STAGE-COACH
AND MAIL IN
DAYS OF YORE

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Brighton Road: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway.

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

Cycle Rides Round London.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: Two Vols.[In the Press.

THE MAIDENHEAD AND MARLOW POST-COACH, 1782.
From a contemporary painting.

STAGE-COACH
AND MAIL IN
DAYS OF YORE

A PICTURESQUE HISTORY
OF THE COACHING AGE

VOL. I

By CHARLES G. HARPER

Illustrated from Old-Time Prints
and Pictures

London:
CHAPMAN & HALL, Limited
1903

All rights reserved

PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

PREFACE

“HANG up my old whip over the fireplace,” said Harry Littler, of the Southampton “Telegraph,” when the London and Southampton Railway was opened, in 1833,—“I shan’t want it never no more”: and he fell ill, turned his face to the wall, and died.

The end of the coaching age was a tragedy for the coachmen; and even to many others, whose careers and livelihood were not bound up with the old order of things, it was a bitter uprooting of established customs. Many travellers were never reconciled to railways, and in imagination dwelt fondly in the old days of the road for the rest of their lives; while many more never ceased to recount stories of the peculiar glory and exhilaration of old-time travel, forgetting the miseries and inconveniences that formed part of it. But although reminiscent oldsters have talked much about those vanished times, they have rarely attempted a consecutive story of them. Such an attempt is that essayed in these pages, confined within the compass of two volumes, not because material for a third was lacking, but simply for sake of expediency. It is shown in the body of this book, and may be noted again in this place, that the task of writing anything in the nature of a History of Coaching is rendered exceeding difficult by reason of the disappearance of most of the documentary evidence on which it should be based; but I have been fortunate enough to secure the aid of Mr. Joseph Baxendale in respect of the history of Pickford & Co., of Mr. William Chaplin, grandson of the great coach-proprietor, and of Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne, grandson of Chaplin’s partner, for information concerning their respective families. Colonel Edmund Palmer, also, communicated interesting notes on his grandfather, John Palmer, the founder of the mail-coach system. To my courteous friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall, whose own recollections of coaching, and whose collections of coaching prints and notes I have largely used, this acknowledgment is due. Mr. J. B. Muir, of 35, Wardour Street, my obliging friend of years past, has granted extensive use of his collection of sporting pictures, and Messrs. Arthur Ackermann & Son, of 191, Regent Street, have lent prints and pictures from their establishment.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

Petersham, Surrey,
April 1903.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

SEPARATE PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore

CHAPTER I
THE INTRODUCTION OF CARRIAGES

“Ah! sure it was a coat of steel,
Or good tough oak, he wore,
Who first unto the ticklish wheel
’Gan harness horses four.”

The lines quoted above are not remarkably good as poetry. Nay, it is possible to go farther, and to say that they are exceptionally bad—the product of one of those corn-box poets who were accustomed to speak of steam as a “demon foul”; but if his lines are bad verse, the central idea is good. That man who first essayed to drive four-in-hand must indeed have been more than usually courageous.

To form anything at all like an adequate idea of the Coaching Age, it is first necessary to discover how people travelled before that age dawned. As a picture is made by contrasted light and shade, so is the story of the coaching period only to be properly set forth by first narrating how journeys were made from place to place before the continuous history of wheeled traffic begins. That history, measured by mere count of years, is not a long one. It cannot, in its remotest origin, go back beyond the first appearance of the stage-waggon, about 1590, when the peasantry of this kingdom began to obtain an occasional lift on the roads, and sat among the goods which it was the first business of those waggons to carry. The peasant, then, was the first coach-passenger, for while he was carried thus, everyone else, in all the estates of the realm, from King and Queen down to the middle classes, rode horseback, and it was not until 1657 and the establishment of the Chester Stage that the Coaching Age opened for the public in general.

If, then, we please to pronounce for that event as the true beginning, and allow 1848, the year when one of the last coaches, the Bedford “Times,” was withdrawn from the London and Bedford road in consequence of the opening of the Bletchley and Bedford branch railway, to be the end, we have the beginning, the growth and perfection of the old coaching era, and its final extinction, all comprised within a period of a hundred and ninety-one years.

Wheeled conveyances are generally said by the usual books of reference to take their origin in this country with the introduction of Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage in 1553; but, so far from that being correct, mention of carriages is often found in authorities of a period earlier by almost two centuries. Thus, in her will of September 25th, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, bequeathed her “great carriage, with the covertures, carpets, and cushions,” to her eldest daughter; and carriage-builders at the close of Edward III.’s reign charged £100 and £1000 for their wares. Carts were not unknown to the peasantry; Froissart tells us that the English returned from Scotland in 1360 in “charettes,” a kind of carriage whose make he does not specify; and ladies are discovered in 1380 travelling with the baggage in “whirlicotes,” which were cots or beds on wheels, or a species of wheeled litter. We have, by favour of one of the old chroniclers, a fugitive picture of Richard II., at the age of seventeen, travelling in one of these whirlicotes, accompanying his mother, who was ill.

But such instances do not prove more than occasional use, and it certainly appears that when Queen Mary rode from the Tower of London to Westminster on her Coronation Day, September 20th, 1553, in her State coach, she thereby revived the use of carriages, which, for some reason or another, had fallen into disuse since those early days. Her coachmaker, by a grant made on May 29th in the first year of her reign, was one Anthony Silver.

We may seek the cause of wheeled conveyances going out of use in the two centuries before this date in the steady and continuous decay of the roads consequent upon the troubled state of the kingdom in that intervening space. Rebellions, pestilences, foreign wars, and domestic strife had marked that epoch. The Wars of the Roses themselves lasted thirty years, and in all that while the social condition of the people had not merely stood still, but degenerated. Towns and districts were half depopulated, and the ancient highways fell into disuse. It is significant that the first General Highway Act, a measure passed in 1555, was practically coincident with the reintroduction of carriages.

Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage—or, as it was called in the language of that time, “coach”—was drawn by six horses, less for reasons of display than of sheer necessity, for, with a less numerous and powerful team, it would probably have been stuck fast in the infamously bad roads that then set a gulf of mud between the twin cities of London in the east and Westminster in the west. Only three other carriages followed her Majesty on that historic occasion, and the ladies who attended rode horseback.

Two years after this new departure mention is found of a “coach”—still, of course, a carriage—made for the Earl of Rutland by one Walter Rippon, who in the same year appears to have built a new one for the Queen.

The next patron of carriages seems to have been Sir Thomas Hoby, sometime Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the French Court: that Sir Thomas who lies beside his brother, Sir Philip, in their magnificent tomb in the little Berkshire village church of Bisham, beside the Thames. He owned a carriage in 1566.

The progressive age of Elizabeth now opens. In 1564, six years after her accession, she was using a carriage brought over from Holland by a certain William Boonen, himself a Hollander. Boonen, indeed, became her Majesty’s coachman, but his services cannot often have been required, for, if we are to believe Elizabeth’s own words to the French Ambassador in 1568, driving in these early carriages, innocent of springs, must have been as uncomfortable as a journey in a modern builder’s cart or an ammunition-waggon would be. When his Excellency waited upon her, she was still suffering “aching pains, from being knocked about in a coach driven too fast a few days before.”

Little wonder, then, that the great Queen used her coach only when occasions of State demanded. She journeyed to her palace at Greenwich by water, between Greenwich and her other palace of Eltham on horseback, and to Nonsuch and Hampton Court and on her many country progresses in like manner, resorting only to wheels with advancing years. How bad were even the roads especially repaired for her coming may be judged from a contemporary description of her journey along that “new highway” whose “perfect evenness” is the theme of the writer. “Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of a base sort lifted it on with their poles.” Majesty must have been sore put to it to look majestic on such occasions, and in the bad condition of all roads at that time we find a new significance in the courtliness of Sir Walter Raleigh, who at Greenwich threw his velvet cloak upon the ground for Elizabeth to walk over.

Elizabeth was an accomplished horsewoman, and it is not surprising, under these circumstances, that she made full use of the accomplishment, continuing on all possible public occasions to appear in this manner. On longer journeys she rode on a pillion behind a mounted chamberlain, holding on to him by his waistbelt just as ladies continued to do for centuries yet to come. The curious in these things may find interest in the fact that the modern groom’s leathern waistbelt, which now serves no practical function, is merely a strange survival of that old necessity of feminine travel. The commonly-received opinion that Elizabeth objected to carriages from the supposed “effeminacy” of using them receives a severe shock from her carriage experiences, which make it quite obvious that travelling in the earliest of them was only to be indulged in by persons of the strongest frame and in the rudest health. She who mounted on her palfrey before her troops at Tilbury, when the Armada threatened, could justly claim that though but a woman she had the spirit of a King—aye, and a King of England—quailed before the rigours of a carriage-drive.

In 1579 the Earl of Arundel imported one of these new and strange machines from Germany. How novel and strange they were may be gathered from the particular mention thus accorded them in the annals of the time. When we consider how bad was the condition even of the streets of London, it will be abundantly evident that a desire for display rather than comfort brought about the increasing use of carriages that marked the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. By 1601 they had become so comparatively numerous that it was sought to obtain an Act restraining their excessive use and forbidding men riding in them. This projected ordinance especially set forth the enervating nature of riding in carriages; but it would seem that the real objection was the growing magnificence displayed in this way by the wealthy, tending to overshadow the public appearances of Royalty itself. Whatever the real reason of this disabling measure, it was rejected on the second reading and never became law, and four years later both hackney and private carriages were in common use in London. Carters and waggoners hated them with a bitter hatred, called them “hell-carts,” and heaped abuse upon all who used them. Both their primitive construction and the fearful condition of the roads rendered their use impossible in the country. Teams of fewer than six horses were rarely seen drawing coaches in what were then regarded as London suburbs, districts long since included in Central London; and perhaps even the haughty and arrogant Duke of Buckingham, favourite of James I. and Charles, was misjudged when, in 1619, the people, seeing his carriage drawn by that number, “wondered at it as a novelty, and imputed it to him as a mastering pride.” Had he employed fewer horses he certainly would have been obliged to get out and walk, or to have again resorted to the use of the sedan-chair, in which, before he had set up a carriage, he was used to be carried, greatly to the indignation of the populace, to whom sedan-chairs were at that time novelties. “The clamour and the noise of it was so extravagant,” we are told, “that the people would rail upon him in the streets, loathing that men should be brought to as servile a condition as horses.” Yet no one ever thought of denouncing Buckingham or any other of the magnificos when they lolled in easy seats under the silken hangings of their state barges and were rowed by the labour of a dozen lusty oarsmen on the Thames. The work was as servile as the actual carrying of a passenger, but the innate conservatism of mankind could not at first perceive this. On the whole, Buckingham therefore has our sympathy. The most innocent doings of a favourite with Royalty are capable of being twisted into haughty and malignant acts, and had it not been for Buckingham’s position at Court his displays would not have brought him the hatred of the people and the rivalry of his own order which they certainly did arouse. The Earl of Northumberland was one of those who were thus goaded into the rivalry of display. Hearing that the favourite had six horses to his carriage, he thought that he might very well have eight, “and so rode,” we are told, “from London to Bath, to the vulgar talk and admiration.”

The first public carriages, according to a statement made to Taylor, the “water poet,” by Old Parr, the centenarian, were the “hackney-coaches,” established in London in 1605. “Since then,” says Taylor, writing on the subject at different times between 1623 and 1635, “coaches have increased with a mischief, and have ruined the trade of the watermen by hackney-coaches, and now multiply more than ever.” The “watermen” were, of course, those who plied with their boats and barges for hire upon the Thames, chiefly between London and Westminster, the river being then, and for long after, the principal highway for traffic in the metropolis. So greatly, indeed, was the river traffic for the time affected, that the sprack-witted Taylor relinquished his trade of waterman and embarked upon the more promising career of pamphleteering.

“Thirty years ago,” he says, in one of these outbursts, “The World runnes on Wheeles,” “coaches were few”:—

Then upstart helcart coaches were to seeke,
A man could scarce see twenty in a weeke,
But now I thinke a man may daily see
More than the whirries on the Thames can be.
Carroches, coaches, jades and Flanders mares
Doe rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares;
Against the ground we stand and knock our heeles,
Whilest all our profit runs away on wheeles.

“This,” we find him saying, on another occasion, “is the rattling, rowling, rumbling age, and the world runnes on wheeles. The hackney-men, who were wont to have furnished travellers in all places with fitting and serviceable horses for any journey, are (by the multitude of coaches) undone by the dozens.”

The bitter cry of Taylor and the Thames watermen may or may not have been hearkened to, but certainly hackney-coaches were prohibited in 1635. This, however, was probably due rather to Royal whim or prejudice than to any consideration for a decaying trade.

It was an arbitrary age, and it only needed a Star Chamber order for public carriages, considered by the Court to be a nuisance, to be suppressed. The reasons advanced read curiously at this time: “His Majesty, perceiving that of late the great numbers of hackney-coaches were grown a great disturbance to the King, Queen, and nobility through the streets of the said city, so as the common passage was made dangerous and the rates and prices of hay and provender and other provisions of the stable thereby made exceeding dear, hath thought fit, with the advice of his Privy Council, to publish his Royal pleasure, for reformation therein.” His Majesty therefore commanded that no hackney-coaches should be used in London unless they were engaged to travel at least three miles out of town, and owners of such coaches were to keep sufficient able horses and geldings, fit for his Majesty’s service, “whensoever his occasion shall require them.”

This despotic measure was amended in 1637, when fifty hackney-coachmen for London were licensed, to keep not more than twelve horses each. This meant either that three hundred or a hundred and fifty public carriages then came into use, according to whether two or four horses were harnessed. “And so,” says Taylor, “there grew up the trade of coach-building in England.”

These early carriages, whether hackney or private, were not only without springs, but were innocent of windows. In their place were shutters or leather curtains. The first “glass coach” mentioned is that made for the Duke of York in 1661. Pepys at this period becomes our principal authority on this subject. On May 1st, 1665, he is found witnessing experiments with newly-designed carriages with springs, and again on September 5th, finding them go not quite so easy as their inventor claimed for them. Yet, since private carriages were clearly becoming the fashion, Mr. Secretary-to-the-Admiralty Pepys must needs have one; and accordingly, on December 2nd, 1668, he takes his first ride: “Abroad with my wife, the first time that I ever rode in my own coach.”

ARMS OF THE WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF COACH AND HARNESS MAKERS.

Pepys always delighted in being in the fashion. He would not be in advance of it, and not, if he could help it, behind. The fact, then, of his setting up a carriage of his own is sufficient to show how largely the moneyed classes had begun to go about on wheels. But better evidence still is found in the establishment, May 1677, of the Worshipful Company of Coach and Harness Makers, whose arms still bear representations of the carriages in use at that period. The armorial bearings of the Coach-makers are, when duly tricked out in their proper colours, somewhat striking. Stated in plain terms, done into English out of heraldic jargon, they consist of a blue shield of arms with three coaches and a chevron in gold, supported on either side by a golden horse, harnessed and saddled in black studded with gold; with blue housings garnished with red, and fringed and purfled in gold. The horses are further adorned with plumes of four feathers in gold, silver, red, and blue. A crest above displays Phœbus driving his chariot, and the motto beneath declares that “After clouds rises the sun.”

The hackney-carriages of London in 1669, the year following Pepys’ establishment of his own private turn-out, numbered, according to the memoirs of Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who travelled England at that time, eight hundred. The age of public vehicles was come.

CHAPTER II
THE HORSEMEN

“The single gentlemen, then a hardy race, equipped in jack-boots and trousers up to their middle, rode post through thick and thin, and, guarded against the mire, defying the frequent stumble and fall, arose and pursued their journey with alacrity.”—Pennant, 1739.

Long before wheeled conveyances of any kind were to be hired in this country, travellers were accustomed to ride post. To do so argued no connection with that great department we now call the Post Office, although that letter-carrying agency and the custom of riding post obtain their name from a common origin. The earliest provision for travelling post seems to have been in the reign of Henry VIII., when the office of “Master of the Postes” was established. Sir Brian Tuke then held that appointment, and to him were entrusted the arrangements for securing relays of horses on the four great post roads then recognised: the road from London to Dover, on which the carriers came from and went to foreign parts; the road to Plymouth, where the King’s dockyard was situated; and the great roads to Scotland and Chester, and on to Conway and Holyhead. These relays of horses were established exclusively for use of the despatch-riders who went on affairs of State; but by the time of Elizabeth these messengers were, as a favour, already accustomed to carry any letters that might be given into their charge and could be delivered without going out of their way; while travellers constantly called at the country post-houses, and on pretence of going on the Queen’s business, obtained the use of horses, which they rode to exhaustion, or overloaded, or even rode away with altogether.

These abuses were promptly suppressed when James I. came to the English throne. In 1603, the year of his accession, a proclamation was issued under which no person claiming to be on Government business was to be supplied with horses by the postmasters unless his application was supported by a document signed by one of the officers of State. The hire of horses for public business was fixed at twopence-halfpenny a mile, and in addition there was a small charge for the guide. A very arbitrary order was made that if the post-houses had not sufficient horses, the constables and the magistrates were to seize those of private owners and impress them into the service. Post-masters, who were salaried officials, were paid at the very meagre rate of from sixpence to three shillings a day. They were generally innkeepers on the main roads; otherwise it is difficult to see how they could have existed on these rates of pay. Evidently these were considered merely as retaining fees, and so, in order to give them a chance of earning a more living wage, they were permitted to let out horses to “others riding poste with horse and guide about their private business.” Those private and unofficial travellers could not demand to be supplied with horses at the official rate: what they were to pay was to be a matter between the post-masters and themselves. In practice, however, the tariff for Government riders ruled that for all horsemen, as made clear in Fynes Morison’s Itinerary, 1617, where he says that in the south and west of England and on the Great North Road as far as Berwick, post-horses were established at every ten miles or so at a charge of twopence-halfpenny a mile. It was necessary to have a guide to each stage, and it was customary to charge for baiting both the guide’s and the traveller’s horses, and to give the guide himself a few pence—usually a four-penny-piece, called “the guide’s groat”—on parting. It was cheaper and safer for several travellers to go together, for one guide would serve the whole company on each stage, and it was not prudent to travel alone. Morison says that, although hiring came expensive in one way, yet the speed it was possible to maintain saved time and consequent charges at the inns. The chief requisite, however, was strength of body and ability to endure the fatigue.

