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.
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.
