The Old Road (8 page)

The whole year came at last to see the passing and re-passing of such men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struck down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the pilgrims: the same weather in which we ourselves traversed it during the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work.

With the jubilee the body was translated in the flush of early summer, and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new and more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the habit of such a journey had now grown so general that every season saw some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer, the winter as we know from the traditional dates preserved upon the Continent, the summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there
must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough of the autumn.

It was not only the directness of the Old Road between Winchester and Canterbury that reconstituted its use for the purpose of these pilgrimages: it was also that peculiar association of antiquity and of religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.

The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by that well,' he heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb that isolated hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it and were banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.' ... 'It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' ... 'The church you will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch sunward by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since custom began.'

From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the oldest of paths. The same force of antique usage and affection which, in a past beyond all record, had lent
their meaning to rocks and springs upon a public way, re-flourished; and once again, to the great pleasure of myself who write of it now, and of all my readers who love to see tradition destroying calculated things, the momentum of generations overcame.

The pilgrimage saved the road. But once started it developed new sanctities of its own, as a tree transplanted will strike roots and take a bend this way or that different from the exact intention of the gardener. In the main it did nothing but preserve the immemorial sites: the cliff above the river Wey, the lonely peaked hill of St. Martha's that answers it from beyond the stream, the cross-roads on the crest of the Downs above Reigate, the ford of the Medway, the entry into the valley of the Stour, it transformed and fixed as Christian things. Our remote ancestry was baptized again, and that good habit of the faith, whereby it refuses to break with any chain of human development, marked and retained for history the oldest things. Upon that rock St. Catherine's was built, upon that hill the Martyrs' Chapel; twin churches in line pointed to the ford of the Medway, the
old and dim great battle of the valley was dominated not only by the rude monuments of those who had fallen in it, but by the abbey of Boxley. Charing worshipped the block on which the Baptist had suffered, and the church of Chilham rose on the flank of the hills which had first disputed the invasion of the Romans. What Canterbury became we know.

But this influence, though it was in the main highly conservative, may here and there mislead us.

The new civilisation was well settled before the pilgrimage began. The Normans had governed and ordered for a century; the new taxes, the new system of justice, the new central kingship, had been well founded for over a generation.

The pilgrims, therefore, at certain places did not need to follow step by step the ancient way. They sometimes fail to find us the prehistoric ford, for many bridges and ferries would exist in their time. They sometimes bend right out of the original path to visit some notable shrine, and there is more than one point where another stream of their fellows, coming
from London or from the Channel, joins and tends to confuse the track. The occasions are but rare,
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and they are noted here only to explain certain conclusions which will follow in the second part of this book. Taking the pilgrimage as a whole it was the chief factor in the preservation of the Old Road.

Second in the causes of the survival of the Old Road came the turnpikes. The system of turnpike roads served to perpetuate, and in many cases to revive, the use of the old way when the pilgrimage itself was but very vaguely remembered. The tolls chargeable upon these new and firm roads furnished a very powerful motive for drovers and pack-riders to use an alternative route where such charges would
not fall upon them. A similar cause was in operation to preserve 'the Welsh road' in the Midlands, and on this southern way of ours there are places when it was in operation, not indeed within living memory, but within the memory of the parents of those now living.

For instance, the road along the summit of the Hog's Back was a better road than the old track which follows the 300-feet contour upon the south side of the hill; but the summit road was a turnpike for many years during which the lower ill-kept lane was free, and hence a track which, since the Reformation, had served only to link up the little villages of Seale and Puttenham was used once more as a thoroughfare between Guildford and Farnham. A new stream had been diverted into the old channel, and this habit of avoiding the turnpike continued till a date so close to our own time as easily to bridge a gap which, but for that diversion, might have proved impassable. It is not without irony that a system whose whole object was to replace by new and more excellent roads the old rough tracks, proved, indirectly,
one of the principal sources of their survival.

The chalk, the third cause of that survival, is of such importance, and that importance is so commonly neglected, that it almost merits an essay of its own.

Consider the various characters which make of this soil the best conceivable medium for the preservation of an ancient road.

Like the sandy heaths and rocky uplands through which other primitive trails would naturally lead, it never paid to cultivate and therefore invited the wayfarer who was not permitted to trespass upon tilled land. But unlike other waste soil, it was admirably adapted to retain the trace of his passage. Long usage will wear into chalk a deep impression which marshy land will not retain, and which hard rocky land will never suffer. Compare, for example, the results of continuous travel along certain of the Yorkshire moors with that which will be produced along the Chilterns above the Thames valley. In the first case very marshy land, perpetually changing, alternates with hard rock. Unless some considerable
labour were expended, as in the making of a causeway, neither of these would retain any record of the road when once it had fallen into desuetude. But on the chalk some trace would rapidly form, and with every succeeding year would grow more obvious.

