_The Physical Effects of Roads: The Way in which the Road Compels
Communication to follow it: The Formation of Urban Centres and the
Urban Habit: The Spread of Ideas by Means of Roads: History Deflected
by the Deflection of the Road: The Example of Shrewsbury and Chester:
Towns which are Maintained by Roads: The Road in Military History:
Results of the Decay of Roads: The Road as a Boundary._
i
So far we have considered the origin and development of the Road: that
is, the effect of its environment upon the Road. We must turn, in
conclusion, to the converse aspect, which may be called “The Reaction
of the Road”--that is, the effect of the Road upon its environment.
A road once formed immediately begins to affect in some degree the
physical circumstances surrounding it, and in a very much greater
degree the human relations which it subserves.
The physical effects of the Road are few and may be briefly mentioned.
They are all connected with the action of water, save for very rare
instances where a particular cutting has precipitated a landslide and
one or two other exceptions of the sort. The effect of the made road
upon physical circumstances is, in fact, dependent upon the conflict
with precipitation in which it is engaged.
It is a general rule in all man’s economic activity that the human
effort is at odds with the general tendency of nature. Nature
perpetually tends to reassert herself, and to undo what man has done in
her despite. The Road is no exception to this rule, and the particular
way in which it works you can see by examining typical cases. One of
these we shall come across more particularly later on when we discuss
the Roman roads of Britain, but it may be worth while to give its
general character here.
The Road, finding a small stream, crosses it by a culvert: the Road,
finding a ravine with too sharp a gradient on either side, traverses
it by an embankment; and then, even if there is no stream at the
bottom of the ravine, it leaves a culvert or other drain for the water
accumulated after rainfall to soak through. Now, when human effort
slackens and the upkeep of a road is no longer sufficient the culvert
gets blocked and the Road begins to act as a dam. The lake so formed
will in time destroy the obstacle, but before this the Road will change
the countryside by the creation of such a lake succeeded by permanent
marsh. To-day the phenomenon passes unnoticed because we are still
living in a high civilization. But it has affected history strongly
in the past. Whenever civilization breaks down you begin to get a
series of marshes, with all their accompaniments of fever and the rest
growing up along the roads. The greatest examples of the growth of
marsh during the Dark Ages were found in Italy, but there are countless
examples of the same thing all over the north and west of the Roman
Empire, and this spreading of marsh (due also to other causes, such as
the abandonment of drains in the fens and the breakdown of locks and
sluices on river ways) is largely caused by the special action of the
Road.
The same thing on a lesser scale is to be seen where a bridge falls
out of repair. The ruins will often half-block the current and make an
overflow on either side, where, if the land is flat, a wide belt of
marsh spreads and the approaches are ruined; so that what was a point
of special opportunity for, becomes a point of special obstacle to,
communication.
ii
On the political side--that is, in relation to its human service--the
reactions of the Road are exceedingly important, and they are not
always as clearly noticed as they might be. There is a whole group
of historical social phenomena which could be connected under the
one heading of the “attraction” of the Road, meaning by the word
“attraction” the way in which the Road compels communication to follow
it once it is established. This attraction produces a quantity of
effects countering or crossing general economic tendencies, and it acts
in countless ways.
One interesting aspect of this is the draining of population down on to
the Road. When a map is drawn up showing the density of population we
see upon it separate areas of density, sometimes far apart, and between
them areas marked by lesser density or even void. But if one should
make an accurate population map of any one moment, plotting down every
individual upon it, you would not get this effect of isolated dense
districts; you would not get the effect of an archipelago, but of a
network; for upon the communications between these districts would be
marked a dense chain of units in progress from the one to the other:
and one would at once grasp how permanent lesser nuclei arise between
the two terminal towns. This aspect of the Road suggests a far more
important one. The Road--in the sense of a means of communication--in
proportion to its excellence differentiates human society
(_a_) Into areas of density and void;
(_b_) Into the urban political habit and the agricultural political
habit.
This is a very important reaction of the Road, which must be allowed
for in every historical and contemporary problem.
