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SHARPE’S NETWORK OF RECTANGLES

by GUY RAGLAND PHILLIPS

Michael Burgess’s “Objections and Obscurities” (T.L.H. No. 65) was a useful exercise in stemming the tendency to create a cult of Alfred Watkins and reduce him to the size of a human genius again – even though Michael’s own article is, of course, open to objections too. It is a little sad though to find that Watkins suffered from the same jealousies and prejudices which to this day bedevil archaeology. For instance, in The Old Straight Track he never mentions Sir Montagu Sharpe, to whom I think he undoubtedly owed a great debt.

Watkins’ book was first published in 1925. Six years earlier appeared the first edition of Sharpe’s remarkabl study, Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times (1st edn. G. Bell & Sons Ltd.,1919; 2nd edn Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1932); but it was based on papers published between 1906 and 1917. It is beyond the bounds of possibility that Watkins was unaware of them.

Sharpe’s attitude is that a remarkable network of rectangles in Middlesex, groups around the great “Roman” roads, were an example of Roman “decuriation” or land measurement and parcelling-out. But read this (pp 90/1/3): “The sites of over forty-eight out of fifty-six mother churches of ancient parishes in Middlesex are situated on the quintarial lines (semitivae) defined by the Roman surveyors’ landmarks … and the inference prima facie is that such churches occupy the sites of compita, or other sacred places existing in Romano-British times.” To this Sharpe appends a footnote quoting Johnson’s Byways in British Archaeology (1912, p1), arguing for 100 pages “that many of our churches stand on pagan sites” and that “in some cases there has been almost continuous site occupancy since the first Christian church was reared”. Sharpe quotes Pope Gregory’s famous instructions to Abbot Miletus (and an earlier edict of AD392 by the Emperor Theodosius) that in Britain pagan sites must be used for churches, and Sharpe then gives a description of the “wayside chapels” (compita) “and sacred groves which the missionaries adapted to Christian uses” and “instances of pagan practises adapted by the Church for Christian uses”.

On p.98 Sharpe says that those who wish to extend this research into other districts should “mark the once existing fens, and forests, undoubted Roman towns, stations, and villas upon an early edition of the ordnance survey sheet of one inch to the mile. Next should be emphasised the state of mother churches, ancient stones, and other landmarks, boundaries of hundreds and parishes, together with the trend of immemorial roadways, and paths, especially those in parallel courses, with crossways at right angles. Then with rule, and compass set to nine furlongs, and having special regard to church sites, the quintarial lines of the ancient survey of a Romanized district may possibly be traced and recovered, for upon and parallel to them rural roads frequently ran. Mainly by these means many marks and stones upon the countryside hitherto unexplained, and maybe even unnoticed, will fall into line, and their use become evident, while at the same time it will become apparent how much the present setting of the face of the land, its roads and bounds, derives its origin from the Roman Survey in the first and second centuries of our era.”

On p.87 Sharpe says it is “manifest” that “neither the rude Saxons nor their Norman successors were capable of designing or carrying out such a comprehensive undertaking, and that only the Roman agrimensores were able thus to lay out the countryside.” To this he has a footnote: “Similar results are obtained in other Romanized districts in England, viz. Essex, Kent, Hants, Isle of Wight, Yorks, etc.” No doubt this is what Watkins had in mind in pointing out that in Ireland the Romans were never present, but the leys are as extensive there as in England.

Sharpe quotes Col. Sir H.G. Lyones, FRS, on “Ancient and Modern Land Measurement” in The Geographical Teacher, No. 76, vol. xii, pt 6, 182, as describing the Roman professional surveyors, the agrimensores and the gromatici, the latter of whom used the groma (a forked stick), a roughly made form of which was in use in Egypt a century or two earlier than the Pompeii disaster (AD 79). This, of course, is Watkins’ sighting stick, the modern hiker’s thumb-stick. {3}

The Roman landmarks listed by Sharpe (p.82) read just like Watkins’. “The finita linea, or outermost line within a pagus [a territorial area], was marked by mounds of earth (botontini) usually containing charcoal, broken crockery, and other matter foreign to the spot, and the internal divisions by holes (arcae) stones, trenches ( fossae) particularly trees (arbores antemissae), etc.” Facing p.88 he gives four excellent drawings of botontini, at Syon Park, Hampstead, Cranford House park, and Salt Hill, Slough. The Hampstead one is the well-known and highly evocative pine-crowned tump by Ken Wood, where I once watched a magnificent sunset and wrote a poem.

Fourread For ? botontini are precisely what Watkins would have called tumuli or tumps. In a footnote Sharpe said charcoal was found in it. One wonders whether broken crockery was also found, and, if so, whether it is now in a museum where it could be examined and dated – or whether any of the specimens of charcoal still exist to be carbon-dated. Sharpe adds: “These terminal mounds have received various names, e.g. Tothill, Greenhill, Salthill, Hlaw, Smallbury, Fairymount, Coldharbour.” See what I mean about Watkins’ lack of acknowledgment?

Sharpe’s spattering of Latin names and phrases are not enough to prove his point that alignments are Roman only. Indeed, it would be very useful to apply Watkins’ viewpoint to Sharpe’s data and maps. Meanwhile it is instructive to note that the bias shown by Watkins did to some extent explain, if it did not excuse, the scorn which was showered upon him by professional archaeologists. Prejudice dies hard. As late as 1967 and 1968 in two editions of his Fieldwork in Local History, W.G. Hoskins ridiculously dismisses Watkins as the “most dangerous” of all books about old roads, and endorses O.G.S. Crawford’s remark (Archaeology in the Field, p.75n) that it was “based upon a mis-conception of primitive society, and supported by no evidence. His writings on the subject are quite valueless.” Alas! Hoskins can scarcely have read Watkins or he would have realised that he himself has produced lots of evidence in support of Watkins’ ideas.

But he can also not have read Sharpe. Hoskins approvingly quotes I.D. Margary’s Roman Ways in the Weald (1948), including Margary’s statement that Roman land settlement markings, still traceable in Italy and North Africa, “had not hitherto been definitely proved to exist in Britain” (that is, not until Margary did it!).

Mr Hoskins makes a great point of the well-known technique of estimating the age of a hedge from the number of kinds of shrub in it, for which he gives some of the credit to Dr Max Hooper of the Nature Conservancy. It is a reasonably useful technique; but the evidence in support of it, strong though it is, is nowhere near as strong as that for Watkins’ leys. It is time he had a proper look at them.