simple in design but often of great beauty, and the two qualities are not unconnected. Then there were a few other houses of medium size, and lastly the humble cottages where most of the inhabitants lived, standing close to the road with a small garden behind them. Such were the components of the old English village. Beyond its doors was the common where the cattle grazed, and beyond that again there were common woods where the pigs picked up their food and where fuel could be gathered. Then there were fields for pasturage and for cultivation, divided up into one-acre strips, of which one man might hold any number. These long strips, separated only by a foot or so of rough grass, must have resembled our modern allotments in this country and the great open fields that one sees in France and elsewhere abroad, where hedges and fences are seldom found. The system of enclosing fields within hedges did not become common until about the time of Queen Anne, so that one feature of our landscape that we rightly regard as characteristically English is comparatively modern. In many cases it is also immoral, for enclosure of common land proceeded apace during the eighteenth century. Yet of all features of the English countryside the one that has changed most is the road. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century roads were simply open tracks through fields or over commons. They were not fenced in, their boundaries being vaguely assumed; and they were not metalled. Their condition was so bad in North Herefordshire in 1788 that they had to be levelled “by means of ploughs, drawn by eight or ten horses; and in this state they remained until the following autumn,” Each parish was held responsible for the “repairs” of its roads, but this process seldom involved more than a cartload of faggots or stones in the worst holes. Hence wheeled traffic was impossible. Everything and everybody had to travel through the mire, on horseback or on foot; and at a time when the population of London amounted to 700,000, its fish was coming on horseback from the Solway, and its mutton was walking up in thousands on its own legs from Scotland and Wales, disputing the road with vast droves of geese and turkeys. Such was the state of affairs up to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when turnpikes and tollbars began to take effect, but the good coaching-roads of Telford and Macadam were not constructed till the nineteenth century. Nor were bridges very common at a time when there was no wheeled traffic, for any shallow stream could be forded by a pack-horse. But such bridges as then existed were almost always a pleasure to behold.