No wild geese, according to an ancient fable, ever again spoiled the cornfields of Weedon after they had once been banished by the miraculously successful prayers of the Princess Werburgh, a holy daughter of Wulfere, King of Mercia, somewhere about A.D. 780. That pious lady, afterwards raised to the hierarchy of saints, was abbess of a religious house here. Her steward assembled the birds: the abbess commanded them to depart, and they immediately took wing, but refused to leave the neighbourhood until a missing one of the flock (killed, cooked and eaten, as it happened) was restored to them. Nothing easier than this to a Saxon saint, and the bird was restored alive to his friends and relations! “The vulgar superstition,” says an old writer, “now observes that no wild geese are ever seen to settle and graze in Weedon field.” Nor in any other field nowadays, it may be added, in this modern England of ours.

At Weedon the old Watling Street bids good-bye to the Holyhead Road for 71½ miles, and goes by itself in a route 75¼ miles long, rejoining the modern road at Ketley, near Wellington.

The meaning of the name “Watling Street” is sought under many difficulties, so many and so hazy are the derivations of it advanced. The Britons, it is said, knew the rough track crossing the island before the Romans came as the Sarn Gwyddelin, or Foreigners’ Road, along whose uncertain course came and went the Phoenician merchants who traded with Britain long before CÆsar had heard of this lonely isle; long, indeed, before he was born. According to Stewkeley, the name “Gwyddelin” stood for “wild men,” and this therefore was the Wild Men’s Road; the savages so named being the wild Irishmen from across St. George’s Channel. Camden and others boldly say the Romans named the road Via Vitellianus, or Vitelliana, an easy Latin modification of “Gwyddelin,” the name by which they heard the Britons call it. At any rate, it is to the Romans that its transformation from a mere forest track to a broad, well-engineered, and well-paved road was due. The work was not soon done, but when completed it took rank among the greatest of military ways.

The Romans engineered the road and did the skilled work; the Britons performed the carrying and the hard labour, forced to it by a thousand stripes and indignities. To them fell the clearing of the woods along the route, and the digging of earth and stone, and to Roman workmen the staking out of the way and the weaving together of those brushwood wattles that compacted the foundations in moist and boggy places. Some fanciful commentators find in those wattles the source of the name given to the road. Completed at length as a military necessity, and with much pagan ceremony committed to the care of the Lares Viales and the less supernatural custody of the road-surveyors, the Via Vitelliana was for over three hundred years a crowded highway, with busy towns and villages along its course; the palatial villas of wealthy Roman citizens peeping out from sheltered nooks. Then came disaster. The Roman garrisons withdrawn, successive waves of savage invasions wrecked the civilisation of that time, and only the burnt walls of towns and settlements remained to tell of what had been. It was not until another four hundred years had passed that the fierce Saxons, becoming tamed, began to rear a civilisation of their own. To this great road they gave, according to that monkish chronicler, Roger de Hoveden, the name “Waetlinga-street,” the Way of the Sons of Waetla, a legendary king; and the Celtic British whom they found in the country, talking what was to them a strange and uncouth tongue, they called, with all the arrogance imaginable, “Wealas,” or strangers, forgetting that they themselves were the strangers and the others upon their native soil. But as “Wealas” they remained, and as such they are still, for from that word sprang the name of the Welsh people, who as a matter of fact, style themselves “Cymru.”

A curious point to be noted is that this is by no means the only “Watling Street.” The name is found repeatedly in this country, applied locally to ancient Roman roads; but the Watling Street prominent above all others is this great way, which traversed Britain from its extreme south-eastern verge, over against Gaul, diagonally in a north-westerly direction for 340 miles, until it touched the sea at Carnarvon and Chester. From the three great fortified starting-points at Dubris, Portus Lemanis, and Portus Rutupis—severally identified with Dover, Lympne, and Richborough—it ran in triplicate to Canterbury, and thence, chiefly along the existing Dover Road, to London. By way of that thoroughfare still known as Watling Street, it traversed the City and emerged at Newgate through the city wall, and so into what were then swampy wildernesses on the line of the present Holborn and Oxford Street. At the Marble Arch it turned abruptly to the right, and thence went in a straight line along the course of the Edgware Road to the great city of Verulamium, adjoining the St. Albans of our own day.

From this point the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road are practically identical so far as Weedon Beck. Dunstable marks the site of the Roman market-town of Forum DianÆ, or DurocobrivÆ, as it was also named; and Stony Stratford by its name proclaims its situation on the old route. It was the Roman “Magiovintum.” Towcester was the “Lactodorum” of the Itinerary. At Weedon the ancient road and the modern part company for 71½ miles, to meet again at Ketley railway-station, between Oakengates and Wellington.