The Ancient Ways of Wessex

Travel and Communication in an Early Medieval Landscape

Alexander Langlands

• Publisher: Windgather Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781911188520
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Ancient Ways of Wessex tells the story of Wessex's roads in the early medieval period, at the point at which they first emerge in the historical record. This is the age of the Anglo-Saxons and an era that witnessed the rise of a kingdom that was taken to the very brink of defeat by the Viking invasions of the ninth century. It is a period that goes on to become one within which we can trace the beginnings of the political entity we have come to know today as England. In a series of ten detailed case studies the reader is invited to consider historical and archaeological evidence, alongside topographic information and ancient place-names, in the reconstruction of the networks of routeways and communications that served the people and places of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Whether you were a peasant, pilgrim, drover, trader, warrior, bishop, king or queen, travel would have been fundamental to life in the early middle ages and this book explores the physical means by which the landscape was constituted to facilitate and improve the movement of people, goods and ideas from the seventh through to the eleventh centuries. What emerges is a dynamic web of interconnecting routeways serving multiple functions and one, perhaps, even busier than that in our own working countryside. A narrative of transition, one of both of continuity and change, provides a fresh and alternative window into the everyday workings of an early medieval landscape through the pathways trodden over a millennium ago.

Part 1

LITERATURE REVIEW

CHAPTER ONE

The landscape of routes and communications

Prehistoric trackways

The ‘lost’ or ‘ancient’ ways of Wessex and the wider landscape through which they pass have proven a popular subject for writers and publishers over the course of the last century (e.g. Belloc 1911; Cox 1927; Massingham 1936; Cochrane 1969; Timperley and Brill 1970; Bulfield 1972; Wright 1988, 10–32; Belsey 1998). With an appeal to a wide audience of ramblers and walkers with increasing access to the countryside, works such as The Lost Roads of Wessex (Cochrane 1969) and The Ancient Trackways of Wessex (Timperley and Brill 1970) tend now to sit more comfortably into an appreciation of landscape that owes more to the English landscape tradition of Wordsworth and W.G. Hoskins – with its Romantic undertones and nostalgic tendencies – than they do in the realms of the theory and practice that characterises modern interdisciplinary landscape studies (Johnson 2006, passim). Whilst many of the routes described in these books can be seen to traverse the landscape for considerable distances and are thus thought to be some of the primary features of our landscape, the common consensus currently amongst landscape archaeologists is that at best, such routes are notoriously difficult to date and at worst, they are entirely speculative as long-distance prehistoric routes (Taylor 1979, 12; Turner 1980, 2; Fowler 1998, 27; Harrison 2003). Paul Hindle, whose work is primarily focused on the post-Conquest period, views the numerous claims made that certain roads and tracks are of prehistoric origin as ‘unsubstantiated’ (1993, 17). Christopher Taylor in his Roads and Tracks of Britain warned against the desire to see obvious ridgeways as necessarily facilitating long-distance communication and was particularly dismissive of the so-called ‘Jurassic Way’ (1979, 34–37). John Barnatt has discredited the idea that a long distance Iron Age or Bronze Age route traversed the Peak District from the Trent Valley in a north-westerly direction (2002, 39–44). The North Downs Trackway is a route that today makes use of the ridge of chalk downland that traverses Kent on an east/west alignment. Although popularly referred to as the medieval ‘Pilgrim’s Way’ in places, the likelihood that such a route existed in the pre-Roman period has been brought into question (Turner 1980). Similar concerns have been voiced for the Icknield Way, a route that at its maximum extent runs from the Wash in East Anglia via a crossing point of the Thames at Goring to the English Channel (Harrison 2003). Archaeological evidence would appear to substantiate these dismissive claims. Sarah Harrison draws attention to excavations undertaken at Aston Clinton (Bucks.) where the ‘accepted’ line of the Icknield Way slights features of early Iron Age to late Roman date (R.P.S. Consultants 2002; Harrison 2003, 11). P.J. Fowler observes the same relationship between ‘The Ridgeway’ (the definite article of which he takes issue with) and ‘two axially arranged organised field systems’ of late Iron Age/Romano-British origin on the Fyfield and Overton downs (Wilts.) (1998, 30). Further north of Fowler’s study area, the same route passes Uffington Hill Fort near to which excavations revealed a layer of compacted chalk overlaying the fill of a late Bronze Age boundary ditch implying an Iron Age date at the earliest (Denison 1998b).

