Suffolk barrows and trackways (C. Morley)

OUR EARLIEST ROADS.

“The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
They’re all old friends on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail;
They’re God’s own guides on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.”

When one is passing through the parts of Suffolk immediately to the west of Bury St. Edmund’s, it is impossible not to observe the barrows which occur in several places, and indeed appear to extend in distinct lines over the face of the country. A course of lectures was delivered upon this subject in Bury during the Summer of 1815 by Mr. Stackhouse, in which was propounded the ingenious theory that in this division of the kingdom, being peopled by a different nation from the western, these barrows were intended as military stations only, whereas those of the West were chiefly raised as sepulchres. The singular lines of communication our barrows appear to form along the sides of the open downs, and the remarkable way in which they appear to command each other, as well as the leading points of the surrounding country, certainly seem to favour the idea; and very interesting is the act of tracing these lines of communication. For it will be found in most cases that one barrow is no sooner lost by the projection of a hill than another appears, so that an enemy passing through valleys could be tracked in every direction. Further, it is to be remarked that the situation of these mounds is the best that could be chosen for conveying telegraphic signals by smoke or fires. Unfortunately the extension of agriculture here, as in every part of England, has rendered the chain of mounds less perfect than formerly.

It is a curious and most interesting fact that in these lectures of just over a century ago a most important discovery respecting the first trade-routes of Britain was all but brought to light. This failure was pretty certainly due to the light and instable condition of the supersoil to the West of Bury. Sir Thomas Gage, in the above remarks upon these lectures in the Suff. Inst., pf. 1859, clearly indicates that the tumuli were employed for the purpose of view-points, but makes no suggestion that they were connected inter se by a trackway. Curiously enough it has required a century to elaborate the view-point theory; but now Mr. Alfred Watkins has established the hypothesis—which he himself is satisfied to be fact—that all the “Early British Trackways” (the title of his 1922 book upon the subject) were laid down in a perfectly straight line between two such elevated view-points at very various distances apart; all tracks ran in a direct line from hill to hill; and, where it was thought well to avoid a hill-top, this was circumvented at an equal level throughout. It is further noteworthy that his observations are pretty well confined to Herefordshire in the West of England, the home of Stackhouse’s “different nation”; and they are extended to show that every landmark that could be ascribed to pre-Roman times, such as artificial earth-mounds and moats and camps and castles, lies exactly upon one of these trackways or leys. We have this old word Leys in Suffolk at Tostock and Redlingfield and elsewhere, but here I am not aware that it has the significance of roads; on the contrary, it seems to rather mean ponds or a series of fish-stews.

This idea of straight trackways is so novel that time has not yet elapsed to allow of its possible application to Suffolk. Hitherto there can be no doubt that the general notion of Celtic ways has been distinctly curvilinear, and this would appear inevitable on account of the number of our ramificating waterways nowadays, combined with their much greater depth and breadth under Imperial occupation. Fox has shown in his account of Roman Suffolk in the 1900 Journal of the Royal Archæological Institute that no more than two, or possibly three, main Suffolk roads can be proved to have existed at that time: Stone Street ran South by Wainford Mills on the East of Bungay, perhaps to Dunwich; another Stone Street, later called Pye Way, ran from Copdock direct to Coddenham, and thence due North through Stonham and Stoke Ash to the Norfolk border at Scole; and this may have had a branch from about Shrubland Park via Dennington and Peasenhall—very unlikely-looking country nowadays—to Dunwich. Both the latter and our third road, which ran from Hitcham via Woolpit and Stow-Langtoft, to Gasthorpe Gate at Knettishall, came from Essex at Stratford Saint Mary, which may have been Ad Ansam. This leaves it quite obvious that there must have been numerous lesser tracks to connect the villages, and one of these is well described in Doughty’s 1910 “Chronicles of Theberton” as running South-West from Dunwich through Westleton, probably to North Stratford and Burgh by Woodbridge. In Saxon times the most celebrated highway was the King’s Road, which connected Bury St. Edmund’s with Dunwich by way of Hoxne; and the reason of so broad a Northerly curve is shown by the numerous rivers in the valleys and forests on the upland boulder-clay that a direct line would have to encounter.

Directness is the last thing we have been accustomed to associate with Celtic passage, and Raven says at Suff. Inst., 1896, p. 258, that “a British track, curling as usual along the higher ground so as to avoid water-crossings, then so much broader than now, ran from the East end of Lake Lothing into the district of Rumburgh, terminating in the small earthwork here.” Traces in a field yet remain of the Pilgrim’s Way into Dunwich at Hinton. But in such waterless districts as the Breck of North-West Suffolk there can be no doubt that the routes were straight or nearly so. The Celtic Icenhild Way—usually corrupted into Ickneild—thus ran direct from Thetford to Moulton, making but a slight angle in order to avoid the more Western swamps and to cross the river Lark at Lackford. And our modern roads from Thetford to Newmarket, formerly Exning, as its direction shows; Brandon and Thetford to Bury, show a regularity unknown in the better watered parts of the county.

But actually the subject of our first roads has received so little attention from Suffolk antiquaries that no adequate account of them is yet possible, and in these circumstances Mr. Watkins’ suggestion respecting methods of research becomes all the more welcome. If he himself has adhered to the proffered “Hints to Ley Hunters”—“Scrap every ley if it does not pass through at least four undoubted sighting points”—it should be fairly sound. I myself know too little of his Hereford localities to opinionate; but there is one very intimate connection between Eastengle and that district, for Æthelbeorht, the patron saint of Hereford Cathedral, was an Eastengle king, whose story is sufficiently romantic:—

Æthelbeorht succeeded his father as King of Eastengle about 790; he was young, handsome, graceful, and prudent. His councillors advised marriage, and upon this subject of his espousing Ælfthryth, the (? youngest) daughter of King Offa of Mercia, he consulted his mother at Bury St. Edmund’s. With her consent he set forth in the Spring of 793, and quite probably crossed the Fen Sea from Herringswell, which church is dedicated to him. On reaching Mercia, he sent forward advices of his arrival, and Offa cordially invited him to Sutton Walls, where he duly arrived and was received with all honour and hospitality. The old-fashioned idea of Saxon carousal (which is really applicable only to the later Danes) is made to fill the evening; and that very night, 20th May, Æthelbeorht was murdered. The method is differently told by each chronicler. Ælfthryth herself gave his retinue warning in time to effect their own escape home. She seems to have been very true to her dead lover, and is said to have immediately entered Crowland Monastery and stayed there till her death: a good girl. The reason of the murder was either a rather far-fetched refusal by Æthelbeorht to the Mercian Queen’s illicit solicitations, or the much more probable downright treachery of Offa himself, in order to gain possession of Eastengle, which he did, and ruled it till his death three years afterwards.

Our point is that the reasonable hypothesis emerges that Æthelbeorht’s body would, in such circumstances, be interred with the utmost secrecy and seclusion. In fact, Roger of Wendover expressly states: “St. Athelbert was ignominiously buried in a place unknown to all, until his body was found by the faithful.” Yet Mr. Alfred Watkins, in discussing chapels erected over wells, finds that “our local example is at Marden near Sutton Walls, where the well, in the west end of the church, central with the nave and the ley, is connected with the tradition of St. Ethelbert.” This means that the body was buried not only near, but actually beneath the frequented public trackway of the time. An unbiased mind might well prefer to consider this ley the later Saxon pilgrim’s path to the Saint’s shrine, rather than an Early English trackway.
CLAUDE MORLEY, F.E.S., F.Z.S.