ssed was not this abortive revolt
of the peasants nor the rising of Jack Cade in 1450, but the meeting
here in 1400 of King Henry IV. and the Emperor of Constantinople, who
came to England to ask for assistance against the ever-encroaching
Turk, then at the gates of Constantinople, which some fifty years
later was to fall into his hands. Blackheath, indeed, has always played
a considerable part in the history of southern England, partly because
it was the last great open space on the southern confines of London,
and partly because of the royal residence at Greenwich. Fifteen years
after it had seen a guest so strange as the Emperor of the East, it
saw Henry V. return from Agincourt, and the Mayor of London with the
aldermen and four hundred citizens, "all in scarlet with hoods of red
and white," greet the hero king.

... London doth pour out her citizens
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort
Like to the senators of the antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in!

Across the Heath we go, taking the road on the right at the triangle,
before long to find ourselves perhaps for the first time on the very
road the pilgrims followed--the great Roman highway of the Watling
Street.

I call the Watling Street a great Roman highway, for that, as we know
it, is what it is, but in its origin it is far older than the Roman
occupation. It ran right across England from the continental gate at
Dover, through Canterbury to Chester, fording the Thames at Lambeth,
and it was the first of the British trackways which the Romans
straightened, built up, and paved. It has been in continuous use for
more than three thousand years, and may therefore be said to be the
oldest road in England. It is older than the greatness of London, for
in its arrow flight across England it ignores the City. After the ford
at Lambeth, to-day represented by Lambeth Bridge, an older crossing of
the Thames than that at London Bridge, it mounted the northern slope,
passing perhaps across the present gardens of Buckingham Palace and
the eastern end of Hyde Park, where to-day it is lost or merely
represented by Grosvenor Place and Park Lane, to cross the great
western road out of London at Tyburn, the original "Cross Roads," the
ancient place of execution close by the present Marble Arch, and to
pursue its way, as we may see it still, directly and in true