The Icknield Way: Portraits the English Countryside. Edward Thomas
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Hykeneldstret or Hikeneldstret. The author does not mention Ermine Street, but two Belinstretes, the other going from St. David’s to Southampton. It is likely that none of these men except Geoffrey and perhaps Henry could have mapped the roads.
The one map of the period showing the roads is such as they might have been expected to make. It belongs probably to the thirteenth century and was reproduced by Hearne, from a British Museum manuscript, in Vol. V of his edition of Leland’s Itinerary (1710). It shows the four roads by means of lines and a brief description—his Fosse going in the approved manner from Totnes to Caithness, the Ermine Street due north and south, the Watling Street from south-east to north-west. Ykenild Street goes straight across from west to east. The artist’s description of this as of the other roads is almost word for word from Henry of Huntingdon. But there are these differences and additions: the western extremity of the Icknield Way is not called St. David’s, but Salisbury, which is thus placed due north of Totnes where St. David’s should be; the eastern—or, as he calls it, the southern—is St. Edmunds. At the point of intersection with Watling Street he writes “Dunstaple,” which is accurate. Thus he is original only in his description of the Icknield Way. In putting “Meridies” by St. Edmunds he made a slip due to his drawing the map with its north end on the right side. It is impossible to decide the extent of his mistake in marking Salisbury at the west end of the road. He may have believed that it went to Salisbury, but have been afraid to deviate from the received opinion that it was an east-and-west road; or he may simply have put Salisbury in mistake for St. David’s. Giving Bury St. Edmunds as the eastern termination suggests local knowledge which the accurate position of Dunstable confirms. He may have been a man of the eastern counties who thought that Salisbury was not only the end of the road, as travellers told him, but a city in the west.
Holinshed, in his Chronicles (1586), mentions Geoffrey as the authority for the origin of the four great roads, and, after quoting him, goes on to describe an “Ikenild or Rikenild” beginning somewhere in the south and going through Worcester, Birmingham, and Chesterfield to the mouth of the Tyne. “I take it,” he says, “to be called the Ikenild, because it passed through the kingdome of the Icenes. For albeit that Leland and others following him doo seeme to place the Icenes in Norffolke and Suffolke; yet in mine opinion that cannot well be doone, sith it is manifest by Tacitus that they laie neere unto the Silures, and (as I gesse) either in Stafford and Worcester shires, or in both, except my conjecture doo fail me.” Here it is to be noticed, first, that he gives Ikenild and Rikenild as alternative names of one road and, second, that he sees the resemblance between “Ikenild” and “Iceni.” He has evidently thought about the matter, but he shows no trace of local knowledge or curiosity. Camden (1586) also only mentions the road in his introduction to the subject of the Iceni; though he has to speak of many places touched by the road, he ignores the fact, if he ever knew it. The poet Drayton, in his Polyolbion (1616), substitutes “Michael’s utmost Mount” for Totnes at the south end of the Fosse Way, and takes Watling Street from Dover to “the farth’st of fruitful Anglesey,” and he writes like a Warwickshire man of the country where those two roads cross (Song xiii, II, 311 et seq.; Song xxvi, II, 43 et seq.). In the “Sixteenth Song” of Polyolbion he makes Watling sing of herself and her “three sister streets”:—
Since us, his kingly ways, Mulmutius first began,
From sea again to sea, that through the Island ran.
Which that in mind to keep posterity might have,
Appointing first our course, this privilege he gave,
That no man might arrest, or debtors’ goods might seize
In any of us four his military ways.
Having sung of the Fosse, Watling continues:—
But O, unhappy chance! through time’s disastrous lot,
Our other fellow streets lie utterly forgot:
As Icning, that set out from Yarmouth in the East,
By the Iceni then being generally possest,
Was of that people first term’d Icning in her race,
Upon the Chiltern here that did my course imbrace:
Into the dropping South, and bearing then outright,
Upon the Solent Sea stopt on the Isle-of-Wight.
“Rickneld” he takes from St. David’s to Tynemouth.
It is very clear that Drayton had read Geoffrey or a disciple. The notes to Polyolbion reveal the fact that Selden accepted Molmutius and his laws. “Take it upon credit of the British story” are his words. He accepted also King Belin and the making of the four roads; but having noticed that authorities vary as to their courses and even their names, he is content to say, “To endeavour certainty in them were but to obtrude unwarrantable conjecture, and abuse time and you.” Evidently he knew these roads as a whole neither from personal knowledge nor from contemporary report, but only from books. Had he known anything he would have betrayed it, for he digresses to tell the little that he knows of “Stanstreet in Surrey.”
Drayton apparently knew more, though perhaps all his knowledge was not available for verse. He is the first to distinguish clearly between the Ricknield and the Icknield Street. He takes the Icknield Way from Yarmouth to the Solent; the definite “Yarmouth,” now for the first time connected with the road, the use of the variant Icning, the connection with the Chilterns, the crossing of Watling Street—all suggest local knowledge. Here more than ever it is to be wished that Drayton had either written his book in prose or had given his authorities and his actual notes of local lore. He was a great lover of England and of Wales, and could have written one of the finest prose books of the seventeenth century had he put down what he knew without ramming it into the mould of rhyme.
Of all these men except Drayton and the man who drew the map, none betrays personal knowledge of the road. They are all writing of something either too generally known to need explanation or of something which they know only from other writers. All their words together hardly do more than prove that there was or had formerly been a road, known as Ricknield or Icknield Street; or at most that there were or had been three roads bearing those names—one from St. David’s east and then north to Tynemouth; a second running south-westwards across the east of England from Norfolk to Southampton; and a third from St. David’s to Southampton. The second seems to owe nothing to Geoffrey, and all the local knowledge, such as it is, is so far connected with this.
In 1677 appeared a book by one who had not only heard of the four royal roads, but had met with what he believed to be one of them. This was Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire. He says:—
“Of the four Basilical, Consular, or Prætorian ways, or Chemini majores, I have met with but one that passeth through this County, the discovery whereof yet I hope may prove acceptable, because not described before, or its footsteps any where noted by Sir H. Spelman, Mr. Camden, or any other Author that I have read or could hear of: whereat indeed I cannot but very much wonder, since it is called by its old name at very many places [Ikenildway] to this very day. Some indeed call it Icknil, some Acknil, others Hackney, and some again Hackington, but all intend the very same way, that stretches it self in this County from North-east to South-west; coming into it (out of Bucks) at the Parish of Chinner, and going out again over the Thames (into Berks) at the Parish of Goreing. The reason, I suppose, why this way was not raised, is, because it lies along under the Chiltern Hills on a firm fast ground, having the hills themselves as a sufficient direction: which is all worth notice of it, but that it passes through no town or village in the County, but only Goreing; nor does it (as I hear) scarce any where else, for which reason ’tis much used by stealers of Cattle: and secondly, that it seems by its pointing to come from Norfolk and Suffolk, formerly the Kingdom of the Iceni, from whom most agree (and perhaps rightly enough) it received its name Icenild or Ikenild; and to tend the other way westward perhaps into Devonshire and Cornwall, to the Land’s End.”
He adds, with some triumph, that Holinshed was much mistaken, but he suspends his judgment because he has read in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire of an “Ickle-street” in that county. He prints a map showing