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.
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.