File:The counties of England, their story and antiquities (1912) (14578417367).jpg

Identifier: countiesofenglan01ditc (find matches)
Title: The counties of England, their story and antiquities
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Ditchfield, P. H. (Peter Hampson), 1854-1930
Subjects: Great Britain -- History England -- Antiquities
Publisher: London : G. Allen
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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h. Roadsminister incalculably to civilization. What the sea hasbeen to Kent and Devon, the Watling Street, the branchesof the Holyhead road, and the railway lines have beento Warwickshire. The county is even now a woodland one. Ancientlythe whole of the district north of Avon—the Arden—wasforest; in Roman times a wedge of woods flanked byroads. This fact will in part account for the comparativescantiness of the traces therein of Roman civilization.Maybe also the prevalence of forest accounts for thewealth of legend within the shire, for old stories andbeliefs survive longest where small communities liveisolated lives, as they must needs do among woodlands.Warwickshire was a part of Mercia—the March orborder—the borderland between Welsh and English ; laterit lay on the border line between Danes and English, onthe Watling Street. Its earthworks, whereof some datefrom prehistoric times, tell tales, unnoted in written pages,of operations offensive and defensive; and we probably Jr
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Warwickshire 261 owe the very name of the county, the grouping togetherof the hundreds that could defend and be defended bythe burh of Warwick, to the military necessities of theDanish invasion. In later times the water-defended fortof Kenilworth and that of rock-built Warwick have avivid feudal and military story of their own, whichmerges, when the respective castles became royalproperty, into the dynastic and political history ofEngland. Coventry also, as a walled town, played anoteworthy part in the Wars of the Roses and the GreatRebellion under Charles I. But the commercial fame of Warwickshire townsdwarfs their military accomplishments. Coventry spranginto greatness with the woollen civilization of thefourteenth, and Birmingham with the coal and ironcivilization of the eighteenth, century. The wealth aboveground of its pastures, and below ground of its mines,combined with its accessibility, has tended, and stillfurther tends, to urbanize—if the word be admissible—north and mi

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