Granted an urban centre, with its special opportunities for
inter-communication between human beings, for experiment and for what
may be called “the cross-fertilization of knowledge,” the growth of
such a centre is, of course, dependent upon many things: its economic
basis, either as a market or as the capital of a productive area, or,
more commonly, as both; the physical surroundings which may, as in the
case of Genoa or Venice for instance, strictly limit that growth, etc.
But among the causes affecting it, and chief among them, is the Road:
the degree of excellence in communication.
The growth of a town is a direct function of this, the most conspicuous
example, of course, in the whole of history being the immense growth of
London following on the supplementing of the old roads by the railway.
In direct connection with this you have a mass of subsidiary effects,
all of the highest importance to the State. The Road having caused the
growth of the city, after a certain point a high differentiation arises
between urban and rural life. The differentiation may become so great
that you arrive at a clash of fundamental interests in which one of the
two is defeated. You certainly have had that in modern England during
the last two generations. The towns became so much the more important
part of English life that the agricultural life was entirely sacrificed
to them--and the Road was the ultimate cause. Again, you get the
curious development of what may be called “reserve” towns: towns like
Brighton and Blackpool, which are the playgrounds of the greater cities
at a distance; the large urban centre breeds, as it were, a lesser
one after its own pattern. You have got in modern times that further
curious reaction due to growing excellence of communications--that is,
due to the growth of the Road--the _pulse_ of the great modern city.
Crowds of human beings pour out of Victoria or Liverpool Street into
London and pour back from London in the evening. The station of St.
Lazare in Paris is, in Europe, the most striking visual evidence of
this strange modern development, great floods of human beings cascading
into the city at the opening day and ebbing back at its close.
At bottom, like so many other human arrangements, this “pulse” is a
negation of its own principles--a sub-conscious effect which a fully
thought-out plan could have avoided. There is no true economic basis
for it, or, at any rate, not for the most of it.
There will always be advantages, of course, in the central point, and
always some tendency in men to seek that central point in order to
enjoy those advantages. Ten men may desire to seek daily the central
point which has only habitation-room for one, and that will lead to
the “pulse” of which I speak. But the necessity for seeking it daily
is already very largely an artificial necessity and is becoming more
and more artificial every day. The same work can be done perfectly well
at a distance as is now done in centres, and in a roundabout way that
truth is impressing itself through an economic effect. The rents become
so high in the crowded centre that whole groups of activities which do
not really need a central position tend to disperse themselves to the
outer boundaries. The printing trade, in those branches which are not
hurried (the printing of books, for instance), is a good example of
this.
When men debate the probable future of our great cities they often
omit one very likely development, which is the creation of a number
of suburban centres which, if the material side of our civilization
declines, will become independent towns and the probable decay of the
central nucleus out of which they all grow. It is a speculation worth
examining.
iii
The reaction of the Road upon society, its political reaction, has
many other departments. For instance, in the communication of ideas
the trace of a road will give you the advance of some religious
development otherwise inexplicable. I have pointed out through more
than one historical allusion in other work how the spread of the
Christian religion may be directly followed along the trace of the
chief Roman roads, and especially of the great trunk road of the
Empire running from Egypt to the Wall in Northumberland. You have only
to make a list of names standing on that trunk road to show that it
corresponds to a list of dates and names in the story of the conversion
of Europe--Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus,
Athens, Brindisi, Naples, Rome, Lyons, Autun, Canterbury, London, St.
Albans.
Again, a road which for some reason has become established along an
artificial line, a line not directly dictated by the formula of minimum
effort, will “canalize” traffic, so that, even when an alternative
and better way has been provided, institutions and towns and all that
goes for human activity will have taken root along the old way and all
history will be deflected by the deflection of the Road.
We have a very interesting example of this here in England in the case
of the great road to the north-west. In the earliest times Chester
was the one terminal and London the other. Chester was the port for
Ireland, and, because it was much easier going along the coast than
over the mountains, Chester was also the base point of departure for
the penetration of North Wales. Chester was also the great garrison
whence troops could be detached for the Lancashire plain and for the
western end of the Wall. Nevertheless, Chester, though it maintained
for centuries its inevitable importance, had a rival in the Roman town
of Uriconium, under the Wrekin: one of the very few Roman towns which
have disappeared--though it has its modern counterpart in Shrewsbury.
