Watling Street by John Higgs

Author:John Higgs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,

If boats were on land, churches on sea,

If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,

And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,

If the mamas sold their babies

To the gypsies for half a crown;

If summer were spring and the other way round,

Then all the world would be upside down.

Our use of the transgender iconography of highwaymen, where men dress as women or women dress as men and live free from the rules of society, is perhaps not just a quirk of modern culture but an indication that we are picking up on a larger truth about those days. Highwaymen symbolise that era in a way that contemporary muggers or carjackers don’t represent the modern world. The crimes committed by Dick Turpin and other highwaymen were shameful, cruel acts born of desperation and necessity and the legends and romance which grew from them are largely false, yet these legends still contain a truth about that transgressive period.

The Newgate Calendar, a popular compendium of executions from the eighteenth century, informs us that Moll Cutpurse specified in her will that she wished to be buried with her backside upwards, ‘that she might be as preposterous in her death as she had been all along in her infamous life’. At a time when the world had indeed been turned upside down, what was more appropriate than that?

In the south-west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral hangs Great Paul, the largest bell in Britain until the twenty-three-tonne Olympic Bell was cast for the 2012 Olympic Games. Great Paul is over sixteen tonnes in weight and rings a deep E-flat. It was cast in 1881 in Loughborough, Leicestershire, and the original plan was to transport it to London by train. But the railway companies refused to take it, fearing its weight would cause a derailment, so it had to travel along Watling Street. It was chained to a cart and pulled by two traction engines. The journey went reasonably smoothly until it got to Little Brickhill in Buckinghamshire, where the road collapsed under the weight. The rest of its journey was equally problematic and it frequently got stuck, blocking the road.

It was not just highwaymen that coach travellers had to be wary of. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the roads themselves were frequently unpassable. Most roads were originally just compressed dirt and many were known as hollow ways, because they became lower in the centre as the earth under the path become flattened. In wet weather paths like these would often fill with water and become difficult to pass. This was why the Romans went to the trouble of building their famous roads.

Roman roads consisted of a number of layers of sand, cement or gravel, known as agger, topped with a layer of stones in a process called metalling. The thickness of the agger and metalling depended on the terrain underneath, with softer, marshier ground needing thicker surfacing. Roman roads were raised slightly in the centre and usually had ditches running along each side, so that rain ran off them.

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