. Roman build- ings often served them as a quarry for their materials of construction, and in at least a dozen demonstrable cases in North-eastern France and Southern Britain, the continuity of a Roman station with a mediaeval monastic establishment or the close proximity of one to the other, is apparent.
Conjecture, then, points to the crossing of
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the Wandle by Merton Abbey as the site of the fourth and last mansio upon the line between Chichester and London.
We may sum up and say that the total distance between the East Gate of Chichester and the South Bridge-head of London Bridge, a distance 3 miles short of the full 60 miles, must have been divided into five stations : that of these two are known and have left clear and indisputable relics — the first at Hardham, the second at Alfoldean. That these two establish, the first a march of 13 miles, the second one of about 12. That much the most probable situation to be discovered for the third station is the town of Dorking : a situation giving a third station of just under 12 miles. And finally, that a very possible and even probable situation for the fourth would be the crossing of the Wandle near Merton Abbey, which would give a fourth stage of over 13 miles, indeed nearly 14, leaving, upon the analogy of many other short last stages upon the great roads on entering the main towns of the Empire, only 8 miles for the fifth and final division of the road.
IV
THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF THE ROAD
The reader of history demands first of a subject that he should hear the historical framework within which it is contained.
What dates may be assigned to the origin of his subject ? — to its use, to its decline, or its extinction ?
He next requires to hear what events fall within that framework, and in their case also to learn with as much exactitude as possible the date of each and its connection in time with other things. It is only after satisfaction upon such points that he is will- ing to turn to more general considerations, and the questions of character, utility, and effect upon the world.
This attitude of the mind towards historical art is eminently just, and is as reasonable as that other attitude adopted by the plain
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HISTORICAL CHARACTER 141
man towards plastic art when he requires of a picture that first and before any other consideration it should resemble that which it represents.
Unfortunately, in the realm where archae- ology and history meet we cannot satisfy this prime question of the historical reader.
We are compelled, in the absence of posi- tive human witnesses and established records to guess, to approximate, to set large margins of anterior and posterior dates within which an event or a use shall be placed, often to forego altogether the mention of any actual historical incidents connected with our sub- ject, and this from the fact that no such incidents remain on record.
All this unfortunate lack of certainty, which applies in general to most archaeological dis- cussion, applies in an especial manner to an historical discussion upon the Stane Street.
There is no single record remaining of its continuous use.
There is no record remaining of its use at some one early period from which we might infer its continuous use.
There is, of course, no record remaining of its inception or building, nor so much as an
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allusion to its decay or repair — at least no record before quite modern times.
With the exception of the battle (and Synod ?) of Ockley, the only recorded in- cidents of the Dark Ages connected with the road concern the neighbourhood of London, such as the death of Cynewulf at Merton, and, as we have seen, and shall see further, the neighbourhood of London is precisely the most disputed portion of its whole trajectory.
We are thrown back, therefore, in the historical discussion of the Stane Street, upon the evidence afforded by the remains of the Street itself, aided by analogy.
There are but two positive records of Roman roads in this country apart from the evidence which the relics of those roads themselves afford. The first is the document known as the " Itinerary of Antoninus." The second is a late l and probably distorted copy of a general Roman map, called " Peutinger's Tables."
We can, indeed, glean from documents of another character, literary or geological but not strictly topographical, evidence which is in the total very large, upon the routes
1 They say of the thirteenth century.
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pursued by armies, commerce, and adminis- tration in the first four centuries. But with the exception of Peutinger's tables and the Antonine Itinerary, we have no positive evi- dence remaining upon the scheme of Roman roads.1
Peutinger's tables do not include any part of Britain save a portion of the south- eastern coast. The rest of the fragment re- garding Britain has disappeared.2 The Stane Street is therefore excluded from this piece of evidence.
The Antonine Itinerary, the sole remaining witness, makes no mention of the Stane Street.
It might be supposed that in the absence of evidence, in the silence of the Antonine Itinerary with regard to the Stane Street, all we had to do was to regret that lacuna, and to pass on to such evidence as the road itself affords.
Unfortunately this is not the case, for there has grown up a deplorable academic
1 The itinerary of "Richard of Cirencester " which Bertram fathered deserves notice. It is not demonstrably a mere forgery. But for the Stane Street it has nihil ad rem.
2 Lost in the sixteenth century.
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habit which will build most readily upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood before one can proceed to truth.
Any slight knowledge of intellectual appe- tites will convince a man that things un- discoverable or only partially discoverable exercise a peculiar fascination over the mind, and that it is where they are concerned that assertions become most bold and the passions of controversy most heated.
