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.