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The next great change came with the change in local government to which I have alluded. It gave us the first Acts of Parliament, taking the place of the old customary upkeep of the roads, but acting, oddly enough, at a period during which the road was declining everywhere. Even the civil wars did little to amend what had become a badly decayed scheme of communication.
One of the reasons for this was that the great arm of the civil wars was the cavalry, and cavalry is not tied to roads as infantry is. Another and better reason was the comparatively small numbers engaged.
The civil wars loom large in our political history because they marked the destruction of the monarchy and the beginning of aristocratic government, but in military history they are no very great affair: a sort of local epilogue to the Thirty Years’ War and the great religious struggle upon the Continent.
What did make a difference was the sudden increase of wheeled traffic with the end of the seventeenth century.
There has been a great deal of exaggeration in this matter. Sundry historians have written as though wheeled traffic were unknown until very modern times. That, of course, is nonsense. But the distinctive mark of the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth was the gradual substitution of ordinary passenger traffic by wheel instead of on horseback. The public vehicle comes in much at the same time as the private vehicle, developed by the new great landlord class for their convenience in their country rounds. As has been the case with the internal combustion engine in our own time, the instrument preceded the change in the road. As wheeled traffic for passengers becomes more common you get increasing complaints on the condition of the roads and increasing motive for improving them, and out of that grows the turnpike system, which, with its later development, has carried us on to the present day.
Toll House on the Bath Road