Britain's Earliest Roads 5 



out of six were heavily wooded, and nineteen manors out of 

 twenty-three had wood on them. " In Lancashire," says 

 Charles Pearson, in the notes to his " Historical Maps of 

 England During the First Thirteen Centuries," "if we dis- 

 tinguish forest from wood, and assume that the former 

 was only wilderness, we still have official evidence for believing 

 that a quarter of a million acres of the land between Mersey 

 and Ribble was covered with a network of separate dense 

 woods." 



Altogether, it is calculated by various authorities that in 

 the earliest days of our history about one third of the surface 

 of the soil in the British Isles was covered with wood, thicket, 

 or scrub. Of the remainder a very large proportion was fen- 

 land, marsh-land or heath-land. " From the sea-board of 

 Suffolk and Norfolk," says the Rev. W. Denton, in " England 

 in the Fifteenth Century," " and on the north coast almost to 

 the limits of the great level, stretched a series of swamps, 

 quagmires, small lakes and ' broads.' " A great fen, 60 miles 

 in length and 40 miles in breadth, covered a large proportion 

 of the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, North- 

 amptonshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. A great part 

 of Lancashire, Mr Denton further states, was a region of 

 marshes and quaking mosses, while " from Norwich to 

 Liverpool, and from the mouth of the Ouse at Lynn to the 

 Mersey, where it falls into the Irish sea, a line of fen, un- 

 cultivated moors and morasses stretched across England 

 and separated the northern counties from the midland districts, 

 the old territory of Mercia." 



Much of the surface, again, was occupied by hills or moun- 

 tains separated by valleys or plains through which some 

 200 rivers many of them far more powerful streams than they 

 are to-day flowed towards the sea. As for the nature of 

 much of the soil of England, the early conditions are further 

 recalled by Daniel Defoe who, in describing the " Tour through 

 the Whole Isle of Great Britain " which he made in the first 

 quarter of the eighteenth century, speaks of " the soil of all 

 the midland part of England, from sea to sea," as " a stiff clay 

 or marly earth " for a breadth of 50 miles, at least, so that 

 it was not possible to go north from London to any part of 

 Britain without having to pass through " these terrible 

 clays," which were, he says, " perfectly frightful to travellers." 



