A History of Inland Transport and Communication in England

A HISTORY OF

INLAND TRANSPORT

AND

COMMUNICATION

IN ENGLAND

BY

EDWIN A. PRATT

AUTHOR OF "RAILWAYS AND THEIR RATES"; "GERMAN VERSUS BRITISH
RAILWAYS"; "RAILWAYS AND NATIONALISATION";
"CANALS AND TRADERS"
ETC.

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., Ltd.

BROADWAY HOUSE, CARTER LANE, E.C.

1912

PREFATORY NOTE

Designed as the introductory volume of a series of books—by various writers—dealing with our "National Industries," the present work aims at telling the story of inland transport and communication from the earliest times to the present date, showing, more especially, the effect which the gradual development thereof, in successive stages, and under ever-varying circumstances, has had alike on the growth and expansion of trade and industry and on the general economic and social conditions of the country.

The various phases of inland transport described in the course of the work include roads, rivers, canals, turnpikes, railways, tramways, and rail-less electric traction; and the facilities for communication of which accounts are given comprise packhorses, waggons, stage-coaches, "flying" and mail-coaches, private carriages, posting, hackney coaches, cabs, omnibuses, cycles, motors, motor-buses, commercial motors, and aeroplanes. Reference is (inter alia) made to most of the English rivers and to many inland towns; the origin, achievements, and shortcomings of canals are traced; a complete outline of the turnpike system is given; a short history of tramways comprises the leading points therein; the story of the rise, development and prospects of the motor industry is related; while the evolution and development of the railways and their position to-day both as a means of transport and communication and as constituting in themselves a "National Industry" are treated in such a way as to afford, it is hoped, a comprehensive idea of the railway system from its very earliest origin down to the strikes and the controversy following the close of the Royal Commission of Inquiry in the autumn of 1911.

Incidentally, also, allusion is made to the rise of Bristol, Lynn, Liverpool, and various other ports; the early history of the textile industries, the cutlery trades, the iron trade, the salt trade, and the coal trade is briefly sketched, while the facts narrated in relation thereto should enable the reader to realise the bearing, throughout the ages, of State policy towards the general question of transport. Finally, the present situation and the future outlook are brought under review.

Even as these pages are passing through the press new developments are occurring which confirm the suggestion I have made, on page [470], that "in the dictionary of transport there is no such word as 'finality.'"

While it is still true that the electrification of the London suburban railways has not been generally adopted by the trunk companies, yet the scheme in this connection announced, on November 18, 1911, by the London and North-Western Railway Company (see page [507]) supplementing the action already taken by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company in regard to some of their suburban lines, is significant of a growing determination on the part of the great railway companies to defend their own interests by competing, in turn, with the electric tramways, which have absorbed so much of the suburban traffic of late years.

Following closely on this one announcement comes another, to the effect that a new company is about to set up, in the Midlands, works covering thirty-four acres for the construction of a type of petrol-electric omnibus for which great advantages over the earlier motor-omnibuses are claimed. (This, presumably, is the vehicle which the Tramways Committee of the Edinburgh Corporation, as mentioned on page [470], propose to watch in preference to deciding at once on a system of rail-less electric traction.)

In commenting on the former of the announcements here in question, "The Times Engineering Supplement" of November 22, 1911, observes:—

It is of importance to realise what this decision portends. The history of the matter is that the steam railways were inadequate to fulfil the requirements of the suburbs, and that an opening was thus afforded to municipalities to provide tramways of their own. It was a crude method of dealing with the problem; it robbed the main roads of every vestige of rural character, and it added new dangers and checks to street traffic. Nevertheless it was a necessity, and it served its purpose, first, by providing facilities that were always cheap to the travellers, even if they were occasionally dear to the taxpayers; and, secondly, by stimulating the railway companies to adopt means to get back their lost traffic. Now that the railway companies are fully alive to the opportunities offered to them by electrification, the general aspect of the problem is changed, and additional support is given to the belief that electric railways and motor-omnibuses will carry an increasing proportion of London traffic, and that from some roads at least tramways may even disappear altogether.

