There are a North Road and a Great North Road. Like different forms of religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways. The North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine Way which led to Lincoln. It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London. The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London. It was measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just remarked, the North Road merged into it. From London to Hadley Green, just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are identical. In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done, from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went. We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. In the comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago, they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming was not so sure a thing. These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice. From the highest to the lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut, every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from sheer necessity. No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.