The campaigns against the Welsh were based for hundreds of years as
much on this middle section of Shrewsbury as on the northern one of
Chester. Finally, when modern engineering made possible a direct
trajectory through the mountains, this middle Shrewsbury section
fixed the Holyhead road, which would otherwise have gone round by
Chester. The main railway system to the north-west, as we know, has
been compelled to follow the coast, and but for the deflection of the
ancient road round by Shrewsbury that road would have done exactly what
the modern railway does.
Now, why was there this strange bend westward and southward towards
Shrewsbury in the road making ultimately for Chester? It was because,
when the Roman Empire was at the height of its material power, when
things were working best and public works were most energetically
created and maintained, _the Romans had not fully conquered the North_.
Therefore their chief trouble with the Welsh mountaineers during that
earlier moment was with those of the Central mountains rather than of
the North. They had, it is true, established their garrison in Chester.
But in making their first great trunk road they had been compelled to
choose a more southern terminal, hence what is still called the Watling
Street curls round by Penkridge (a Roman name descended from the Roman
place-name of the Itinerary) and then makes westward. Later, when the
conquest was more complete, a branch was thrown out from Shrewsbury
northward to Chester. Long after a short cut was driven from Penkridge
to Chester direct. We have grounds for belief that this last road was
of later and inferior work, because, though the traces of it survive,
the main work has almost wholly disappeared.
It stands to reason that the original trackway before the Romans came
would have run pretty directly from London to Chester without going
round by the Shrewsbury district; and, indeed, the course to which all
the first part of the Watling Street points is evidence of that. When
the Roman military engineers began their thorough rebuilding of the
roads (in the most permanent fashion in the world) they were at first
confined to the southern plain, in which alone they felt secure, and
hence was that deflection round westward towards Shrewsbury created
which has affected the whole of English history.
You may next observe the Road producing the economic effect of
maintaining towns, and especially ports. A road being driven from an
existing port to some inland terminus and the port later becoming less
and less useful, either through the building of ships too deep for it
or silting up or what not, the mere existence of the Road tends to
make men cling to the port in spite of its disadvantages. They will,
as a rule, from the effect of custom and of vested interest, from the
attraction of the points already established on the Road, expend in the
maintenance of the port more energy than would have been required to
build an alternative road to some new and better port. The effect of
this is very marked in Northern France. Boulogne was not only the great
Roman port of the channel because it stood in the Narrows; it was also
of such importance because it was in antiquity a very broad, secure,
land-locked estuary, stretching over what is now all dry land up above
the town three miles towards Pont-de-Briques. Centuries ago the harbour
silted up, and if it had been left alone it would be hardly serviceable
at all. But every effort has been made to maintain that point. Boulogne
harbour has been steadily maintained artificially for centuries
because the road led to it and needed it, and the alternative use of
the far superior estuary of the Seine, with the corresponding growth of
Havre, only came quite late in history.
The Road has the same canalizing effect where it overcomes an obstacle
such as a broad river, or a mountain chain, or a belt of dense
woodland. For instance, the fertile lowland fringe of South Wales
and the corresponding fertile land to the east of the Severn were
connected, when primitive methods alone could be used, by the bridge
at Gloucester, high up the river. The lower reaches were too much for
the earlier engineers, especially in the face of such a tide as runs
on them. As a result the whole of that line of communications remained
for 2000 years highly deflected, and only quite recently has there been
some attempt at the more natural line by the piercing of the Severn
tunnel.
This effect of the Road in canalizing human effort is specially marked
in the case of armies. The saying “an army is tied to the road” is a
truth which historians should always keep in mind. There have been
great cavalry raids in history--not often of permanent effect--which
marched on a broad front, almost free of roads, and dependent only upon
a sufficiency of forage. They have come from the grazing grounds of
Asia, as a rule, and swept over the plains of Eastern Europe; but the
organized and disciplined forces which have moulded history have always
of necessity followed the Road. An army is not an island. It is an
organism connected by a stalk with its base and dependent on this stalk
for its feeding and equipment, its passing back of its prisoners and
its wounded, and all its life. All these depend upon the Road. There
are even cases in history--more numerous than one might imagine--where
the first creation of the Road has been due to military action _alone_.
