_Through the Dim Ages: The Characteristics of the English Road: Absence
of Plan: A Local instead of a National System Leading to the Present
Crisis._
i
The general theory of the Road having been discussed, we may next turn
to the particular case of THE ENGLISH ROAD, my second and concluding
section. The English Road has, as we shall see, highly-marked
characteristics of its own which are of immediate concern to us at this
revolutionary moment in the economic history of the State.
The fortunes of the English Road followed, of course, the story of
all the other main English institutions in their outline. Just as
you had the pre-Roman barbaric period, then the Roman period, then
the Dark Ages in the general history of the State, so you had the
British trackway, the Roman Road, and the continued use during the
continued decline of the latter as material civilization fell away
after the fifth century. The spring of the Middle Ages gave you the
renaissance of the Road. The Black Death, which is the watershed of
the Middle Ages, breaks the history of the Road just as it breaks the
history of the language. French dies out: all England is speaking
English in the generation after the Black Death, and there is a great
change throughout society. That change is marked on the roads by a
considerable decline in travel, coupled with the use of better means
of transport--a paradox to which our times are not accustomed. But you
get a good deal of that in the Middle Ages. You have, for instance, a
decline of wealth in the monasteries, and yet more detailed building
in the monasteries; a bad decline in manuscript writing, both with
regard to accuracy and legibility, and yet an increase in the amount
written. So far as we can judge from our very imperfect evidence, after
the Black Death (the middle of the fourteenth century) the volume of
traffic upon the roads of England tends to get less, and perhaps the
surface also deteriorates, though that is more doubtful.
The Reformation, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries,
is the next great date. The violent revolution imposed A.D. 1536-40
on every department of the national life affects the roads as it
affects all else. In general, the Reformation, especially through the
dissolution of the monasteries, had the following economic effects upon
England:
(1) Customary economic action tended to be replaced, after the
change, by competitive economic action;
(2) Corporate action tended to be replaced by individual action;
(3) The principal land-owning class--the squires--became much
wealthier than they had been in proportion to the rest of the
community.
The accommodation of these three main economic facts had the general
result of substituting more and more statutory duties in local affairs
for customary duties, and it affected the roads thus: where the local
community had, in a customary fashion, kept up the local road as part
of the old social habit the new lay owner refused. He was averse to the
outlay, the Crown had less control over him, and as he was running the
whole thing on an idea of profit and loss every outlay was cut by him
as much as possible.
There was at the same time a revolution in agriculture, a falling off
of population, the throwing together of small holdings, the growth of
grazing, and the decline of tillage.
You consequently get, through the common action of all these
influences combined, in the middle of the Reformation period the
first interference of the central Government by direct statute in
the making and conservation of the English road system. This famous
piece of legislation (2 and 3 Philip and Mary, Cap. VIII) is familiar
to all who deal with the law and history of the highway. It governed
the constitution and maintenance of English roads right down to the
great modern change in the same which falls under the general term
“turnpike.” These are the main stages in the story of the Road in this
island up to the present moment, when, apparently, another stage has
opened.
We have for these seven chapters very different information: on the
first nothing but conjecture, on the second a considerable body of
evidence, on the third again conjecture, and on the fourth conjecture,
though conjecture filled in from the indirect evidence of historical
event. For the second mediaeval period we have even less evidence than
for the first. Our knowledge begins to grow after the increase of
wheeled traffic, and with the early eighteenth century becomes for the
first time full and detailed.
ii
We will now follow this development.
The English Road has a character of its own which clearly
differentiates it from the other road systems of Western Europe. So
sharp is the distinction that, since modern travel recovered the use of
the road through petrol traffic, the new type of road he discovers is,
after the language, the most striking novelty affecting the foreigner
on his arrival.