So it is in the matter of Roman topography, especially in Britain. Since we cannot tell with any certitude from contemporary evidence where the bulk of the roads ran, nor even with what spots a great number, perhaps the majority, of our surviving Koman place- names can be precisely identified, theories upon the line of the Roman roads are plotted out with an amazing assurance. The Roman place-names are identified with quiet security, or what is worse, the mere lack of evidence is used for the purposes of confident negation.
It is this last feature, the feature which I have put in italics, which must be especially remarked, for it is the peculiar disease of our time in this province of inquiry.
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For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century, when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record re- turned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did — what ? — why, ceased to exist !
No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true. Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date towards the close of the Roman Imperial system and another fixed date (rather more than two hundred years later) at the beginning of the Dark Ages, therefore it has been solemnly put forward under academic authority that London in the interval disappeared !
It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours when we happen to be absent from them. Common sense ought to teach men
K
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who propound such fantasies that at any moment in the digging of any new foundation in London or in the building of any new road, a piece of positive evidence may blow their absurdity sky-high.
But an extravagant contradiction of common sense is an actual incentive to the spirit which I am here criticising. And the desire to deny the Roman origins of our civilisation is so violent wherever the tradition of civilisa- tion is felt to be disturbing and inimical to established properties or religious feeling, that mad theories of the sort are not only solemnly propounded at Oxford and Cam- bridge, but have been erected for a couple of academic generations into a sort of insane orthodoxy.
What has that to do with the silence of the Antonine itinerary upon the Stane Street ?
Why, it has this to do with it : That un- less we could prove in the most irrefutable manner that the Stane Street does stand to- day, and is as certainly the work of Imperial Rome, the Universities would certainly deny its existence.
In the matter of a Roman road, their
ITS HISTORICAL CHARACTER 147
vagaries are particularly prominent. Until plain relics of Roman occupation are dis- covered, the Roman origin of some town manifestly and of necessity ancient is not doubted but actually denied. The inevitable crossing-place of a river will not be allowed to be the crossing-place the Roman armies used unless a discovery of coins or what-not proves it. A causeway self-evidently the work of a high civilisation, and with no con- ceivable authorship posterior to that of the Roman civilisation, will not be allowed to be Roman by these Moderns, unless it conforms to certain rules of construction discoverable in some remaining fragment of documentary evidence and gratuitously laid down by them as universal. Tradition, that sole guide in matters where direct evidence is lacking, is simply ignored. You get men saying that Anderida was no considerable port ; that Silchester (with walls as long as Bavai's or Winchester's) was not more than a village ; that Roman Britain as a whole, with its active military history and its vast export of grain, was but sparsely populated and in- sufficiently held.
One must be prepared in establishing the
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route of the Stane Street, as in the establish- ing of any other Roman origin in England, for an abnormal scepticism and for the official denial of any point until an overwhelming accretion of positive evidence is brought up to break the resistance down ; and the omission of any mention of the Stane Street in the itinerary would be sufficient to call into question the plain fact that the road is there, and is sufficient to dispute every recon- struction of its more doubtful sections.
Well, the silence of the Antonine Itinerary is of very little importance. Of how little importance we can best understand when we appreciate what the document is.
Stripped of technical language and of the affectation of authority, all we can say of the date of the Itinerary is this : that it was com- piled at some time between the reign of Had- rian and that of Constantine, while we may conjecture (but cannot prove), that, in the form in which we now have it, it was added to and expanded in the course of those 'centuries.
Next we must know that the itinerary does not bear the mark of any complete survey. It is whimsical, and perpetually refers to what looks like some individual experience of
ITS HISTORICAL CHARACTER 149
travel, and not like a universal scheme. The earliest of the English commentators upon its text, and not the least scholarly, made it out to be a record of Hadrian's journeys, and thus explained its vagaries and its omissions. But in truth we do not know to what acci- dent those vagaries and those omissions are due.
In the absence, then, of any positive evi- dence, we must turn to the evidence of the road itself and conjecture from analogy the date of its construction.
The inferior and superior dates of that con- struction are easy to determine. Direct ad- ministration from Rome ceased in Britain with the first years of the fifth century, 407- 410 A.D. The first years of regular and peaceful administration in which a great Roman work could have been undertaken, correspond to the very end of the first cen- tury after the work of Agricola, 85 A.D. Within those 300 years we have the date in which the Stane Street was constructed.
Earlier it cannot have been made. There was no strategical reason for the undertaking of so great a work. The paucity of com- munications was felt in the North, not in the
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South, during the Northern fighting with which Agricola's name is connected ; and a military business of this kind, until complete control was established over the island, would have been sheer waste.
Were we dealing with Gaul, the superior date might be extended. It is possible that in Gaul military roads upon the Roman plan were constructed, it is certain that they were repaired, as late as the sixth or seventh century, possibly even in the eighth. But in Britain we can look for no such continuity, at least, near her southern and eastern shores.