FIGURE 2. Ridgeways and earthworks of Wessex (Hippisley-Cox 1914, 20–21).

The presumption that our ‘ancient’ and ‘lost’ ways were in permanent and regular use as single long-distance trackways, connecting up far-flung parts of the British Isles is a notion, therefore, that is clearly refuted. But what if such routes hosted more intermittent usage, serving large-scale seasonal gatherings, or movements of livestock, and only the occasional long-distance communication? Such movement might not require a fixed, constrained and metalled surface but might rather be reflected, in Fowler’s description of sections of The Ridgeway, in a ‘bundle of former track lines’, sinuous and braided as they negotiate open country. From his analysis of Wansdyke in the southern parts of the parishes of Fyfield and West Overton, he considers the construction of the post-Roman bank and ditch and the regularity of original gates within the earthwork as a response to a 5 km (3.1 miles) wide corridor of movement that required marshalling (2001, 195). As early as 1951 W.F. Grimes demonstrated that the distribution of material culture along the line of a conjectural ‘Jurassic Way’ represented a ‘corridor for traffic rather than a single track’ and that it constituted what was in effect a ‘Jurassic Zone’ of movement as recent as the late Iron Age (1951, 158–171). So whilst convincing evidence for such ridgeways serving as regularly functioning socio-economic transport networks in prehistory (i.e. premeditated and planned highways) is lacking, as stretches of open (certainly by the late Bronze Age) and dry country they fundamentally allowed for ease of movement and therefore must have served as attractive thoroughfares – in any period of Britain’s landscape history (Figure 2). It may not be specious to draw a comparison here with the most recent of overland transport networks. Only a very small percentage of travellers using a motorway travel its entire course. More frequently, sections of it facilitate movement on a much more local level. It is perhaps, then, in the sub-regional sphere that the study of the pattern of prehistoric route networks is likely to find itself on more solid ground.

Tom Williamson, in his most recent assessment of the longevity of prehistoric field systems, believed that the boundaries that constrained prehistoric fields – particularly those on the long axes that created the courses of their ‘slightly wavy brickwork’ appearance in plan form – may actually have been, in their first incarnation, ways that served communities within valleys by running at right-angles to a parallel banding of resources. These routes allowed the people dwelling in the valleys access to woodland, summer pasture, arable fields and alluvial meadows and their continued use throughout the Romano-British period, early medieval period and beyond represents, in Williamson’s words, ‘a response to similar environmental circumstances’ (2008, 130–132).

In Wessex, Fowler, like Williamson, suggests that the earliest lines in the landscape of West Overton and Fyfield are the trackways allowing access to woodland and downland pasture and that these go on to form the main axes of later field systems (1998, 26–32). In the Romano-British period they were, he states, ‘already old’ and that ‘they contributed to the shaping of the land units, the tithings and the parishes and goodness knows what before them’ (1998, 40). A further characteristic of these field systems is that their long axes (i.e. those that run from the valley bottom to the higher ground) tend to terminate at watersheds (Williamson 2003, 40). Of the Scole-Dickleborough field system for example, the long axes appear to terminate at a ‘traverse element which was variously a watershed trackway, a parish boundary and a hundred boundary’, and the same relationship occurs in two examples of co-axial field systems identified in Hertfordshire (see Figure 3). Despite scepticism over the extensiveness of individual long-distance tracks, the local approach to route ways, one that carefully examines their relationship with field systems, presents good evidence for a network of ways, tracks and paths serving, certainly by the late Iron Age, and especially in the south-east of Britain, a relatively dense settlement pattern (Cunliffe 1974, 153–179).