As to that, the horsemen of the period were, equally with those of over a hundred years later, mentioned by Pennant, “a hardy race.” In March, 1603, for example, Robert Cary, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, eager to be first in acclaiming James VI. of Scotland as James I. of England, left London so soon as the last breath had left the body of Queen Elizabeth, and rode the 401 miles to Edinburgh in three days. He reached Doncaster, 158 miles, the first night, Widdrington, 137 miles, the second, and gained Edinburgh, 106 miles, the third day, in spite of a severe fall by the way. About the same time a person named Coles rode from London to Shrewsbury in fourteen hours.

When Thomas Witherings was appointed Master of the Post, in 1635, the Post Office, as an institution for carrying the correspondence of the public, may be said to have started business, although as early as 1603 private persons were forbidden to make the carrying of letters a business. Like all such ordinances, this seemed made only to be broken every day. It was particularly unreasonable because, before Witherings came upon the scene in 1635 and reorganised the posts, there existed no means by which letters could be sent generally into the country. Only the post-riders on business of State on the four great roads were in the habit of taking letters, and their doing so was a matter of private arrangement.

The postmasters now, on the appointment of Witherings, first officially made acquaintance with letters, and their name began to take on something of its modern meaning. They still supplied horses to the King’s messengers and the King’s liege subjects, and held a monopoly in these businesses.

In 1657 the so-called “Post Office of England” was established by Act of Parliament, and the office of Postmaster-General created, in succession to that of Master of the Posts. His business was defined as “the exclusive right of carrying letters and the furnishing of post-horses,” and these two functions—the overlordship of what were officially known for generations afterwards as the “letter post” and the “travelling post”—the long line of Postmasters-General continued to exercise for a hundred and twenty-three years.

In 1658 the mileage the country postmasters were entitled to charge was, according to an advertisement of July 1st in that year, increased from twopence-halfpenny to threepence, and on the Chester Road, at least, there was no longer any obligation to take a guide:—

“The postmasters on the Chester Road, petitioning, have received order, and do accordingly publish the following advertisement: All gentlemen, merchants, and others who have occasion to travel between London and West Chester, Manchester, and Warrington, or any other town upon that road, for the accommodation of trade, dispatch of business, and ease of purse, upon every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, between six and ten of the clock, at the house of Mr. Christopher Charteris, at the sign of the Hart’s Horns, in West Smithfield, and postmaster there, and at the postmaster of Chester, and at the postmaster of Warrington, may have a good and able horse or mare, furnished at threepence the mile, without the charge of a guide; and so likewise at the house of Mr. Thomas Challoner, postmaster at Stone in Staffordshire, upon every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, to go to London; and so likewise at all the several postmasters upon the road, who will have such set days, so many horses, with furniture, in readiness to furnish the riders, without any stay, to carry them to and from any of the places aforesaid in four days, as well to London as from thence, and to places nearer in less time, according as their occasions shall require, they engaging, at the first stage where they take horse, for the safe delivery of the same to the next immediate stage, and not to ride that horse any farther without consent of the postmaster, by whom he rides, and so from stage to stage to their journey’s end. All those who intend to ride this way are desired to give a little notice beforehand, if conveniently they can, to the several postmasters where they first take horse, whereby they may be furnished with as many horses as the riders shall require, with expedition. This undertaking began the 28th of June 1658, at all the places aforesaid, and so continues by the several postmasters.”

The Chester Road—the road to Ireland—was of great moment at that age. Indeed, it had been of importance for centuries past. It was in a lonely hollow near Flint, on his landing from Ireland, that Richard II. was waylaid in 1399 by Henry Bolingbroke, and his progress to London barred; and from Chester as well as from Milford Haven English expeditions were wont to sail—some carrying fire and sword across St. George’s Channel, and later ones taking English colonists to occupy and cultivate the lands from which the shiftless Irish had been driven. But it was not until the close of Elizabeth’s reign, when Ireland was subjugated, that this road began to be constantly travelled.

Under James I. the Irish chieftains came to these shores to swear fealty, and in the wild and whirling series of events that filled the years from 1641 to 1692 with horror, a continual flux and reflux of military travellers and trembling refugees came and went along these storied miles.

Already, in the year before the announcement of post-horses on the Chester Road, the first stage-coach of which we have any particulars had been established on this very route. It did not continue to Holyhead, for the individually sufficient reasons that no practicable road to that port existed for anything going on wheels, and that Chester itself, and Parkgate, a few miles down the estuary of the Dee, were the most convenient ports of embarkation for Ireland. No direct road to Holyhead existed until 1783, when coaches began to run to that port. Before that time, those who wished to cross from Holyhead generally rode horseback. Few ventured across country by Llangollen and Bettws-y-Coed; most, like Swift, leaving civilisation behind at Chester, took horse and guide, and going by Rhuddlan and Conway, dared the precipitous heights of that great headland called Penmaenmawr, or, even more greatly daring, crept round by the rocks underneath at ebb tide. Swift wrote two couplets for the inn that then stood beside the track on Penmaenmawr. As the traveller approached he read, on the swinging sign:—

Before you venture here to pass,
Take a good refreshing glass;

while the returning wayfarer was cheered by:—

Now this hill you’re safely over,
Drink, your spirits to recover.

One personage, greatly daring, did in 1685 succeed in passing his carriage over this height. This was the Viceroy, Henry, Earl of Clarendon, who, ill enough advised to try for Holyhead, embarked his baggage at Chester, and essayed this perilous undertaking. “If the weather be good,” he wrote, before setting out, “we go under the rocks in our coaches.” But it was December, the weather was not good, and so they had to take to the hill-top. His Excellency had ample cause to regret the venture, for he was five hours travelling the fourteen miles between St. Asaph and Conway, and on the crossing of Penmaenmawr the “great heavy coach” had to be drawn by the horses in single trace, while three or four sturdy Welsh peasants, hired for the job, pushed behind, so that it should not slip back. His Excellency walked all the way across, from Conway to Bangor, and Lady Clarendon was carried in a litter. How the Menai Straits were crossed does not appear, but there is evidence in the tone of his letters that he was astonished at last to find himself safely come to Holyhead.

In 1660, on the Restoration, the law of 1657, constituting the Post Office and regulating the letting of post-horses, was re-enacted. By some new provisions and amendments of old ones, travellers might now hire horses wherever they could if the postmasters could not supply them within half an hour. This concession, together with that which repealed the power given by the earlier Act for horses to be seized, was evidently made in deference to the indignation of travellers delayed by lack of horses in the hands of the only persons who could legally hire them out, and by the fury of private individuals who had seen their own choice animals not infrequently requisitioned in the King’s name and hack-ridden unconscionable distances by travellers or King’s messengers whose first and last thoughts were for speed, and who had not the consideration of an owner for the steeds that carried them. The term “postage,” occurring in the Act of 1660, shows that a widely different meaning was then attached to the word: “Each horse’s hire or postage” is a phrase that sufficiently explains itself.

Such were the methods and costs of riding horseback when stage-coaching began. The Government monopoly, however, was infringed with increasing impunity as time went on, and as the letter-carrying business of the Post Office developed, so was the “travelling post” allowed to decay. The growing number and increasing convenience of the coaches, too, helped to make the monopoly less valuable, for when travellers could be conveyed without exertion by coach at from twopence to threepence a mile, they were not likely to pay threepence a mile and a guide’s groat at every ten miles for the privilege of bumping in the saddle all day long. Those who mostly continued in the saddle were the gentlemen who owned horses of their own, or those others to whom the chance company of a coach was objectionable.

The Post Office monopoly in post-horses was, accordingly, not worth preserving when it was abolished by the Act of 1780. From that time the Postmasters-General ceased to have anything to do with horse-hire, and anything lost by their relinquishing it was amply returned to the State by the new license duties levied upon horse-keepers or postmasters, and coaches. A penny a mile was fixed as the Government duty upon horses let out for hire, whether saddle-horses or to be used in post-chaises. All persons who made that a business—generally, of course, innkeepers—were to take out an annual five-shilling license, and were under obligation to paint in some conspicuous place on their houses “Licensed to let Post-Horses.” In default of so doing the penalty was £5. As a check upon the business done, travellers hiring post-horses were to be given a ticket, on which the number of horses so hired, and the distance, were to be specified. These tickets were to be delivered to the turnpike-keeper at the first gate, and the vigilance of these officials was made a matter of self-interest by the allowance to them of threepence in the pound on all tickets thus collected. At certain periods the tickets were delivered to the Stamp Office, and the innkeepers and postmasters themselves were visited by revenue officers, who required to see the books and the counterfoils from which these tickets had come.

But the Government did not for any length of time directly collect these duties. They were farmed out by the Inland Revenue Department, just as the turnpike tolls were farmed by the Turnpike Trustees, and men grew rich by buying these tolls and duties at annual auctions, relying for their profit on the increased vigilance they would cause to be exercised. The Jews were early in this field. In the golden era of coaching a man named Levy farmed tolls and duties to the annual value of half a million sterling.

But to return to our horsemen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the country gentlemen, the members of Parliament, the judges on circuit, every hale and able-bodied man of means sufficient, rode his horse, or hired one on his journeys, for the reason that carriages could only slowly and with great difficulty and expense be made to move along the distant roads. The passage from Pennant’s recollections, quoted at the head of this chapter, shows the miseries made light of by the single gentlemen, and endured by those married ones whose wives rode behind them on a pillion and clutched them convulsively round the waist as the horse stumbled along.

Nor did stage-coaches immediately change this time-honoured way of getting about the country, for there existed an aristocratic prejudice against using public vehicles. Offensive persons who never owned carriages of their own were used to give themselves insufferable airs when journeying by coach, and hint, for the admiration or envy of their fellow-passengers, that an accident had happened to their own private equipage. Satirists of the time soon seized upon this contemptible resort of the snob, and used it to advantage in contemporary literature. Thus we find the committeeman’s wife in Sir Robert Howard’s comedy explaining her presence in the Reading coach to be owing to her own carriage being disordered, adding that if her husband knew she had been obliged to ride in the stage he would “make the house too hot to hold some.”

Here and there we find exceptions to this general rule. In the coach passing through Preston in 1662, one Parker was fellow-traveller with “persons of great qualitie, such as knightes and ladyes”; and on one occasion in 1682 the winter coach on its four days’ journey between Nottingham and London had for passenger Sir Ralph Knight, of Langold, Yorks; but the single gentlemen in good health continued for years after the introduction of stage-coaches to go on horseback, and when their families came to town they usually took the family chariot, and either contracted with stable-keepers for horses on the way, or else, taking their most powerful horses from the plough, harnessed four or six of them to their private vehicle, and so, with the driving of their best ploughman, came to the capital in state, much to the amusement of the fashionables of Piccadilly and St. James’s.

We must, however, suppose, from the fury of Cresset’s Reasons for Suppressing Stage Coaches, of 1662, that some of the less energetic among the country gentlemen had already succumbed to the discreditable practice of travelling in them. In his pages we learn something of what a horseman’s life on the road was like, and what he escaped by taking to the coach. The hardy race became soft and grievously enervated by the unwonted luxury; their muscles slackened, and they developed an infirmity of purpose that rendered them no longer able to “endure frost, snow, or rain, or to lodge in the fields”—trifling inconveniences and incidents of travel which, it appears, they had previously been accustomed to support with that cheerfulness or resignation with which one faces the inevitable and incurable.

But Cresset had other indictments, throwing a flood of light upon what the horseman endured in wear and tear of body, mind, and wearing apparel: “Most gentlemen, before they travelled in coaches, used to ride with swords, belts, pistols, holsters, portmanteaus and hat-cases, which in these coaches they have little or no use for; for, when they rode on horseback, they rode in one suit and carried another to wear when they came to their journey’s end, or lay by the way; but in coaches a silk hat and an Indian gown, with a sash, silk stockings, and beaver hats, men ride in, and carry no other with them, because they escape the wet and dirt, which on horseback they cannot avoid; whereas, in two or three journeys on horseback these clothes and hats were wont to be spoiled; which done, they were forced to have new ones very often, and that increased the consumption of the manufactures and the employment of the manufacturers; which travelling in coaches doth in no way do.”

Fortunately, the biographical literature of our country is rich in records of the horsemen who, still relying upon their own exertions and those of their willing steeds, rode long distances and left the toiling stage leagues behind them at the close of each day’s journey. Ralph Thoresby, of Leeds, a pious and God-fearing antiquary who flourished at this time, gives us, on the other hand, the spectacle of one who generally rode horseback trying the coach by way of a change. He had occasion to visit London in February 1683, and as there was at that time no coach service between Leeds and London, he rode from Leeds to York to catch the stage, which seems to have kept the road in this particular winter. He rose at five one Saturday morning, and was at York by night, ready for the coach leaving for London on the Monday. Four years earlier he had scorned the coach, and did not now take it for sake of speed, for he commonly rode from Leeds to London in four days, and the York stage at this period of its career took six; so, including the two days expended in coming to York, he was clearly twice as long over the business. He looked forward to the coach journey with misgivings, “fearful of being confined to a coach for so many days with unsuitable persons and not one I know of.”

On other occasions, when he rode horseback, his diary is rich with picturesque incident. He finds the waters out on the road between Ware and Cheshunt, and waits until he and a party of other horsemen can be guided across by a safe way, and so avoid the pitiful fate of a poor higgler, who blundered into the raging torrent where the road should have been, and was swept away and drowned. He loses his way frequently on the high-road; shudders with apprehension when crossing Witham Common, near Stamford, “the place where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman”; and, with a companion, has a terrible fright at an inn at Topcliffe, where they miss their pistols for a while and suspect the innkeeper of sinister designs against them. Hence, at the safe conclusion of every journey, with humble and heartfelt thanks he inscribes: “God be thanked for his mercies to me and my poor family!”

In 1715, when John Gay wrote his entertaining poem, A Journey to Exeter, describing the adventures of a party of horsemen who rode down from London, things were, we may suppose, much better, for the travellers found amusement as well as toil on their way.

They took five days to ride to Exeter. The first night they slept at Hartley Row, 36 miles. The second day they left the modern route of the Exeter Road at Basingstoke, and, like some of the coaches about that time, struck out along the Winchester road as far as Popham Lane, where they branched off across the downs to Sutton and Stockbridge, at which town they halted the night, after a day’s journey of 30 miles. The third morning saw them making for Salisbury. Midway between Stockbridge and that city their road falls into the main road to Exeter. That night they were at Blandford. The fourth day took them to Axminster, and the fifth to Exeter:—

’Twas on the day when city dames repair
To take their weekly dose of Hyde Park air;
When forth we trot: no carts the road infest,
For still on Sundays country horses rest.
Thy gardens, Kensington, we leave unseen;
Through Hammersmith jog on to Turnham Green:
That Turnham Green which dainty pigeons fed,
But feeds no more, for Solomon is dead.
Three dusty miles reach Brentford’s tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legg’d chickens known:
Thence o’er wide shrubby heaths and furrow’d lanes
We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
We ferry’d o’er; for late the winter’s flood
Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.
Prepar’d for war, now Bagshot Heath we cross,
Where broken gamesters oft repair their loss.
At Hartley Row the foaming bit we prest,
While the fat landlord welcom’d ev’ry guest.
Supper was ended, healths the glasses crown’d,
Our host extolled his wine at ev’ry round,
Relates the Justices’ late meeting there,
How many bottles drank, and what their cheer;
What lords had been his guests in days of yore,
And praised their wisdom much, their drinking more.

* * * * *

Let travellers the morning’s vigils keep:
The morning rose, but we lay fast asleep.
Twelve tedious miles we bore the sultry sun,
And Popham Lane was scarce in sight by one;
The straggling village harbour’d thieves of old,
’Twas here the stage-coach’d lass resigned her gold;
That gold which had in London purchas’d gowns,
And sent her home, a belle, to country towns.
But robbers haunt no more the neighbouring wood;
Here unnamed infants find their daily food;
For should the maiden mother nurse her son,
’Twould spoil her match, when her good name is gone.
Our jolly hostess nineteen children bore,
Nor fail’d her breast to suckle nineteen more.
Be just, ye prudes, wipe off the long arrear,
Be virgins still in towns, but mothers here.
Sutton we pass; and leave her spacious down,
And with the setting sun reach Stockbridge town.
O’er our parch’d tongues the rich metheglin glides,
And the red dainty trout our knife divides.
Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
What! no election come in seven long years!
Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float,
Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.

* * * * *

Next morn, twelve miles led o’er th’ unbounded plain
Where the cloak’d shepherd guides his fleecy train.
No leafy bow’rs a noontide shelter lend,
Nor from the chilly dews at night defend;
With wondrous art he counts the straggling flock,
And by the sun informs you what’s o’clock.
How are our shepherds fall’n from ancient days!
No Amaryllis chants alternate lays;
From her no list’ning echoes learn to sing,
Nor with his reed the jocund valleys ring.
Here sheep the pasture hide, there harvests bend,
See Sarum’s steeple o’er yon hill ascend;
Our horses faintly trot beneath the heat,
And our keen stomachs know the hour to eat.
Who can forsake thy walls, and not admire
The proud cathedral and the lofty spire?
What sempstress has not proved thy scissors good?
From hence first came th’ intriguing riding-hood.
Amid three boarding-schools well stock’d with misses,
Shall three knight-errants starve for want of kisses?
O’er the green turf the miles slide swift away,
And Blandford ends the labours of the day.

