2/14 When, after 250 years of conflict, the barbarians triumphed, its work was done. In the next age of ceaseless orderless warfare it was less fit, with its straight broad streets, for defence and for fighting than the chaos of narrow tortuous lanes out of which it had grown and to which it now returned. The cases are few in which survivals of Roman streets have conditioned the external form of mediaeval or modern towns. We in England tend perhaps to overrate the likelihood of such survivals. Our classical education has, until very lately, taught most of us more of ancient than of mediaeval history, and when our antiquaries find towns rectangular in outline and streets that cross in a Carfax, they give them a Roman origin. |