THE KING'S HIGHWAY.
THERE are certain names and phrases in daily use which seem to demand that they should be used as the title of a book, and "The King's Highway" is one of them. How many books, or essays, or chapters of books have been written Tinder the title may be left to the librarian to discover ; the number, in any case, will doubtless grow. The latest addition to the bookshelves is Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's "English Local Government : the Story of the King's Highway" (Longmans and Co., 7s. fid. net), which is at once a concise history and a bibliography of the roads of England and Wales. It is not an exhaustive history, for the writers pass rapidly from Roman roadmaking through the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century ; but it is certainly a useful compendium of a large body of facts, and in particular it gives a good summary of the changes which brought into existence, and in turn are likely to modify the work of, the Road Board. Our present system, if it can be called a system, of road administration is an extraordinarily haphazard .business. We have no Government department responsible for the management of our national thorough- fares. There is practically no opportunity for raising or discussing questions of road maintenance in Parliament; and if, as a reply, it is urged that the reason why questions as to the state of the roads are not put to the Government in the House of Commons is because road maintenance is an affair of local government, the criticism still holds good that the methods of local government are absurdly complicated. The roads of England and Wales are adminis- tered by nearly one thousand nine hundred local authorities, with the result that there are all kinds of gaps and over- lappings and anomalies and wastages of expenditure. The ratepayers of Surrey and Sussex, for instance, still have to mend and maintain the surfaces of the roads between London and Brighton and Portsmouth in return for the privilege of watching the wheels of Londoners' motor-cars every Saturday and Sunday ; and although everywhere, as a consequence of the development of motor traction, the cost of road maintenance, and consequently the county rate, has gone up, the roads on which most money is spent are not those which are necessarily most used by the actual ratepayers. There could be no stronger argument in favour of some new system of road administration which should be as truly national as the great thoroughfares themselves.
Our roads, indeed, are one of our most distinctive national possessions; they are a national heritage, and they have the romance of a heritage. They belong to and connect the very beginnings of our national civilization. Ancient man, working his way from point to point., from Salisbury Plain to the uplands of Surrey and Kent, or from the knappers' settle- ment at Brandon in Suffolk to the Ridgeway of Berkshire, followed in all his comings and goings the same tracks and the same methods. The journeying tribesmen chose the lines of the hills because only on the high ground could they see where they were going and could keep free from the swamps and impenetrable forests of the valleys. They followed broad and natural rules of travel : they liked to go dry and warm, and so they chose for preference the sunny side of the hill, but they had different levels of trackway for different winds and weathers, as one may see on the old drove road, part of which came to be known later as the Pilgrim's Way, between the west of England and Canterbury. And so, after centuries of treading and traffic, the men of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age smoothed out the trackways, as the Romans found them, along the ranges of hills—the Way from Salisbury Plain to Kent, the Icknield Way along the northern slope of the Chilterns, the roads of the Mendips and the Quantocks, the Ridge Way passing Wayland's Smithy along the crest of the Berkshire Downs. Those were the beginnings, used later, no, doubt, by the roadmakers of Rome, but only until better roads could be made. It is with the Roman roads that we begin the second stage by which we have come through to the heritage of to-day. They are the first real high- ways. The Roman engineer chose high ground where he could, and he built his road high above the surface of the land through which he laid his metal; but his first object was to make a path between two points so that troops could march as quickly and as easily as possible. He began, therefore, from some definite point, working to another point, but though he