* * * * *

The morning rose; the supper reck’ning paid,
And our due fees discharg’d to man and maid,
The ready ostler near the stirrup stands,
And as we mount, our halfpence load his hands.
Now the steep hill fair Dorchester o’erlooks,
Bordered by meads, and wash’d by silver brooks.
Here sleep my two companions, eyes supprest,
And propt in elbow-chairs they snoring rest;
I weary sit, and with my pencil trace
Their painful postures and their eyeless face;
Then dedicate each glass to some fair name,
And on the sash the diamond scrawls my flame.
Now o’er true Roman way our horses sound;
Grævius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.
On either side fair fertile valleys lie,
The distant prospects tire the travelling eye.
Through Bridport’s stony lanes our route we take,
And the proud steep ascend to Morecombe’s lake.
As hearses pass’d, our landlord robb’d the pall,
And with the mournful scutcheon hung his hall.
On unadulterate wine we here regale,
And strip the lobster of his scarlet mail.
We climb’d the hills when starry night arose,
And Axminster affords a kind repose.
The maid, subdued by fees, her trunk unlocks,
And gives the cleanly aid of dowlas smocks.
Meantime our shirts her busy fingers rub,
While the soap lathers o’er the foaming tub.
If women’s gear such pleasing dreams incite,
Lend us your smocks, ye damsels, ev’ry night.
We rise, our beards demand the barber’s art;
A female enters, and performs the part.
The weighty golden chain adorns her neck,
And three gold rings her skilful hand bedeck;
Smooth o’er our chins her easy fingers move,
Soft as when Venus strok’d the beard of Jove.
Now from the steep, ’mid scatter’d cots and groves,
Our eye through Honiton’s fair valley roves.
Behind us soon the busy town we leave,
Where finest lace industrious lasses weave.
Now swelling clouds roll’d on; the rainy load
Stream’d down our hats, and smoked along the road;
When (O blest sight!) a friendly sign we spy’d,
Our spurs are slacken’d from the horse’s side;
For sure a civil host the house commands,
Upon whose sign this courteous motto stands—
“This is the ancient hand, and eke the pen;
Here is for horses hay, and meat for men.”
How rhyme would flourish, did each son of fame
Know his own genius, and direct his flame!
Then he that could not Epic flights rehearse
Might sweetly mourn in Elegiac verse.
But were his Muse for Elegy unfit,
Perhaps a Distich might not strain his wit;
If Epigram offend, his harmless lines
Might in gold letters swing on alehouse signs.
Then Hobbinol might propagate his bays,
And Tuttle-fields record his simple lays;
Where rhymes like these might lure the nurses’ eyes,
While gaping infants squall for farthing pies.
“Treat here, ye shepherds blithe, your damsels sweet,
For pies and cheesecakes are for damsels meet.”
Then Maurus in his proper sphere might shine,
And these proud numbers grace great William’s sign;—
“This is the man, this the Nassovian, whom
I named the brave deliverer to come.”
But now the driving gales suspend the rain,
We mount our steeds, and Devon’s city gain.
Hail, happy native land!—but I forbear
What other counties must with envy hear.

Dean Swift, too, was a frequent traveller on horseback, particularly on the Chester and Holyhead road. He seems once to have tried the Chester stage, and ever after to have taken to the saddle. Riding thus in 1710 from Chester to London in five days, he describes himself as “weary the first, almost dead the second, tolerable the third, and well enough the rest,” but “glad enough of the fatigue, which has served for exercise.” After making the journey from London to Holyhead and Dublin in 1726, he wrote to Pope, describing “the quick change” he had made in seven days from London to Dublin, “through many nations and languages unknown to the civilised world.” He had expected the enterprise, “with moderate fortune,” to take ten or eleven days. “I have often reflected,” he adds, “in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the Antipodes.” Swift was by no means indulging in playful banter when he wrote this. He felt a genuine cause for wonder in such expedition; and certainly if the rustic speech of rural England was like a strange and uncivilised tongue, how much more strange and uncivilised the languages of Wales and Ireland must have sounded!

The Dean’s last recorded journey was made in September 1727. The little memorandum-book, tattered and discoloured, in which he noted down many of its incidents is still in existence, and is not only a valuable document in the story of Swift’s life, but is equally precious and interesting as an intimate record of the daily trials and troubles of a traveller in those times, set down while he was still on his journey and thus echoing every passing feeling. Swift was in bad health and worse spirits when he wrote this diary at Holyhead, where he was detained for seven days by contrary winds. It was written for lack of employment afforded to a cultivated mind in the dreary little seaport, and under the influence of a great sorrow. “Stella” lay dying over in Ireland, and he, raging with impatience at Holyhead, filled his notebook with aimless scribbling. “All this to divert thinking,” he writes, sadly, in the midst of it.

The original notebook is still in existence, and is carefully preserved at the South Kensington Museum, to which it was bequeathed by John Forster. Inside its cover the handwriting of successive owners gives the relic an authentic pedigree, and Swift himself humorously declares how he came into possession of the blank book: “This book I stole from the Right Honourable George Dodington, Esq., one of the Lords of the Treasury, but the scribblings are all my own.” This George Dodington was George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe.

On the first page are hastily-scribbled memoranda for appointments: “In Fleet Street, about a clerk of St. Patrick’s Cathedral”; “Spectacles for seventy years old”; “Godfrey in Southampton Street”; “Hungary waters and palsy drops.”

Then the Dean left London, riding horseback, with his servant, Watt, for company on another nag, and carrying his master’s travelling valise. The heavy luggage had been sent on by waggon to Chester. Watt, as we shall presently see, was a veritable Handy Andy, always doing the wrong thing, or the right thing in a wrong way. Swift carried the notebook in his pocket, without writing anything of his journey in it until Holyhead was reached.

A few unfinished lines on an old cassock, out at elbows, preface the diary, which begins abruptly: “Friday at 11 in the morning I left Chester. It was Sept. 22, 1727. I baited at a blind ale house 7 miles from Chester. I thence rode to Ridland (Rhuddlan), in all 22 miles. I lay there: bred, bed, meat and tolerable wine. I left Ridland a quarter after 4 morn on Saturday, slept, on Penmanmaur (Penmaenmawr), examined about my sign verses the Inn is to be on t’other side, therefore the verses to be changed.”[A]

[A] See [p. 21.]

Here, on the verge of the wild Welsh coast, the way was so uncertain and dangerous that travellers had of necessity to employ guides, who conducted them thence to Bangor, and across Anglesey to Holyhead. The roads in Anglesey were unworthy of the name, and only a little better than horse-tracks; while the inhabitants of the isle spoke only Welsh, and understood not a word of English. Nearly two hundred years have passed, but although the roads have been made good, the folks of Anglesey speak English no more than they did then, when the guides acted the part of interpreters as well.

Swift, therefore, is found at Conway, mentioning the guide who had already brought him safely over Penmaenmawr: “I baited at Conway, the guide going to another Inn; the maid of the old Inn saw me in the street and said that was my horse, she knew me. There I dined, and sent for Ned Holland, a Squire famous for being mentioned in Mr. Lyndsay’s verses to Day Morice. I there again saw Hook’s tomb, who was the 41st child of his mother, and had himself 27 children, he dyed about 1638. There is a note here that one of his posterity new furbished up the inscription. I had read in Abp. Williams’ Life that he was buryed in an obscure Church in North Wales. I enquired, and heard that it was at[B] ... Church, within a mile of Bangor, whither I was going. I went to the Church, the guide grumbling. I saw the Tomb with his Statue kneeling (in marble). It began thus (Hospes lege et relege quod in hoc obscuro sacello non expectares. Hic jacet omnium Praesulum celeberrimus). I came to Bangor and crossed the Ferry, a mile from it, where there is an Inn, which, if it be well kept, will break Bangor. There I lay; it was 22 miles from Holyhead.”

[B] It was Llandegai.

This was the “George” at Menai Straits, a house that until the building of Telford’s suspension bridge in 1825, flourished greatly on the traffic of the ferry that then plied between it and the opposite shore. Large additions have been made to the hotel, but the original wing that Swift knew is still in existence, and is a characteristic specimen of the architecture in vogue about the time of Queen Anne.

Swift unfortunately tells us nothing of the actual crossing of the Straits. He must have been up at an unconscionable hour, for he was already on the Anglesey side by four o’clock the next morning, Sunday: “I was on horseback at 4 in the morning resolving to be at Church at Holyhead, but we then lost Owain Tudor’s tomb at Penmarry.” This was Penmynydd, a very steep and craggy place, whence came those Tudors who through the fortunate marriage of Owain Tudor came at last to the throne of England.

“We passed the place,” says Swift, “being a little out of the way, by the Guide’s knavery, who had no mind to stay. I was now so weary with riding that I was forced to stop at Langueveny (Llangefni), 7 miles from the Ferry, and rest two hours. Then I went on very weary, but in a few miles more Watt’s horse lost his two fore-shoes. So the Horse was forced to limp after us. The Guide was less concerned than I. In a few miles more my Horse lost a fore-shoe and could not go on the rocky ways. I walked above two miles, to spare him. It was Sunday, and no Smith to be got. At last there was a Smith in the way: we left the Guide to shoe the horses and walked to a hedge Inn 3 miles from Holyhead. There I stayed an hour with no ale to be drunk. A boat offered, and I went by sea and sayled in it to Holyhead. The Guide came about the same time. I dined with an old Innkeeper, Mrs. Welch, about 3, on a Loyne of mutton very good, but the worst ale in the world, and no wine, for the day before I came here a vast number went to Ireland after having drunk out all the wine. There was stale beer, and I tryed a receit of Oyster shells which I got powdered on purpose; but it was good for nothing. I walked on the rocks in the evening, and then went to bed and dreamt I had got 20 falls from my Horse.

“Monday, Sept. 25.—The Captain talks of sailing at 12. The talk goes off, the wind is fair, but he says it is too fierce. I believe he wants more Company. I had a raw Chicken for dinner and Brandy with water for my drink. I walked morning and afternoon among the rocks. This evening Watt tells me that my landady whispered him that the Grafton packet-boat just come in had brought her 18 bottles of Irish Claret. I secured one, and supped on part of a neat’s tongue which a friend at London had given Watt to put up for me, and drank a pint of the wine, which was bad enough. Not a soul is yet come to Holyhead, except a young fellow who smiles when he meets me and would fain be my companion, but it has not come to that yet. I writ abundance of verses this day; and several useful hints, tho’ I say it. I went to bed at ten and dreamt abundance of nonsense.

“Tuesday 26th.—I am forced to wear a shirt 3 days for fear of being lowsy. I was sparing of them all the way. It was a mercy there were 6 clean when I left London;—otherwise Watt (whose blunders would bear an history) would have got them all in the great Box of goods which went by the Carrier to Chester. He brought but one crevat, and the reason he gave was because the rest were foul and he thought he should not get foul linen into the Portmanteau. For he never dreamt it might be washed on the way. My shirts are all foul now, and by his reasoning I fear he will leave them at Holyhead when we go. I got a small Loyn of mutton but so tough I could not chew it, and drank my second pint of wine. I walked this morning a good way among the rocks, and to a hole in one of them from whence at certain periods the water spurted up several feet high. It rained all night and hath rained since dinner. But now the sun shines and I will take my afternoon walk. It was fiercer and wilder weather than yesterday, yet the Captain now dreams of sailing. To say the truth Michaelmas is the worst season in the year. Is this strange stuff? Why, what would you have me do? I have writ verses and put down hints till I am weary. I see no creature. I cannot read by candle-light. Sleeping will make me sick. I reckon myself fixed here, and have a mind like Marshall Tallard to take a house and garden. I wish you a Merry Christmas and expect to see you by Candlemas. I have walked this morning about 3 miles on the rocks; my giddiness, God be thanked, is almost gone and my hearing continues. I am now retired to my chamber to scribble or sit humdrum. The night is fair and they pretend to have some hopes of going to-morrow.

“September 26th.—Thoughts upon being confined at Holyhead. If this were to be my settlement during life I could content myself a while by forming new conveniences to be easy, and should not be frightened either by the solitude or the meanness of lodging, eating or drinking. I shall say nothing about the suspense I am in about my dearest friend because that is a case extraordinary, and therefore by way of comfort. I will speak as if it were not in my thoughts, and only as a passenger who is in a scurvy, unprovided comfortless place without one companion, and who therefore wants to be at home where he hath all conveniences proper for a gentleman of quality. I cannot read at night, and I have no books to read in the day. I have no subject at present in my head to write upon. I dare not send my linen to be washed for fear of being called away at half an hour’s warning, and then I must leave them behind, which is a serious Point. I live at great expense without one comfortable bit or sup. I am afraid of joyning with passengers for fear of getting acquaintance with Irish. The days are short and I have five hours a night to spend by myself before I go to Bed. I should be glad to converse with Farmers or shopkeepers, but none of them speak English. A Dog is better company than the Vicar, for I remember him of old. What can I do but write everything that comes into my head? Watt is a booby of that species which I dare not suffer to be familiar with me, for he would ramp on my shoulders in half an hour. But the worst part is in my half-hourly longing, and hopes and vain expectations of a wind, so that I live in suspense which is the worst circumstance of human nature. I am a little wrung from two scurvy disorders, and if I should relapse there is not a Welsh house-cur that would not have more care taken of him than I, and whose loss would not be more lamented. I confine myself to my narrow chamber in all unwalkable hours. The Master of the pacquet-boat, one Jones, hath not treated me with the least civility, although Watt gave him my name. In short I come from being used like an Emperor to be used worse than a Dog at Holyhead. Yet my hat is worn to pieces by answering the civilities of the poor inhabitants as they pass by. The women might be safe enough who all wear hats yet never pull them off, and if the dirty streets did not foul their petticoats by courtesying so low. Look you; be not impatient, for I only wait till my watch makes 10 and then I will give you ease and myself sleep, if I can. O’ my conscience you may know a Welsh dog as well as a Welsh man or woman, by its peevish passionate way of barking. This paper shall serve to answer all your questions about my journey, and I will have it printed to satisfy the kingdom. Forsan et haec olim is a damned lye, for I shall always fret at the remembrance of this imprisonment. Pray pity your Watt for he is called dunce, puppy and lyar 500 times an hour, and yet he means not ill for he means nothing. Oh for a dozen bottles of Deanery wine and a slice of bread and butter! The wine you sent us yesterday is a little upon the sour. I wish you had chosen a better. I am going to bed at ten o’clock because I am weary of being up.

“Wednesday.—To-day we were certainly to sayl: the morning was calm. Watt and I walked up the mountain Marucia, properly called Holyhead or Sacrum Promontorium by Ptolemy, 2 miles from this town. I took breath 59 times. I looked from the top to see the Wicklow hills, but the day was too hazy, which I felt to my sorrow; for returning we were overtaken by a furious shower. I got into a Welsh cabin almost as bad as an Irish one. There were only an old Welsh woman sifting flour who understood no English, and a boy who fell a roaring for fear of me. Watt (otherwise called unfortunate Jack) ran home for my coat, but stayed so long that I came home in worse rain without him, and he was so lucky to miss me, but took good care to convey the key of my room where a fire was ready for me. So I cooled my heels in the Parlour till he came, but called for a glass of Brandy. I have been cooking myself dry, and am now in my night gown.... And so I wait for dinner. I shall dine like a King all alone, as I have done these six days. As it happened, if I had gone straight from Chester to Park-gate 8 miles I should have been in Dublin on Sunday last. Now Michaelmas approaches, the worst time in the year for the sea, and this rain has made these parts unwalkable, so I must either write or doze. Bite, when we were in the wild cabin I order Watt to take a cloth and wipe my wet gown and cassock: it happened to be a meal-bag, and as my gown dryed it was all daubed with flour well cemented with the rain. What do I but see the gown and cassock well dryed in my room, and while Watt was at dinner I was an hour rubbing the meal out of them, and did it exactly. He is just come up, and I have gravely bid him take them down to rub them, and I wait whether he will find out what I have been doing. The Rogue is come up in six minutes, and says there were but few specks (tho’ he saw a thousand at first), but neither wondered at it, nor seemed to suspect me who laboured like a horse to rub them out. The 3 packet boats are now all on their side, and the weather grown worse, and so much rain that there is an end of my walking. I wish you would send me word how I shall dispose of my time. I am as insignificant a person here as parson Brooke is in Dublin; by my conscience I believe Cæsar would be the same without his army at his back. Well, the longer I stay here the more you will murmur for want of packets. Whoever would wish to live long should live here, for a day is longer than a week, and if the weather be foul, as long as a fortnight. Yet here I could live with two or three friends in a warm house and good wine; much better than being a slave in Ireland. But my misery is that I am in the very worst part of Wales under the very worst circumstances, afraid of a relapse, in utmost solitude, impatient for the condition of our friend, not a soul to converse with, hindered from exercise by rain, caged up in a room not half so large as one of the Deanery closets; my Room smokes into the bargain, but the weather is too cold and moist to be without a fire. There is or should be a proverb here: When Mrs. Welch’s chimney smokes, ’Tis a sign she’ll keep her folks, But when of smoke the room is clear, It is a sign we shan’t stay here. All this to divert thinking. Tell me, am not I a comfortable wag? The Yatcht is to leave for Lord Carteret on the 14th of October. I fancy he and I shall come over together. I have opened my door to let in the wind that it may drive out the smoke. I asked the wind why he is so cross; he assures me ’tis not his fault, but his cursed Master, Eolus’s. Here is a young Jackanapes in the Inn waiting for a wind who would fain be my companion, and if I stay here much longer I am afraid all my pride and grandeur will truckle to comply with him, especially if I finish these leaves that remain; but I will write close and do as the Devil did at mass, pull the paper with my teeth to make it hold out.