Chalk is viscous and spongy when it is wet. It is never so marshy as to lose all impression made upon it. It is never so hard as to resist the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil. The platform of the road is pressed outward, and kneaded, so to speak, into an outer escarpment, which would make such a track, for generations after it was abandoned, quite plain along the hillside. Finally, there are, or were until lately, no forces at work to destroy such a record. The chalk was little built upon; it had no occasion to be largely traversed by modern roads; it stood up in steep hills whereon
no one would have dreamt of building, until the torture of our modern cities drove men to contrast.

How these hills invited, and almost compelled, the primitive traveller to use them has been already described. Once he began to use their soil, better than any other soil in England, it would retain his memory.

Now since some considerable portion of the Old Road has been preserved, a basis for knowledge is afforded. Patches aggregating in length to just over eighty miles are certain and fixed. It is possible to work from that known thing to the unknown, and the gaps where the Road is lost can be recovered by the consistent pursuit of a certain method; this method when it is described will be seen to lend to a first vague and tentative examination a greater value than it seemed to promise. It permitted us to establish by converging lines of proof so much of what had been lost, that one may now fairly call the full course of the Road established from the north gate of Winchester, whence it originates,
to the west gate of Canterbury, which is its goal.

A description of our method is a necessary preliminary to that of the journey upon which it was put to the test.

The reconstitution of such a road is essentially the filling up of gaps. The task would be impossible if a very large proportion did not remain evident to the eye, or recorded by continuous history. The task would be much more difficult if the gaps in question were of very great length, succeeded by equally long unbroken pieces of the existing road. Luckily, the record or preservation of the Pilgrim's Way has not fallen upon these lines. There is no continuous gap throughout the whole of these 120 miles of greater length than seven miles, and we have in what may be called the 'known portions,' stretches of ten, thirteen, and even fifteen miles, almost unbroken.

Moreover, the proportion of the known to the unknown is considerable: 60 per cent. of the total distance of 120 miles is known to 40 per cent. unknown, and it must be understood that throughout this book I
speak of those parts as 'known' or 'recognised,' which have been universally admitted since the study of the subject was approached by archæologists.

These two facts, the considerable proportion of the known to the unknown, and the absence of any very long stretch in which the Road is lost, facilitate the task in a manner that can be put best graphically by some such little sketch as the preceding, where the dark line is the known portion of the Road. It is evident that the filling up of the gaps is indicated by the general tendency of the rest.

There is a mass of other indications besides the mere direction to guide one in
one's research; and a congeries of these together make up what I have called the method by which we approached the problem.

That method was to collate all the characteristics which could be discovered in the known portions of the Road, and to apply these to the search for traces of the lost portion.

Supporting such a method there are the
a priori
arguments drawn from geographical and geological conditions.

There are place-names which point out, though only faintly, the history of a village site.

There is the analogy of trails as they exist in savage countries at the present day.

There is the analogy of other portions of prehistoric tracks which still exist in Britain.

All these confirm or weaken a conclusion, but still the most important arguments are found in the characteristics which can be discovered in the known portions of the Road, and which may be presumed, in the absence of contradictory evidence, to attach to the lost portions also.

When a gap was reached, it was necessary to form an hypothesis to guide one in one's next step, and such an hypothesis could best be formed upon a comparison of all these various kinds of knowledge. The indication afforded by any one of them would, as a rule, be slight, but the convergence of a number of such indications would commonly convey a very strong presumption in favour of some particular track.

It was then our business to seek for some remaining evidences, apparent to the eye, whereby the track could be recovered. Such evidences were the well-known fact that a line of very old yews will often mark such a road where it lies upon the chalk; the alignment of some short path with a known portion behind, and a known portion before one; while, of course, the presence of a ridge or platform upon such an alignment we regarded (in the absence of any other lane) as the best guide for our search.

Occasionally, the method by which we brought our conjecture to the test had to be applied to another kind of difficulty, and a choice had to be made between two
alternative tracks, each clear and each with something in its favour; in one or two short and rare examples, the Road very plainly went one way, when by every analogy and experience of its general course it should have gone another. But, take the problem as a whole, whether applied to the commonest example, that of forming an hypothesis and then finding whether it could be sustained, or to the most exceptional (as where we found the Road making straight for a point in a river where there was no ford), the general method was always the same: to consider the geographical and geological conditions, the analogy of existing trails of the same sort, the characters we had found in the Road itself throughout its length as our research advanced, and to apply these to the parts where we were in doubt.