England from Winchester to Canterbury.

Now, though for any man who follows that road to-day it is filled with
these great companies of pilgrims, there are older memories, too, which
it evokes and which, if the history of England is precious to him, he
cannot ignore.

To begin with the exit from Winchester: there in Jewry Street a Roman
road overlies the older British way, not indeed exactly, but roughly,
certainly as far as King's Worthy, whence it still shoots forth
straight as an arrow's flight over hill over dale to Silchester. The
very street by which he leaves the city, as it were, by the now
destroyed North Gate, is Roman, one of the four roads which met in the
Forum of Venta Belgarum and divided Roman Winchester into four
quarters, though, perhaps because of the marshes of the Itchen, not
into four equal parts as in Chichester. The present name of this road,
Jewry Street, indicates its character all through the Middle Ages, when
here by the North Gate, upon the road to London, the Jews had their
booths, and the quarter of Winchester which this road served was
doubtless their ghetto, the richest quarter of the city.

It was not, however, of the Middle Age, but of the Dark Age I thought
as I issued out of Winchester where, not much more than a hundred years
ago, the old North Gate still held the way. In the year 1001, after the
battle of Alton, in which the men of Hampshire were utterly broken by
Sweyn and his Danes, this road was filled with the routed Saxons in
flight pouring into the city of Winchester. The record of that
appalling business is very brief in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," a few
lines under the date 1001. "A. 1001. In this year was much fighting in
the land of the English, and well nigh everywhere they (the
Danes) ravaged and burned so that they advanced on one course
until they came to the town of Alton; and then there came
against them the men of Hampshire and fought against them.
And there was Ethelward the King's high-steward slain, and Leofric at
Whitchurch and Leofwin the King's high-steward and Wulfhere the
bishop's thane, and Godwin at Worthy, Bishop Elfry's son, and of all
men one hundred and eighty; and there were of the Danish men many more
slain, though they had possession of the place of slaughter." A mere
plundering expedition, we may think, but it foretold with certainty the
rule of the Danes in England, which as we know came to pass, and was
not the catastrophe it might have been