_The “Potential” in Political Geography Examples: The Primitive
Trackways: The Roman Road System: The Earlier Mediaeval Period: The
Later Mediaeval Period: The Turnpike Era._
i
Let us next turn to a very rough sketch of the development of the
history of the English Road: the stages through which its development
has passed, measured, not from cause to effect, but in time.
Before turning to this I would first define the use of a certain
word already used which will recur and may be unfamiliar to some of
my readers. It is a word taken as a metaphor from physical science,
and one of the utmost value in political geography. It is the word
“potential.”
We talk of the “potential” between two commercial centres, or between
a capital and a port, or between a mineral producing region and an
agricultural region, or between a region whence barbarians desire to
invade fertile civilized land and the centre of the fertile civilized
land which desires to defend itself, etc., etc., and our use of this
word “potential” is drawn from the doctrine of physical science that
energy in open shape, energy at work, is given its opportunity by the
tendency of two points to establish a communication: the tendency of
two separate situations to establish unity, the tendency of a hitherto
“potential”--that is, only “possible,” not yet “actual”--force to
realize itself. For instance, you will have a highly charged electrical
area tending to discharge itself by the line of best conduction. You
will have a head of water creating a “potential”: a reservoir a hundred
feet above the valley has to be connected with the floor of the valley
by a tube to turn the potential energy into actual energy and to drive
a turbine.
Now, in the development of the road system we metaphorically use this
word “potential” in just the same fashion. For instance: there was
originally no bridge across a river because the people in the town on
one side of it had no particular reason to cross to barren land upon
the other. The town gradually developed into a holiday resort. The
only place for a good golf links was on the far side of the river,
and visitors who lived in the town during their holidays wanted
to go during part of the day to the golf links. A “potential” was
established. Thus there has always been a most powerful “potential”
between London and Dover, between the great commercial centre of the
island and the port nearest to the Continent. That is a “potential”
which has worked throughout the whole of English history. We can
watch other potentials at work in different periods arising and dying
out again. For instance, during the Norman and early Angevin period
there was a very strong “potential” between the middle north coast of
France and the coast of Sussex, with a corresponding development of
traffic. The principal people in England were also great land owners
and officials on the coast immediately opposite. That “potential” died
down until the revival of modern steam traffic. Again, there is a
“potential” to-day between any coal field and any centre of consumption
of wealth distant from that coal field. So there is between any coal
field and any great port. Again, you will have a strategic “potential.”
A particular point of no economic value may be of the utmost strategic
value. The holding of it may make all the difference to the defenders
of the frontiers, and in that case a “potential” exists which is the
driving motive for a road between the capital and the point in question.
With this note in mind we can proceed to some sketch of the history of
the English Road.
ii
The development of the English Road up to the present turning-point in
its history, following, as we have seen, the political story of the
island, falls into five divisions.
=A.=--First came the primitive trackways, the chief of which must have
been artificially strengthened, and some of which may have been, in
sections at least, true roads up to the Roman invasions.
=B.=--Next came the Roman road system, which was presumably developed
in the second century of our era. This is the framework of all that
followed. All our roads from that date (eighteen hundred years ago)
to modern times have sprung from and have grown in connection with
this original set plan or framework. That is true, no doubt, of all
western countries, but it is especially true of England. The English
road system is the product in every age of the great Roman scheme, the
relics of which are more marked in England than they are anywhere else
in the world.
This point is the master point of the whole story. It is a point upon
which popular history has completely lost its way. Popular history
represents the Roman occupation of this island as an accident, a sort
of interlude between the native British period and a later and separate
“English” period which arose upon the invasion of the country by German
tribes from beyond the North Sea. That is not the history of England at
all. The history of England is the history of a Roman province.
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST ROAD]
England began by being, like everything else in the North and West,
barbaric. It was civilized from the Mediterranean and made a part of
the Roman Empire--that is, of one common civilization--one great state
stretching from the Grampians to the Euphrates, and from the Sahara to
the North Sea. This civilizing imprint of the Roman Empire Britain has
never lost.
Our civilization fell into decay, as did that of the whole of the rest
of Europe. The decay was not due to the pirate raids from North Germany
and Holland any more than it was due to the raids of the Scottish
Highlanders, which were just as frequent and violent, or the raids of
Irish pirates from the west, which were at one moment so severe as to
put up a separate realm on the west coast of this island. The history
of England is continuous, and its foundation, from which we get all our
institutions, more than half our language, all our ideas and religion
and the rest of it, is in the 400 years of high civilization between
the landing of the Roman armies and the breakdown of the imperial
system in the West.
The Roman Road is the true and only root of the road system of Britain.
All our local roads can be found developing slowly from the Roman
roads of the district which had preceded them, and it is nearly always
possible to trace the causes which led to each particular local
system. In each you find the Roman Road is the backbone of the affair,
and the later local roads existing only as developments of and changes
from this basic Roman plan.
=C.=--The third division is one for which we have little direct, but
plenty of indirect, evidence, and the remains of which are with us upon
every side. It is the growth in the Early Middle Ages, presumably from
about the Angevin period, of the mediaeval road system which was the
deflection and extension of the old Roman road system. At the end of
the Empire, during the Dark Ages (_i.e._ from the fifth to the eleventh
century), though the Roman road system had remained the only available
one, it had decayed, and numerous modifications of it had already
appeared; but with the Early Middle Ages those modifications seem to
have grown prodigiously, and the indirect network of local roads would
then seem to have arisen.
=D.=--The fourth chapter is even more obscure. It is a partial decline,
only affecting certain districts, and affecting some much more than
others: a decline which corresponds more or less to the end of the
sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It went with
the flooding of the fen lands, with the breakdown of central authority,
the increase of local interests, and so on.
=E.=--The fifth chapter is the great revolution in road planning and
construction which may be called the turnpike era: beginning early in
the eighteenth century and flourishing at its close.
The turnpike system continued to develop with continual changes
through three or four generations. It survived the competition of the
railroads. It was vastly improved by the new local legislation of
from forty to twenty years ago. It left us with the road system we
now enjoy, which must, under the pressure of quite recent changes, be
modified if our communications are to be saved, or, at any rate, to
keep pace with the present conditions of travel.