CHAPTER II 



BRITAIN'S EARLIEST ROADS 



IT has been assumed in some quarters that, because the main 

 routes of travel in this country did not have to pass over 

 lofty mountains, as in Austria and Switzerland, therefore the 

 construction of roads here was, or should have been, a com- 

 paratively easy matter. But this is far from having been the 

 case, the earliest opening of regular lines of communication 

 by road having been materially influenced by certain physical 

 conditions of the land itself. 



The original site of London was a vast marsh, extending 

 from where Fulham stands to-day to Greenwich, a distance of 

 nine or ten miles, with a breadth in places of two or two and a 

 half miles. The uplands beyond the Thames marshes were 

 covered with dense forests in which the bear, the wild boar, 

 and the wild ox roamed at will. Essex was almost entirely 

 forest down to the date of the conquest. Nearly the whole 

 expanse of what to-day is Sussex, and, also, considerable 

 portions of Kent and Hampshire, were covered by a wood 

 the Andred-Weald, or Andreswald which in King Alfred's 

 time is said by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been 

 120 miles long and 30 miles broad. Here it was that, until 

 even these great supplies were approaching exhaustion, the 

 iron industry established in Sussex in the thirteenth century 

 obtained the wood and the charcoal which were exclusively 

 used as fuel in iron-making until the second half of the 

 eighteenth century, when coal and coke began to be generally 

 substituted. Wilts, Dorset and other southern counties had 

 extensive woodlands which were more or less depleted under 

 like conditions. Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and 

 Leicestershire all had extensive woods. Sherwood Forest 

 extended over almost the whole of Nottinghamshire. In 

 Derbyshire, as shown by the Domesday Survey, five hundreds 



