368 THE ROMANS IN CORNWALL. 



doubt improved, but which as certainly they did not originate. 

 To reason from the use of the word " street" is to argue from 

 the name instead of the thing ; and the mere existence of such 

 names as "Ickneild street" and " Watling street" ought to 

 show the danger of that method of procedure. " Streets " were 

 well known to the Saxons, as paved or formed roadways ; and 

 the cognates of the word " street " are found in all the Teutonic 

 languages, to go no further. To say then that a place is called 

 Stratton because it is on a street is not the same thing by any 

 means as to say that the " street " is of Eoman origin. All you 

 can say is that the Saxons either founded or renamed a place — 

 "a ton" — on a pre-existing duly-formed line of thoroughfare; 

 and that helps you not one whit to the origin of the said thorough- 

 fare. If you insist that the " street " is Roman, as history is quite 

 silent on the point you must assume that up to the time when the 

 particular Stratton in question was founded (there are of course 

 several) no one in England had been competent to make a 

 "street" in this ancient sense, but the Romans. That was the 

 assumption of the elder antiquaries, but they never adduced a 

 scintilla of evidence in its sup]3ort, and all the evidence we have 

 obtained since their time leads the other way. 



And this brings me to a local consideration of great 

 importance. In my "Notes on the ancient Topography of 

 Cornwall," published in the Journal of the Institution for 1885, 

 I expressed an opinion that the route of the ancient Fosseway 

 had nothing to do with the modern Totnes, but that it came into 

 Cornwall at a low, probably the lowest, ford on the Tamar, and 

 kept the higher ground to or by Bodmin, Truro, and Marazion, 

 along a line in which there are yet ample traces of the 

 characteristic British "ridgeway." I suggested then that the 

 Fosseway continued on from Exeter to Tamara, which I placed 

 near Tavistock, across Dartmoor ; and I pointed out that in the 

 centre of Dartmoor there were the remains of an ancient road 

 that could not have been made for merely local traffic — known as 

 the "great central trackway "- — and I identified that road with the 

 Fosseway. When I wrote only a small portion of its course was 

 known in the vicinity of Post Bridge. This year, (1889) however, 

 Mr. Eobert Burnard has succeeded in tracing it some seventeen 

 miles — right into the cultivated land, heading for Tavistock in 



