But, whatever the cause or circumstances, the phenomenon is quite plain. The local roads developed for purely local purposes on either side of the original Roman line, and that line, since there is no longer required any continuous traffic along it, disappears. vi (4) Lastly, we have the Peddars Way. It has presented a very difficult problem to all historians, but I think a solution is to be guessed at, though not to be too strongly affirmed. The Peddars Way runs as a main artery right through Suffolk and Norfolk. Its origin was clearly Stratford St. Mary’s, on the southern edge of Suffolk, and it was built to link up that water crossing with some harbour now disappeared on the Wash. Its use has dropped out; local roads are only concerned with it in a short section, and men argue thus: why was it ever made, and, if made, why did it fail as a means of communication? I think the answer is military. The Peddars Way never linked up any centres of population. It goes through land where men have never built cities or even large villages. But what it would do as a military road, what I think it was designed to do, was the holding of all that solid block of East Anglia which apparently exactly corresponds with the territory of the Iceni. For we must remember, as I have said above, that our county system is probably Roman in origin, and most of it corresponds to tribal divisions earlier even than the Roman administration. It is a point that has often been denied, but those who deny it fail to remark the analogy of the Continent, the evidence of Kent, Sussex, Dorsetshire, and Essex, apart from the striking list of that mass of counties which all centre round a Roman town or a town grown up as the suburb of a Roman town--Leicestershire, Worcestershire, Huntingdonshire, Gloucestershire, etc. The Peddars Way cuts right across East Anglia through its very centre, so that a chain of stations along it commands the whole territory. It further divides that territory into two--a territory which was the scene of a great revolt in the beginning of the Roman occupation. It continued to subserve a certain function to the very end, because from it as a base one can radiate to threatened points upon the coast when the pirate raids began in the middle of the Roman occupation. When, in the Dark Ages, the whole island fell into districts, fighting one against the other, each with its local king, the whole a chaos and a welter, the Peddars Way entirely lost its meaning and value. There was no longer one government or one army. There was no need for the controlling of a subject populace, for the populace had ceased to be subject save to its local chiefs. Such few men as still came over the North Sea were not, until the Danish invasion, enemies, and as the Peddars Way served no line of villages or of towns it fell completely out of use.