Holinshed, in his _Chronicles_ (1586), mentions Geoffrey as the authority for the origin of the four great roads, and, after quoting him, goes on to describe an “Ikenild or Rikenild” beginning somewhere in the south and going through Worcester, Birmingham, and Chesterfield to the mouth of the Tyne. “I take it,” he says, “to be called the Ikenild, because it passed through the kingdome of the Icenes. For albeit that Leland and others following him doo seeme to place the Icenes in Norffolke and Suffolke; yet in mine opinion that cannot well be doone, sith it is manifest by Tacitus that they laie neere unto the Silures, and (as I gesse) either in Stafford and Worcester shires, or in both, except my conjecture doo fail me.” Here it is to be noticed, first, that he gives Ikenild and Rikenild as alternative names of one road and, second, that he sees the resemblance between “Ikenild” and “Iceni.” He has evidently thought about the matter, but he shows no trace of local knowledge or curiosity. Camden (1586) also only mentions the road in his introduction to the subject of the Iceni; though he has to speak of many places touched by the road, he ignores the fact, if he ever knew it. The poet Drayton, in his _Polyolbion_ (1616), substitutes “Michael’s utmost Mount” for Totnes at the south end of the Fosse Way, and takes Watling Street from Dover to “the farth’st of fruitful Anglesey,” and he writes like a Warwickshire man of the country where those two roads cross (Song xiii, II, 311 _et seq._; Song xxvi, II, 43 _et seq._). In the “Sixteenth Song” of _Polyolbion_ he makes Watling sing of herself and her “three sister streets”:--
Since us, his kingly ways, Mulmutius first began, From sea again to sea, that through the Island ran. Which that in mind to keep posterity might have, Appointing first our course, this privilege he gave, That no man might arrest, or debtors’ goods might seize In any of us four his military ways.
Having sung of the Fosse, Watling continues:--
But O, unhappy chance! through time’s disastrous lot, Our other fellow streets lie utterly forgot: As Icning, that set out from Yarmouth in the East, By the Iceni then being generally possest, Was of that people first term’d Icning in her race, Upon the Chiltern here that did my course imbrace: Into the dropping South, and bearing then outright, Upon the Solent Sea stopt on the Isle-of-Wight.