The King's Four Highways: legal fiction meets fictional law

Abstract

Legal compilations of the twelfth century include the idea that there were four roads in England, on which travellers enjoyed unique protection. This idea has been regarded as a statement of the origin of the King's Highway from which wider definitions grew. In fact, the Four Highways did not exist as a category in Anglo-Saxon law, but were a twelfth-century fabrication that came to be quite antithetical to the genuine law of the highway. The idea was invented by Henry of Huntingdon around 1130. It was subsequently embroidered by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who concocted the stories of two kings, Dunvallo Molmutinus and Belinus, who gave protection to travellers and built roads to guarantee this protection. These ideas were then adapted in legal and literary texts of the twelfth century. Verbal and conceptual overlaps suggest the transfer of ideas back and forth between the legal and literary traditions. The adaptations do, however, reflect real efforts to limit the definition of the highway and the jurisdictional intrusion it represented. The history of this myth thus sheds light on the confused state of English law before the introduction of principles derived from the Roman tradition.