The Icknield Way: Portraits the English Countryside. Edward Thomas
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Helen of Wales, the Pilgrims’ Way of England. It is part of their power that they have no obvious and limited significance, and were certainly not bestowed by king or minister as names are given by a merchant to his commodities. Instead of “London Road” we see “Watling Street”; instead of “North Road” there is “Foss Way” or “Ermine Street.” But all these make some appeal, however fantastical, to the intelligence. “Icknield Street” or “Icknield Way” makes no such appeal. It is the name of two apparently distinct roads: one with a Roman look running north and south through Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the other winding with the chalk hills through Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire. I shall confine myself as far as possible to this second road. It runs south-westwards from East Anglia and along the Chilterns to the Downs and Wessex; but the name is mysterious. For centuries—since Holinshed—it was supposed to be connected with the East Anglian kingdom of the Iceni: only fifty years ago Guest confidently translated it as the warpath of the Iceni, and connected it with the names of places along its course, such as Icklingham, Ickleton, and Ickleford. To-day, it is pointed out with equal confidence that “according to philological laws Iceni would have produced in England a form beginning with Itch- or Etch-.” Dr. Henry Bradley cannot believe that there was any knowledge of the Iceni in Berkshire, but finds it “a natural supposition” that the road was called after a woman named Icenhild, though he points out that no such person or name is known in myth or history.
It is a pleasure to see a learned man of the twentieth century thus playing at the invention of a twilight deity as the patroness of an old road, like the Helen or Elen of Wales. Two hundred years ago his invention would have been wholly serious and generations of equally serious and less inventive antiquaries would have followed him. There have been other explanations. Camden, at the same time as Holinshed, accepted the connection with the Iceni, but “what the origin of the name should be,” he says in his Suffolk, “as God shall help me, I dare not guess, unless one should derive it from the wedgy figure of the county, and refer to its lying upon the ocean in form of a wedge. For the Britons in their language call a wedge Iken. …” John Aubrey had it from “Mr. Meredith Lloyd” that “Ychen is upper, as to say the upper country or people,” and that “Ychen” also signifies “oxen.” Wise, in 1738, linked it with the name of Agricola, because of the significant core of Ick, or in the form “Ryknield,” rick. Willis, in 1787, said that the road took its name from the Itchen, believing that it began at Southampton and went parallel to that river to Winchester; and that Iken-eld was the Saxon name for the Old Iken Street. The poet William Barnes, lover of ancient Britons, said that it might come from a word meaning high or upper, either because it was “an upcast way” or because it was the “upper or eastern road,” while Ryknield seemed to him to come from a word meaning a trench, and therefore a “hollow way.” And still nobody knows or believes that anybody else knows. The name, therefore, throws no light at present on the use or history of the road.
Much has been written about the Icknield Way by antiquaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Most of them regarded the road as one of the four royal roads or Roman roads of Britain, on the authority not of local evidence and direct examination, but of half-mythic laws and histories. The earliest of these are “The Laws of Edward the Confessor.” Here four roads are mentioned—Watlinge strete, Fosse, Hikenilde strete, and Erminge strete—two of them extending across the breadth of the land and two throughout the length; and travellers on them were protected by the king’s peace. But Liebermann assigns as a probable date to these laws a year between 1130 and 1135: Pollock and Maitland, in their History of English Law, condemn the work as a compilation of the last years of Henry I; having something of the nature of a political pamphlet and being adorned with pious legends, “its statements, when not supported by other evidence, will hardly tell us more than that sane men of the twelfth century would have liked these statements to be true.” The French version of the “Laws of William the Conqueror” is almost word for word the same as the Laws of the Confessor in the matter of the royal roads: the Latin version omits Hykenild strete. Roger de Hoveden, in 1200, uses almost the same words: so does Henry of Huntingdon in 1130, except that he describes the Icknield Way as going out of the east into the west.
Mr. Harold Peake suggests to me that these writers may all have had as their inspiration the brilliant Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the History of the British Kings in the early twelfth century. He tells us, in language not more credible than that of “The Dream of Maxen” in the Mabinogion, that King Belinus commanded four roads to be made over the length and breadth of the island:—
“Especially careful was he [King Belinus] to proclaim that the cities and the highways that led unto the city should have the same peace that Dunwallo had established therein. But dissension arose as concerning the highways, for that none knew the line whereby their boundaries were determined. The king therefore, being minded to leave no loophole for quibbles in the law, called together all the workmen of the whole island, and commanded a highway to be builded of stone and mortar that should cut through the entire length of the island from the Cornish sea to the coast of Caithness, and should run in a straight line from one city unto another the whole of the way along. A second also he bade be made across the width of the kingdom, which, stretching from the city of Menevia on the sea of Demetia as far as Hamo’s port, should show clear guidance to the cities along the line. Two others also he made to be laid out slantwise athwart the island so as to afford access unto the other cities. Then he dedicated them with all honour and dignity, and proclaimed it as of his common law, that condign punishment should be inflicted on any that should do violence to other thereon. But if any would fain know all of his ordinances as concerning them, let him read the Molmutine laws that Gildas the historian did translate out of the British into Latin, and King Alfred out of the Latin into the English tongue.”
This great north-and-south road is like Ermine Street, the slantwise roads might be Watling Street and the Foss Way, and that across the width from Menevia to “Hamo’s port,” the Icknield Way. As Geoffrey makes one road go from the Cornish sea to Caithness, so Henry of Huntingdon takes his Fosse Way from Totnes to Caithness. Henry, as is known, had read part or all of Geoffrey’s book before it was given to the world and made an abstract of it; and the romancer had warned him to be silent as to the British kings, because he had not that book in the British tongue, brought from Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translated into Latin by Geoffrey himself. Here, as usual, it can safely be said that Geoffrey’s words are not pure invention; but what his authority in writing or tradition may have been appears to be undiscoverable. He may have used some tradition which was the basis also of the account of the Empress Helen’s road-making in “The Dream of Maxen.” He may have used the so-called laws of Dynwal Moel Mud—“before the crown of London and the supremacy of this island were seized by the Saxons”—who measured the length and breadth of the island, in order “to know its journeys by days.” (Laws and Institutes of Wales: Vendotian Code.) Henry of Huntingdon may well have been a meek adapter of Geoffrey’s majestic statements, and some local knowledge of his own may have helped him to put names upon the roads of Belinus. To this second road from St. David’s (Menevia) to Hamo’s port or Southampton he gives the name of Ichenild or Ikenild. Walter Map, in De Nugis Curialium (circa 1188), speaks of Canute holding London and the land beyond Hickenild, and Edmund the rest; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Edmund had Wessex and Canute the “north part” or Mercia; and these two together help to define the road.
Whether Henry of Huntingdon’s history owed anything to Geoffrey, Robert of Gloucester’s metrical chronicle (circa 1300) certainly did, for he refers to Belinus as the road-maker; but, like Henry, he calls the road from Totnes to Caithness the Fosse. Of the Icknield Street he says that it went from east to west, and also, apparently, that it was the road from St. David’s to Southampton through Worcester, Cirencester, and Winchester. A writer of circa 1360, Ralph Higden, mentions Belin, and he gives two theories about the Fosse, but evidently himself knows nothing. He calls the east-and-west road from St. David’s to Southampton Watling Street. His fourth road goes from south to north, from St. David’s, by Worcester and Birmingham, Lichfield and Derby, Chesterfield and York, to Tynemouth; and its name varies in different manuscripts from Rikenildstrete to Hikenilstrete. Guest has pointed out that Higden was following Geoffrey. In the Eulogium Historiarum