If we attempt to conjecture at what moment in those three centuries the great work was undertaken, we are entirely at a loss. All we can put together is this : —
It was a purely military work — that is, it linked up no centres of population nor canalised any stream of commerce. Its sole military value was the connection of all the sheltered creeks and harbours which run from Chichester to Portchester eastward, with London and the crossing of the Thames by a shorter route than the way round by Winchester. The use of these western har-
ITS HISTORICAL CHARACTER 151
hours came later than the use of the Straits of Dover as an entry to the country, and was subsidiary to it. They seem particularly im- portant towards the end of the Roman oc- cupation, and it is therefore possible to conjecture very vaguely that the Stane Street more probably belongs to the later rather than the earlier part of those centuries of Roman rule.
If we were to admit the argument of some authorities that the first scheme of Roman roads was connected with a ferry 300 yards east of London Bridge, and if we were further to admit that the Stane Street in its last alignment points towards that ferry, this would give us an earlier rather than a later date for the construction of the road.1
But the first contention is doubtful and the second almost certainly false. The alignment from the corner of Juniper Hill across the Wandle points as absolutely at the southern
1 Such a ferry certainly led to the island fortress of Rich- borough : such another crossed the Humber. But though the Thames at London was tidal as these waters were, yet it was far narrower than they, and seaborne commerce had no call, as on the Humber and round Thanet, to proceed further : for this among many other reasons given at length on pp, 54-56, 1 conclude for the Bridge.
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end of old London Bridge as any measure- ment will allow.1
If we find it impossible to fix a date save within such very wide limits for the construc- tion of the road, it is still less easy to fix, with the vaguest approximation to accuracy, the moment when the continuity of its use was broken.
Nevertheless the discussion is not without interest. There must have been some one period up to which, in spite of the decline of all civilisation, a man could use the Stane Street in all its length from Chichester to London Bridge. And there must have been some date on and after which that continuity of use was broken.
Now there are several indications to support the conjecture that the disuse of the Stane Street as a continuous road came early in the Dark Ages. Chichester is undoubtedly a city of Roman origin, and, short of some miracle specially worked for the benefit of scepticism, we must believe that it has maintained its life as a town from Roman times to this day. Unless, that is, we ajre to accept the extra- ordinary point of view, for which there is no
1 See measurements in note at the end of the book.
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evidence, whether in analogy or in documents, that the pirates who raided Britain from the sea-coast would first destroy a city, then leave it a heap of ruins, and then be at the pains of rebuilding it on exactly the same site, we must believe that Chichester, like every other Roman town which has survived in this island, maintained a continuous life.
Well, when the light of recorded history dawns again upon Britain with the reorganisa- tion of the Church and the preaching of Her doctrines in the south and east of the island, it is remarkable that no record of travel shows us Chichester (or, for that matter, the Sussex sea- plain as a whole) in direct communication with the Thames valley.
That sea-plain has always contained the great bulk of the population. The Weald, though not the impassable forest which it has been made out, was always sparsely inhabited, and always difficult to cross ; and the little strip of fertile land between the Downs and the sea must have suffered heavily during the pirate raids, Irish and German, which succeeded the breakdown of Roman power. We know that this strip of country remained pagan for one hundred years after the landing
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of St Augustine, and nothing is more remark- able in the early history of the Dark Ages in this country than the isolation of the sea-plain of Sussex. When St. Wilfrid came to preach the Faith to Sussex, though we do not know by what road he came, we read of Sussex in connection with that mission as attached to Wessex on the one hand and to Kent upon the other, with no mention of travel to, or commerce with, the Thames valley. Cad- walla, who lurked in the Weald as an outlaw, fought Kent and later the Isle of Wight, and became king of Wessex, but there is no story of his fighting north towards London. It is true that his story is connected with the Chilterns also, but it is in no way connected with the Lower Thames Valley, and when Cad walla achieved a general overlordship, it was an overlordship of the south coast of Kent and Wessex and Sussex. Generation after generation throughout the Dark Ages we can follow and find no mention of the use of the Stane Street, nor even any record of a march from which we might infer that use. Nearly one hundred years after Cadwalla and St. Wilfrid, we are able to fix a limit to which the road was still used as a highway south-
ITS HISTORICAL CHARACTER 155
ward out of London into Surrey, for in 782 and again in 789 the chronicle tells us of a synod held at Ockley, and seventy years later again, in 851, we have the battle of Ockley, which was fought hard by the Stane Street, a little south of Dorking and upon the eastern slope of Leith Hill.