went as straight as he could, he made no extra difficulties for himself ; he would swerve so as to avoid too steep a descent to lower ground or too severe a gradient in ascending a hill, or the necessity of crossing a stream. The consequence was that, though his roads go straight for many miles together, the general effect is a series of straight stretches making a long zigzag. Many of his roads are in actual use to-day, and near by some of them, so skilfully did he choose his route through unmapped country, the railroads of our modern traffic) follow the same line of direction. So strong and lasting, too, were the materials which he used and the methods by which he made use of them that even to-day, more than nineteen centuries after Caesar's Eagles were first carried along a British trackway, the roads which the Roman engineer drove through wood and valley are plain to see and to examine as specimens of scientific work. The Roman engineer, if he did not work on a plan exactly corresponding to methods of road- making as understood to-day, went about his task in a very thorough manner. He began by cutting two parallel ditches, and then laid a sort of roadway-rampart, an agger, between them. First came the original soil, level with the surface of the adjacent fields ; above that the statumen, a layer of rubble stones without lime, five inches deep at the centre ; next a layer of concrete, rudus, broken stones mixed with lime, fifteen inches deep at the centre ; over that the nucleus, fine pounded material mixed with lime, ten and a half inches at the centre ; and on the top of these different layers the top or back, summunt dorsum, which was made of paving stones, four or five inches thick, and cemented together. This was a general rule for road- making which is given by Vitruvius, writing in the reign of Augustus. But, of course, the Roman roadmaker, being a practical man and bound by the limitations of the locality in which he worked, could not always follow it in strict detail. In the " Archaeologica Cantiana," quoted by Morris and Jordan in their book, " Local History and Antiquities," there is a description of a part of Watling Street which was discovered under the present High Street of Rochester, which differs considerably from the construction of the road described by Vitruvius, but which is certainly Roman. At the bottom of the section examined, some eleven feet under the line of the present pavement, there is a carefully prepared bed of sand, earth, and flints fifteen inches deep ; above that a layer of six inches of rammed chalk ; next twelve inches of angular gravel, rammed; above that flints, laid in six inches ; next fourteen inches of angular gravel; and on the top of that seven feet of accumulated earth and debris topped by the line of the pavement of to-day. Here is an example of the engineer in a chalk-bearing country making use of whatever material lay ready to hand. Again, when the Roman road-maker had to cross a marsh or fen he had to adopt different plans for different depths of wet soil. From the Medway opposite Rochester to the foot of Strood Hill he made a causeway, built with six strata : first, marsh mud with piles about four feet in length, with wood laid above them, and perhaps in some way fastened with nails; next forty-two inches of large flints, Kentish rag and broken Roman tile ; next five inches of rammed chalk ; then seven inches of fine broken flint ; above that nine inches of pebble gravel mixed with black earth, rammed ; and, on the top of all, the paved surface of the causeway, Kentish rag boulders cut polygonally, with the interstices filled in with fine pebble gravel. Above this Roman surface to-day lies the post-Roman road, a layer of thirty-two inches. The Roman work, then, goes down to a depth of twelve feet below the surface of the road as we see it to-day. No wonder that the Saxons, when they came to England and found these marvellous rampart-roads running for mile after mile through what was otherwise almost unbroken wilderness, compared the " streets " they saw on earth before them with the Milky Way in the sky above them, and thought of Watling Street as the work of giants of the earth, as the Milky Way' would be the path of giant gods through the heavens.
These great Roman roads—the Stane Street or Stone Street between London and Chichester, Watling Street, the Fosse Way, the Peddar's Way in Norfolk, Ermine Street, south of London on the Surrey downs, and north through Stamford —deserve, as the trackways that were trodden before them deserve, to be treated with the care and the reverence due to our oldest and finest national memorials. For that reason we welcome the public spirit' and patriotism of the
Hertfordshire County Council, who have applied to have the ancient roads which run through the county of Hertford scheduled as national memorials, which will thus be preserved for the future from damage or destruction. This is a step which we trust will be taken by other County Councils. It ought to have been taken before. Too many cases of destruc- tion by local authorities or by private and irresponsible persons have been allowed to take place in the past, and the damage done is already incalculable. The work of despoiling and defacing ought now to be stopped once for all, and the King's highway—above all the ancient royal roads which were grouped for the English King in the Quatuor Chimini a thousand years after the Roman laid them for his Emperor's Eagles—ought to be preserved for all time among our most cherished national possessions.
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