The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

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.