A1-The Great North Road

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Romans

Ptolemy (or Claudius Ptolemaeus) drew a map of the world in around AD 150. Longitude was measured in degrees from 0 to 180 from somewhere west of Ireland and Spain, eastwards to Asia's distant ends.  There are no roads marked in Britain but many places are named.  Longitude 20º passes exactly through London, York (Eboracum), Aldborough (Isurium), Catterick (Caturactonium) and Corbridge (Corda), which would have made a much straighter Great North Road than the Romans ever managed.  Further north Ptolemy went seriously awry, giving Scotland a 90º turn into the North Sea.

The Tabula Peutingeriana  or Peutinger Table is a 13th century copy by a monk of Colmar in Alsace, of a Roman road map.  It is topological with places along the roads in the right order but distances and directions distorted, the north-south direction being relatively foreshortened, allowing Europe and west Asia to be fitted onto a strip about twenty feet long and a little over a foot wide.  Unfortunately most of Britain got lost off the end so land north of about Watford does not exist and little light is shed on a North Road.

The Antonine Itineraries are written descriptions of the empire's major roads, including fifteen routes in Britain.  The descriptions are not of direct roads but are more the routes taken by itinerant civil servants touring important centres.  So eight routes include London and four pass through York.  Several include portions of our Great North Road as the tables below show.  In 1799 Thomas Reynolds produced a detailed description of Itineraries together with a map.  Here's a modern map (thanks to Eric Howgate) and a full list and here's both together.  Codrington gives an account together with some notes on the translating and publishing history of the Itineraries.

Itinerary I

Itinerary I starts at Rochester, in Redesdale on the A68 a few miles south of the Scottish border.  This was Dere Street, once the main Roman route into Scotland.  Here at Bremenio, another road branched eastwards to link with the Devil's Causeway which led to Berwick.  North of Rochester the A68 takes a westerly route to enter Scotland at Carter Bar while Dere Street heads more northerly to cross the Cheviots at a higher level by Woden Law.  Southwards, Itinerary I takes Dere Street to Corbridge, Ebchester and Binchester, near Bishop Aukland, before reaching the modern Great North Road, the A1, at Scotch Corner.  From here the Itinerary continues southward to York but then takes the scenic route via Malton  and Delgovicia, which was probably near Wetwang, before reaching the Humber ferry at Brough.

Itinerary II

Itinerary II starts North of Hadrian's Wall on the west coast at a Fort called Blatobulgium, on the A74 about halfway between Gretna and Lockerbie.  It crosses the Pennines between Brough and Bowes by the road that is now followed by the A66 to join Itinerary I and the A1 at Scotch Corner.  From York it leaves the route of Itinerary I, keeping to the Great North Road's later route, to pass through Tadcaster, but then keeps going west to Manchester, Chester, south through Wroxeter and south east to London and the Channel port of Richborough near Dover.

Itinerary V

Itinerary V starts at London and takes in Chelmsford and Norwich before doubling back to Cambridge with Durobrivas or Water Newton the first town on the Great North Road that is listed.  Causennis may be Saltersford, south of Grantham or Ancaster to the north.  The route then went through Lincoln but turned west to cross the Trent at Littleborough rather than continuing north to cross the Humber and join Itinerary I.  North of Doncaster the Roman route lay a little to the west of the modern routes crossing the Aire at Castleford rather than Ferrybridge but then continued to York, Aldborough and Catterick, following the same roads as Itinerary II to Carlisle.

Two of the Roman towns, Lincoln and York, three if we count Colchester, on the Roman Great North Road, were given the significant status of Colonia.  Here is Collingwood to explain:

Within the general framework of a Roman province there was plenty of room for local self-government. In the first place, there were institutions of strictly Roman character. Of these the most important was the colonia, which was a settlement of time-expired legionaries on the land. Its members were there­fore Roman citizens. They lived in a town and held allotments outside it, so that culturally they enjoyed an urban life and all its institutions, while economically they had the status of inde­pendent farmers. It is true that the title of colony could be conferred in an honorary sense on communities very different from this in origin, but so far as we know it never was so conferred in Britain; Tacitus goes out of his way to remark that it had not been given to London, in spite of its size, wealth, and importance as a commercial centre and military depot. A colony received a charter conferring upon it, among other rights, that of electing four annual magistrates, duoviri inn dicundo for jurisdiction and duoviri aediles for building and finance; and it was to some extent free from interference by the provincial governor in its affairs. In Britain we know of four colonies: Colchester, founded A.D. 50, Lincoln, founded under the Flavians, Gloucester, under Nerva (96-7), and York, perhaps under Antoninus Pius.

The Antonine Itineraries were the subject of a curious forgery.  Charles Bertram (1723-1765) claimed, in 1747, that he had discovered a manuscript by a medieval monk that supplemented the Itineraries.  Stukeley accepted the claim and read a paper describing the discovery to the Society of Antiquaries in 1756 and the forgery was not uncovered for over a century until B. B. Woodward, librarian of Windsor Castle, demonstrated the inconsistencies in the text.  Thomas Reynolds, in his Iter Brinniarum, was one of the few who doubted the authenticity of Bertram's claim.

There are a number of Roman milestones scattered up and down the land, now mostly in museums such as at Grantham and at Aldborough.  But here are a few words of warning from Codrington.  The so-called milliaries afford very little information about the roads.  With very few exceptions those that have been preserved only bear inscriptions to emperors, and it may be doubted if they can properly be called milestones.  They consisted of a short column on a square base, or of a flat stone set upright, and their fate has been to be used for garden-rollers, posts, grottoes, gravestones, building, and the like purposes.  The inscriptions are nearly always of too late a date to be evidence for that of the roads, and the original position of the stones, which might sometimes determine the course of a road, is often unknown.

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©Biff Vernon, 2002