It is at Deptford, as I say, that we begin to leave the mean streets, for at the cross-roads we turn up Blackheath Hill, and though this is not in all probability the ancient way, it is as near it as modern conditions have allowed us.  The old road, as far as can be made out, ran farther to the east, quite alongside Greenwich Park, and not over the middle of the Heath, as the modern road does.  Blackheath is not alluded to in Chaucer’s poem, though it must have been famous at the time he was writing, for in 1381 Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and their company were there gathered.  Perhaps the most famous spectacle, however, that Blackheath has witnessed 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 Roman fashion down what we know as Edgware Road.  That great north-western highway lies over the very pavement of the Romans, which lies only a few feet below the surface of the modern road.