But with the seventeenth century the profound change which had worked for a hundred years throughout all English life appeared in the Road. The monarchy fell. A national road system became impossible. The local landlords took command of society. The _local_ road was the only basis for development. Commons were enclosed, co-operative village farming gradually disappeared, the hedges everywhere increased in number, cutting up the old open fields. Any extension of communication could only come through the linking up of tortuous village ways. Then came the industrial revolution, the exploitation of better surface through the turnpike, the epoch of Telford and Macadam. Lastly, the huge increase of the great towns in the middle and later nineteenth century, the coming of the internal combustion engine, and the present crisis. For we have come to a crisis to-day in the history of the English Road. It must be changed--or supplemented--under peril of such congestion as will strangle travel and interchange: that is the interest of the subject to-day. I propose, therefore, in what follows to consider, first, how this particular character in the English Road developed: what were the agencies which gradually made it so different from the road of the neighbouring Continent: next, to sketch very briefly and only in its bare outline the history of the English Road, and to conclude with an examination of the reforms which we should undertake and the crisis in travel and the use of the Road which has led to that duty. CHAPTER VIII THE “BLINDNESS” OF ENGLISH ROADS _The Two Causes Governing the Development of English Roads--Waterways and Domestic Peace: The Relation of the English Road to Military Strategy._ i Of many of the features of the English Road we can determine the origins at once, for they are of common knowledge. The “blindness” of the English Road is due to the enclosures and the consequent increase in hedges since the seventeenth century, coupled, as I have said, with the dying out of “champion” or “co-operative” open-field farming. It is in part due, also, to that which has also been alluded to and has affected the English Road in all its aspects (surface, variation of gauge and gradient, tortuousness, etc.), the government of the squires following on the defeat of the monarchy nearly three hundred years ago. I shall touch on this again when I come to the history of the English Road. But, apart from these obvious and well-known causes, two causes much less familiar--and yet of the first importance--two causes peculiar to this island in all Europe, have governed its development: waterways and domestic peace.