[Illustration: _Part II_, Sketch I, _District of_ TYPICAL ENGLISH ROAD
SYSTEM. _Widths exaggerated._
_Lower part of Sketch I (Part II)_, _District of_ TYPICAL
FRENCH ROAD SYSTEM. _Widths exaggerated. Same scale as above_]
Abroad, the French model--recovered from the Roman tradition,
remodelled in the late seventeenth century, and vastly developed in
the nineteenth--has impressed itself everywhere: the Road is there
built up on a framework of very broad, straight main ways, carefully
graded, proceeding everywhere upon one plan. These are connected by
a subsidiary net of country ways less direct and less broad, but all
carefully planned and graded, and these in turn by local lanes of all
surfaces and gradients and gauges, dependent upon parish rates and
betraying by their irregularity their independence of the national
system.
[Illustration: TYPICAL ENGLISH LANE]
Here the scheme is contradicted at every point. A long stretch dead
straight is very rare: when it is found it is due to some accident of
local choice. The surface differs not as between the main road and
local road, but indiscriminately: a small parish way will often have
a better surface than the main road it joins. The gauge is haphazard:
the main road between the capital and some great port will go through
the most surprising changes in breadth, here appearing as the narrow
high street of a suburb, and there, a few miles on, spreading to 50
feet upon an open heath, then again turning abruptly round the sharp
right-angle corners and between the irregular frontages of a village.
The English roads are far more numerous, the mileage of good road
surface to the hundred square miles far greater, than abroad. Yet
not one of them is planned throughout. They all twist, the lesser
ones winding perpetually and usually without any reason of their
own, compelled to such anomalies by the custom of older paths, by
enclosures, by encroachments. For the most part these roads, from
the most important to the least, are “blind,” that is, bounded by
obstacles which mask the approach of corners and conceal the country
on either side: a very pronounced national characteristic, due mainly
to the use of hedges upon the more fertile land. The grading is
never continuous--the main roads in which this feature has been most
thoroughly looked to yet have astonishing exceptions of 1 in 9, 1 in 8.
The bridges are of varying strength, half of them bearing warnings that
they are dangerous to heavy vehicles.
When we seek the origin of this strange mixture of serviceable and
unserviceable in the English road system we discover it in the
political history of the country. The English hedged roads yield their
more pleasing landscape, they have more length to the square mile than
those abroad, they are haphazard in gauge and gradient (only half
planned), they have such excellent surface (and that independently of
their importance), such a strange assortment of bridges, such abrupt
and blind corners--all because the Road, like every other institution,
is a function of society, and because English society proceeded on
special political lines of its own after the Reformation.
Like the road systems of every other country, that of England arose
from the great Roman military ways. It went through exactly the same
phases of decline as those of the neighbouring Continent, it had the
same new development in the Middle Ages, it ran through open fields
mainly. A man put down on an English road of Henry VIII or Elizabeth’s
day would have marked no great distinction between its character and
those of a Flanders or a Breton or a Provençal road, or the roads of
the Rhine.
But with the seventeenth century the profound change which had worked
for a hundred years throughout all English life appeared in the Road.
The monarchy fell. A national road system became impossible. The local
landlords took command of society. The _local_ road was the only basis
for development. Commons were enclosed, co-operative village farming
gradually disappeared, the hedges everywhere increased in number,
cutting up the old open fields. Any extension of communication could
only come through the linking up of tortuous village ways.
Then came the industrial revolution, the exploitation of better surface
through the turnpike, the epoch of Telford and Macadam. Lastly, the
huge increase of the great towns in the middle and later nineteenth
century, the coming of the internal combustion engine, and the present
crisis. For we have come to a crisis to-day in the history of the
English Road. It must be changed--or supplemented--under peril of
such congestion as will strangle travel and interchange: that is the
interest of the subject to-day.
I propose, therefore, in what follows to consider, first, how this
particular character in the English Road developed: what were the
agencies which gradually made it so different from the road of the
neighbouring Continent: next, to sketch very briefly and only in its
bare outline the history of the English Road, and to conclude with an
examination of the reforms which we should undertake and the crisis in
travel and the use of the Road which has led to that duty.