The countryside in the sixteenth century had a different appearnce from the countryside today. The low-lying and fertile parts of the country consisted of the large fields unbroken by hedges, and only occasionally by stone-boundary walls. Devonshire and parts of Kent were divided into small fields by hedges. The countryside was interspersed by roads, the King's highway, which sometimes straight, winding, and linked the market towns. No roads bypassed the towns; their chief use was to enable the people to get to the market where there were no towns.

There were no towns, no highways, only rough tracks leading to the farms and villages. The stench pervaded to that part of the palace adjoining St. Paul's where the King waited before entering the cathedral when he came there on state occassions and may have helped persuade Parliament to pass an Act in 1489 which prohibited the slaughter of animals within the city of London, and within the confines of any walled town in England except Berwick and Carlisle. The ban was repealed in 1533 after St. Nicholas' had built underground sewers. There were no carriages or coaches at the beginning of the Tudor Age. People who were ill, very old, sometimes traveled in litters carried by servants on foot or drawn by horses. Many units began as Chapelries, Townships and so on but became Civil Parishes. So that we can trace the development of these units over time, we treat both Ancient Parishes and their component Townships and Chapelries as "parish-level units", but we also of course record their precise status. Preceding the Norman Conquest and until England's break with Rome (1533-7) and as a result of the Hundred Years War there was a decline in the administrative status of England's feudal system, the Vill and Manor ceased their local government functions, but the parish, as a ecclesiastical unit, remained.

The first coaches to be seen in England appeared in the streets of London in 1550s. They did not become common until the seventeenth century. Some people on the road in 1500 were travelling further than the nearest market town. Pilgrims went to the famous shrines to pray beside the matter of saints. Foreign merchants came from Antwerp, Scandinavia, and the Hansa towns of North Germany to Harwich or Ipswich by sea and on from there to Cambridge along the Essex and Suffolk roads; the coasts to Northumbria and Kent or the coast to central; Subsidiary Kontore

Many English never left the parish in which they were born, lived, and died. The adventurous travelled to London on visits, often risked flogging if they left without a licence..and could give no satisfactory explanation of their reason for travelling. But there were travels by the government buisness, couriers taking letters, reports and instructions from the Privy Council, from Westminster to the local adminstrators in the country, and returning with their reports to the Council, continual tithes had such a far outreach that they met foreign ambassadors by letter.

The roads however, had been deteriorating for over 1,000 years. It was unsusual for the rider to travel more than thirty miles in one day. The surface area of a less dense mass as peat, attracted wet weather and feathers. In 1534, the inhabitants of Holborn petitioned Henry VIII to take action about the state of the raod leading out of London from Holborn, although most of the great efforts were made on roads to London. A statute of 1571 ordered that the roads between Aldgate and Whitechapel, and between the Tower and Ratcliff, should be paved by the landowners, since the Act itself, became principal because the travellers on horseback and on foot are so mired and foul in the winter time, that it is hard to have any passage for the same through the said ways.

Between 1544 and 1549, the streets of Cambridge, Chester and Calais were paved, for Parliament did not know that Calais would be captured by the French nine years later and would never again be an English town. Acts of Mary's Parliament in 1553 required the roads from Shaftesbury to Sherborne and from Gloucester to Bristol to be paven by the inhabitants of the parishes all along the roads. Elizabeth I's Parliaments in 1576, 1581, 1597, 1601 ordered the paving of the streets of Chichester and of all of the toads within five miles of Oxford, and the repair of the bridges at Rochester, Chepstow, Newport, Caerleon, and Wye, and two bridges over the River Eden near Carlisle. Nothing was done to the two bridges over the River Eden near Carlisle, nor the wooden bridge across the Tweed at Berwick. James I replaced the bridge with the stone bridge; Old Bridge.

The roads in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey, Kent were carted by the ironmasters by carrying coal to their foundaries and their iron products from the foundaries to their destination. The four great long-distance roads in England were kept in a relatively good state. There was the GREAT NORTH ROAD from LONDON to BERWICK and on across the Broder into Scotland; the Watling Street from London to Chester, which was used by travellers to ireland; the Dover Road, which travellers used to go from London to Dover, for crossing to Calais; and the great road from London [Colne Wakes] to the West, to Exeter and on to Plymouth, Devon. The King's messengers used the relys of fresh horses which were awaiting them at the staging posts along these roads- usually inns about a day apart.