This battle at Ockley proves the continuity of the use of the Stane Street so late as the middle of the ninth century between London and its site. Any earlier breach of continuity we must conjecture to have taken place further south than that point.
The battle of Ockley, then, though it took place in the Surrey village to which tradi- tion attaches, does not give us a date up to which there was continuous use of the whole Stane Street, from Chichester to London. On the contrary, we may guess from the isola- tion of Sussex in the seventh century that the Way had been broken to the south long before 700, let alone 851. But as the one historical event certainly connected with the road in the Dark Ages, it merits a brief dis- cussion. The reader will not be surprised to hear that, being the one certain point we have, it has been disputed.
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The pirates of the North Sea, pagans generically known in the history of this country as " the Danes," had for a generation and more landed on the shores of Britain in small bands, burning, pillaging, and destroy- ing. In the winter of 850-1 some body of them wintered for the first time on British soil, in Thanet, and with the spring (as we may suppose) of 851 a fleet of 350 vessels came into London river to reinforce them. They stormed the walls of Canterbury and of London. Ethel wulf, the father of Alfred, gathered an army against them. The pirate host had crossed the Thames into Surrey. By which road Ethelwulf and the men of Wessex marched against them we do not know, but the old British way from Winchester by Alton leads to the neighbourhood of the battlefield which was to see the shock between the two forces. In the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, " King Ethelwulf and his son Ethelbald with the levy of the West Saxons fought against them at Ockley, and there made the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that we have heard tell of to this present day, and there got the victory."
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The matter is perfectly plain : therefore it has been doubted.
It has been argued that the battlefield was more likely to be Oakley, near Basingstoke, than the traditional Ockley in Surrey.
The motive of this argument is of course that itch for discovery coupled with a sus- picion of tradition which is the bane of modern pedantry. As against the one and only record, a perfectly clear one, and as against the tradition of the Surrey village, the only approach to argument is the spelling of the place-name in the chronicles " Aclea," which might correspond to the place-name " Aclei " in Doomsday, while Ockley in Surrey is spelt in Doomsday " Hoclie." As against this random guess, you have the fact that Ockley has not only the very power- ful argument of tradition in its favour, nor only the presence in its neighbourhood of a huge fortified ring (which the Danish army may not have made, but in which they could have reposed), but the fact that it is at the meeting-place of two main avenues of ad- vance. An army coming up from Wessex by the old prehistoric road, which was in full use for centuries later, would come upon the
158 THE STANE STREET
Stane Street just opposite Dorking and with- in an hour or an hour and a half's march of the battlefield, while an army marching south of the Thames, as we are particularly- told in the Chronicle the Danes did, to ravage Surrey, would have no ancient way open to them save the Stane Street.1
The Stane Street not only goes right through Ockley and the traditional field of the battle, but is more apparent there, has been more thoroughly studied there, and has been in more continuous use there than in any other part of its trajectory. Moreover, the one document — the only one — which gives us the original story at all,2 distinctly tells us that the fight was in Surrey ; that the Danes had been ravishing Surrey before
1 Mr. Oman, of Oxford, tells us in this connection that Ockley, standing in the clearest bit of Roman road in the kingdom, and the best attested and the most widely known (to the vulgar), is " unlikely " to be the site of the battle, because " it is far from any road" (Oman's England before the Norman Conquest, p. 425.) The same authority tells us that Arundel is on the Adur (England before the Norman Conquest, p. 169).
2 The Parker MSS. 173, C.C.C.C. In a hand perhaps only thirty years later than the event. The other accounts are later still, and the Peterborough MS. [The Laud MS . , Laud Misc. 636, in a hand three hundred years later, inverts the order of the land and sea battles.]
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it. Oakley near Basingstoke, is not in Surrey at all ; it is in Hampshire. Not only is it in Hampshire, but the great Roman road along which we are asked to believe that the Danes marched to this supposed battlefield 1 (it is 2 miles off the Silchester-Winchester road) never goes anywhere near Surrey.
Nor is this all. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle particularly points out that the Danes "marched south over the Thames into Surrey." The road towards Basingstoke keeps north of the Thames until it is well past the Surrey boundary.
In a word, this idea that the battle of Ockley did not take place at Ockley but some- where else, is but one more instance of that search for iconoclastic novelty at the expense of scholarship which is the very disease of dons. It arises partly from vanity, partly from a love of local fame, more from a misconcep- tion of what history is and means, and it is a detestable ingredient in modern writing. I
1 "In a good position for an army covering Wessex for an attack from the north-east." Oman again, and pure guesswork posing as history. There is no mention in the original of any attack from the north-east. The attack was by the West Saxons on the Danes from the south-west. {England before the Conquest, loc. cit.)
