There is one very curious puzzle about this famous road, and which has never been settled, and to which I offer no more than an attempt at solution. We are fairly certain that one of the great Roman stations for the repelling of raids lay at Brancaster, upon the Wash. Yet the Peddars Way does not make for Brancaster, but for a point about four miles to the east along the coast. Why is this? There has been suggested a ferry across the Wash, but that hypothesis cannot be entertained. The distance is one of eleven miles over very difficult water, and leading to no important district. We have, I think, the key to the position in the presence of a harbour which has been destroyed by erosion. All that coast has been modified perpetually during the last two thousand years through the vagaries of the sea. Of the great harbours of the Middle Ages, Dunwich to the south has disappeared, Orford is blocked and is decayed. Yarmouth, on the other hand, has grown up from a shingle bank into a town, and Breydon Water has changed from an estuary into a land-locked broad. I cannot doubt that there was some harbour at the end of the Peddars Way which the sea has destroyed. Brancaster, the military post, was established near it, but not actually within its confines, for some local reason, the character of which we have now lost. We must remember that Brancaster is a late fortification and the Peddars Way was settled before Brancaster came into being. vii We must imagine this process of gradual local development continuing uninterruptedly throughout the Dark Ages, the Roman roads serving local purposes gradually ceasing to have continuous use save for the Fosse Way, the Watling Street, and one or two of the other greater roads: the local ways, very ill maintained, growing up out of the Roman system. When the Dark Ages came to an end, and when the mediaeval civilization succeeded it--that is, in the five great centuries between the Conquest and the Reformation--this new system of local ways was hardened and became the national system which we still inherit. When I say the mediaeval system I mean the system which must have had its origin, or, at any rate, its mainspring, in the twelfth century, and which substituted for the use of the decayed Roman roads a competing system of roads no longer identical with them, though originally based upon them as a framework. Here again we have no direct records, but we have indirect evidence sufficient for our purpose. The twelfth century was the moment when civilization was arising again everywhere throughout the west, and nowhere more strongly than Britain. That was true of the architecture and town life and education, and of letters, and, we may justly presume, of the road system as well.