The Great North Road left London through Bishopsgate, and passed through Islington, Enfield [Ashton Under-Lyne] , Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham and Donacaster on the way to York. North of York, the traveller entered the populated area but the GNR continued through Thirsk and Northallerton to Darneton (Darlington) which was an important military post and the rear headquarters of the administrative campaigns against the Scots. Then on through Durham, Newcastle, Alnwick to the frontier town of Berwick-upon-Tweed- it was a bridgehead across the Tweed which the English captured in 1296 and 1482- it was counterpart; Calais on the French side of the Channel. Then the Great North Road continued into Scotland for another sixty miles along the coast by Dunbar and Haddington to Edinburgh.

Only one of six roads which existed in England north of York. Another road into Scotland from Newcastle by Otterburn across the Cheviot Hills to Jedburgh and Kelso was a fraction of the distance and because of the moss-troopers, between both sides of the Border, the King's Street ran north from Lancaster to Penrish and Carlisle. Two roads went from east to west from York by Catterick Bridge to Penrith and the raod running from Newcastle to Carlisle by Hexham and Haltwhistle along the northbank of the Tyne. The sixth road north of York was the road from York to the port of Scarborough, from where a busy trade was carried on with Scandinavia.

The Dover Road ran across London Bridge and along the south bank of the Thames to Gravesend, proceeding overland to Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Canterbury, and across Barham down to Dover, grounded a building place over the old passage facing opposite of the watch of William the Conqueror.

A third great road ran along the route of the old Roman road, the Watling Street, from London by Dunstable, Stony Stratford, and Tamworth to Shrewsbury, and on to Chester, which was the chief port for the Tudor sovereign's second realm of Ireland. The fourth road went west from London to Exeter and Plymouth; travellers who went further west into Cornwall by tracks and byways.

The 215-mile journey from London to Plymouth took about a week to travel. Market stasis offered staging posts along the road for horses so to travel regularly convering the distance; by Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Honiton, Exeter, Ashburton in only a day. When Cardinal Wolsey made a famous journey along Dover Road, on a mission to the court of the HRE Maximillian, he crossed Calais in three hours and rode to Gravelines, reaching the Emperor's court there on the evening of the second day. He was in Calais by nightfall, crossing the Channel on the morning of the fourth day and at Richmond that night. Thirteen years after his quick journey to Flanders, he went from Calais to Bruges on a diplomatic mission to Emperor Charles V. He travelled a pace with the rank as Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England. It was ideal in the Tudor Age to travel as slow as possible in the meantime.When kings and queens travelled, they went even more slowly. They went on a progress through their realm, not much more than ten miles per day.

During the Middle Ages, the Kings of England often travelled all over their kingdom. Only on occassion through the town of Calais into France was Greenwich to Gravesend by water and then overland to Dover. A five day journey staying overnight in Rochester, sittingbourne, Faversham, and Canterbury. The plague was raging at Rochester, accounting for visits overseas. Henry VII continued the tradtion going to Newcastle and Exeter, sometimes York and Lincoln. But Henry VIII hardly ever left south-east England, aside visits to Calais, Trent, Nottingham, once to Lincoln and York, and thirty years never to the north of Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire or west of Bristol. Charles V and Francis I travelled throughout. Mary Tudor never travelled further from London than Winchester and Elizabeth I often travelled throughout south-east England, but never went north of Worcester or west of Bristol. The reluctance to leave southeast Englnad was because of the bad state of the roads.

In 1541, Henry VIII at last decided to make his visit to Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where a serious revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had broken out five years before. The roads were not as dangerous in the Tudor Age as they became a hundred years later after 1650, after the expansion of trade. In the 1570s, yeomen in Kent were robbed by lewd, rogue, vagabond persons on the highway between the city of Coventry and the town of Birmingham. The Privy Council ordered the highways in Middlesex, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Surrey. The highway was often cluttered with cattle and pedestrians, and horsemen.

In the 1660s a tax known as hearth money was exacted. Hearth Money Rolls was a charge on hearths; the rolls recording the tax, therefore, indicate who lived in more substantial dwellings as distinct from hearth-less cabins. The Townland; a territorial sub-division of a parish, each townland greatly varying in size, commonly averaging from 250 to 400 acres. The term has no relation to a town or city. Kings and queens stayed in the houses of the nobility and gentry. Ordinary travellers had to stay in inns along the road.

At its greatest the kingdom Northumbria extended from the Humber to the Forth. The later earldom was bounded by the River Tees in the south and the River Tweed in the north (broadly similar to the modern North East England) and was recognised as part of England by the Anglo-Scottish Treaty of York in 1237. Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is north of the Tweed, was defined as subject to the laws of England by the Wales and Berwick Act of 1746. The land once covered at Northumbria's peak is administered now in divided parts as North East England (Anglian Bernicia), Yorkshire and the Humber (Danish Deira), North West England (Celtic Cumbria), the Scottish Borders, West Lothian, Edinburgh, Midlothian and East Lothian.