LOCOMOTION IN MIDDLE AGES. 



Sardinia, and England, and even Africa and Asia, were intersected 

 and penetrated by roads, forming the continuation of the great 

 European system. 



These colossal works were not paths rudely prepared for the 

 action of the feet of horses and the wheels of carriages, by merely 

 removing the natural asperities from the surface of the soil. 

 They were constructed, on the contrary, on principles in some 

 respects as sound and scientific as those which modern engineering 

 has supplied. Where the exigencies of the country required it, 

 forests were felled, mountains excavated, hills levelled, valleys 

 filled up, chasms and rivers bestridden by bridges, and marshes 

 drained, to an extent which would suffer little by comparison with 

 the operations of our great road-makers of modern times. 



On the fall of the Empire, these means of communication, 

 instead of subserving the purposes of the commerce of the people 

 through whose territory they were carried, were, for the most 

 part, destroyed. When the barbarians conquered Rome, and a 

 multitude of states were formed from its ruins, the victors shut 

 themselves up and fortified themselves in these several states, as 

 an army does in a citadel ; and, far from constructing new roads, 

 they destroyed those which had already existed, as a town 

 threatened with siege breaks those communications by which the 

 enemy may approach it. 



8. From this epoch through a long series of ages, the nations of 

 Europe, animated only by a spirit of reciprocal antagonism, 

 thought of nothing but war, and entered each other's territories 

 only for the purposes of conflict. The history of the intercom- 

 munications of nations during the middle ages is only a history of 

 their wars. 



When Europe emerged from this state, and when commerce 

 began to force itself into life, its operations were in a great 

 measure monopolised by Jewish and Lombard merchants, who 

 carried them on subject to the greatest difficulty and danger. 



The provincial nobles and lords of the soil, through whose pos- 

 sessions the merchant necessarily passed in carrying on the 

 internal commerce of the country, were nothing better than high- 

 way robbers. They issued with their bands from their castles and 

 arrested the travelling merchant, stripping him of the goods which 

 he carried for sale. 



The sovereigns of France endeavoured in vain, by penal enactr 

 ments, to check this enormous evil. Dagobert I. established a. 

 sort of code to regulate the public communications through his 

 dominions, and decreed heavy fines against such provincial lords 

 as might obstruct the freedom of communication, by interrupting 

 or plundering travellers. These decrees, however, remained a 



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