CHAPTER V 



EARLY ROAD LEGISLATION 



IT was in the year A.D. 411 that the Roman legions were 

 withdrawn from Britain, and it was not until 1555, or 1144 

 years after their departure, that the first general Act was 

 passed, not for the construction, but for the repair of roads in 

 this country. In the meantime such further construction or 

 repairing as was actually done had been left to the Church, 

 to private benevolence, to landowners acting either volun- 

 tarily or in accordance with the conditions on which they held 

 their estate, or to the inefficient operation of the common law 

 obligation that the inhabitants of a parish must repair the 

 highways within the same. 



A writer in 1823, William Knight Dehany, of the Middle 

 Temple, in a book on " The General Turnpike Acts," comes 

 to the conclusion, after careful research into the records of 

 this early period, that " With the exception of the principal 

 roads communicating with the important sea ports and for- 

 tresses of the Kingdom (probably the four great roads formed 

 either by the Romans or Saxons), the other highways were 

 but tracks over unenclosed grounds, where the passenger 

 selected his path over the space which presented the firmest 

 footing and fewest impediments, as is the case in the present 

 day in forests and wastes in remote situations." He considers 

 that when packhorses only were used for the transport of 

 burdens, the state of the roads was not a subject of much 

 interest and importance ; but certain it is that the subject 

 became more acute when the greater traffic that resulted from 

 expanding trade and commerce led to the roads getting into 

 an even worse condition than they had been in previously. 



The earliest road legislation that can be traced was an Act 

 passed in 1285, in the reign of Edward I., directing that on 

 highways leading from one market town to another " there be 



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