“Thursday.—’Tis allowed that we learn patience by suffering. I have not spirit enough now left me to fret. I was so cunning these three last days that whenever I began to rage and storm at the weather I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in hope by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up.... Well, it is now three in the afternoon. I have dined and revisited the master; the wind and tide serve, and I am just taking boat to go to the ship. So adieu till I see you at the Deanery.

“Friday, Michaelmas Day.—You will now know something of what it is to be at sea. We had not been half an hour in the ship till a fierce wind rose directly against us; we tryed a good while, but the storm still continued; so we turned back, and it was 8 at night dark and rainy before the ship got back, and at anchor. The other passengers went back in a boat to Holyhead; but to prevent accidents and broken shins I lay all night on board, and came back this morning at 8. Am now in my chamber, where I must stay and get a fresh stock of patience.”

EPIGRAM SCRATCHED WITH A DIAMOND-RING ON A WINDOW-PANE BY DEAN SWIFT.

So ends this curious diary. This is the last time that Swift is known to have visited England, and it has always been assumed, from the lack of evidence of his again touching these shores, that he never did return. But he was mentally active until 1736, and it was not until 1745 that he died, in madness and old age. Meanwhile, there still exists indisputable evidence of his travelling along the Holyhead Road in 1730; for an old diamond-shaped pane of glass, formerly in a window of the “Four Crosses” Inn at Willoughby, and deeply tinged with a greenish hue, as much old glass commonly is, may be found in private possession at Rugby, inscribed by him with a diamond ring. The handwriting compares exactly with that of his diary and other manuscripts still extant, and the ferocity of the humour in the lines is characteristic of him. Other windows, at Chester and elsewhere, are known to have been inscribed by him with epigrams and satirical verses, but they do not appear to have survived. The occasion of his offering this advice to the landlord of what was then the “Three Crosses” has always been said to have been the landlady’s disregard of his importance. Anxious to set off early in the morning, he could by no means hurry the good woman over the preparation of his breakfast. She told him; “he must wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time in this manner.

John Wesley was of this varied company of horsemen, and in a long series of years rode into every nook and corner of England. His “Journal,” abounding with details of his adventures on these occasions, proves him to have been a hard rider and among the most robust and enduring of travellers in that age. He rode incredible distances in the day, very frequently from sixty to seventy miles. Once, in 1738, he travelled in this way from London to Shipston-on-Stour, a distance of 82¾ miles, and ended the long day, as usual with him, in religious counsel. “About eight,” he says, “it being rainy and very dark, we lost our way, but before nine came into Shipston, having rode over, I know not how, a narrow footbridge which lay across a deep ditch near the town. After supper I read prayers to the people of the inn, and explained the Second Lesson; I hope not in vain.” The next day this indefatigable traveller and missioner rode 59 miles, to Birmingham, Hednesford, and Stafford; and the next a further 53 miles, to Manchester, feeling faint (and no wonder!) on the way, at Altrincham. In November 1745, riding from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Wednesbury, he did not experience many difficulties until he came, in the dark, to Wednesbury Town-end, where he and his companion stuck fast. That is indeed a bad road in which a horse sticks. However, people coming with candles, Wesley himself got out of the quagmire and went off to preach, while the horses were disengaged from their awkward position by local experts. The spot where Wesley was bogged is now a broad and firm macadamised road through Wednesbury, part of the great Holyhead Road. Eighteen years before this happening, an Act of Parliament had been passed for repairing and turnpiking the road between Wednesbury and Birmingham; but, although the turnpike gates may have been in existence, the road itself certainly does not seem to have been repaired, and must have remained in the condition described in the preamble to that Act, when it was “so ruinous and bad that in the winter season many parts thereof are impassable for waggons and carriages, and very dangerous for travellers.” At the same time, the road on the other side of Wednesbury was “in a ruinous condition, and in some places very narrow and incommodious”; so it is evident that Wednesbury was in the unenviable but by no means unique position of being islanded amid execrable and scarcely practicable roads.

In his old age Wesley occasionally made use of coaches and chaises, which were then a great deal better and more numerous than they had been forty years earlier, when he commenced his labours; but he did not give up the saddle until very near the last. In 1779, being then in his seventy-seventh year, he was still so active that on one day he rode from Worcester to Brecon, sixty miles, and preached on his arrival there. In 1782, when eighty, he still travelled, according to his own computation, four or five thousand miles a year, rose early, preached, and possessed the faculty of sleeping, night or day, whenever he desired to do so. When he began to travel he rose at the most astonishing hours—hours unknown even to the early-rising, hard-riding, hard-living travellers of that time. Let us look at his record for February 1746, along the Great North Road:—

“16th February.—I rose soon after three. I was wondering the day before at the mildness of the weather, such as seldom attends me in my journeys; but my wonder now ceased. The wind was turned full north, and blew so exceeding hard and keen that when we came (from London) to Hatfield neither my companions nor I had much use of our hands or feet. After resting an hour, we bore up again through the wind and snow, which drove full in our faces; but this was only a squall. In Baldock field the storm began in earnest; the large hail drove so vehemently in our faces that we could not see, nor hardly breathe; however, before two o’clock we reached Baldock, where one met and conducted us safe to Potton. About six I preached to a serious congregation.

“17th.—We set out as soon as it was well light; but it was hard work to get forward, for the frost would not well break or bear; and, the untracked snow covering all the roads, we had much ado to keep our horses on their feet. Meantime the wind rose higher and higher, till it was ready to overturn both man and beast. However, after a short bait at Bugden, we pushed on, and were met in the middle of an open field with so violent a storm of rain and hail as we had not had before; it drove through our coats, great and small, boots, and everything, and yet froze as it fell, even upon our eyebrows, so that we had scarce either strength or motion left when we came into our inn at Stilton.

“We now gave up our hopes of reaching Grantham, the snow falling faster and faster. However, we took the advantage of a fair blast to set out, and made the best of our way to Stamford Heath; but here a new difficulty arose from the snow lying in large drifts. Sometimes horse and man were a well nigh swallowed up, yet in less than an hour we were brought safe to Stamford. Being willing to get as far as we could, we made but a short stop here; and about sunset came, cold and weary, but well, to a little town called Brig Casterton.

“18th.—Our servant came up and said, ‘Sir, there is no travelling to-day; such a quantity of snow has fallen in the night that the roads are quite filled up.’ I told him, ‘At least we can walk twenty miles a day, with our horses in our hands.’ So in the name of God we set out. The north-east wind was piercing as a sword, and had driven the snow into such uneven heaps that the main road was not passable. However, we kept on on foot or on horseback, till we came to the White Lion at Grantham”—from whence Mr. Wesley continued his journey to Epworth, his birthplace, in Lincolnshire.

Wesley’s economy of time and his methods when riding are indicated in an interesting way in his observations on horsemanship:—

“I went on slowly, through Staffordshire and Cheshire, to Manchester. In this journey, as well as in many others, I observed a mistake that almost universally prevails; and I desire all travellers to take good notice of it, which may save them both from trouble and danger. Near thirty years ago I was thinking, ‘How is it that no horse ever stumbles while I am reading?’ (History, poetry, and philosophy, I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times.) No account can possibly be given but this—because when I throw the reins on his neck, I set myself to observe: and I aver that in riding above a hundred thousand miles, I scarce ever remember any horse, except two, (that would fall head over heels any way,) to fall, or make a considerable stumble, while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a tight rein prevents stumbling is a capital blunder. I have repeated the trial more frequently than most men in the kingdom can do. A slack rein will prevent stumbling, if anything will, but in some horses nothing can.”

Dr. Johnson’s is a figure more often associated with coach and chaise travelling than with horsemanship, but in his younger days he could ride horseback with the best. He only lacked the money to afford it. His wedding-day—when he took the first opportunity of teaching his Tetty marital discipline—was passed in a journey from Derby. His wife rode one horse and he another. “Sir,” he said, a few years later, “she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her husband like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and when I rode a little slower she passed me and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice, and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears.”

It has already been noted that judges and barristers formerly rode circuit on horseback. As Fielding says, “a grave serjeant-at-law condescended to amble to Westminster on an easy pad, with his clerk kicking his heels behind him.” In such cases, and when a lady rode pillion behind her squire, clutching him by the waistbelt, the “double horse” was used. This, which was by no means a zoological freak, was the type of horse asked for and supplied by postmasters to two riders going in this fashion on one animal. Like the brewers’ double stout, the “double horse” was specially strong, and possessed more the physique of the cart-horse than the park hack. It was chiefly for the use of the ladies thus riding that the “upping blocks,” or stone steps, still occasionally seen outside old rustic inns, were placed beside the road. They enabled them to get comfortably seated.

Travellers from Scotland to London about the middle of the eighteenth century were accustomed to advertise for a companion. Thus, in the Edinburgh Courant for January 1st, 1753, we find:—

“A Gentleman sets off for London Tomorrow Morning, and will either post it on horses or a Post-Chaise, so wants a Companion. He is to be found at the Shop of Mr. Sands, Bookseller.”

It was then generally found cheap, and sometimes profitable as well, to buy a horse when starting from Edinburgh, and to sell him on arrival in London. Prices being higher in the Metropolis, the canny travellers who adopted this plan often got more for the horse than they had given. This method had, however, the defect of not working in reverse, and so those Scots who returned would have had to hire at some considerable expense, or buy dear to sell cheap, a thing peculiarly abhorrent to the Scottish mind. Dr. Johnson would have characteristically brushed this argument away by declaring that the Scot never did return.

During many long years Scots travelling in their own country followed an equally economical plan. “The Scotch gentry,” said Thomas Kirke in 1679, “generally travel from one friend’s house to another; so seldom require a change-house. Their way is to hire a horse and a man for twopence a mile; they ride on the horse thirty or forty miles a day, and the man who is his guide foots it beside him, and carries his luggage to boot.” The “change-house” was, of course, an inn; and from this custom, when every man’s house was an hotel, the Scottish inns long remained very inferior places.

Fielding throws a very instructive light upon the device hit upon by any two travellers who wished to go together and yet had only one horse between them. This was called “Ride and Tie.” He says: “The two travellers set out together, one on horseback, the other on foot. Now, as it generally happens that he on horseback outgoes him on foot, the custom is, that when he arrives at the distance agreed on, he is to dismount, tie the horse to some gate, tree, post, or other thing, and then proceed on foot; when the other comes up to the horse, he unties him, mounts, and gallops on, till, having passed by his fellow-traveller, he likewise arrives at the place of tying. And this is that method of travelling so much in use among our prudent ancestors, who knew that horses had mouths as well as legs, and that they could not use the latter without being at the expense of suffering the beasts themselves to use the former.”

Not until the first decade of the nineteenth century had gone by did the horseman wholly disappear from the road into or on to the coaches. Let us attempt to fix the date, and put it at 1820, when the fast coaches began to go at a pace equal or superior to that of the saddle-horse. The curious may even yet see the combined upping-blocks and milestones placed for the use of horsemen on the road across Dunsmore Heath.

In thus giving 1820 as the date of the horseman’s final disappearance, it need not be supposed that Cobbett and his Rural Rides are forgotten. He covered England on horseback some years later, but his journeys are not on all fours with those of the horsemen whose only desire was quickly to get from start to finish of their journeys. He halted by the way, and from the vantage-point of the saddle cast a keenly scrutinising eye upon the agricultural methods of the various districts, as seen across the tops of hedgerows, or delayed his travels to harangue the farmers on market-days. Nor is the existence forgotten of those country gentlemen and City merchants who, seventy years ago, rode to and from the City on horseback; but they also formed an exception. Already, by some ten years or so, the commercial travellers, as a body, had left the saddle and taken to what was, in its first inception, essentially the vehicle of the commercial representative. This was the “gig.” The gig at once became a favourite middle-class conveyance. Thurtell, the flashy betting-man, vulgar roué, and murderer, was thought by a witness “a respectable man: he kept a gig.” This aroused the scorn of Carlyle, who coined the word “gigmanity.”

The early commercial travellers, in fact, were long known as “riders,” from their custom of riding horseback from town to town, sometimes with a led pack-horse when their samples were unusually bulky or heavy. The “London riders” sometimes found mentioned in old literature were therefore London commercials. The successive names by which these “ambassadors of commerce,” as they have sometimes been grandiloquently styled, were known are themselves highly illuminating. They were, in succession, “bagmen,” “riders,” “travellers,” and “commercial gentlemen.” They are now “representatives.”

CHAPTER III
DAWN OF THE COACHING AGE

Meanwhile the first stage-coaches had been put upon the chief roads out of London, and had begun to ply between the capital and the principal towns. Stage-coaches are, on insufficient authority, said to have begun about 1640, but no particulars are available in support of that statement, and in considering this point we are bound to look into the social state of England at that time, and to consider the likelihood or otherwise of a public service of coaches being continued throughout those stormy years which preceded, accompanied, and followed the great Civil War that opened with the raising of the King’s standard at Nottingham in 1642, and ended with the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. That victory ended the war in favour of the Parliament men, but the political troubles and their attendant social displacements continued.

It has been said that hawking parties pursued their sport between the opposed armies on Marston Moor, and the inference has been drawn that the nation was not disturbed to its depths by what we are usually persuaded was a tremendous struggle between King and Parliament. Certainly the Associated Counties of East Anglia were little affected by the contest, but theirs was an exceptional experience, brought about by that association, entered upon for mutual protection against either side, and to prevent the scene of warfare being pitched within those limits. It is not likely that any service of coaches ran in the disturbed period, when confidence was so rudely shaken; and it was not until the Commonwealth had been established some years that the first coaching advertisement of which we have any knowledge appeared.

In writing thus, it is not forgotten that somewhere about the year 1610 a foreigner from the wilds of Pomerania obtained a Royal patent granting him, for the term of fifteen years, the exclusive right of running coaches or waggons between Edinburgh and Leith. We have no details of this purely local service, but it is to be supposed that it was little more than a stage-waggon carrying goods and passengers too infirm to ride horseback between Edinburgh and its seaport. We are equally ignorant of the length of time the service lasted.

The next reference to stage-coaches is equally detached and inconclusive. It is found in a booklet issued by John Taylor, describing a journey he made to the Isle of Wight in 1648. He and his party set out on October 19th to see the captive Charles the First, their “gracious Soveraigne, afflicted Lord and Master,” imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle. They “hired the Southampton Coach, which comes weekly to the Rose, near Holborn Bridge”—a statement that at least proves the existence of a public vehicle of sorts. But it is the first and last reference to the Southampton Coach that has come down these two hundred and fifty-odd years. If Taylor tells us nothing of its history, he at least gives a description of the journey that retains something of its original amusing qualities, and, with the lapse of time, becomes something of an historic document:—

We took our coach, two coachmen and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses.
We wheel’d the top of th’ heavy hill call’d Holborne
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soule borne),
And so along we jolted past St. Gileses,
Which place from Brainford six (or neare) seven miles is.
To Stanes that night at five o’clock we coasted,
Where (at the Bush) we had bak’d, boyl’d, and roasted.
Bright Sol’s illustrious Rayes the day adorning,
We past Bagshot and Bawwaw Friday morning.
That night we lodg’d at the White Hart at Alton,
And had good meate—a table with a salt on.
Next morn w’arose with blushing cheek’d Aurora;
The waves were faire, but not so faire as Flora,
For Flora was a goddesse, and a woman,
And (like the highwayes) to all men was Common.
Our Horses, with the Coach, which we went into,
Did hurry us amaine, through thick and thine too;
With fiery speede, the foaming bit they champt on,
And brought us to the Dolphin at Southampton.

Southampton, eighty miles from their starting-point, was therefore a three days’ journey in the autumn of 1648. That they were careful not to be on the road after dark is evident from the time they got to Staines, the first stopping-place. The sun sets at exactly 5 p.m. on October 19th.

The reference to a place called “Bawwaw,” between Bagshot and Alton, is not to be explained by any scrutiny of maps.

Thenceforward until 1657 stage-coaches are not mentioned in the literature of the age, and we set foot upon firm ground only with the advertisement in the Mercurius Politicus of April 9th in that year:—

“FOR the convenient accommodation of Passengers from and betwixt the Cities of London and Westchester, there is provided several Stage-Coaches which go from the George Inn without Aldersgate upon every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to Coventry, in Two days for Twenty five shillings, to Stone in Three days for Thirty shillings, and to Chester in Four days for Thirty five shillings, and from thence to return upon the same days; which is performed with much safety to the Passengers, having fresh Horses once a day. In Mondays Intelligence last the severall sums and rates were by the Printer mistaken.”

The objective of the first stage-coach ever established being Chester naturally provokes inquiry. There seems to have been no other stage upon any road in that pioneer year. The preference for Chester argues a large traffic already existing on that road: men riding post-horses, women riding pillion behind friends, relatives, or servants, or possibly in some stage-waggon whose history has not come down to us. The coach can only have been established to satisfy a pre-existent demand. The question why there should have been more travellers on this route than any other is answered in this being the road to Ireland then generally followed, and Chester itself the port of embarkation for that country. Coventry and Stone were only served incidentally.

The following spring witnessed an amazing burst of coaching activity, for the Mercurius Politicus in April contained an advertisement announcing stage-coaches on the Exeter and Great North roads, to begin on the 26th of that month. They ran from the “George” Inn, Aldersgate Street Without:—

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to Salisbury in two days for XX^s, Blandford and Dorchester in two days and a half for XXX^s, Burput in three days for XXX^s, and Exmaster, Hunnington, and Exeter in four days for XL^s.