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am glad to have exposed here a conspicuous example of its charlatanry and folly.
Ockley, then, we may safely take to be a limit up to which the Stane Street was cer- tainly used in the ninth century. There is mention of one other point in the Dark Ages between Ockley and London, and that is Merton, where Cynewulf was killed in 78 6. x
Of positive evidence beside these points we have none, and they seem between them to lead to some such conclusion as this : —
The Stane Street remained in continuous •ase right on through the Dark Ages, and perhaps until near their close, from London to that point beyond the shoulder of Leith Hill where the unfertile waste of the High Weald with its deep clay, bad water, and thickets begins. There, if we may judge by the absence of buildings or remains of build- ings, of monastic establishments, and of all historical record, by the presence of the county boundary between Surrey and Sussex, and by the long isolation of the latter county, the
1 786 ? 786 upon the theory that all dates in this part of the Chronicle are, like the death of Charlemagne (by far the best datum point), antedated two years by erroneous copying. The MSS. of the Chronicles give 784.
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first break in the road occurred. Very possibly this was due to the ruin of the bridge over A run at Alfoldean, a little further south. Whenever this occurred, to proceed further south along the Stane Street would have led one nowhere ; and it must further be remarked that the gap between the road still in use near Ockley and Alfoldean Bridge is the worst bit of soil and heaviest going in all the passage of the Stane Street through the Weald.1
From Alfoldean Bridge south to Pul- borough it must have remained in some sort of continuous use, if only to link up isolated farms; while in the southern part of this stretch it continuously united two groups of population — Billingshurst and Pulborough — and formed for most of its length the road to another old inhabited site (of whose origin, however, we know nothing) — Horsham. South of Pul- borough was again a break, due presumably once more to the breach of communications over a river and a marsh, the breakdown, that is, of a bridge and a causeway.
1 It must be remembered, however, that a track survives — all signs of metalling lost on the surface — and is marked continuous as late as 1725 (Bowies' Map).
L
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This gap was a serious one, since it took all the meaning out of the road from Chichester over the Downs. With the breakdown of the road in this gap, the Stane Street would be used from Chichester so long as it served the sea-plain — that is, up to Halnecker Hill, in its neighbourhood — but after that its passage over the uninhabited Downs led nowhere.
When the roadways were linked up again by the recovery of civilisation, the Stane Street was not recovered in its entirety. Those great deflections took place in it which will be the matter of my next section, and which so largely correspond to the gaps I have here noted.
Of further history in connection with the Stane Street there is none. The Conquest certainly found a monastic establishment at Boxgrove, and probably found one at Hard- ham. The new Norman civilisation also found (and largely expanded) the establish- ment at Merton; but of battles, synods, or civic gatherings, still more of commerce pro- ceeding along the road, or of any form of human communication using it for great purposes capable of leaving historical record, there is no trace.
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES
WHEN I speak of the " divergences" of modern roads from the Stane Street, I must not be understood to mean the slight deflec- tions of a few yards produced in the course of 1500 years from the original direct line of a Roman road which is still in use. Such deflections are notable in the Watling Street, for instance, and have an interest of their own. They are to be found throughout Western Europe upon the line of every sur- viving Roman road wherever such a road runs.
The " divergences " I speak of in connec- tion with the Stane Street are of far greater interest and importance.
The Stane Street ceased to be a continuous means of communication between Chichester and London at a date which, although, as we have seen, it cannot be precisely estab-
168
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lished, was certainly so early that any pro- minent example of divergence in its course, is an important indication of the influences which moulded travel in the Dark Ages; for the divergences from the Stane Street are concerned only with the disjointed fragments of the road, as those fragments were left after its continuous use was in- terrupted, and after it had sunk into a series of isolated links connecting, not London and the sea-coast, but neighbouring points in any one countryside. On this account the forces tending to replace the old Roman line by new ways had the fullest scope. The new tracks were not tied to a trajectory in constant and uninterrupted use and though they originated in the Stane Street, the most excentric very largely differ from its course.
I say the divergences apparent on such a broken-down Roman road are of the highest historical interest ; and for this reason, that they provide one of these links which ill-informed or unobservant men be- lieve (in the lack of written record) to be lacking between Roman and medieval times in Britain.
.THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 165
It is frequently remarked, especially by modern writers, that the streets of our cities and the lanes and roads of our countrysides so little correspond with the old Roman lines, as to prove a complete devastation of Britain by the pagan pirate raiders of the fifth century and the destruction of Eoman culture at a blow. The thesis till recently popular in the universities was that of a conquest of all Eastern Britain by the Saxon pirates, and the extermination of the population. That thesis has been suffi- ciently exploded. The material argument drawn from the post-Roman course of roads and streets was, in particular, an example of that lack of general culture which is the bane of our universities ; for a little intelligent travel, a little observation of Paris or of Orleans, of Aries, of Lyons, or of Rome itself, should have been enough to disprove it. In all those towns a similar lack of correspondence between modern and ancient streets is apparent. But even with general culture lacking, a view of this island is suffi- cient to disprove such follies as the idea of a pirate "conquest," and the particular case of the Stane Street clearly discovers the manner
166 THE STANE STREET
in which the modern system of highways developed out of the Roman model.
The more one studies the particular nature of the places where the post-Roman roads diverge from the track of the Stane Street, the more evident does it become that this divergence was a gradual and natural affair, consequent upon the decline of civilisation, and not upon its sudden destruction by the barbarians. For one thing, the propor- tion of the Stane Street which is and has been used as a highway, is considerable. If we count only that part of it which is undisputed, and follow it only from the East Gate of Chichester to Warren's Barn, near Epsom Downs (where it is lost), we find that of a total distance of 41 miles, 20 miles are metalled highway to-day, and quite 10 miles more are lanes in constant use. If we count that part which has been, within historical memory, used as a road, green or hard, the proportion is extended from three-quarters to nearer four-fifths. It must include the way up Halnacker Hill and down again on its southern side, the succeeding portion between Seabeach and the Ertham road, and all that part which begins at Cumber Corner and descends the
THE MODERN DIVEKGENCES 167
escarpment of the Downs above Coldharbour, for this is still used as a green road.1
The stretch of 2 miles between the Eartham road and Gumber Corner, overgrown as it is with the Nore Wood, cannot be counted as a road in use ; but with that exception, one may say that all the 10 miles from the East Gate of Chichester to the foot of the Downs re- mained in continuous use for centuries, and very much the most of it remains so still.
From Pulborough Bridge the whole of the Stane Street has remained in use continuously, whether as a metalled road or a trackway, as far as Alfoldean Bridge, and is so used still. Much of it has always been used as a hard way, and early in the nineteenth century the whole of it was at last metalled from one crossing of the Arun to the other. It is true that the short f mile from Alfoldean Bridge to Bowhook, though it is covered by a track, does not find that track in exact correspondence with the Koman road. The way goes now to one side, now to the other, of the embankment, and only here and there precisely corresponds with it. The same is
1 For this and all that follows, see general map at end of volume.
168 THE STANE STREET
true after Kowhook as far as Monk's Farm, but during the whole of this stretch of If- mile there are not 50 yards continuously which do not either preserve the right-of- way or are not used by some track. After Monk's Farm it enters again into continuous use until we come to the smithy below Oak- wood Hill ; thence it proceeds f of a mile, through the greater part of which no right- of-way has been preserved, and where con- tinuous travel has deflected from the road, though we shall see in the description of the road at this point a very good explanation for this deflection. But the f of a mile over and the stream crossed, we have the road in continuous use again, and for centuries used as a hard way. To-day it is metalled throughout for 3 miles, until its use ceases again at Buckinghill Farm.
From this last point — Buckinghill Farm — to Burford Bridge is the longest continuous stretch over which the road fell out of use in the Weald and north of it. It is, as the crow flies, just over 65- miles, and along the line of the road itself somewhat over 6 J.
Burford Bridge and its crossing have always been in continuous use ; but we have no proof of
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 169
a continuous use upon the right bank of the Mole until, at a point a full mile and a half north and east of Burford Bridge, the lane reappears in general use as we leave Mickle- ham Woods and come to the open country of the Leatherhead Downs. From that point for 2 miles its continuous use is certain.
The Stane Street, then, though it ceased in the Dark or perhaps early Middle Ages, to afford an unbroken approach from London to the Sussex sea-plain, will afford, in the various isolated sections into which it fell, as good an example of the causes and nature of " Divergence," as good a paradigm of the gradual and connected succession from Roman to mediaeval things as you will find in Europe.
For when we come to examine each section in which post- Roman usage has abandoned the road, so far from finding a scheme which presupposes an abrupt disuse of the Stane Street, each such divergence can be clearly accounted for by the changing necessities of travel in a time of declining civilisation, and on the analogy of similar divergences upon the Continent and in other parts of Britain. We can be certain that there was
170 THE STANE STREET
no sudden cessation of the Roman use, but only a gradual one.
It concerns us, then, to establish at the out- set of our examination what causes they were which led to these gradual divergences from the fixed Roman line which developed from it our present scheme of roads.
These causes are three in number.
First, the gradual breakdown of the sur- face, with the consequent necessity men were under of picking their way, especially in bad going (as on clayey land), by a devious suc- cession of drier strips which led them off the artificial causeway.