FIGURE 3. Co-axial landscapes in the Chiltern dip slope (Williamson 2008, 129, fig. 32).

Roman roads

Very often the network of major Roman roads in Britain identified by the likes of Thomas Codrington (1903), G.M. Boumphrey (1935, 216) and Ivan Margary (1948; 1957; 1973) is used to furnish the distribution and location maps of historical and archaeological studies of the early medieval period (Figure 4). Without wishing to single out any one study, in the employment of what is essentially a very specific topographical construct there is an implicit assumption that the entire Roman road network continued in use from the Roman through to the medieval period. The extent, however, to which it survived the ravages of time and impacted upon the development of post-Roman society in Britain has yet to come under closer scrutiny and has resulted, even in most recent scholarship, in opposing generalisations. On the one hand, there is a continuing temptation to see the orbit of movement in the early medieval period as being in some way less expansive than in the Roman, thus impacting upon the survival of the Roman networks as a device for long distance communication. Most recently, ‘the travelling needs of the Saxon settlers’ have been considered to be so local they resulted in ‘the long stretches of Roman road [breaking] into shorter stretches of continuous road’ (Allen and Evans 2016, 12). Yet, on the flip side, echoing Frank Stenton’s observation that Ogilby’s map of 1675 preserves ‘in essence’ the situation as it was in fifth century (1936, 1), Hindle summarises that ‘many of these roads clearly remained in use, providing a basic network’ (2016, 34).

On the evolution of the road network in early medieval Europe, Albert Leighton suggests that Roman roads had become something of a liability during the period, serving better the marauders and plunderers of the migration and invasion period and stretching beyond the horizons of the political and geographical zones of the day. Put literally, ‘they no longer led where people wanted to go’ (1972, 52). Similarly, Norbert Ohler (1989, 22) draws attention to the anachronistic character of Roman roads after the fall of the empire. They were, he argues, designed for military purposes and to get the quickest and most effective action from the smallest amount of troops. By the middle centuries of the first millennium they had in his view become defunct. Their fate, however, was variable. Some found themselves robbed, some abandoned, some formed boundaries (as they may well have done during active service) and others, whilst experiencing continuing usage, would have suffered through lack of maintenance. It has been estimated that Roman roads would have stood up under the onslaught of iron-shod and iron-tyred wheels for no more than seventy to one hundred years (Forbes 1955, 159), and for those that clearly had no immediate requirement as a means of communication, evidence from the continent demonstrates their use as quarries for the construction of local buildings (Schreiber 1962, 156–157). Maintenance would have undoubtedly been costly and it has been proposed that keeping Roman roads in a serviceable condition was even beyond the financial capabilities of the Byzantine and Islamic Empires of the eastern Mediterranean (White 1967, 66–67).

This view is contrasted with the accepted view on the survival of Roman roads in Britain where it appears, certainly from analysis of later medieval maps that, ‘many Roman roads remained in use’ into and beyond the post-Conquest period (Hindle 1976; 1982a; Edwards and Hindle 1991, 124). Many studies too of the early medieval period imply that the Roman road network was a functioning entity. For example, Anne Cole’s recent assessment (2007) of water transport in early medieval England has identified a series of place-names which indicate early ports and harbours and a key shared characteristic of these sites is their apparent proximity to Roman roads. Likewise, Leigh Symonds and R.J. Ling’s representation of socio-geographical concepts of time and travel in early medieval England suggests that the Roman roads of the Lincolnshire area survived as viable routes through which to conduct trade and communicate (Symonds and Ling 2002; Symonds 2003, 135, 161, 168, 224). Although Katharina Ulmschneider is reserved in her assessment of the proximity of single coin finds of the middle Anglo-Saxon period to Roman roads, her distribution map demonstrates that, ‘Roman roads are clearly important in the distribution of coinage’ (2000, 100, map 21; see also Palmer 2003, 58–59, fig. 5.3). There is always a danger, however, that the interrelationships presented in such studies are the results of the accidents of geography: the fact that Roman roads might occupy and connect the corridors of landscape most conducive to centres of occupation and settlement spanning multiple time frames. Keith Briggs (2009, 44) has demonstrated that without rigorous statistical analysis we ought to be careful of how assured we are of any apparent positive correlations between certain place-names and Roman roads.

