It will be evident that after this first stage of the process the original irregular line between A and B will have been much straightened. You have but to repeat the manœuvre half a dozen or a dozen times to get the whole body of men into a strictly straight line between the two extremities many miles apart, and that although those in the middle cannot see either extreme and neither extremity can see the other. In theory this method can be used for an indefinite extent of country. In practice it seems to have been used (if it were indeed that upon which the Roman engineers relied) for spaces sometimes as great as a three days’ march, and quite often as great as one day’s march or more. iv The scheme of Roman roads, following in the main these great straight limbs, covered the whole country, and was for the most part completed, we may presume, by the end of the second century. It must not, of course, be imagined that these great military ways were the only means of communication in Roman times. Many historians have fallen into that grotesque error, with the result that history becomes meaningless to their readers. These great ways were only the main arteries, which were linked up in all the intervening spaces by a mass of local ways not specially constructed or engineered--most of them presumably aboriginal, and also maintained presumably by a local authority. FOOTNOTE: [2] _The Stane Street._ Constable and Co. CHAPTER XII THE DARK AGES _The Decline of the Roman Road: The Period at its Occurrence: Gaps: Roman Roads which Fell into Disuse: The Relationship of the Modern to the Roman System: Watling Street: Stane Street: The Short Cut Between Penkridge and Chester: Peddars Way: The coming of the New Civilization in the Twelfth Century._ i The next phase in the development of the English Road is the very gradual breakdown of the great Roman ways. The Dark Ages--that is, the 500 or 600 years between the fifth and the tenth or eleventh centuries--formed the period during which this process took place.