“Stamford in two days for XX^s, Newark in two days and a half for XXX^s, Doncaster and Ferribridge for XXXV^s, and York in four days for XL^s.”

Every Monday and Wednesday others were to set forth for,

“Ockinton and Plimouth for L^s.

“Edinburgh, once a fortnight for £4 apeece.

“Darneton and Ferryhill for L^s, Durham for LV^s, and Newark for £111.”

Every Friday,

“To Wakefield in four days for XL^s.”

This advertisement then concluded by inviting passengers to another “George” Inn:—

“Let them repair to the George Inn on Holborn Bridge, and they shall be in good Coaches with good Horses at and for reasonable rates, to Salisbury, Blandford, Exmaster, Hunnington, Exeter, Ockinton, Plimouth, and Cornwal.”

The extraordinarily misspelt names of some of the places mentioned in these notices show how ill-known the country then was. For “Burput” we must read Bridport; for “Hunnington,” Honiton; and for “Exmaster,” Axminster; “Ockinton” is probably Okehampton.

At this time, and for very many years yet to come, the stage-coaches were strictly fair-weather services. With every recurrent spring they were brought out from their retirement, and so early as Michaelmas were taken off the roads and laid up for the winter. How the pioneer coach to Chester fared in its second season is hid from us, but the announcement of its third year, in 1659, is instructive:—

“These are to give notice, that from the George Inn, without Aldersgate, goes every Monday and Thursday a coach and four able horses, to carry passengers to Chester in five days, likewise to Coventry, Cosell (Coleshill), Cank, Litchfield, Stone, or to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Newport, Whitchurch, and Holywell, at reasonable rates, by us, who have performed it two years.

“William Dunstan.
“Henry Earle.
“William Fowler.”

It now took a day longer to reach Chester—assuming that the promise to perform the journey in four days ever was kept; and it will be observed that Birmingham, Shrewsbury, and other places, on a different route than that through Lichfield and Stone, are named in the manner of an alternative. The Chester stage of this year, in fact, varied its itinerary to suit its passengers. The “by us, who have performed it two years,” looks suspiciously like an opposition already threatened; while the “four able horses” insisted on (but not mentioned in the first announcement) reads like an improvement upon a former team that was not able. Those, of course, were times before horses were generally changed on the way, and the same long-suffering beasts that dragged the coaches from London often brought them to their destination. According to the first advertisement of this Chester stage, quoted above, this particular coach was an exception to the usual practice, and actually had fresh horses once a day.

A stage seems to have plied between London and Oxford in 1661, but new coaches for a time were few, and it is said that there were but six in 1662. In the following year a coach of sorts ran from Preston in Lancashire to London; and, as may be gathered from a letter from Edward Parker to his father, it was a very primitive contrivance:—

“I got to London on Saturday last; my journey was noe way pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the waye. The company y^t came up with mee were persons of greate qualitie, as knightes and ladyes. My journey’s expense was 30^s. This travell hath soe indisposed mee, y^t I am resolved never to ride up againe in y^e coatche. I am extremely hott and feverish. What this may tend to I know not. I have not as yet advised my doctor.”

Our natural curiosity on that head cannot be satisfied, for the Parker correspondence ends abruptly there; but we fear the worst. Heading that testimony to the quality of early coach-travelling, we may find it not altogether without significance that from this year forward to 1667 little is heard of coaches. Perhaps those who gave the early ones a trial were glad to get back to their saddles and ride horseback again. However that may be, certainly coaching history, except by inference, is in those years a blank. We may infer services to other towns from oblique and scattered references, but direct information is lacking. That a stage-coach—or possibly more than one—was on the road between London and Norwich in 1665 is to be gathered from the proclamation issued in that East Anglian city on July 20th of that terrible year of the Great Plague, which destroyed half the population of London: “From this daie,” ran that ordinance, “all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London, and come from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons.” Already, before that notice was issued, wayfarers from that doomed city had been struck down by the deadly and mysterious disease, and at Norwich itself travellers hailing from the centre of infection had died, swiftly and in circumstances that struck terror into the hearts of the people. Not that plagues were things unknown; for Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, had died from the vexation and enforced idleness of the Cambridge edict of 1631, forbidding intercourse with London, even then ravaged with an infectious disorder.

What were the first stage-coaches like?

If we are to credit Taylor’s description of the earliest coaches, some of them must have resembled the present Irish jaunting-car, or Bianconi’s mid-nineteenth century coaches, in the manner of carrying passengers. He tells us, in his fanciful way, that a coach, “like a perpetual cheater, wears two bootes and no spurs, sometimes having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in that miserable manner, and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways, as they are when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered.” This boot, or this pair of boots—which did not in the least resemble, in shape or position, the fore and hind boots of a later age—was a method of carrying the outsides in days before the improvement of roads rendered it possible for any one to ride on the roof without incurring the danger of being flung off. No illustration of this type of coach has ever been found, but it seems possible that the back-to-back boots, to carry four, were built on to the hinder part of the coach, and really formed the first attempt to carry outsides.

This type of coach described by Taylor must have been freakish and ephemeral. Those in general use were very different, resembling in their construction the private carriages and London hackney-coaches of the time, and varying from them only in being built to hold a number of people—usually six, but on occasion eight. In Sir Robert Howard’s comedy, The Committee, printed in 1665, the Reading coach brings six passengers to London.

The body was covered with stout leather, nailed on to the frame with broad-headed nails, whose shining heads, gilt or silvered, picked out the general lines of the structure, and were considered to give a pleasing decorative effect. Windows and doors were at first unknown. In their stead were curtains and wooden shutters, so that the interior of an early coach on a wet or chilly day, when the curtains were drawn, must have been a close and dismal place. It was this feature that gave Taylor an opportunity of comparing a coach with a hypocrite: “It is a close hypocrite, for it hath a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness.” The first vehicle with glass windows was the private carriage of the Duke of York, in 1661, and we do not begin to hear of glazed windows in stage-coaches until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when “glass coaches” were announced. It is, indeed, unlikely that glass could in any case have been introduced for the purpose of country travelling at an earlier date, for it would need to have been of extraordinary strength and thickness to survive the shocks and crashes of travel of this period.

All these vehicles were low hung, for the heavy body, slung by massive leather braces from the upright posts springing from the axletrees of front and hind wheels, was too responsive to any and every rut and irregularity of the road to be placed at the height to which the coaches of a century later attained.

In the excessive jolting then incidental to travelling, the body of a coach swayed laterally to such an extent that it would often swing, in the manner of a pendulum, quite clear of the underworks. Occupants of coaches were thus often afflicted with nausea, not unlike that of sea-sickness, and to be “coached” was at that time an expression which meant the getting used to a violent motion at first most emphatically resented by the human stomach.

Although the body of a coach enjoyed a wide range of motion sideways, it had not by any means the same freedom back and forth. A severe strain, in the continual plunging and jolting, was therefore thrown upon the supporting uprights, so that they not infrequently gave way under the ordeal, and suddenly threw passengers and coachman in one common heap of ruin. To aid him in making such roadside repairs as these and other early defects of construction often rendered necessary, the coachman carried with him a box of tools placed under his seat, and it is from this circumstance that the name of “hammercloth”—the hangings decorating the coachman’s seat on many a State carriage—was derived.

Bad as was the situation of the passengers, that of the coachman was infinitely worse. His was a seat of torture, for it was placed immediately over the front pair of wheels, and, totally unprovided with springs, transmitted to his body the full force of every shock with which those wheels descended into holes or encountered stones.

In 1667 a London and Oxford coach is found, performing the fifty-four miles in two days, halting for the intervening night at Beaconsfield; and in the same year the original Bath coach appears, in this portentous announcement:—

“FLYING MACHINE.

“All those desirous to pass from London to Bath, or any other Place on their Road, let them repair to the ‘Bell Savage’ on Ludgate Hill in London, and the ‘White Lion’ at Bath, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the Whole Journey in Three Days (if God permit), and sets forth at five o’clock in the morning.

“Passengers to pay One Pound five Shillings each, who are allowed to carry fourteen Pounds Weight—for all above to pay three-halfpence per Pound.”

This is the first appearance of the epithet “Flying” in the literature of coaches. Possibly it was used in this first instance in order to distinguish the new conveyance from a stage-waggon that must for many years before have gone the journey, as well as to justify the higher fare charged by the new vehicle. The waggon would have conveyed passengers at anything from a halfpenny to a penny a mile; by “Flying Machine” it came to threepence. The term “Flying,” for a coach that consumed three days in performing a journey of 109 miles, raises a smile; but it was only relative, and in contrast with the pace of the waggons of that period, which would probably have made it a six-days’ trip.

This Bath coach would seem to have set the fashion in nomenclature, for in April 1669 a “Flying Coach” began to fly between Oxford and London. It was, it will be noticed, a “coach,” and not a “machine”; the term “machine” did not come into general use until about seventy years later. But although the Oxford coach did not call itself by so high-sounding a title, it made a better pace than the Bath affair, doing the fifty-four miles in one day, between the hours of six o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening. Moreover, its fare—twelve shillings, reduced two years later to ten—was somewhat cheaper. Perhaps one was always charged higher rates on the fashionable Bath Road.

How, in this thirteen years’ interval between 1657 and 1669, had the older stages progressed? The Chester stage was going its way, promising to do the distance in five days, but taking six—a sad falling off from the original four; of the others, presumably continuing, we hear nothing further, and of new ventures there is not a whisper. Yet it is surely not to be supposed that, at a time when coaches ran to Bath, to York, to Coventry, and to Norwich, such a place (for instance) as Bristol would be without that convenience. For Bristol was then what Glasgow is now—the second city. London came first, with its half a million inhabitants; Bristol came next, with some 28,000, and Norwich third, with 27,000. It is, then, only fair to assume that other coaches existed of whose story nothing has survived. A strong reason for coming to this conclusion is found in the publication in 1673 of Cresset’s violent tirade against coaches, not, surely, called forth apropos of the already old-established stages, but provoked, doubtless, by some sudden increase, of which we, at this lapse of time, know nothing. What brief John Cresset could have held for the innkeepers and horse-breeders, and for the other trades supposed to be injuriously affected by the increase of stage-coaches, we know not, nor, indeed, anything of Cresset himself, except that he lived in the Charterhouse.

Between London, York, Chester, and Exeter he calculated that a total number of fifty-four persons travelled weekly, making a grand total for those roads of 1,872 such travellers in a year. A brief examination of his arithmetic shows—as we have already pointed out—that the coaches of that age lay up for the winter months.

His indictment of coaches is to be found in his Grand Concern of England Explained, and is very vigorous indeed, and—as we see it nowadays—extravagantly silly:—

“Will any man keep a horse for himself and another for his servant all the year round, for to ride one or two journeys, that at pleasure, when he hath occasion, can slip to any place where his business lies for two or three shillings, if within twenty miles of London, and so proportionately to any part of England? No, there is no man, unless some noble soul that seems to abhor being confined to so ignoble, base, and sordid a way of travelling as these coaches oblige him to, and who prefers a public good before his own ease and advantage, that will keep horses.”

According to this vehement counsel for the suppression of stage-coaches, they brought the country gentlemen up to London on the slightest pretext—sometimes to get their hair cut—-with their wives accompanying them; and when they were both come to town, they would “get fine clothes, go to plays and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love for pleasure that they are uneasy ever after.

“Travelling in these coaches can neither prove advantageous to men’s health or business, for what advantage is it to men’s health to be called out of their beds into their coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in them from place to place till one, two, or three hours within night, insomuch that sitting all day in the summer time stifled with heat and choked with dust, or in the winter time starving or freezing with cold, or choked with filthy fogs? They are often brought to their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get a supper, and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men’s health or business, to ride all day with strangers oftentimes sick, or with diseased persons, or young children crying, to whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of their boxes and bundles? Is it for a man’s health to travel with tired jades, to be laid fast in the foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in mire, afterwards to sit in the cold till teams of horses can be sent to pull the coach out?”

Cresset was also of opinion that the greater number of the many roadside inns would lose their trade owing to the rapidity of coach-travelling. Here, at least, he exceeded his brief, for coaches by no means attained so speedy a rate of travel as that reached by horsemen. Thoresby, ten years later, is a case in point. He was wont to travel horseback between Leeds and London in four days, but when he journeyed from York to London in the coach, no greater distance than from Leeds, it took six days. Swift, too, in 1710, rode from Chester to London in five days; when the degenerating Chester stage, which had started to perform it in 1657 in four days, had already taken one additional day, and was about to take another. Cresset, summing up such objectionable things as “rotten coaches” and traces, and coachmen “surly, dogged, and ill-natured,” advocated the total suppression of such methods of travelling, or at least—counsels of moderation prevailing—of most of them. In conclusion, he proposed that coaches should be limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and forwards once a week.

Unhappily for Cresset’s peace of mind, coaches did not decay. Nor did they wilt and wither before the onslaught of another writer, who, under the pen-name of “A Country Tradesman,” published a pamphlet in 1678, called The Ancient Trades Decayed, Repaired Again. According to this writer, if coaches were suppressed, more wine and beer would be drunk at the inns, to the great increase and advantage of the Excise; and the breed of horses would be improved, in consequence of the gentlemen who then rode in coaches being obliged to return to horse-riding.

In 1673, in an announcement of stages to York, Chester, and Exeter, the journey to Exeter is put at “eight days in summer, ten in winter.” Here was at least one coach that had already begun to run throughout the year, but its summer performance justified the remarks of those ancients who, seeing the original “four-days” announcement of 1658, had shaken their heads and suspected it would never last.

The year 1678 saw a coach on the road between the important seaport of Hull and the city of York, probably in connection with the York stage between that and London; but our only knowledge of its existence at so early a date is—to put it in rather an Irish way—a reference to its having been taken off. Ralph Thoresby, the Yorkshire antiquary, is our authority. In his diary he notes that he landed at Hull in November of that year, and that the stage-coach was already over for the winter. This Hull and York coach we may suppose to have been in connection with a York and London stage already existing—that original vehicle, started in 1658 and alluded to in 1673, which was to perform the journey in four days, the fare 40s. The first detailed account of the “York Old Coach,” as it came to be known, is found in an old advertisement broadside discovered some years since at the back of an old drawer at the “Black Swan,” in York. It is dated 1706, and is evidently an announcement of the coach resuming its season after one of its annual hibernations:—

YORK  Four Days
Stage-Coach.

Begins on Friday the 12th of April 1706.

ALL that are desirous to pass from London to York, or from York to London, or any other Place on that Road, Let them Repair to the Black Swan in Holbourn in London, and to the Black Swan in Coney street in York.

At both which Places, they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which performs the whole journey in Four Days, (if God permits.) And sets forth at Five in the Morning.

And returns from York to Stamford in two days, and from Stamford, by Huntington to London in two days more. And the like Stages on their return.

Allowing each Passenger 14l. weight, and all above 3d. a Pound.

Also this gives Notice that Newcastle Stage Coach, sets out from York, every Monday, and Friday, and from Newcastle every Monday, and Friday.

OLD COACHING BILL, PRESERVED AT THE “BLACK SWAN,” YORK.

It still took four days, as it had done when first established close upon half a century before. Clearly times and coaches alike moved slowly.

That York even then displayed its sub-metropolitan character will be seen from the footnote to the handbill, relating to the Newcastle coach. Local services apparently radiated from the city to Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, and other places.

Meanwhile, other provincial towns had not been idle, and we must needs make a slight divergence here to give an outline of what Glasgow was attempting in local intercommunication. Nothing thus early was on the road between Glasgow and London, but strenuous efforts were made to link Glasgow and Edinburgh (forty-four miles apart) together by a public service so early as 1678, when Provost Campbell and the magistrates of Glasgow agreed with William Hoorn, of Edinburgh, for a coach to go on that road once a week: “a sufficient strong coach, drawn by sax able horses, whilk coach sall contine sax persons and sall go ance ilk week, to leave Edinburgh ilk Monday morning, and to return again (God willing) ilk Saturday night.” To travel those forty-four miles was, therefore, the occupation of three days. Even thus early we see the beginnings of that spirit of municipal enterprise which has in modern times carried Glasgow so far. Now the local tramway, water, gas, and electric lighting authority, she, so early as the seventeenth century, essayed a public service of coaches.

Like much else in early coaching history, this is merely a fragment; but again, in 1743, Glasgow is found returning to the question, in an attempt of the Town Council to set up a stage-coach or “lando,” to go once a week in winter and twice in summer. The attempt failed, and it was not until 1749 that the first conveyance to ply regularly between Glasgow and Edinburgh was established. This was the “Caravan,” which made the passage in two days each way. It was succeeded in 1759 by the “Fly,” which brought the time down to a day and a half.

In 1697, according to an entry in the diary of Sir William Dugdale, under date of July 16th, a London and Birmingham coach, by way of Banbury, was then running; but such isolated references are quite obscured by the flood of light thrown upon coaching by the work of De Laune, The Present State of London, dated 1681. In his pages is to be found a complete list of all the stage-coaches, carriers, and waggons to and from London in that year. The carriers and waggons are very numerous, and there are in all 119 coaches, of which number between sixty and seventy are long-distance conveyances, the remainder serving places up to twenty or twenty-five miles from London. In that list we find that, although a marvellous expansion of coaching had taken place, some of the places already catered for in 1658 are abandoned. The Edinburgh stage does not appear, and nothing is to be found on that road farther north than York. The reason for the omission was, doubtless, that York, then relatively a more important place than now, had its own well-organised coaching businesses. Travellers from London for Edinburgh would secure a place to York, and, arriving there, book again by a York and Edinburgh coach. The Edinburgh stage from London, once a fortnight, is, indeed, not heard of again until 1734.