FIGURE 4. The Roman roads of Wessex (Margary 1957, 76–77, fig. 3).

It is also clear that in some places Roman roads fell almost entirely out of use. O.G.S. Crawford’s (1953, 67–73) study of the London to Bath Roman road demonstrated the complete abandonment of the Roman roads in favour of higher ground and river crossings better suited to fording than those crossing points determined by the trajectories of Roman roads. Although an absolute chronology for the abandonment of the Roman road remains elusive, elsewhere the early failure of all Roman urbs in an east–west belt through central southern England has been observed (Reynolds and Langlands 2006, 42). It therefore seems highly likely that the London to Bath Roman roads, via Silchester, fell out of use soon after the demise of the towns and cities they served.

Christopher Taylor’s study of the local road network around Stamford illustrates how when the Roman bridge over the River Welland on Ermine Street fell out of use, a fording place further east was favoured and the course of the road subsequently diverted (1979, 97–101). A second shift however is observed further east to a bridging of the river at ‘Danish Fort’ (north of Welland) and ‘English Fort’ built by Edward the Elder in 918. Significantly, Taylor’s case study illustrates parallels with that of Crawford, in that for Roman roads, the loss of a crossing point could impact upon the wider use of the road. Della Hooke observes a similar situation at Stratford-upon-Avon in her study of a route that runs parallel to the Roman road (1977, 214–215). Key places such as the ford itself, a pagan Saxon cemetery, and a site of Romano-British occupation are used to suggest an apparent shift away from an ancient route and crossing of the Avon to the course of the Roman road. However, the presence of a minster church and assembly place on the course of the ancient route might yet suggest a reversion to that thoroughfare in the mid-to-later Anglo-Saxon period.

Tim Tatton-Brown has observed that from the outset there was ‘good evidence’ to suggest that in the early Anglo-Saxon period, much of the Watling Street route through northern Kent was probably not used at all and that ‘only in the late Anglo-Saxon period’ did it once again become an overland route between Canterbury and London (2001, 121–122). However, when this route did come back into existence, few stretches respected the alignment of the original Roman road, which itself survived only as parish boundaries, hedgerows and local tracks. It was not until the building of the A2 in 1924, Tatton-Brown observes, that the line of the original course of the Roman road was once again taken up.

Analysis of excavation reports of Roman roads might help us to understand the variable histories many roads enjoyed. But without sophisticated scientific dating techniques, it is notoriously difficult to date road surfaces and to refine chronologies sufficiently to identify particular periods of use and abandonment. A good example of this is the Roman road from Silchester to Winchester in the location of East Stratton, which in the mid-1970s was subjected to analytical earthwork survey prior to a number of cuttings being made through the projected course (Fasham 1981). In one cutting, a phase of activity characterised by a humus and phosphate-rich dark soil overlay the first two phases of road construction that were believed to be of the Roman period. Thirty-seven sherds of pottery recovered from this 20 cm thick dark soil yielded a date range from the sixth to seventh century and this deposit was interpreted as a mid-Saxon occupation layer. ‘Period 3’, as it was designated, was in turn overlain by a layer of flint cobbles believed to correspond to a phase of ‘late Saxon road building’ (Fasham 1981, 167–172).

Whilst the evidence from Stratton Park suggests that the Roman road may have very naturally slipped into redundancy, the desire to restrict free movement along the course of Roman roads must be considered as evidence of their continued use. This is best illustrated by excavations undertaken at Bokerley Dyke where successive blockings and re-openings of the course of the Roman road from Old Sarum to Badbury Rings were in evidence from the fourth century and later (Eagles 199...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
• PART 2: THE CASE STUDIES
• PART 3: DISCUSSION
• Conclusion: Wessex and the early medieval world beyond
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography