Old Roads and New Roads

by William Bodham Donne

As Ser Brunetto was despatched on very urgent business, it may be presumed that he was journeying by the most direct road which he could find. Until the reign of Charlemagne indeed there were but few towns, and consequently few roads, in Germany. The population generally was widely spread over the surface of the land. “A house, with its stables and farm-buildings,” says Mr. Hallam, “surrounded by a hedge or inclosure, was called a court, or as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage: the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a Pagus, or district.” There was indeed little temptation or need to move from place to place, when nearly

every article of consumption was produced or wrought at home. For several centuries there is perhaps not a vestige to be discovered of any considerable manufacture. Each district furnished for itself its own articles of common utility. Rich men kept domestic artizans among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their clothes made by the women upon their farms. The weaver, the smith, and the currier were often born and bred on the estate where they pursued their several crafts.

The position of Rome as the ecclesiastical metropolis of the world caused both a general and periodical recourse of embassies, deputations, pilgrims, and travellers to the Italian peninsula, yet we cannot discover that any especial conveniences were provided for the wayfarers. Even in the great and solemn years of the Jubilee the roads were merely patched up, and the bridges temporarily repaired by the Roman government, and only in such places as had become actually impassable. The floating capital of the more commercial of the Italian Republics was employed rather upon their docks and arsenals than upon their roads and causeways. Venice indeed, which for central vigour was the most genuine offspring of Imperial Rome, paved its continental possessions with broad thoroughfares. But neither Padua, Ravenna, nor Florence followed the example of the Adriatic Queen. On the contrary, Dante, when in his descent

to Hell he meets with any peculiarly difficult or precipitous track, frequently compares it to some road well known to his countrymen, which fallen rocks had blocked up, or a wintry flood had rendered impermeable. Spain presented, as it presents at this day, to the engineer, almost insurmountable difficulties. The Moorish provinces of the south alone possessed any tolerable roads; nor were the ways of Arragon or Castile mended after the wealth of Mexico and Peru had been poured into the Spanish exchequer. Portugal owed its first good roads in modern times to its good king Emmanuel; and the Dutch and Flemings, the most commercial people of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, found in their rivers and canals an easier transit than roads would have afforded them, for the wares which they brought from Archangel on the one hand and from the Spice Islands on the other. The military restlessness of France indeed led to the earlier formation of great roads. Yet France was a land long divided in itself; and the Duchies of Burgundy and Bretagne had little in common with the enterprising spirit of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Upon the whole the roads of England, bad as they were, were at least upon a par with those of the Continent.

In this retrospect, hasty and imperfect as it is, we must not pass over the roads of Asia. And here ancient history affords us at least glimpses of

definite knowledge. In that portion of the Asiatic continent which is seated between the Euxine Sea, the chain of Mount Taurus, and the Ægean, the crowded population, the activity of the Greek colonies, and the necessity for direct communication with the interior and seat of government, led to the construction of good and uniform highways. In the Ionian Revolt large bodies of troops were readily brought to bear upon the insurgents, and the preparations of Xerxes for his invasion of Greece cannot have been made without a previous provision of military roads. An exact scale of taxation was drawn up by Darius Hystaspes for all the provinces of his vast empire; and as the system survived the extinction of the royal house of Persia, and was adopted by the Macedonian conquerors in all its more important details, it may be inferred that such system worked with tolerable regularity and success. But as the tithes and tolls of Persia were paid both in money and in kind, it is obvious that the communication between the capital and satrapies of the empire must have been well organized. Such organization implies the existence of main roads radiating from Sousa and Ecbatana. Nor are we left to conjecture only. The establishment of running posts and couriers was a distinguishing feature of the Persian empire; and the speed at which they journeyed from the sea-coast or the banks of the Hyphasis to the seat of government proves that the roads were in good

order and the stations and relays of runners well ascertained. The Anabasis of Cyrus—his “march up” the country—affords another proof. The narrative of Xenophon, in its earlier portions at least, and so long as the ten thousand Greeks kept to the main roads, resembles in the precision with which it marks distances and stations a Roman Itinerary or a Bradshaw’s Guide. On this day, says the historical captain of mercenaries, we marched seven parasangs and bivouacked in an empty fort; on such a day we marched five parasangs and encamped in a pleasant park or ‘paradise’ of the great king. It is only after the Greeks have been forced from the ‘Road-down’ by the clouds of Persian cavalry, that they enter upon more rugged and devious mountain-paths. The account of Xenophon is confirmed by Arrian in his history of Alexander’s Anabasis; and so long as the Macedonian conqueror was within the bounds of Persia proper, we rarely meet with any impediments to his progress arising out of the badness of the roads.

We have made some mention of the more conspicuous of ancient travellers. But travelling, either for business or pleasure, among the moderns, dates from the era of the Crusades. The barriers of the East were once again thrown open by that general ferment in the European world. Piety, the passion of enterprise, the dawning instincts of commerce, a new thirst for exotic luxuries, all contributed to inspire a desire for exploring the

seats of the most ancient civilization. To this desire and to its effects we owe some of the most graphic and entertaining of modern writings. If we were, through any misadventure, sent to jail, we would stipulate for permission to carry into our cell Hakluyt’s Voyages. The narratives of modern travellers are often learned, more often flimsy, and from the universality of locomotion, much given, like the prayers of the old Pharisees, to tedious repetitions. A tour in Greece or Italy now affects us with unutterable weariness. A journey from London to York affords more real novelty than many of these excursions. Sir Charles Fellows or Mr. Layard write in the spirit of the old travellers, and we would willingly wander any-whither with George Borrow. But, for the most part, the art of writing travels is lost—its imaginativeness, its credulity, its cherishing of mystery, and its proneness to awe. The old travellers are never sentimental—and sentiment is the very bane of road-books,—and they never describe for description’s sake. The world was much too wonderful in their eyes for such unprofitable excursions of fancy. Beauty and danger, difficulty and strangeness, novel fashions and unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to them “as a banner broad unfurled,” and inscribed with mystic signs and legends. They were not whirled about from place to

place: they had leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery; they journeyed with their lives in their hands, and were often yoke-fellows with hunger and nakedness, and the fury of the elements. Luckily for us who read their narratives, they were most unscientific, and ascribed the howling of the night-wind, the bursting of icebergs, the noise of tempests, and the echoes that traverse boundless plains after great heats, or are imprisoned in rock and fell, to the voice of demons exulting or lamenting to each other. We now cross the desert with nearly as much ease as we hail an omnibus, or book ourselves for Paris. But such was not the spirit in which Marco Polo, in the thirteenth, century, traversed the wilderness of Lop.