But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king, when they fought their way across the bridge, and, taking possession of Rochester, sacked town, castle, and cathedral, but also for that exploit of the townsfolk who cut off the tail of one of Becket's sumpter-mules, whereupon that wrathful prelate cursed them, and caused them and their descendants to go with tails for ever. Thus the story which accounts for the county nickname of "Kentish long-tails," but I do not perceive that the Strood folks are so unusually decorated. Perhaps they are at pains to hide their shame. XIX [Sidenote: STROOD] Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to derive from _strata_, "the street," standing as it does on that ancient way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon "strode": a marshy region. [Sidenote: WATLING STREET] The original meaning of "Watling Street" is never likely to be determined to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an identical route with the present highway, ran between London and Dover long before Caesar landed can scarce be matter for doubt. That the Britons were barbaric and unused to commerce or intercourse with the Continent can scarcely be supposed, for Britain was the Sacred Island of the Druidical religion, and to it came the youth of Gaul for instruction at the hands of those high priests whose Holy of Holies lay, across the land, in remote Anglesey. Those priests were the instructors, both in religion and secular knowledge, of the Gaulish youth; and, outside the civilisations of Greece and Rome, Britain was even then the best place to acquire a "liberal education." Up the rugged trackway of the Sarn Gwyddelin == the Foreigners' Road, from Dover to London, and diagonally across the island, came these youths; and down it, to voyage across the Channel, and to take part with their Gaulish friends in any fighting that might be going, went those tall British warriors whose strength and fierceness surprised Caesar in his Gallic War. Imports and exports, too, passed along this rough way; skins and gold, British hunting-dogs and slaves were shipped to Gaul and Rome by merchants who, to keep the trade unspoiled, magnified the dangers of the sea-crossing and the fierceness of the people. Pottery, glass-beads, and cutlery they imported in return; and this primitive "road" must have presented a busy scene long before it could have deserved the actual name.