I believe that the United States show examples of this, especially
along the border between the northern and southern states east of the
Mississippi. Certainly Europe shows them in striking fashion: it was a
military necessity which made the great roads linking up the stations
on the Rhine with the towns of Gaul and the rest of the Empire; it
was a military necessity which made the regular roads over the Alpine
passes. You can hardly say that there was a _commercial_ necessity for
the great trunk road which struck the Rhine at Cologne, and which there
later created the first bridge across the river. The country beyond was
barbarous, and though a large number of Roman merchants penetrated it
and a corresponding amount of trade was done, the main necessity for
Cologne was a military necessity. Military necessity which drove the
great road from the heart of Northern France to this isolated point
and so opened up the wild wooded region in between.
iv
The negative effect of the Road, the effect of its breakdown,
especially at the bridges and in the causeways over marshy land, is
equally indisputable in human relations. We have the typical case of
Sussex remaining heathen for one hundred years after the conversion of
its neighbours, because the main road from the north with its causeway
everywhere crossing the clay and piercing the scrub of the weald fell
into decay, and because the bridge at Alfoldean broke down. It is most
significant that the great battle of Ockley was fought north of this
break in communications. The Danes, marching from London against the
English army, could get down as far south as this, and the English army
coming up from Hampshire could intercept them as far south as this,
but all the Danish attack on Sussex, such as it was (and it was very
slight), came from the sea.
Another very conspicuous example of the breakdown of the Road and
of the political effect thereof is the chaos you get in the Balkan
peninsula after the decay of the great Roman trunk roads. If the Greek
Church is to-day separate from the Latin Church to the west it is due
not only to the obstacle of the Pinsk Marshes in the north, but to
the gradual decline in the south of the main artery between Durazzo
and Constantinople. For centuries old and new Rome communicated by the
great trunk road down to Brundusium and then across the narrow sea to
Dyracchium and Byzantium. When that traffic began to be interrupted the
contrast between the east and the west was founded and increased.
A last minor effect of the Road upon human society is the use of the
Road as a _boundary_. That is a use, of course, which hardly ever
develops in a high civilization. On the contrary, a road of its nature
should run _transverse_ to boundaries. It is built to unite towns the
territories of which have boundaries naturally perpendicular to the
Road. The road from Canterbury to London, for instance (the first great
main road in this island), is transverse to the Darent frontier, and
all the great roads from the French-speaking to the German-speaking
country on this side of the Rhine are transverse to the language
boundary. It is in the very function of a road to be thus transverse
to political limits. But with the decay of civilization the remains
of a great, well-built road lend themselves at once to the idea of a
boundary. Men need something to which they can perpetually refer which
will be a permanent mark and which will be indisputable. A river is
thus often so chosen; sometimes, but much more rarely, a range of
hills, especially where the crest is particularly steep and marked. But
the Road, when the use of documents declines and when record is with
difficulty maintained--the Road, especially if it has been built to
endure, comes in to fulfil this artificial function. Here in England we
have more examples of this than in any other part of Europe. Very often
you can recover a Roman road first by noting on the map the parish
boundaries running on straight lines, which are the prolongation one
of the other, and the survival of a Roman road used in the Dark Ages
to define a parochial limit. The Road is thus also used as a boundary
not only for parishes but for states, not only for states but for
realms. The Roman road to the north-west of London was part of the
great boundary established between Wessex and the Danish territories
of the north and east. One could quote hundreds of cases with a
little research, but best of all perhaps is that of the boundary of
Westminster, which dates from the heart of the Dark Ages. The northern
limit of the manor was fixed by the great Roman military road which to
this day survives and is the boundary of Hyde Park on the north.
* * * * *
THE ROAD
§ II THE ENGLISH ROAD