Again, from that date onwards you begin to get sites unconnected with the old Roman road system, and their number increases rapidly as the Middle Ages advance. Again, we learn from any amount of evidence the comparative rapidity of travel after the Dark Ages, and that even over roads which certainly were not Roman. We can trace it in the marching of armies, the transport of grain and other provisions, and the travel of individuals. We may take almost any district in England and discover for ourselves by a little study how the mediaeval road system, which continued to develop until the change in its use by the turnpike, grew up out of the Roman Road, and we can thus show how the Roman road system is at the foundation of all our English ways. There was no regular plan or order in all this. Local usage, local necessity developed the tortuous network, and has left its stamp upon the face of England. CHAPTER XIII WHEELED TRAFFIC AND THE MODERN ROAD _The Transition from the Horse to the Vehicle: The Distinctive Mark of the Later Seventeenth Century: The Turnpike System and the Making of the Modern English Road: The Underlying Idea of the Turnpike and its Effects for Good and Ill: Its Decline and the First Emergence of the General National System in 1810: Thomas Telford and His Work: The Movement Connected with the Name of Macadam: The Coming of the Locomotive and its Results on Canals and Roads._ i The next great change came with the change in local government to which I have alluded. It gave us the first Acts of Parliament, taking the place of the old customary upkeep of the roads, but acting, oddly enough, at a period during which the road was declining everywhere. Even the civil wars did little to amend what had become a badly decayed scheme of communication. One of the reasons for this was that the great arm of the civil wars was the cavalry, and cavalry is not tied to roads as infantry is. Another and better reason was the comparatively small numbers engaged. The civil wars loom large in our political history because they marked the destruction of the monarchy and the beginning of aristocratic government, but in military history they are no very great affair: a sort of local epilogue to the Thirty Years’ War and the great religious struggle upon the Continent. What _did_ make a difference was the sudden increase of wheeled traffic with the end of the seventeenth century.