England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
Men who were not bishops now begin to exercise themselves in suggesting
roads which may have been continuations of this Ickleton or Icknield
Way. They print their opinions with varying degrees of certainty.
In 1829 Dr. Mason, rector of Orford, in Suffolk (_Archæologia_,
XXIII), traces it, “after it leaves Ixworth,” to Buckenham and thence
by two forks to Caistor and to Burgh Castle. Samuel Woodward, in
1830 (_Archæologia_, XXIII), also assumes that it passes through
Buckenham, Ixworth, and Bury St. Edmunds. In 1833 Alfred John Kempe
(_Archæologia_, XXVI) takes it for granted that the road “crossed
the kingdom from Norwich towards Old Sarum.” With an “I need hardly
observe,” he connects the road with the Iceni, and explains it as “the
Iken-eld-strete, that is, the old street or way of the Iceni.” Arthur
Taylor (_Archæological Institute: Memoirs_, 1847; Norwich volume)
connects the road with Norwich Castle Hill, which he believes to be
British. Like the Ordnance Survey map, he takes it through Newmarket,
Kentford, Cavenham, Lackford, and Thetford. Like Bennet, both Woodward
and Taylor regard the road as a British trackway. But Taylor earns his
chief distinction by the possession of a deed “apparently of the reign
of Henry iii,” relating to premises at Newmarket and “extending upon
Ykenildweie.”
In 1856, in the form of a discourse afterwards embodied in his
_Origines Celticæ_ (1883), Edwin Guest wrote a long account of the
Icknield Way. He mentions as evidence charters of the tenth century
referring to estates in Berkshire between Blewbury and Wayland’s
Smithy, so minute, he says, as almost to be sufficient foundation for a
map, but not to enable him to trace the road; for he accepts Bennet’s
substitution of the Ridgeway. North of the Thames his earliest evidence
is a parchment, possibly of the fourteenth century, relating to the
foundation of Dunstable Priory at a place where the two royal roads of
Watling and Ickneld cross, a place of woods and robbers near Houghton.
He quotes a “letter testimonial of 1476” proving that this trackway,
west of Dunstable, was known as Ikeneld Strete. He takes the road
from Icklingham and through Ickleton and Ickleford because that is a
possible course and because he believes those names to be connected
with “Iceni” and “Icknield.” What was the one great road described as
Icknield Street in the _Laws of the Confessor_ he finds it hard to
define. But he can find no traces of Roman construction in the road.
Inspired by the map showing Salisbury at the end of the road, he
suggests that “most probably” it joined the Ridgeway east of Avebury
and continued along its course, as recently described by Sir Richard
Colt Hoare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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