Secondly, the total breach of continuity which occurred where a bridge had broken down or a causeway over a marsh had been swallowed up ; to which must be added the cessation, as civilisation lowered and central government disappeared, of any necessity for rapid and continuous travel between distant points.
Thirdly, the encroachments which private interests made upon the public way/Aas the instrument of central administration, designed to curb men locally powerful, was lost.
So long as the way was kept up, it formed,
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 171
as it was designed to form, the most direct line of communication between one point and another. As such it would be followed for its superior surface even when civilisation declined, save in one exceptional particular, which must have come early, and is as follows : —
Travel would tend to abandon the very steepest of the gradients which a Roman road effected in crossing a ravine or breasting an abrupt hillside ; for though wheeled traffic declined and was largely replaced by water- carriage for heavy material, and though inland communication was largely replaced by pack- horses and voyaging upon foot, many great loads still depended upon wheels. When the chariot was forgotten and all postal service had ceased, a heavy load (especially as the surface of the * direct road began to degrade) would tend to descend and ascend by gentler gradients, longer than and diver- gent from the old straight line. The new track would go round the base of a steep hill or curve in a deep " U " to negotiate a valley. Perhaps the best out of numerous examples is that of the Radstock Valley, on the Fosse Way.
172 THE STANE STREET
Next, when the first divergences at steep gradients were established, the gradual decay of the road surface would produce another type. Society from the fifth century grew ill-content to maintain the energy and, above all, to pay the taxes which the high civilisa- tion of Rome involved. It was not content, therefore, to keep up the great Imperial ways, and their progressive degradation pro- duced a second set of divergences.
The form such divergences took was the leaving of the strict line of the way and the following of it to one side, to the right or to the left. When the good surface on the summit of the raised ridge was broken up, travel along that ridge ran the risk of accident. Wheeled vehicles might topple from the bank, and it was safer to follow along the level at its foot. Of this there are innumerable examples all over England and the Continent, where we see a modern lane or road still following closely the line of a Roman road, but, instead of being absolutely identical with it, having the ridge of that road running upon one side or the other in the shape of a bank often surmounted by a hedge and used as a boundary.
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 173
But this would only occur where the local soil was fairly hard and dry. Elsewhere traffic would tend more and more to pick out for itself the most convenient* natural course, from dry patch to dry patch, in a circuitous abandonment of the road, which it would re- join again wherever its next section of main- tained pavement began, the degraded sections thus forming a chord to the arc of divergence which would tend to disappear under the plough in cultivated countries.
It is evident that examples of such diver- gence would be more numerous on a clay soil like that of the Sussex Weald than, say, on a dry and hard soil such as chalk or sand.
Such was the second form of divergence consequent upon the decline of the Imperial power to gather taxes and to maintain its military roads.
There was a third form.
This last form of divergence was due to absolute breaks in the continuity of the road. These breaks would most probably occur at the passage of rivers or marshes, and their effect was to make each section of the road thus isolated lead nowhere, and in the neigh- bourhood of such points a road already
174 THE STANE STREET
divergent would lead right away from the line of the Roman road and seek a passage by some distant point. We have a good example of this on the Stane Street in the Horsham Road leading off from Five Oaks Green. When the bridge at Alfoldean was broken, the section between Five Oaks Green and the Arun led only to small and isolated steadings and farms. The branch road lead- ing to so considerable an agglomeration as Horsham became far more important at the expense of the old Roman way.
With this cause is intimately associated the cessation of all necessity for general and rapid communication from one distant point to another, which of course accompanied the decline of material civilisation and the loss of power on the part of the central Govern- ment. The continual travel — military, ecclesi- astical and civil — which the first four centuries demanded between two such points as Chi- chester and London, the continual passage to and fro of officials and of troops from distant town to distant town, disappeared with the disappearance of the organised Imperial power. Society sank into a number of self-contained and self-sufficient country-
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 175
sides. To get from the chief market of these to the various villages was a necessity ; but only along the very largest arteries of European travel (such as the Watling Street) was it still necessary, after the breakdown of the central Government, to proceed con- tinuously and in large numbers from, say, London to a port, or from one bishopric to the next.
Again, a place upon a Roman road occasion- ally (though rarely) declined in relative im- portance, or even disappeared in the course of the Dark Ages ; and off the line of the road (though that was still less frequent) what had been a village with the Romans might grow into a town. When this form of desuetude occurred, divergence would take the shape of an " elbow " or " V," the later road leaving the Roman road in order to visit the new centre of habitation, and the old Roman road along the base of the " V " falling into ruin.1
Of this form of divergence there is no ex- ample upon the Stane Street, but a cognate
1 There are several examples of this in Northern Gaul and in Britain, of which, perhaps, the most striking is that of Castre a few miles south-west of Brussels, where the " elbow " or " V " was actually formed before the repairing of the Roman roads was abandoned.
