The fortunes of the English Road followed, of course, the story of all the other main English institutions in their outline. Just as you had the pre-Roman barbaric period, then the Roman period, then the Dark Ages in the general history of the State, so you had the British trackway, the Roman Road, and the continued use during the continued decline of the latter as material civilization fell away after the fifth century. The spring of the Middle Ages gave you the renaissance of the Road. The Black Death, which is the watershed of the Middle Ages, breaks the history of the Road just as it breaks the history of the language. French dies out: all England is speaking English in the generation after the Black Death, and there is a great change throughout society. That change is marked on the roads by a considerable decline in travel, coupled with the use of better means of transport--a paradox to which our times are not accustomed. But you get a good deal of that in the Middle Ages. You have, for instance, a decline of wealth in the monasteries, and yet more detailed building in the monasteries; a bad decline in manuscript writing, both with regard to accuracy and legibility, and yet an increase in the amount written. So far as we can judge from our very imperfect evidence, after the Black Death (the middle of the fourteenth century) the volume of traffic upon the roads of England tends to get less, and perhaps the surface also deteriorates, though that is more doubtful. The Reformation, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries, is the next great date. The violent revolution imposed A.D. 1536-40 on every department of the national life affects the roads as it affects all else. In general, the Reformation, especially through the dissolution of the monasteries, had the following economic effects upon England: (1) Customary economic action tended to be replaced, after the change, by competitive economic action; (2) Corporate action tended to be replaced by individual action; (3) The principal land-owning class--the squires--became much wealthier than they had been in proportion to the rest of the community. The accommodation of these three main economic facts had the general result of substituting more and more statutory duties in local affairs for customary duties, and it affected the roads thus: where the local community had, in a customary fashion, kept up the local road as part of the old social habit the new lay owner refused. He was averse to the outlay, the Crown had less control over him, and as he was running the whole thing on an idea of profit and loss every outlay was cut by him as much as possible. There was at the same time a revolution in agriculture, a falling off of population, the throwing together of small holdings, the growth of grazing, and the decline of tillage.