Many of the coaches mentioned by De Laune went twice and thrice a week, and a large proportion of those to places not beyond twenty or twenty-five miles from London made double journeys in the day. Thus Windsor had no fewer than seven coaches, six of them in and out daily. The age, it will be conceded, was not without enterprise. But the omissions are striking; Okehampton, Plymouth, and Cornwall, included in the purview of the pioneers of 1658, are not mentioned. Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Leicester, Hereford and others were outside their activities. No one, it seemed, wanted to go to Glasgow; Manchester men were content to ride horseback; Leeds, now numbering some 430,000 inhabitants, and increasing by 2,000 a year, was a town of only 7,000, and the clothiers rode to York and caught the London coach there. To Bath and Bristol, however, there were five coaches; to Exeter, four; to Guildford, three; to Cambridge, Braintree, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Gloucester, Lincoln and Stamford, Norwich, Oxford, Portsmouth, Reading, Saffron Walden, and Ware, two each.

Despite the four coaches between Exeter and London mentioned by De Laune in 1681, the Mayor of Lyme Regis, having in October 1684 urgent official business in London, is found, in company with one servant, hiring post-horses from Lyme to Salisbury. It is quite clear that if there had been a coach serving at the time, he would have caught it at Charmouth, a mile and a half from that little seaport; but there was, for some unexplained reason, a break in the service, and it was not until Salisbury was reached, sixty miles along the road, that he found a stage. The coach fare from Salisbury to London for self and servant was 30s., and he spent, “at several stages, to gratify coachmen,” 4s. 6d.

With the existence of such a volume of trade as that disclosed by De Laune, it is not surprising to find that the scolding voices of opponents to coaching had by this time died down to a mere echo. Instead of reviling coaches, the writers of the age extolled their use and convenience. Thus Chamberlayne, in the 1684 edition of his Present State of Great Britain, the Whitaker’s Almanack of that period, says: “There is of late such an admirable commodiousness for both men and women to travel from London to the principal towns in the country, that the like hath not been known in the world; and that is by stage-coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place, sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging of one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over-violent motion, and this not only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed in one hour as that the post in some foreign countries cannot make but in one day.” Those foreign countries have our respectful sympathy, for Chamberlayne in thus extolling our superiority was singing the praises of four miles an hour!

From the limbo of half-forgotten things we drag occasional references to coaches towards the close of the seventeenth century. In April 1694 a London and Warwick stage was announced to go every Monday, to make the journey in two days, “performed (if God permit) by Nicholas Rothwell”; and in 1696 the “Confatharrat” coach was already spoken of as a familiar object on the London and Norwich road. All we know of the “Confatharrat” is that it came to the “Four Swans,” in Bishopsgate Street Within. Its curious name is probably the seventeenth-century spelling of the word “confederate,” and the coach itself was, no doubt, run by an association, or “confederacy,” of owners and innkeepers, in succession to some unlucky person who singly had attempted it and failed.

On some roads enterprise slackened. Thus, in 1700, the “Fly” coach to Exeter slept the fifth night from London at Axminster, where the next morning a woman “shaved the coach,” and on the afternoon of the sixth day it crawled into Exeter. Forty-three years earlier it had taken only four days.

BIRMINGHAM
STAGE-COACH,

In Two Days and a half; begins May the
24th, 1731.

SETS out from the Swan-Inn in Birmingham, every Monday at six a Clock in the Morning, through Warwick, Banbury and Alesbury, to the Red Lion Inn in Aldersgate street, London, every Wednesday Morning: And returns from the said Red Lion Inn every Thursday Morning at five a Clock the same Way to the Swan-Inn in Birmingham every Saturday, at 21 Shillings each Passenger, and 18 Shillings from Warwick, who has liberty to carry 14 Pounds in Weight, and all above to pay One Penny a Pound.

Perform d (if God permit)

By Nicholas Rothwell.

The Weekly Waggon sets out every Tuesday from the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham, to the Red Lion Inn aforesaid, every Saturday, and returns from the said Inn every Monday, to the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham every Thursday.

Note, By the said Nicholas Rothwell at Warwick, all Persons may be furnished with a ‘By-Coach,’ Chariot, Chaise or Hearse, with a Mourning Coach and able Horses, to any Part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates: And also Saddle Horses to be had

OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL.

Nicholas Rothwell, of the London and Warwick stage in 1694, reappears in an extremely interesting broadsheet advertisement of 1731, announcing that the “Birmingham stage-coach in two days and a half begins, May the 24th.” Although we have no earlier information of this coach, it is probably safe to assume that this, like the advertisement of the York coach already quoted, merely advertised the beginning of a new season, and that winter was still largely, as it had been seventy-six years before, a blank in the coaching world. Rothwell was evidently established at Warwick, and seems to have been the first notable coach-proprietor, the forerunner of the Chaplins, Nelsons, Mountains, Shermans and Ibbersons of a later age. By his old advertisement we see that he catered for all classes of travellers—by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise, and waggon—and that he hired out horses to the gentlemen who still preferred their own company and the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneous strangers. Even the dead were not beyond the consideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose “Hearse, with Mourning Coach and Able Horses,” is set forth to “go to any part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates.” Unhappily for the historian eager to reconstruct the road life of those times, this old advertisement is almost all that survives to tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate we are to have even that, for such sheets, as commonplace when issued as the advertisements of railway excursions are at the present time, are now of extreme rarity. It would appear, from the rude woodcut illustrating Rothwell’s bill, that his coach was of the old type, hung on leather straps and quite innocent of springs—the kind of coach that Parson Adams, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, outwalked without the slightest difficulty. It seems to be more up-to-date in the matter of windows, and to be a “glass-coach,” if we may judge by the appearance of the window at which the solitary and unhappy-looking passenger is standing in an attitude suggestive of stomachic disturbance. There are no windows in the upper quarters of the coach, which in that and some other respects greatly resembles the vehicle pictured in 1747 by Hogarth in his Inn Yard.

THE STAGE-COACH, 1783. After Rowlandson.

Rothwell’s coach is drawn by four horses in hand, with a postilion on the off horse of a couple of extra leaders. The practice of using six horses and a postilion is one to which we find allusion in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, written nine years later than the date of this Birmingham coach. The curious will find the description in the twelfth chapter of that novel, where Joseph, recovering from the murderous attack of two highwaymen, attracts the attention of the postilion of a passing stage-coach. “The postilion, hearing a man’s groans, stopped his horses, and told the coachman he was certain there was a dead man lying in the ditch, for he heard him groan.” (That postilion surely was an Irishman.) “‘Go on, sirrah!’ says the coachman: ‘we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.’ A lady, who heard what the postilion said, and likewise heard the groan, called eagerly to the coachman to stop and see what was the matter. Upon which, he bid the postilion alight and look into the ditch. He did so, and returned, ‘That there was a man sitting upright, as naked as ever he was born.’ ‘O J—sus!’ cried the lady; ‘a naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him!’”

Rowlandson shows that in 1783 six horses were still used, and that a postilion continued to ride one of the leaders. It was about this same period that the generally misquoted remark about the ease of driving a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament grew proverbial. It had originated so early as 1689, when Sir Stephen Rice, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer and a bigoted Papist, declared for James the Second, and was often heard to say he would drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement. Later generations, knowing nothing of six horses to a coach, and unused to seeing more than four, unconsciously adapted the saying to the practice of their own times.

CHAPTER IV
GROWTH OF COACHING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

All this while the stages had gone their journeys with the same horses from end to end, and travel was necessarily slow. To the superficial glance it would seem that neither the dictates of humanity towards animals nor even the faintest glimmering perception of the possibilities of speed in constant relays had then dawned upon coach-proprietors; but it would be too gross an error to convict a whole class of stupidity so dense and brutal. It is not to be supposed that, at a time when ten-mile relays of saddle-horses for gentlemen riding post were common throughout the kingdom, the advantages of frequent changes and fresh animals were hidden from men whose daily business it was to do with coaches and horses. The real reasons for the bad old practice were many. They lay in the uncertainty of passengers, in the extreme difficulty of arranging for changes at known places of call, and, above all, in the impossibility of those coaches changing whose route between given starting-point and destination was altered to suit the convenience of travellers.

The first hint of quicker travel and of a better age for horses is obtained in this advertisement of the Newcastle “Flying Coach,” May 9th, 1734:—

“A coach will set out towards the end of next week for London, or any place on the road. To be performed in nine days, being three days sooner than any other coach that travels the road: for which purpose eight stout horses are stationed at proper distances.”

This, we may take it, was a rival of the old once-a-fortnight London and Edinburgh stage, travelling those 396 miles in fourteen days, and, as we infer from above, reaching Newcastle in twelve. At the same time John Dale came forward with a statement that a coach would take the road from Edinburgh for London, “towards the end of each week,” also in nine days; so that rivalries evidently existed on the great road to the north at that period. No conceivable change can satisfy everyone, and these accelerated services alarmed the innkeepers, who thought they saw their business of lodging and entertaining travellers thus doomed to decay. It was obvious that when the Edinburgh stage travelled an average of forty-four miles a day instead of a mere twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and lay on the road only eight nights instead of thirteen, innkeepers on that route must have lost much custom in the course of the year. Other innkeepers on other roads gloomily heard of these improvements, thought the times moved a great deal too rapidly, and talked of the good old days when travelling was safe and respectable, and an honest licensed victualler could earn a living. All these good folks were, no doubt, greatly relieved when this sudden burst of coaching enterprise died away, as it presently did, either because the proprietors had undertaken to perform more than they could do, or possibly for the reason that they had come to an agreement not to force the pace or cut the fares. Such rivalries and such subsequent agreements were in after years the merest commonplaces of coaching history, and if we seek them here we shall probably be by way of explaining the falling-off that left its traces twenty and thirty years later in the following announcement:—

THE EDINBURGH STAGE-COACH, for the better Accommodation of Passengers, will be altered to a new genteel Two-end Glass Machine, hung on Steel Springs, exceeding light and easy, to go in ten Days in Summer and twelve in Winter, to set out the first Tuesday in March, and continue it from Hosea Eastgate’s, the Coach and Horses in Dean-street, Soho, LONDON, and from John Somervell’s in the Canon gate, Edinburgh, every other Tuesday, and meet at Burrow-bridge on Saturday Night, and set out from thence on Monday Morning, and get to London and Edinburgh on Friday. In the Wintera o set out from London and Edinburgh every other Monday Morning, and to get to Burrow-bridge on Saturday Night; and to set out from thence on Monday Morning, and get to London and Edinburgh on Saturday Night. Passengers to pay as usual. Perform’d, if God permits, by your dutiful Servant, HOSEA EASTGATE.

Care is taken of small Parcels, paying according to their Value.

COACHING ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE EDINBURGH COURANT, 1754.

It is noteworthy that the Sunday was still kept in this year of 1754 as a day of rest. The reference to fares, in the lack of antecedent information, leaves us in ignorance of what the passengers who paid “as usual” really did pay, but it seems that the coach itself was in that year something new and wonderful—a great improvement on what had gone before. The old conveyance, hung on leather straps and with unglazed windows, was discarded, and we have a “glass coach-machine,” on steel springs, and with two ends, whatever they may have been. Also, the coach ran winter and summer. The rough woodcut accompanying this advertisement in the Edinburgh Courant for March 4th, 1754, and subsequent dates, shows us rather a coach built on the lines of the gentleman’s private carriage of that age than a stage-coach. The boasted springs are duly indicated. The driver has four horses in hand, while a postilion, with a face like an agonised turnip, has a couple of leaders.

So much for 1754 on the Great North Road; but 1763 showed that retrogression was still the note of the time in that quarter, for the Edinburgh stage set out only once a month, and only when the weather was favourable did it get to its destination in less than a fortnight.

A feeble effort made about 1739 to expedite travelling on the Exeter Road seems also to have done little. The Exeter “Flying Stage” of that year, purporting to inform the journey in three days, generally took six. In 1752 it was announced that the “‘Exeter Fast Coach,’ for the better conveyance of travellers, starts every Monday from the ‘Saracen’s Head,’ Skinner Street, Snow Hill.” This also, although it promised to get to Exeter in three days and a half, usually took six days in winter.

Its programme was thus set out:—

Monday.—Dines at Egham; lies at Murrell’s Green.

Tuesday.—Dines at Sutton; lies at the “Plume of Feathers,” in Salisbury.

Wednesday.—Dines at Blandford; lies at the “King’s Arms,” in Dorchester.

Thursday.—At one o’clock, Exeter.

It carried six inside, but no outsides.

But let us be just to the coach-proprietors whose fate it was to work the Exeter Road at that time. In that very year a correspondent wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine pointing out the dreadful character of that road. “After the first forty-seven miles from London,” he said, “you never set eye on a turnpike.” There were turnpikes, and, by consequence, well-kept roads, on the way to Bath, and he declared that every one who knew anything at all about road-travelling went to Exeter by way of Bath. As for the country along the Exeter Road, it was reputed to be picturesque, but the state of the road forbade any one making its acquaintance. “Dorchester is to us a terra incognita, and the map-makers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities of Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants, savages, or what they please.”

Meanwhile, manufacturing England was coming into existence, and the growing necessities of trade had brought about an increase of coaches in other directions. Thus Birmingham, whose first direct communication with London has already been shown in existence in 1679, and again in 1731, had set up a “Flying Coach” in 1742, followed in 1758 by an “Improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated” prominent on the axle-boxes. This the Annual Register declared to be “perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.” Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of that wonderful device.

It was not until 1754 that Manchester and London were in direct communication. The desire of the provinces to get into touch with the metropolis has always been greater than that of London to commune with the country towns, and thus we see that it was an association of Manchester men who set up the “Flying Coach,” just as the citizens of Oxford and the good folks of Shrewsbury’s desire to travel to London established conveyances for that purpose, and just as that early railway, the London and Birmingham, was projected and financed at Birmingham, and should, strictly speaking, have been inversely named. But hear what the Manchester men of 1754 said:—

“However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.” The distance, it may be remarked, was 182 miles.

The ancient rivalry of Manchester and Liverpool was roused by this, and four years later the Liverpool “Flying Machine” was established, to travel the 206½ miles between Liverpool and London in three days. The fare, at £2 2s., thus represents about 2½d. a mile. This was followed by the Leeds “Flying Coach” of 1760, advertised to do the 190 miles in three days, by Barnsley, Wakefield, and Sheffield, but actually taking four.

Another great centre of coaching activity at this was Shrewsbury. Those who know that grand old town, seated majestically on its encircling Severn, that girdles the ancient blood-red walls with a flow as yellow as that of the Tiber, will have observed an ancient metropolitan air, an atmosphere of olden self-sufficiency, subtly characterising the place. It is complete in itself: within the double ceinture of river and hoary defensive walls it comprises something typical of each separate estate of the realm. The monarch and the governing idea are represented within that compass by the Castle and by the Council House, and all around are still to be seen the town houses of the old nobility and county families, neighboured by prosperous shops and smaller residences. Shrewsbury, like York and Edinburgh, is in fact an ancient seat of government, delegated directly from the Crown, once as vitally viceregal as the Viceroyalty of India is now and much more so than that of Ireland for long years past has been. Shrewsbury remained the capital of the Marches of Wales until 1689, and the history of the Council that thence ruled the border-lands is still singularly fresh. Nor did it lose its importance even with the abolition of that body; for, more than elsewhere, the town, until the railways came—suddenly breaking up the old order and centralising everything in London—was a centre of social life for wide surrounding districts. The titled and gentle families of Shropshire, Herefordshire and North Wales who had resorted to the old Court of the Marches continued to adorn Shrewsbury, which had its own fashionable season and its own self-contained interests. The whole social movement of those surrounding districts was centred here, and at a time when the great manufacturing future of England had not dawned, creating vastly populated cities and towns, Shrewsbury was not rivalled as a coaching centre even by Bath. A Shrewsbury coach was in existence in 1681, but the roads between the Salopian capital and London proved too bad, and it did not last long, nor was it succeeded by any other coach until the spring of 1753. Stage-waggons were on the road in the interval between 1737 and that date, but they did not fit the requirements of the gentlefolk, who, when they did not ride horseback or drive in their own chariots to London, posted across country to Ivetsey Bank, where they caught the Chester and London stage.

With 1753 the continuous coaching history of Shrewsbury begins, in the starting of the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach,” which journeyed to London in four days, by the efforts of six horses. The distance was 152 miles, the fare 18s. The “Long Coach” was a type of vehicle intermediate between the “Caravan” of 1750[C] and the “Machine,” established in April 1764. It was a cheap method of conveyance, one remove above the common stage-waggons. It set out once a week, and seems to have been so immediately successful that a rival and somewhat higher-class vehicle was put on the road as soon as the coachmakers could build it. It was in the June of that same year that the rival—“Fowler’s Shrewsbury Stage-coach” was the name of it—began to ply to and from London in three and a half days; fare, one guinea inside, outside half a guinea. Thus they continued to run for thirteen years, without the intrusion of a third competitor. We are not told how these outsides were carried. Probably they were obliged to cling to the sloping roof, on which the athletic and adventurous found a fearful joy with every roll and lurch, while those who were neither agile nor imbued with the spirit of adventure grew grey with apprehension. Indeed, it was probably the freak of some wild spirit—perhaps a sailor or a drunken soldier—in seating himself on the roof that first gave coach-proprietors the idea that roofs might be used to carry outsides as well as to shelter the august occupants of the interior. We may be allowed to imagine the arrival of the coach that first carried these freakish persons on that dangerous eminence, and to picture the joy of the proprietor, who thereupon determined that, as these pioneers for the fun of it had arrived safely, there must be a commercial value in places on the roof. The thing was done. Three outsides sat on the front part, with their feet on the back of the driving-box, while one had a place on the box-seat with the driver, and room was left for three more on the hind, and most inconvenient, part of the roof, where, like Noah’s dove, they found no rest for the soles of their feet, and had the greatest difficulty in maintaining their position.

