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Not As Easy as the Yellow Brick Road
The Ancient Britons in pre-Roman times used mostly
unpaved trackways like the very ancient South
Downs Way which ran along the elevated ridge of
hills keeping your feet dry at least. By the first
century BC these avid traders had begun engineering
roads. When the Romans came they sought to allow
the rapid movement of troops and military supplies
by the most direct route possible. Most of the known
Roman network was complete by 180 AD. Some six
centuries after the Romans left, at the time of the
Domesday survey, it is believed that some 10,000
miles of Roman roads were still in use.
Place names help us to see which Roman roads were
still in use during the mediaeval period. The Romans
didn’t seem to have given their roads names – each
was a trunk road radiating from Londinium to key
Roman towns and they were probably referred to by
their destination. Watling Street, Ermine Street etc are
Anglo-Saxon names that use the word
stræts
from the
Latin
strata
meaning a paved (Roman) road. Villages
and towns on the old Roman routes used the prefix
stræts in their names such as Streatham, Stratton and
Streatly. Shelters at the side of Roman roads to
provide protection from bad weather were called Cold
Harbour and Coldecot.
In that six centuries since the Romans had left what
had mostly fallen into disrepair and ruin were the
river bridges so now roads tended to peel off from the
old Roman route to a usable ford. These new tracks
weren’t paved or metalled and the mark they left on
the landscape depended on the frequency of their use.
If a mediaeval unpaved road became blocked a new
track was made as a diversion and if a hill needed to
be climbed there might be a dry weather and a wet
weather option. You can see how a good working
knowledge of the meaning of place-names would
have been very useful for travellers trying to follow
these organic mediaeval roads, very little of which
remain today.
An
address
is a modern creation – a collection of
information used for describing the location of a
building, other structure or plot of land which
generally uses political boundaries and street names
as references together with a house number and even
more recently a postal code. Paris started numbering
their houses as early as 1512 but British houses were
not systematically numbered until the Postage Act
of 1765. Most people would have relied on the
persons name (after all even the biggest towns were
much, much smaller) maybe a description of the
house with a street name if there was one plus some
useful indicators such as
in the parish of,
or the useful
proximity of an inn or a shop sign.
Street Names
Before the 19
th
century street names were typically
generic, describing the goods sold activities on offer,
specific neighbourhoods or practical functions. You
see this very clearly in the City of London with Bread
Street, Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane all leading
from Cheapside, the central market place, its name
coming from the Saxon word chepe meaning to barter
or to buy. Nearby are the equally descriptive Old
Jewry and Gutter Lane. At the St Paul’s Cathedral
end of Cheapside there are street names which
remember the order of religious processions into the
cathedral, Amen Court, Ave Maria Lane and
Paternoster Square from the Latin
our father
for the
Lord’s prayer.
At the other end of Cheapside, quite literally, the
business end (where for a few hundred yards it is
called Poultry) we find Lombard Street on a piece of
land granted by Edward I to goldsmiths from the part
of northern Italy known as Lombardy. Bucklesbury
comes from another Italian connection, probably the
Boccherelli family from Pisa first recorded here in
1104 as Bucherel. In the 13
th
century the Bukerel
family were established as a leading City family
supplying a Lord Mayor. This was their place, bury
coming from the Anglo-Saxon burgh which we met