The Anglo-French writer Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) remains best known today as the author of the 1907 `Cautionary Tales for Children’ with its often comically violent accounts of what happens to misbehaving youngsters. Belloc, son of a French father and English mother, produced more than 150 books, and lived most of his life in London or West Sussex. He was the Member of Parliament for Salford for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910, and a lifelong devout Catholic. His interpretation of his religion compelled him to oppose the suffragette movement, despite the face it was something passionately supported by his mother.
Belloc’s link with Kent is through one book, but an influential one. `The Old Road’ was published in 1904, This described the route of the trackway from the coast of Winchester to Canterbury. The route Belloc described himself as travelling ran through Farnham, and then close by Dorking, Reigate and Redhill, before coming to Otford within Kent, Kemsing, Wrotham, Trottiscliffe, Snodland, Detling, Lenham, Charing and finally via Chilham to the destination. Belloc’s argument for why the old road existed, and what its origins were, is conveyed in a storybook way. Imagining a man coming in prehistoric times from the continent across the waters from the modern day French coast, Belloc speculates:
`The wind might fail him, or the wind might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he would be caught by the flood tide some miles from the land. He cold drift up along the English shore, getting a few hundred miles nearer with every catspaw and looking impatiently for some place to which he could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland.’ (Belloc, `The Old Road’, Constable and Company, 1911, 38).
Belloc asks why it was that these early travellers then made their way to Canterbury. `The certain matter is that this place was the knot of south-eastern England, and the rallying point of all the roads from the coast,’ Belloc explains. `Caesar landed at Deal, but Canterbury fort was the place he had to take; Augustine landed at Richborough but Canterbury was the place where the fixed the origins of Christianity in England’ (Ibid, 43). The theories that Belloc presents are driven as much by their need to accommodate a settled idea of antiquity and identity as anything else. Most have been effectively questioned, dismantled or modified by archaeologists and historians since the time this book was written. In particular, the idea of Christianity coming with Augustine. As Lullingstone Roman Villa near the route of the ancient track made clear in its excavations half a century later, Christianity was practiced at least in some places from the 300s – two centuries before the Roman emissary’s re-introduction of the ideology and practice of the `new’ religion.
What Belloc succeeded in doing however, in his descriptions of a walk along the Winchester-Canterbury route, was to reinforce the idea that there had been a defined ancient pathway, that it was linked to a `deep’ past, and that this traced a specific memory trace across the landscape. The appeal of the track and its mixing of myth and reality is discussed in Derek Bright, `The Pilgrim’s Way: Fact and Fiction on an Ancient Trackway’, The History Press, Stroud, 2011. Bright writes of the way that `modern-day pilgrims… seek a deeper secular or spiritual meaning from their journey’ despite the fact that `from its prehistoric origins through to the romanticism of the Victorian and Edwardian pilgrims one will find a mass of contradictory views about how we should define the Pilgrims’ Way’ (Bright, 12). Even Belloc had shown some restraint, simply using the prosaic term `the Old Road’ rather than mentioning pilgrims.
And yet the appeal to the imagination of this route being one of pilgrimage with all the spiritual meaning associated with that has been powerful. One of the most vivid examples is in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s `A Canterbury Tale’ from 1944. There it is attributed with an almost mythical quality. All of this had been massively reinforced by Chaucer’s great work from the late 14th century which had involved pilgrims ostensibly telling their stories while travelling along a part of the route, though one that originated in London, and followed presumably the Watling Street Roman line before aligning with the Belloc route somewhere around the Medway Crossing. Passionate debate has been undertaken about exactly how travellers did get across this river in the period before any of the bridges existed.
While Bright is respectful of many of Belloc’s argument and his decisions on routes, he is also circumspect on the idea of an over neat notion of what this track was. More akin to a band of different routes varying according to season and terrain, and perhaps linked deep into the prehistoric religious monuments of Salisbury Plain, the annexation by pilgrim usage from relatively late in the history of the track simply added a layer of services, monuments and new usage to a feature that had many others before all of this. And the romance is all part of this, albeit intangible and found more in words than landscape features. Belloc in describing the end of his travels is overcome at the sight of Canterbury cathedral by a fit of purple prose. `I stood considering the city and the vast building and especially the immensity of the tower,’ he enthuses.
`It was as though a shaft of influence had risen enormous above the shrine: the last of all the emanations which the sacred city cast outwards just as its sanctity died. That tower was yet new when the commissioners came riding in, guarded by terror all around them, to destroy, perhaps to burn, the poor materials of worship in the great choir below; it was the last thing in England which the true Gothic spirit made’ (Belloc, 278)
As an example of how imagination, history and environment mix into each other, this ancient road would be hard to better. Even today, with large larges of it now labelled as the `North Downs Path’, it leaves hints and traces all across the county, in small lanes, cottages, and other features labelled with the `Pilgrims’ Way’ name.