[C] P. 119.

If the “outsides” on Fowler’s Shrewsbury stage of 1753 were not carried on the roof, they must have been carried in “the basket”; but as stage-coaches provided with this species of accommodation were generally stated in their advertisements to have “a conveniency behind,” and the advertisement of this makes no such claim, we are free to assume that the roof was their portion. The “basket” was, however, already a well-established affair. It was a great wickerwork structure, hung on the back of the coach between the hind wheels by stout leather straps, and rested on the axletree. Originally intended to convey the luggage, it was found capable of holding passengers, who suffered much in it in order to ride cheaply. In the racy, descriptive language of the time, this “conveniency” was known much more aptly as the “rumble-tumble.” In this “rumble-tumble,” then, the second-class passengers sat, up to their knees in straw. The more straw the better the travelling, for although the body of the coach had by this time been eased with springs, the basket was not provided with any such luxury, and anything in the nature of padding would have been welcome. Already, in 1747, Hogarth had pictured an inn yard with a coach preparing to start, and had shown a basket fully occupied, and two outsides above.

The coaches were by now hung much higher, and the original driver’s seat had given place to a lofty box, from which the coachman had a greater command over his horses.

The general appearance of stage-coaches at this time has been eloquently described by Sir Walter Scott. They were covered with dull black leather, thickly studded with broad-headed nails, tracing out the panels. The heavy window-frames were painted red, and the windows themselves provided with green stuff or leather curtains which could be drawn at will. On the panels of the body were displayed in large characters the names of the places whence the coach started and whither it went. The coachman and guard (when there was a guard at all) sat in front upon a high narrow boot, often garnished with a spreading hammer-cloth with a deep fringe. The roof rose in a high curve. The wheels were large, massive, ill formed, and generally painted red. In shape the body varied. Sometimes it resembled a distiller’s vat somewhat flattened, and hung equally balanced between the immense back and front springs; in other cases it took the form of a violoncello case, which was, past all comparison, the most fashionable form; again, it hung in a more genteel posture, inclining on the back springs, in that case giving those who sat within the appearance of a stiff Guy Fawkes. The foremost horse was still ridden by a postilion, a longlegged elf dressed in a long green and gold riding-coat and wearing a cocked hat; and the traces were so long that it was with no little difficulty the poor animals dragged their unwieldy burden along. It groaned, creaked, and lumbered at every fresh tug they gave it, as a ship, beating up through a heavy sea, strains all her timbers.

In 1774 the proprietors of the “Original London and Salop Machine, in the modern taste, on steel springs,” announced that, among other improvements, their coach had “bows on the top.” Some consideration of this portentous improvement inclines us to the belief that these “bows” must have been guard-irons on the roof for passengers to hold on by, and to prevent them being thrown off. A little further consideration will perhaps bring us to the conclusion that those “bows” would not even then have been placed there had not some serious accident already happened. Such protection was not uncommon, as may be gathered from an account of a coach journey written by Charles H. Moritz, a worthy German pastor who visited England in 1782. His narrative shows that those who were obliged to ride cheaply had a choice of the basket and the roof, and that although the roof then had no seats, it was provided with little handles, to hold on by. But they were of little use, and when the coach rolled like a ship upon a stormy sea the chances of being flung overboard were still as many as ever. But he, like others, having tried both basket and roof, preferred the latter, and returned to it, groaning with the shocks received in the “rumble-tumble.”

Rowlandson’s picture of a stage-coach in 1780 shows the same preference. Only one passenger is seen in the wickerwork appendage, while the roof, innocent of safeguards or seats, is covered with sprawling passengers who are content to take their chance of an involuntary flight, so that they escape the certain inconveniences of the “conveniency.”

“I observe,” says Moritz, “that they have here a curious way of riding, not in, but upon, a stage-coach. Persons to whom it is not convenient to pay a full price, instead of the inside, sit on the top of the coach, without any seats or even a rail. By what means passengers thus fasten themselves securely on the roof of these vehicles I know not; but you constantly see numbers seated there, apparently at their ease and in perfect safety. This they call riding on the outside, for which they pay only half as much as those who are within.

“Being obliged to bestir myself to get back to London, as the time drew near when the Hamburg captain with whom I intended to return had fixed his departure, I determined to take a place as far as Northampton on the outside. But this ride from Leicester to Northampton I shall remember as long as I live.

“The coach drove from the yard through a part of the house. The inside passengers got in from the yard, but we on the outside were obliged to clamber up in the street, because we should have had no room for our heads to pass under the gateway. My companions on the top of the coach were a farmer, a young man very decently dressed, and a blackamoor. The getting up alone was at the risk of one’s life, and when I was up I was obliged to sit just at the corner of the coach, with nothing to hold on by but a sort of little handle fastened on the side. I sat nearest the wheel, and the moment that we set off I fancied I saw certain death before me. All I could do was to take still tighter hold of the handle, and to be strictly careful to preserve my balance. The machine rolled along with prodigious rapidity over the stones through the town of Leicester, and every moment we seemed to fly into the air, so much so that it appeared to me a complete miracle that we stuck to the coach at all. But we were completely on the wing as often as we passed through a village or went down a hill.

“This continual fear of death at last became insupportable to me, and therefore, no sooner were we crawling up a rather steep hill, and consequently proceeding slower than usual, than I carefully crept from the top of the coach, and was lucky enough to get myself snugly ensconced in the basket behind. ‘O sir, you will be shaken to death!’ said the blackamoor; but I heeded him not, trusting that he was exaggerating the unpleasantness of my new situation. And, truly, as long as we went on slowly up the hill, it was easy and pleasant enough; and I was just on the point of falling asleep, having had no rest the night before, when on a sudden the coach proceeded at a rapid rate downhill. Then all the boxes, iron-nailed and copper-fastened, began, as it were, to dance around me; everything in the basket appeared to be alive, and every moment I received such violent blows that I thought my last hour had come. The blackamoor had been right, I now saw clearly; but repentance was useless, and I was obliged to suffer horrible torture for nearly an hour, which seemed to me an eternity. At last we came to another hill, when, quite shaken to pieces, bleeding, and sore, I ruefully crept back to the top of the coach to my former seat. ‘Ah, did I not tell you that you would be shaken to death?’ inquired the black man, when I was creeping along on my stomach. But I gave him no reply. Indeed, I was ashamed; and I now write this as a warning to all strangers who are inclined to ride in English stage-coaches and take an outside seat, or, worse still, horror of horrors, a seat in the basket.

“From Harborough to Northampton I had a most dreadful journey. It rained incessantly, and as before we had been covered with dust, so now we were soaked with rain. My neighbour, the young man who sat next me in the middle, every now and then fell asleep; and when in this state he perpetually bolted and rolled against me with the whole weight of his body, more than once nearly pushing me from my seat, to which I clung with the last strength of despair. My forces were nearly giving way, when at last, happily, we reached Northampton, on the evening of July 14th, 1782, an ever-memorable day to me.

“On the next morning I took an inside place for London. We started early. The journey from Northampton to the metropolis, however, I can scarcely call a ride, for it was a perpetual motion, or endless jolt from one place to another, in a close wooden box, over what appeared to be a heap of unhewn stones and trunks of trees scattered by a hurricane. To make my happiness complete, I had three travelling companions, all farmers, who slept so soundly that even the hearty knocks with which they hammered their heads against each other and against mine did not awake them. Their faces, bloated and discoloured by ale and brandy and the knocks aforesaid, looked, as they lay before me, like so many lumps of dead flesh. I looked, and certainly felt, like a crazy fool when we arrived at London in the afternoon.”

CHAPTER V
THE STAGE-WAGGONS AND WHAT THEY CARRIED: HOW THE POOR TRAVELLED

We have now arrived at the time when the goods traffic became a prominent feature of the road.

The precursor of all public vehicles was the carrier’s waggon, a conveyance of hoary antiquity, intended in the first instance for the carriage of heavy goods, but finding room for those wayfarers who were too poor to own or hire a horse, or possibly too infirm to sit one even if their means sufficed. At least a hundred and fifty years before the earliest stage-coach was put on the road, the waggon, the poor man’s coach, was creaking and groaning on its tedious way at a pace of little more than two miles an hour. The stage-waggon, in fact, came into use about 1500, and the first glimpse and earliest notice of the carrier’s and stage-waggon business introduces us to a very celebrated waggoner indeed, by far the most notable of all his kind—none other, in fact, than Thomas Hobson, the carrier between Cambridge and London, the grand original of the Chaplin & Hornes, the Pickfords, the Carter Patersons, and Suttons of succeeding generations. Hobson’s London place of call was the “Bull,” Bishopsgate Street Within. When the business was founded is not on record, but it was old-established and prosperous when he succeeded to it on the death of his father in 1568. Under the terms of his father’s will he inherited, among other things, the vehicle with which the carrying trade was conducted, the “cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things thereunto belonging, with the nag.” It is quite evident from this that one cart or waggon sufficed for all the commerce between London and Cambridge at that time. If he did not choose to take these things, he was to have £30 instead, the equivalent of their value, which—taking into consideration the fact that the purchasing power of money at that time would be about six times that of our own—was therefore £180. The “nag” specified in the will was, of course, the horse ridden by the waggoner by the side of the eight-horse waggon team. In old prints of stage-waggons we see that the waggoner did not usually drive his team from the waggon holding the reins, but rode a pony, and, wielding a whip of formidable length, urged on the much-suffering beasts through mud and ruts.

Hobson senior had been a man of wealth and consideration, and his son increased both. In his father’s lifetime he had gone continually back and forth with the waggon, and so continued to go until his death, January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year. He was, as his father had been before him, not merely a carrier between Cambridge and London, but the only one, and specially licensed by the University. He conveyed the letters, too, and had a very lucrative business of letting out saddle-horses. In those days, before coaches had come into existence, and when able-bodied men, despising the slow progress of the waggon, rode horseback, his stable of forty horses, “fit for travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow,” was in great request. From his determination to allow no picking and choosing, and his refusing to allow any horse to be taken out of its proper turn, first arose that immortal proverb, “Hobson’s Choice, that or none”—in other words, no choice whatever. University witlings made great play with Hobson, and when at last he died, quite a sheaf of lyrical epitaphs on him appeared, from the well-known ones by Milton to the more obscure exercises of anonymous versifiers.[D]

[D] For a detailed notice of Hobson, with a portrait of him, see the Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road, pp. 10–12, 32, 140, 157–166.

The business of stage-waggoning obtained its first specific notice so late as 1617, when Fynes Morison, in his Itinerary, mentioned the “carryers, who have long covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from place to place; but this kind of journey is so tedious by reason they must take waggon very early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.”

How early they were accustomed to start, and how late would come to their inns, may be gathered from the great classic instance in Shakespeare, where the two carriers in the First Part of King Henry the Fourth are discovered in the innyard at Rochester preparing to set forth for London. It is two o’clock in the morning, and London but thirty miles away, yet it will not be earlier than “time to go to bed with a candle” before that gammon of bacon and those two razes of ginger are delivered at Charing Cross.

Shakespeare, of course, here wrote, not of the manners and customs of Henry the Fourth’s time, but of what he had himself heard and seen, and what might so be seen and heard on any day, early in the morning, in the yard of any considerable hostelry in the kingdom. He has fixed for ever, in his deathless pages, the road life that existed when the sixteenth century was drawing to its close.

Contemporary with, but originating even earlier than, the stage-waggons were the pack-horses, which dated from a time when even the broad-wheeled wains would have sunk hopelessly in the mud of the best roads in the country. By pack-horse, at an earlier date than 1500, all goods, and even such heavy articles as building-stone, coals and timber, were carried, for the very eloquent reason that, before the passing of the first General Highway Act, in 1555, which was the first obligation upon the parishes to repair and maintain the roads, nothing had been done to keep them in repair for many centuries; and the parishes, with the best will in the world, could not at once retrieve them from their desperate condition. Wheeled traffic had been unknown until the early stage-waggons appeared, and those few who travelled otherwise than afoot or on their own horses were content to mount the pack-saddle of a patient and long-suffering pack-horse, themselves only a degree less long-suffering and patient. Then the etymology of the words “travel” and “journey” was abundantly justified; for it was sorrow and hard labour to leave one’s own fireside, and a day’s journey was—what the word “journey” implies—the passing from place to place within the hours of daylight. No one dared travel the roads when night had fallen, and it was not until the eighteenth century had dawned that coaches began to run by night as well as day.

In far parts of the country and on the by-roads the pack-horse train lasted an incredible time. Wheeled conveyances of any kind were, generally speaking, impossible on any but the principal roads. The farmers and higglers who had occasion to transport heavier loads than it was possible for horses to carry, used a primitive kind of sledge, formed of tree-trunks, of which the light tapering ends formed the shafts and the heavy bodies of the trunks the runners. Thus the building materials were of old often carried or dragged, with much friction and waste of effort, to their destination. In Devon and Cornwall these truly savage makeshifts were called by the peculiarly descriptive name of “truckamucks.”

When Smollett, the novelist, travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh and on to London as a young man, in 1739, he rode pack-horse as far as Newcastle, for the simple reason that between Glasgow and the Tyne there was neither coach, cart, nor waggon on the road; and in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Devon and Cornwall, and the like extreme corners of the land, where remoteness from the world and the rugged nature of the country conspired to exclude wheels, the packman and his small but sturdy breed of laden horses alone kept the rural districts supplied with their barest requirements until the first years of the nineteenth century were come. The old packmen’s and drovers’ ways, narrow and winding to avoid the turnpike-gates that once took toll of all but the foot-passenger, may still be traced on the Yorkshire wolds, along the shoulders of the Westmorland and Cumberland fells, and by the rivers and moors of Devon and Cornwall. Often they are not even lanes, but only precipitous and rocky tracks, eloquent of those old times that are commonly pictured so rosy, but were really very grey and dour. Here and there the sign of the “Pack Horse” still survives, and marks the old houses of entertainment once frequented by the packmen of that vanished past. The “Pack Horse” at Chippenham and those two old houses at Turnham Green, the “Old Pack Horse” and the “Pack Horse and Talbot” were halting-places of the packmen who travelled the Bath Road. The last-named house is now little more than an ordinary London “public,” but it still displays a picture-sign, copied from an old original, showing a pack-horse with a talbot by his side; the “talbot” being the old English hound, something between a foxhound and a bloodhound, a fierce creature who guarded his master’s property from the thieves and dangers of all kinds that then befell so constantly along the roads, or even at the often ill-famed inns by the wayside.

An attempt to supplant the pack-horses between London and Shrewsbury was made in 1737, by the establishment of the “Gee-ho.” Facts relating to this conveyance are of especial interest, because we are told the circumstances that led to it being put on the road. It seems, then, that until that year Shrewsbury had known no other than a pack-horse service, which set out from and came to what was then the “Pheasant,” now the “Lion and Pheasant,” Inn on Wyle Cop, in that town. A Mrs. Warner, a widow, was landlady, and apparently pack-horse proprietor as well. A shrewd fellow named Carter, a soldier who had been billeted at the inn, made love to the widow, married her, and managed the business. Let us hope they were both happy and successful. At any rate, Carter started the “Gee-ho” as the first conveyance to ply between Shrewsbury and London. It was a stage-waggon, drawn by eight horses, with two others in reserve to pull it out of those sloughs that might then be confidently expected on the way. It was advertised to go to or from London in seven, eight, or nine days in either direction, according to the condition of the roads.

Smollett’s description of how Roderick Random and Strap easily overtook the waggon journeying to London along the Great North Road naturally leads to an inquiry why, if being ill-provided with money and only lightly burdened with luggage, they, in common with others, preferred to pay for the doubtful privilege of going slower than they could easily walk. The reason, perhaps, lay partly in that lack of appreciation of scenery which characterised the period. Poets had not yet seen fit to rhapsodise upon the beauties of nature, and artists had not begun to paint them. Both were in thrills of the most exquisite rapture on the subject of shepherds and shepherdesses, but their Arcady was bounded by bricks and mortar. Strephon and Chloe wore silk and satin, red-heeled shoes and wigs, and patched and powdered amazingly. Theirs was a bandbox Arcady, a pretty bit of make-believe of the kind pictured by Watteau; and though they found much poetry in lambs, they knew nothing of the wintry horrors experienced by the genuine shepherds in the lambing season, and, indeed, nothing of nature outside the well-ordered parks and formal gardens of the great. All classes alike looked with horror upon natural scenery, regarded the peasantry as barbarians, and left the towns with reluctance and dismay.

With feelings of this kind animating the time, it is not surprising that even humble wayfarers, ill able to spare the money, should have sought the shelter and the society that the interior of the stage-waggons afforded. Other reasons existed, little suspected by the present generation, whose great main roads, at any rate, are well defined and excellently well kept. No one, nowadays, once set upon the great roads to York and Edinburgh, to Exeter, to Portsmouth, Dover or Bath, need ask his way. It is only necessary to keep straight ahead. In those old days, however, when travellers could describe the visible road as being a narrow track three feet wide, occasionally rising out of the profound depths of mud and water on either side, no one who could afford to pay would walk, even assuming the very doubtful physical possibility of struggling through such sloughs afoot.

