different line; and also, "in consideration that many other common ways in the said weald of Kent be so deep and noyous by wearing and course of water and other occasions, that people cannot have their carriages or passages by horses upon or by the same, but to their great pains, peril, and jeopardy," permitting all other persons that might be so disposed, to lay out new and more commodious roads, by oversight and assent of two justices of peace of the county, and twelve other discreet men inhabiting within the hundred or the hundred adjoining. In 1534, by the 26 Hen. VIII. c. 7, this act was extended to the county of Sussex. About the same time began the paving of the streets of London, the first act for that purpose being the statute 24 Hen. VIII, c. 11, passed in 1532-3, "for paving of the highway between the Strand Cross and Charing Cross,"—that is, the greater part of the line of way now known as the Strand, the Strand Cross having stood at the church of St. Clement Danes. But this road was hardly as yet accounted one of the streets of the metropolis; it was rather a country road leading to the village of Charing, with many houses, indeed, built on both sides of it, but yet with the line of building everywhere broken by fields and gardens. This "common highway" is described in the preamble of the act as ' "very noyous and foul, and in many places thereof very jeopardous" to all people passing and repassing, "as well on horseback as on foot, both in winter and in summer, by night and by day;" the occasion of which is affirmed to be that "the landlords and owners of all the lands and tenements next adjoining, on both sides of the said common highway, be and have been remiss and negligent, and also refuse and will not make and support the said highway with paving every of them alter the portion of his ground adjoining to the same." It appears that the part of the Strand between the church of St. Clement Danes and Temple Bar was already paved; and the act directs that the owners of lands adjoining to the rest of the road shall each pave in the same manner the part lying along his lands or tenements as far as to the middle; which it is
