This, from a man who has been driven up Wæcelinga Stræt in a Morris Minor to the very center of England. The word 'street' today is an urban construct: houses, offices, shops in a line by a raised paved strip: the strata - a Roman word which we Saxons and Celts and Norsemen took for the long, long lines through the landscape that the Romans left behind them.
Those streets are the stuff of the dark ages - journeys through forests and abandoned villages, a civilised and literate past falling into disrepair: features in the landscape so old and so familiar that local people had no names for them, naming their own places Stretton, Stratford, Streetly, Street.
Where our distant and darkened ancestors forgot the word 'Roman' they remembered that someone or something laid down these lines in stone: giants, perhaps the Gog and Magog who feature in the landscape you have walked in, all those suspiciously-straight lanes and paths by Fulbourne. As have I, further East down Stoneygate Lane and the Fosse Way, and Kirby Road that goes from the 'street' I grew up in to Mandvessedum that Aethaelstan named for himself, not knowing or caring that his own name, if he could've read it, spelt out the street he lived on.
Those ordinary streets saw legionaries, traders, invaders and barbarians, monks and missionaries, peasants, crusaders, robbers, monellenders, troubadors, roundheads and cavaliers, tarmacadam gangs and navvies as foreign and frightening to the villagers as Tartars; the Stræts of England will outlive us all before they fade completely into the landscape, long after travellers in Morris Minors join the knights and pilgrims on the lanes of fading history.
Sometime I will mention 'Kitchener Streets', street politics from first-hand experience, and show you where your own street comes from. But not today. I think the word 'Street' has worked quite hard enough, for now.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 06:48 pm (UTC)An ordinary word, oh my.
This, from a man who has been driven up Wæcelinga Stræt in a Morris Minor to the very center of England. The word 'street' today is an urban construct: houses, offices, shops in a line by a raised paved strip: the strata - a Roman word which we Saxons and Celts and Norsemen took for the long, long lines through the landscape that the Romans left behind them.
Those streets are the stuff of the dark ages - journeys through forests and abandoned villages, a civilised and literate past falling into disrepair: features in the landscape so old and so familiar that local people had no names for them, naming their own places Stretton, Stratford, Streetly, Street.
Where our distant and darkened ancestors forgot the word 'Roman' they remembered that someone or something laid down these lines in stone: giants, perhaps the Gog and Magog who feature in the landscape you have walked in, all those suspiciously-straight lanes and paths by Fulbourne. As have I, further East down Stoneygate Lane and the Fosse Way, and Kirby Road that goes from the 'street' I grew up in to Mandvessedum that Aethaelstan named for himself, not knowing or caring that his own name, if he could've read it, spelt out the street he lived on.
Those ordinary streets saw legionaries, traders, invaders and barbarians, monks and missionaries, peasants, crusaders, robbers, monellenders, troubadors, roundheads and cavaliers, tarmacadam gangs and navvies as foreign and frightening to the villagers as Tartars; the Stræts of England will outlive us all before they fade completely into the landscape, long after travellers in Morris Minors join the knights and pilgrims on the lanes of fading history.
Sometime I will mention 'Kitchener Streets', street politics from first-hand experience, and show you where your own street comes from. But not today. I think the word 'Street' has worked quite hard enough, for now.