In 1739 two Glasgow merchants, going horseback from Glasgow by Edinburgh to London, found no turnpike road until they had gone three-quarters of their journey, and were come to Grantham. Up to that point they travelled on a narrow causeway, and met from time to time strings of pack-horses, thirty to forty in a gang, carrying goods. The leading horse of each gang carried a bell, to give warning to travellers coming from an opposite direction. The narrow causeway not affording room to pass, the horsemen were obliged to make room for the pack-horses and plunge into the mud, out of which they sometimes found it difficult to get back upon the road again. Those were the times when coachmen, often finding the old roads impassable, would make new routes for themselves across a country not merely strange to turnpike roads, but still largely open and unenclosed. Travellers then dare not go alone, if only for a very well-founded fear of losing their way, just as Pepys, years before, often did when travelling in his carriage to Bath, to Oxford, Salisbury and elsewhere. He is found paying a guide 22s. 6d. to show him and his coachman the way between Newport Pagnell and Oxford; 3s. 6d. for another to guide him from Hungerford to Market Lavington, and, indeed, after he had experienced the awful seventeenth-century mischance of losing his way two or three times through having economised and neglected to provide this necessary aid, guides everywhere. Travellers then achieved what we moderns are apt to think wonderful things in thus losing themselves. Pepys actually missed his way on the Bath Road between Newbury and Reading, and Thoresby lost himself riding on the Great North Road between Doncaster and York in 1680; in his diary fervently thanking God that he found it again.

Although, by an early Act of William III.’s reign, the justices were ordered to erect guideposts at the cross-roads, and road surveyors were to be fined 10s. if the provisions of the Act were not complied with, such posts (except perhaps on the road to Harwich, so often travelled by the Third William on his journeys to and from the Continent) were conspicuously lacking for many generations yet to come, and no one ever seems to have heard of country surveyors being fined for not performing the duty thus laid upon them. An exception to this picture of an uncharted wilderness thus presented is found in the diary of Celia Fiennes, who in the last decade of the seventeenth century travelled through England on horseback, and especially remarked the Lancashire cross-roads between Wigan and Preston being furnished with “hands pointing to each road, with ye names of ye great towns on.” The fact of her thinking the circumstance worth noting shows us how uncommon it was for roads to be signposted.

Only the waggoners who constantly used the roads could with certainty find their way; and so, and for fear of the highwaymen and the footpads and other hedgerow rascals to whom the smallest plunder was not despicable, the waggon was a welcome friend to the poor. Safety was thought to lie in numbers; although it is true that, in the moment of trial, even a waggonful of able-bodied travellers would commonly surrender their few valuables to the first demand of a single highwayman, whose pistol was probably unloaded, and, even if primed, generally refused to “go off” when fired. It is not unnatural to prefer to be robbed in company with a number of others, rather than to be the solitary victim. For these reasons, therefore, even the able-bodied and unencumbered often chose to tediously travel with the women, the infirm, and those whose luggage compelled. Smollett’s humorous description of the stage-waggon and the follies and foibles of its very mixed passengers is the classic authority for this stratum of road life. The sham captain, really a quondam valet, braggart before the timorous, but shaking with the fear of death upon him when the pretended highwayman appears; his wife, aping a gentility as mean as it is transparently false; the money-loving and peace-loving but satirical Jew; the lively Miss Jenny, and the waggoner, are all types, slightly caricatured, but true to the life of the period. Putting aside the question as to whether such people could be conjured out of his inner consciousness without some basis of fact, we must consider that Smollett, writing of his own time, would not for his own sake be likely to draw a picture which would seem a forced or unnatural representation of the wayfaring life of the period. Thus, when he makes his characters journey for five days in this manner, and brings them on the sixth to an inn where the landlord gives the meal they had bespoken to three gentlemen who had just arrived, we think we learn something of the contempt with which almost every one looked down upon passengers by stage-waggons. The gentlemen themselves said: “The passengers in the waggon might be d——d; their betters must be served before them; they supposed it would be no hardship on such travellers to dine on bread-and-cheese for one day.” And the poor devils certainly would have gone without their meal had it not been for that good fellow Joey, the waggoner, who, entering the kitchen of the inn with a pitchfork in his hand, swore he would be the death of any man who should pretend to seize the victuals prepared for the waggon. “On this,” says Smollett, “the three strangers drew their swords, and, being joined by their servants, bloodshed seemed imminent, when the landlord, interposing, offered to part with his own dinner, for the sake of peace,” which proposal was accepted, and all ended happily.

THE WAGGON, 1816. After Rowlandson.

Such was the picture of travel by stage-waggon it was possible to present to the public in 1748 as a reasonably accurate transcript of road-life.

It was at that time the usual practice among a party of travellers by waggon to elect a chairman on setting out. The one thus set above his fellows arranged with the waggoner where they were to halt during the day, settled with the innkeepers an inclusive charge for meals and accommodation, and was treasurer, paymaster, umpire, and general referee in all disputes. Thus was the ancient original idea of government in larger communities—government solely for the welfare of the community itself—reproduced in these poor folk.

The gradual replacement of the pack-horses by heavy waggons began on the most frequented roads about the third decade of the eighteenth century. Twelve Turnpike Acts for the improvement of local roads had been passed in the ten years between 1700 and 1710. They increased by seventy-one in the next ten years, and no fewer than two hundred and forty-five came into existence between 1730 and 1760, followed from 1760 to 1770 by a hundred and seventy-five more. The great number of five hundred and thirty Acts in seventy-five years shows both the crying needs of the age and the energy with which the problem of road-improvement was grasped by Parliament. If the resulting betterment of the roads was not so great as it should have been, that was due rather to the unbusinesslike methods by which the turnpike trustees despatched their business, and not to the Government.

Aikin, writing of Manchester and its history, tells how the trade of that town, carried on of old by chapmen, owning gangs of pack-horses, began to increase in 1730, consequent upon the improvement of the roads. Waggons were set up, and the chapmen, instead of setting forth with their goods for sale, only rode out for orders, carrying patterns with them in their saddle-bags. Thus the commercial traveller, familiar in all the years between 1730 and the present time, came into existence. During the forty years from 1730 to 1770, says Aikin, the trade of Manchester was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these “riders,” as they were called, all over the kingdom. The goods they sold by sample were delivered in bulk by the waggons.

By 1750, the gradual introduction of two classes of vehicles between the common stage-waggon and the stage-coach had begun. The first of these intermediate types was the Shrewsbury and London “Flying Stage Waggon,” announced to begin flying from Shrewsbury, October 22nd, 1750, to reach London in five days, winter and summer. As Shrewsbury is 152 miles from London, this meant thirty miles a day. Welsh flannels, and consignments of butter and lard and miscellaneous goods, shared this vehicle with the passengers. There was nothing in the build of this new comer on the road to distinguish it from the common stage-waggons, and it only progressed the quicker because, following the newly-established practice of the coaches of that period, it changed horses at places on the way, instead of making the whole journey with one—often tired and exhausted—team. The other type of vehicle was the “caravan” or “long coach,” the next step higher in the social scale. A “caravan” was put on the road between Shrewsbury and London at the close of 1750. It was an affair greatly resembling modern gipsy-vans, and was fitted inside with benches for eight, twelve, or even, at a pinch, eighteen persons. It was drawn by “six able horses,” and professed to reach London in four days, but often occupied the whole of five. The fare to London by “caravan” was 15s.—rather less than a penny-farthing a mile. A six-horsed conveyance answering to this description, but uncovered, is pictured by Rowlandson fifty-six years later, on a road not specified by him.

In April 1753 the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach” began to ply between those places and London, completing the distance in three and a half days; fare 18s. Here, evidently, were several social grades; and when the Shrewsbury stage-coach of the same year, charging a guinea for an inside place, and the “Machine” of 1764, with a limited number of seats at 30s., each came on the scene, the several degrees of contempt with which all these classes of travellers, from those at twopence-farthing a mile down to those others at a penny-farthing, regarded one another and the lowest class, whose shilling a day or halfpenny a mile was the lowest common denominator in stage-waggon travelling, must have been curious certainly, if not edifying, to witness. The usual alternative of a halfpenny a mile or a shilling a day gives about twenty-four miles as a day’s journey for the common stage-waggon, and as the Flying Waggon was advertised to go at the rate of thirty miles a day, six miles a day was therefore the measure of the superiority in speed of one over the other. But the accumulated contempt of all those social scales for the occupant of the common waggon did not rest there, any more than it began with the passengers of the “Machine.” Just as the lordly and gentle folk who had travelled in their own chariots looked down even upon the loftiest heights of stage-coach travelling, so did the poor folk of the waggons unload their weight of contempt upon those poorest of the poor, who, having nothing to lose, feared no one—except perhaps the parish constable, apt to be arbitrary and not always able to distinguish between a penniless but honest wayfarer and a rogue and vagabond. Frequently these travellers in the lowest stratum saw the highwayman approach, not merely without fear but with a certain pleasurable anticipation; because your true knight of the road had a certain generous code of morals, and while he robbed the rich, gave to the needy—a thing perhaps counted to him for righteousness by that recording angel who effaced the record of Uncle Toby’s hasty imprecation with a kindly obliterating tear.

THE STAGE-WAGGON, 1820. After J. L. Agasse.

The general increase of heavy traffic soon after the middle of the eighteenth century did not escape the notice of those responsible for the condition of the roads. Incompetent road-surveyors, ignorant of the science of road construction and employing unsuitable materials and unskilled labour, saw the highways they had mended with mud, road-scrapings and gravel continually falling into ruts and sloughs, often from twelve to eighteen inches deep. Seeking any cause for this rather than their ignorance of the first rudiments of construction, they naturally discovered it in the passage of the heavily-weighted waggons, and raised an outcry against them accordingly. To an age that saw no better method of mending the roads than that of raking mud on to them and throwing faggots and boulder-stones upon that basis, this seemed reasonable enough, and Parliament was at length persuaded to authorise discriminatory rates to be imposed by the turnpike trusts upon carts and waggons whose wheels were not of a certain breadth. The argument was that the broader the wheels, the greater would be the distribution of weight, and consequently the road would be less injured. It was an argument based, correctly enough, upon natural laws, and the age was not educated to the point of seeing that roads should be made to the measure of the traffic they might be called upon to bear, rather than that the build of vehicles should be altered to suit the disabilities of the roads themselves. So, from 1766, a series of Turnpike Acts began, containing clauses by which narrow wheels were penalised and broad ones relieved. Tolls were not uniform throughout the country, but although those one Trust would be authorised to levy might, from some special circumstance, be higher than others, they ranged within narrow limits. Generally, a four-wheeled waggon drawn by four horses, with wheels of a less breadth than six inches, would pay a shilling on passing a turnpike gate; with wheels measuring six inches broad and upwards, the toll would be ninepence; and with a breadth of nine inches and upwards, sixpence. Not at every gate was payment of tolls made in those old days. Payment made at one generally “freed” the next, and sometimes others as well; but here again there was no general rule. Special circumstances made some trusts liberal and others extremely grasping.

A width of sixteen inches for waggon wheels was very generally urged and adopted, and thus it is that in old pictures of this period the great wains have so clumsy an appearance, looking, indeed, as though the wainwrights had not yet learned their business, and from ignorance built more solidly than the loads carried gave any occasion for.

In 1773, one James Sharp, of Leadenhall Street, advertised his invention of a “rolling waggon,” whose rollers (in place of wheels) were of this breadth of sixteen inches, and proceeded to state that “two late Acts of Parliament” allowed all carriages moving upon rollers of that gauge to be drawn by any number of horses or cattle, and further, that they were allowed to carry eight tons in summer and seven in winter, and to pass toll-free for the term of one year from Michaelmas 1773, and after that time to pay only half toll. Clearly, then, in the great mass of legislation for roads and traffic there was then a limit existing for loads and for teams. It only remained for the wisdom of the time to enact laws giving a bonus to every waggon whose wheels exceeded a breadth of two feet—thus making every such vehicle its own road-repairer—for the absurdity to be complete. There had, indeed, already arisen a bright genius with a somewhat similar idea, for in 1763 Bourne published his design of a four-wheeled waggon whose front axletree was to be so much shorter than the hind one that the foremost wheels would make a track inside the hinder. The breadth of wheel, indeed, was not to be more than fifteen inches, but the combined breadth of all four planned thus would flatten out no less than a five-foot width of road, and the heavier the contents of the waggon, so much better for the proper rolling of the way. But this ingenious person took no account of the extra difficulty of haulage, and the consequently larger teams that would be required for this engine of his. It never came into use, nor did the rival invention of another amiable theorist meet a better fate. This device set out to deal with the problem of soft and rutted roads by fixing heavy iron rollers under the frame of a waggon. While the vehicle progressed along good roads these rollers were not brought into contact with the ground, but as soon as the wheels began to sink into foul and miry ways, the rollers came into touch with the surface, and at the same time prevented any further sinking and flattened out all irregularities.

Turnpike roads, being then things “new-fangled” and unusual, were of course disapproved of by all that very numerous class who distrust any change. Doubtful of their own ability to hold their own in any order of things newer than that in which they have been brought up, any change must to them be for the worse. The waggoners to a man were numbered in this class, and, apart from the tolls to be paid on the new roads, objected to them as new. An entertaining contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1752 consulted “the most solemn waggoner” he could find between London and Bath. This was one “Jack Whipcord,” who, like every one else, preferred to go round by “a miserable waggon-track called ‘Ramsbury Narrow Way.’ Jack’s answer was, that roads had but one object—namely, waggon-driving; that he required but five feet width in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest might go to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be damned, and not run gossipping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi. 16.[E] Thus,” says the writer, “finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a profane country wag, I left him, dissatisfied.”

[E] “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”

We are not to suppose, from this imaginary “Jack Whipcord,” that waggoners were generally of a dour and unpleasant nature. Indeed, the consensus of opinion to be collected from old-world literature shows that, as a class, they were pleasant and light-hearted. M. Samuel de Sorbière, a distinguished Frenchman who visited England in 1663 and has left a very entertaining account of his travels, paints a charming little cameo portrait of the waggoner who was in charge of the six-horse stage-waggon by which he travelled from Dover to Gravesend. The horses were yoked one before the other, and beside them walked the waggoner, “clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and was a merry fellow, who fancied he made a figure and seemed mightily pleased with himself.” “Joey,” too, the waggoner already glimpsed in Roderick Random, was sprightly and light-hearted; and we have the evidence of that old English ballad, the “Jolly Waggoner,” that men of this trade were conventionally regarded as devil-me-care fellows, own brothers in disposition to sailors, always represented as jolly, even in the old days when rations were scanty and bad and rope’s endings plentiful. This jollity is insisted upon, even by the old wayside signs of the country inns. Now and again you may find the sign of the “Jolly Anglers,” while on the Portsmouth Road the “Jolly Drovers” is to be seen, and on the Exeter Road the “Jolly Farmer,” a creature vanished from this country and utterly unknown these forty years and more; but only the waggoners and the sailors are usually known by that adjective. Rarely, indeed, is the sailor described in any other way. In a few instances he may be “Valiant,” but ninety times in every hundred he is “Jolly.”

According to the second verse of the “Jolly Waggoner,” his cheerfulness was invincible:—

It is a cold and stormy night: I’m wetted to the skin,
But I’ll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn,
And then I’ll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Sing wo! my lads, sing wo!
Drive on, my lads, gee-ho!
For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do-o-o?

He knew something of all kinds of weather, and met all kinds of men in his daily journeys, and thus early became something of a philosopher, looking forward for nothing beyond his nightly inn, in whose kitchen he was well known and esteemed, alike for his own qualities and the news and parcels he brought from the outer world on the other side of the distant hills. With a sack over his shoulders and peace in his mind, he could greet the rainy days with joke and song, or endure even the wintry horrors of December and January with equanimity; yet when spring was come and grass grew green and the bare, ruined boughs of the trees began to be clothed again with leaves, not even the old heathen Greeks and Romans in their Floralia celebrated the coming again of the sun with more heartiness. His horses and himself were decked with ribbons on May Day, his sweetheart had some longed-for present from the Great City, and not even the blackbird on the hawthorn spray sang a merrier tune, as he drove his team along their steady pace.

It is not a little difficult to pronounce an opinion upon the fares which the poor folk paid by stage-waggon. Prices varied widely. On the Great North Road in 1780, between London and Edinburgh, the measure was, indeed, not by miles but by days; but as the journey took fourteen days, and the fare was a shilling a day, and the distance covered was 396 miles, we can figure it out at about twenty-eight miles a day at something less than a halfpenny a mile. Early stage-waggons to Cambridge, however, appear to have exacted three-halfpence a mile, and moved with incredible slowness, taking two and a half days to perform the fifty-one miles, and sleeping two nights upon the road. On the Bath Road the waggon-fare seems to have been something less than a penny a mile.

We have already seen something of the old waggon-life, as shown by Smollett: let us now inquire into the costs and charges of the journey, apart from the fare. How did these humble folk eat and drink, and how did they lodge for the night when the waggon came to its inn at sunset? Sometimes they slept in the shelter of the waggon itself, under the substantial covering of the great canvas tilt, snugly curled up in the hay and straw, and barricaded by the crates and boxes that formed part of the load—not an altogether uncomfortable, if certainly too promiscuous, a sleeping arrangement. At other times the stable-lofts of the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries, mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides) existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the “basket,” did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the waggons, to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was their portion. Swift himself, that terrible genius of the eighteenth century, who knew the extremities of obscurity and fame, of penury and affluence, was, in his early days, of this poor company. When a young man, travelling from the house of his patron, Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, to see his mother at Leicester, he rode in the waggon, and slept at “the penny hedge-inns,” where they were not above letting a bed for the night to a young man so unusually particular as to pay sixpence extra for clean sheets and a bed to himself—an exclusive arrangement, it would appear, not within the everyday philosophy of those humble caravanserais. He whom not only later ages, but even his contemporaries, unite in acclaiming a genius, generally chose to take his food with waggoners, ostlers, and persons of that station. The superfine Lord Orrery, who recorded these facts, and tells us that Swift “delighted in scenes of low life,” says he “dined” with them; but if Lord Orrery had been as well acquainted with humble circles he would have known that the low people in them do not “dine” at all; they just “have dinner.”