I.
There was once an American who, with cheap wit, expressed a fear of travelling in the little island of Great Britain, lest he should accidentally fall over the edge of so small a place. It is quite evident that he never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.
You have to perform that journey to realise that this is, after all, not so very small an island. It is not enough to have been wafted between London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance. We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.
There are a North Road and a Great North Road. Like different forms of religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways. The North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine Way which led to Lincoln. It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London.
The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London. It was measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just remarked, the North Road merged into it. From London to Hadley Green, just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are identical.
In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done, from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went.
We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. In the comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago, they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming was not so sure a thing.
These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice. From the highest to the lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut, every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from sheer necessity. No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.
We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery. If a love of the wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this sense. The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were, doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found nothing beautiful in mountain ranges. Their successors, however, during four hundred years had leisure and plentiful opportunities of cultivating taste, and travel was highly organised among them. A milliare, or milestone, was placed at every Roman mile—4854 English feet—and “mansiones,” or posting-stations, at distances varying from seven to twenty miles.
Roman roads were scientifically constructed. The following was the formula:—
| I. | Pavimentum, or foundation. Fine earth, hard beaten in. |
| II. | Statumen, or bed of the road. Composed of large stones, sometimes mixed with mortar. |
| III. | Ruderatio. Small stones, well mixed with mortar. |
| IV. | Nucleus. Formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded brick, or tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay. |
| V. | Summum Dorsum. Surface of the paved road. |
So