The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc
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and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the distance from the sea is that of a day's march for an army with its baggage. Disembark your men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn and you hope that night to rest secure behind the walls of Winchester or Canterbury.
The reason of this arrangement was as follows: an inland place has many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as the resting-place of an army. It has a better food supply; communication from it radiates upon all sides, not only from half its circumference (indeed in many ports there is but one narrow exit along the isthmus of the peninsula or up the valley which forms its harbour). There is likely to be more wood, a matter of great importance for fuel and fortification and sometimes for the construction of engines of war; it will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is an important, fact that in early times the population of an inland place would be trained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be divided by the occupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland fortress is liable to but one form of attack. You may have landed your men after a successful voyage, but, on the other hand, you may have landed them after a hot pursuit. In the first case it is not a disadvantage to sleep the night sheltered by walls inland, and in the second case it is a necessity.
Remembering all these things, it is evident that to have your town of refuge within a day's march of the landing-place is a condition of its value to you. It is far preferable to reach fortification within the daylight than to pass your first halt under the strain of partial and temporary defence.
Winchester and Canterbury are each, of course, upon rivers. They are each upon rivers just above the limit to which the tide would help light-draught, primitive boats, and where yet they could enjoy the fresh water coming down from above. So Caen, so Norwich, and a hundred other cities, have been founded upon rivers a day's march inland from port, and (with the exception of the tide) similar conditions perhaps produced the greatest of all these examples—Rome.
The similarity of the rivers is also remarkable: each of such a size that it can be canalised for traffic above the city, and yet used to turn mills; each supplying industries that depend upon water, especially brewing and tanning; each divided for such a purpose into a number of small regular trenches which flow along the lower streets of the city—an arrangement only possible where a flat site has been chosen—the Itchen, tumbling along the eastern boundary of Winchester, and the Stour, on the northern gate of Canterbury, complete a parallel almost as strong as that of the cities which stand upon them.
They are of much the same length, depth, rapidity of stream, and volume of water. They flow very clear—running over the chalk, clean and potable streams. At a point where each cuts through a range of hills, a point somewhat below the last ancient ford, and just barely above the recorded limit of the tide, a point right on the valley floor where the hills recede somewhat, each bears its city.
Of both towns we are certain that they were prehistoric centres. Not only have the earliest implements of men been discovered in their soil, but it is evident that the prehistoric mode of defence in these islands was used by each—a camp or temporary refuge crowning the hill above the settlement and defended by great circumvallations of earth. Canterbury has the camp in Bigberry Wood; Winchester that upon St. Catherine's Hill. In each town a considerable British population existed before the Roman invasion. In each the coins of British kings struck under the influence of Greek commerce, a century to a century and a half before the Christian era, are to be discovered. The name of each has a British root when it first appears in British history. Canterbury, Durovernum, was the town upon the river bank; and Winchester still preserves the trace of such an origin: the 'Venta' of the Romans: the Celtic 'Gwent'—an open space.
Each was Roman; each occupied much the same area; from each radiated a scheme of Roman roads; upon each the history of Roman Britain is silent; each first appears recorded in the story of the pirate invasions and of the conversion of England after the dissolution of the Imperial scheme.
Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the rich belt of south England. The one the king's town, the other the primate's; the political and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those natural and dark centuries. By a division common to the history of our ancestors in all parts of Europe, one fell naturally to the Court, the other to the Church. The king in Winchester, the primate in Canterbury, 'like two strong oxen pulled the plough of England.' And each, as was necessary to the period, had its great tomb, but not at the same time. Winchester, the capital, had in the Dark Ages its lamp of sanctity. In the Middle Ages this focus moved to the east—to Canterbury. There could be no rivalry. Winchester created its own saint, St. Swithin, with the murder of à Becket Canterbury put out the light of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; from that time onwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives chiefly as the city of St. Thomas.
The Causes of the Preservation of the Old Road; its General Character, and our Application of this in our Method of recovering it
We can regard Winchester, then, and Canterbury, as the point of departure and the termination of the Old Road. We can be certain that it would lie along the upper valleys of the Itchen and the Wey until it struck the Hog's Back, and that thenceforward it would follow the southern slope of the North Downs until these are cut by the river Stour. From that point the last few miles to Canterbury would naturally run parallel with, and in the valley of, the little Kentish river.
But the task which is attempted in this book is more definite than such a general scheme would convey. Many portions of the Old Road have been preserved, many more have been recovered and mapped by the researches of antiquarians; the remaining gaps alone was it our care to explore and settle, until we should, if possible, have reconstituted the whole ancient way, yard for yard, from the capital of Hampshire to the capital of Kent. That was our business, and in order that the reader may follow the more clearly my account of our journey I shall, before beginning that account, set down here, at the end of the present essay, the difficulty which the task presented, how we were aided by certain causes which had conspired to preserve the Old Road, what those causes were, and finally what method we applied to the problem that lay before us.
All archæological research must necessarily repose upon evidence less firm than that of true history, yet a great part of it deals with things lying right to hand.
A barrow is an unmistakable thing. You open it and you find a tomb.
Whatever may be said of paleolithic man, neolithic man has left the most enduring and indubitable evidence. He worked in the most resisting of materials, and he worked well.
A Roman road is a definite thing. Its known dimensions are a guide for our research: the known rules of the Roman engineers. The strata of material, often the embankment, remain. Its long alignments have but to be recovered in a couple of points to establish its direction through a considerable stretch of country. Did a man but know the ridge over Gumber Corner and down Bignor Hill, the Billingshurst Road, the hard foundations through Dorking Churchyard, it would be enough to make him certain of the Stane Street.
But of all the relics of antiquity the prehistoric road is the most difficult to establish.
These old tracks, British, and (if the word has any meaning) pre-British, though they must abound in the island, have become most difficult to reconstitute.
The wild, half-instinctive trail of men who had but just taken on humanity: later a known and common track, but a track still in the hands of savages for countless generations, a road of this kind is preserved by nothing stronger than habit. No mathematical calculation presided at its origin, none can therefore be used to reconstruct it when it has been lost. When (as in the last phase of the road which is the subject of this book) religion may have prolonged its use into historic times, that influence is capable indeed of perpetuating a tradition; but though religion maintains a shrine or a legend it does not add those consistent records of material works which are the best guide for the research of posterity.
The Old Road was not paved; it was not embanked. Wherever the plough has crossed it during the last four hundred years, the mark of it is lost.
From the clay it has often disappeared: from marshy soil, always. On the chalk alone has it preserved an unmistakable outline. Nor can it be doubted that it would