The Icknield Way may have been such a combination. The Danes might have combined it with the Ridgeway in 1005, when they burnt Wallingford and went by Cholsey and Cuckhamsley to Kennet. They probably used the road along the Chilterns when they burnt Thetford and Cambridge and turned south to the Thames; and other parts of it when they stole inland from their ships through Norwich to Thetford. Sweyn may have gone along it when he went to Wallingford, and so over the Thames westward to Bath, where the western men submitted and gave hostages and he became king of the whole people. Giraldus may have trodden it in South Wales. At an earlier age, as Mr. Moray Williams has suggested, the Icknield Way might have been the line of the Iceni in their alleged migration westward, after the defeat of Boadicea. It should have been Imogen’s pathway to Milford Haven. There are not many early references to the travel upon the road. It would be used chiefly by traders and travellers from a distance. Plot remarked that it passed through no towns or villages in Oxfordshire, and this, in his day, made it convenient for stealers of cattle. A road used by strange travellers and robbers waiting for them was not a likely one for small settlements and local use. When it was spoken of as the way the oxen go--unless the phrase implied a road along which came oxen from a distance--it may already have been degenerating. Guest says: “Your guide will talk of the long lines of pack-horses that once frequented the ‘Ickley Way,’ as if they were things of yesterday; and a farmer in the Vale of Aylesbury told me ... that in the popish times they used to go on pilgrimage along it from Oxford to Cambridge.” Messrs. Jordan and Morris (_Introduction to the Study of Local History and Antiquities_) speak of the road as connecting the flint-knappers’ settlement at Brandon with Avebury and Stonehenge: “The men of Wiltshire would wish to obtain flint instruments from Brandon; men from Brandon to have access to Avebury and Stonehenge.” But Wiltshire men would not go to Suffolk in search of flints except for a wager. [Illustration: Whiteleaf Cross.] The Icknield Way is sufficiently explained as the chief surviving road connecting East Anglia and the whole eastern half of the regions north of the Thames, with the west and the western half of the south of England. For the men of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, Bedford, Hertford, Buckingham, and Oxford, it did what the Harrow Way did for men of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and East Hampshire. CHAPTER III FIRST DAY--THETFORD TO NEWMARKET, BY LACKFORD AND KENTFORD