XIX
STROOD
Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to derive from strata, “the street,” standing as it does on that ancient way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon “strode”: a marshy region.
WATLING STREET
The original meaning of “Watling Street” is never likely to be determined to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an identical route with the present highway, ran between London and Dover long before Cæsar landed can scarce be matter for doubt. That the Britons were barbaric and unused to commerce or intercourse with the Continent can scarcely be supposed, for Britain was the Sacred Island of the Druidical religion, and to it came the youth of Gaul for instruction at the hands of those high priests whose Holy of Holies lay, across the land, in remote Anglesey. Those priests were the instructors, both in religion and secular knowledge, of the Gaulish youth; and, outside the civilisations of Greece and Rome, Britain was even then the best place to acquire a “liberal education.” Up the rugged trackway of the Sarn Gwyddelin == the Foreigners’ Road, from Dover to London, and diagonally across the island, came these youths; and down it, to voyage across the Channel, and to take part with their Gaulish friends in any fighting that might be going, went those tall British warriors whose strength and fierceness surprised Cæsar in his Gallic War.
Imports and exports, too, passed along this rough way; skins and gold, British hunting-dogs and slaves were shipped to Gaul and Rome by merchants who, to keep the trade unspoiled, magnified the dangers of the sea-crossing and the fierceness of the people. Pottery, glass-beads, and cutlery they imported in return; and this primitive “road” must have presented a busy scene long before it could have deserved the actual name.
When Cæsar, eager for spoil and conquest, marched across country from Deal, and first saw the Sarn Gwyddelin from the summit of Barham Downs, it could have been but a track, never built, but gradually brought into existence by the tramping of students and fighting-men, and widened by the commerce of those exclusive merchants. Thus it remained for at least ninety-eight years longer; rough, full of holes, mires, and swamps, and crossed by many streams. Cæsar came and went; and not until Aulus Plautius and Claudius had overrun Britain, and probably not before many successive Roman governors had served here, and reduced this province of Britannia Prima to the condition of a settled and prosperous colony, was the Foreigners’ Road made a viâ strata, a paved Roman Military Way.
Its date might be anything from the landing of Aulus Plautius, in A.D. 45, to the time of Hadrian, the greatest of all road-builders, A.D. 120. Then it became a true “street,” made in the thorough manner described by Vitruvius, and paved throughout with stone blocks; the “strata” from which the word “street” is derived.
Engineered with all that road-making science which, not less than their victories, has rendered the Romans famous for all time, the Watling Street, as the Romans left it, stretched from sea to sea. Starting from their three great harbour fortresses on the Kentish coast—from Rutupiæ, Portus dubris, and Lemanis, Englished now as Richborough, Dover, and Lympne—it converged in three branches upon their first inland camp and city of Durovernum, where Canterbury now stands. Proceeding thenceforward on the lines of the present Dover Road, the Roman road came to their next station of Durolevum, whose site no antiquary has fixed convincingly, but which might have been at either Sittingbourne, Ospringe, Davington, or Key Street. Thence it reached Durobrivae, which was certainly on the site of Rochester. Crossing the Medway by a trajectus, or perhaps even by a bridge of either stone or wood, the road passed through Strood, and branched off through Cobham, coming again to the modern highway at Dartford Brent. Perhaps it even had two branches here, one touching the river at Vagniacae, probably both Northfleet and Southfleet; and the other keeping, as we have seen, inland until a junction was effected near Dartford. But with its proximity to London, the story and the geography of Watling Street grow not a little confused. Where, for instance, the succeeding station of Noviomagus was situated no one can say with certainty. It might have been at Keston; it probably was at Crayford; or there might have been two branches again, as some antiquaries suggest. Through London, the Watling Street went across England, past St. Albans and Wroxeter, and finally to Segontium, or the hither side of the Menai Straits, throwing off a branch to Deva, Chester.
This and other great roads grew gradually to perfection throughout the country for four hundred years. Towns and military stations dotted them at intervals, and in between the abodes of men the way was lined, after the custom of the Roman people, with tombs and cemeteries. This explains the many “finds” of sepulchral urns and various relics beside the road.
THE OLD ROADS
When the Saxons came, they could not pronounce the name by which the half-Roman people called this road, and so “Gwyddelin” became “watling” on their tongues, while “strata” was corrupted to “street.” No new roads were made now, and, indeed, not until the Turnpike Acts of George the Third’s time and the era of MacAdam was the art of road-making practised again in England. For ages the “roads” of this country were a byword and a reproach to us. By the middle of the twelfth century the Roman roads that had been made and kept in repair for hundreds of years fell into ruin, and the detritus and miscellaneous accumulations of twenty-five generations now cover the greater portion of them. At a depth varying from five to fourteen, and even eighteen, feet, excavators have come upon the hard surface of the original Roman road, and mosaic pavements of villas found at that extreme depth attest how the surface of a country may be altered only by the gradual deposit of vegetable matter. The thickest deposits are found in low-lying situations, where the flow of streams or rain-water has brought liquid earth to settle upon the deserted sites of an ancient civilisation. This has occurred notably at such places as Dartford, Rochester, and Canterbury, all situated in deep valleys, where springs and storms have united to bring mud, sand, and gravel down from the hillsides, and thus to equalise in some measure the ancient irregularities of the scenery. While the hollows have thus been rendered less profound, the hill-tops and table-lands have remained very much as they were, and it is in these elevated situations that the line of Watling Street can most readily be traced, or could have been had not the stone pavings that composed the road been long ages ago abstracted.
This long neglect of the roads made country journeys exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Travellers’ tales in England during six or seven centuries are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that, rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to these circumstances for an explanation. The southern counties bore a bad reputation for impassable roads until about seventy years ago, and Kentish miles were long linked with Essex stiles and Norfolk wiles as prime causes of beguilement; while the fertility of Kentish soil is joined with the muddy character of Kentish roads in two old county proverbs. Thus, “Bad for the rider, good for the abider,” expressed truths obvious enough to those who came this way a hundred years ago; and “There is good land where there is foul way” would have said much for the excellence of Kent, where all the ways were foul. But if the traveller was not a landed gentleman, except in the sense that he was generally covered with mud from head to foot, the reflection that the county through which he waded deep in slush must be singularly fertile could scarce have afforded him much consolation for lost time and spoiled clothes. Here is a tale of an unfortunate horseman bogged on these miscalled “roads” which is quite eloquent of what old-time wayfaring was like. He comes to a suspicious-looking slough and hesitates. “Is there a good bottom here, my man?” he asks of a country joskin regarding him with a wide smile. “Oo-ah! yes, there’s a good bottom to un,” replies the countryman, and the traveller urges on his way until, within a yard or so, his horse sinks to the girth in liquid mud. “I thought you said there was a good bottom to this road,” shouts the traveller. “Yes,” rejoins the rustic, “soo there ees, but you a’n’t coom to un yit, master.”