176 THE STANE STREET
form is very common, which is the linking- up of a line of villages somewhat off the road, which villages were insignificant in Imperial times compared with the great traffic of an Imperial artery, but communication between which in the Dark Ages was more important than the use of an Imperial high- way. That Imperial highway was no longer of general service because the two distant points which it connected were no longer in admini- strative touch one with the other : a loop line going up villages just off the Eoman road took its place.
The last cause of divergence was encroach- ment. No private man, however locally powerful, could interfere with public necessity so long as the Roman order remained intact. When it collapsed, men locally powerful began in every form to annex what had been of public right, and, in sparsely inhabited districts it needed no great wealth or influence to do this. Even an isolated farm might, for its convenience, divert traffic off some portion of a road which its owner had seen fit to enclose.
With these main causes in mind, we may examine the divergences developed from the
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 177
line of the Stane Street, beginning at the Chichester end.
To take them in order : —
First we have the "elbow" at Westhamp- nett. The cause of this I have found it impossible to discover, but its shape suggests encroachment.
Next we have the post-Roman road aban- doning the Roman line at the foot of Hal- nacker Hill and rejoining it a mile further on. The cause of this divergence is self-evident from a glance at the contours, and especially clear upon an examination of the spot. Hal- nacker Hill is abrupt and steep, with simple parallel contours. To go over the shoulder of it was part of the scheme of a military road engineered upon straight lines. But the moment the surface of the road fell into decay, heavy wheeled traffic would of neces- sity have followed round the base of the hill. It involved less than 300 yards of divergence from the straight line — to which local traffic was naturally indifferent — and about 150 of extra total distance. Exactly the same factor was present in the crossing of that eminence known as Long Down, and it was natural that as the surface of the old road grew
M
178 THE STANE STREET
more and more difficult, the new one should tend to follow the easier contours along the side of the slope. But here the first serious loss of the Stane Street as a continuous mode of travel appears. Of the next mile and a half, one full mile is overgrown with the great Nore Wood.1 The London road drifts further and further away from the dead- straight of the Roman line, makes for the valley of Upwaltham, and down Duncton Hill to Petworth.
Why was this? Why was the road aban- doned at this point ?
The answer to this question is to be dis- covered in the nature of the use to which the Roman road was put when the central Government of Britain failed. Its use, as I have said, became a local one. With every decade the clay Weald, always sparsely in- habited (and sparsely inhabited to this day), ill-watered, tending to continual rough over- growth, and, though fertile, arable only under conditions of a fairly developed civilisation, formed, not indeed a barrier, but a belt of land more and more neglected, through which there was no temptation for the Northerner to
1 Miscalled upon the Ordnance Map, the " North Wood."
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 179
r~-sra Stttlie Street in use as a metalled road
.-.__ Stane Street as a track only
:r^ Divergences of the modern road
Contours at 100ft.
,, „ 25 ft.
TOO
SCALE OF MILES
1 1
FIG. 15.
180 THE STANE STREET
travel south, or for the inhabitants of the southern coast to seek the Thames valley. The business of Chichester in the Dark Ages was to seek Petworth or to seek Arundel. The Stane Street, rising right over the Downs, led nowhere ; it led to no market which the cultivators of the sea- plain need seek, nor to any seat of government with which they were concerned. Arundel (a for- tress of the Dark Ages, a place with some vestiges of Roman material in its neighbour- hood, an obvious crossing of the river, a traditional port, and therefore presumably Roman) lay quite off this track, and there must in any case have been a road to it through so fertile a district.1 To reach Pet- worth the obvious track for droves and men was to follow the great funnel made by Up- waltham Combe, across the low pass above Lavington, and then to pick one's way down, sidling across the escarpment of the Downs by Duncton Hill.
The Roman road was indeed locally used and still is, from Gumber over the Downs to the parish of Bignor, but this use formed no
1 Moreover, the discoveries of graves at Westergate and Avisford confirm our common sense in the matter.
THE MODERN DIVERGENCES 181
part of any general travel : it was purely parochial.
I have said that between Bignor and the bridge at Pulborough— that is, between the foot of the Downs and the first crossing of the Arun — the Stane Street is altogether abandoned by post-Roman lanes ; but I have further said that an examination of the map and a knowledge of the locality tells one that it was abandoned naturally and gradually, and not simply forgotten.
The road ceases to correspond with any modern lane just where it enters Grevatt's Wood. There is a point not quite half a mile further on, where it again corresponds with the modern road.
Why did the lane make the detour it does to the right to get around to this point