The Roman Road in England suffered the fate of all our ancient civilization. It very slowly declined and coarsened, but it remained the one necessary means of communication. We have no dates and no contemporary record after the fourth century for Britain, but we have the analogy of Northern France, in which we know that the upkeep and repair of the great Roman roads continued until well into the seventh century, and we have the evidence of the Roman roads as they now stand before us, with the result of their very gradual and only partial breakdown in a use of centuries. We have also the fact that much the most of the great battles took place on or near the Roman roads until the twelfth century, that most of the new great monastic and other houses were built near them, or on them, and that the ports most commonly used in the Dark Ages were nearly always ports with a Roman road serving them. We can thereby roughly judge (although we have no direct evidence) what happened to the system. In the first place, the Roman Road was so solidly built that centuries of neglect did not entirely destroy its usefulness. Sections of each road disappeared: some from causes which are easily explicable, some under the most obscure conditions the causes of which it seems impossible to discover. Every great Roman road in Europe, and even those in Britain (which are better preserved than those in the most part of the Continent) shows these gaps. Sometimes a whole great section of road will almost entirely disappear--more often it is a stretch of a few miles. Thus the whole of the short cut through Penkridge to Chester, which certainly existed and some elements of which can be reconstituted, has disappeared; so that most maps of Roman Britain erroneously mark the connection between London and Chester as going round by Shrewsbury. As an example of a short part utterly disappearing, one can take any one out of hundreds; the best example near London (typical of many others) is the gap in the Roman road between the Epsom racecourse and Merton. The road is evident as a clearly marked high embankment above the steep rise at Juniper Hill near the Dorking road to within a mile of Epsom racecourse. Then it suddenly ceases. There is no change in the soil. It is on chalk before and after its disappearance; and yet, just here, at about a mile from Epsom racecourse, it completely and totally disappears. There is no trace even of its foundation left from thence onwards northwards until you get to the site at Merton (which was state land and almost certainly the last camp and halting-place on the road before London).