In other directions there are reports of individual agriculturists who are constructing light railways of their own to secure direct communication between their farms and the nearest main line railway, sympathetic local authorities having offered them practical encouragement by making only a nominal charge for the privilege of crossing the public roads where this is necessary. A new era in agricultural transport and cultivation is further foreshadowed in the announcement that it is quite reasonable to believe that resort to rail-less electric traction will serve as a means of introducing electrical supply into rural areas for agricultural purposes; while in the House of Lords on November 22, 1911, Lord Lucas, replying for the Government to some comments made by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu on the first report of the Road Board (dealt with on page [481]), said that body considered the most important thing at present was to improve the surface of the roads; but "they had borne in mind the fact that it would be necessary for them before long to undertake larger operations, involving heavier expenditure."

Still further developments occurring, maturing, or under consideration when the text of the present work was already in type include—

(1) A projected alliance between the tube railways and the London General Omnibus Company, following on the conspicuous success obtained by the latter in substituting motor for horsed vehicles for the 300,000,000 passengers it carries annually.

(2) The issuing of "Minutes of Evidence taken before the Departmental Committee of the Board of Trade on Railway Agreements and Amalgamations" [Cd. 5927], containing some notable expressions of opinion by railway managers concerning the future of the railway system, together with much important information on the general subject.

(3) The publication, on December 1, of the Fourth Annual Report of the London Traffic Branch of the Board of Trade [Cd. 5972], which deals with various matters already touched upon in my last three chapters, including the effects of improved transport facilities on the migration of population from the inner to the outer suburban ring; the further widening of the motor-transport delivery radius, to the advantage of urban, but to the disadvantage of suburban traders; the steady substitution of mechanical traction for horse-drawn vehicles of every type—the Report predicting, on this point, that "if two-wheeled horse cabs continue to diminish at the rate of the last two years, they will disappear before the end of 1912"; the improbability of further material extensions of the tramway system, and the assumption that "the competition of promoters for the privilege of constructing tube railways has come to an end"; while the Report also discusses the merits of a scheme for the provision, at an estimated cost of between £20,000,000 and £30,000,000 of about 120 miles of great arterial roads across London for the accommodation of the increasing traffic, and of still another scheme, put forward by a Departmental Committee of the General Post Office, for relieving the streets of London of a good deal of mail-van traffic by the construction of an underground electric railway, 6½ miles in length, and costing £513,000, across the centre of London from east to west, for the conveyance of Post Office matter, the Report further suggesting that this particular system might be found equally applicable to other forms of enterprise which require the use of carts for the frequent conveyance of goods in small consignments between fixed points.

(4) The passing by the House of Commons, on November 22, of a resolution expressing the opinion that a meeting should take place between the parties on whose behalf the Railway Agreement of August 19, 1911, was signed (see p. [448]), "to discuss the best mode of giving effect to the Report of the Royal Commission"; the acceptance by such parties of Board of Trade invitations to a conference, in accordance with the terms of this resolution, and the holding of a conference which began, at the offices of the Board of Trade, on December 7, under the presidency of Sir George Askwith, Chief Industrial Commissioner, and resulted, on December 11, in a settlement being effected.

(5) The prospective increase, from January 1, 1912, of certain season, excursion, week-end or other special-occasion fares (many of which now work out at a rate of a halfpenny or a farthing, or even less than a farthing, per mile) as a means of assisting the railway companies to meet advances in wages, such increases in passenger fares (distinct from any increases in merchandise rates, for a like reason, as foreshadowed by the Government undertaking of August 19, 1911, alluded to on pp. [448] and [511]) being already in the option of the companies, provided the latter do not exceed the powers conferred on them by their Acts, and subject to the condition that on fares of over a penny the mile Government duty must be paid.

(6) The reading, by Mr. Philip Dawson, at the Royal Automobile Club, on December 8, of a valuable paper on "The Future of Railway Electrification," in which—after detailing what had already been done in the United States, in Germany, and, in this country, on the suburban systems of the Lancashire and Yorkshire, the North Eastern and the London, Brighton, and South Coast railways—he showed the practicability and the advantages of applying electric traction (single phase system) to main-line long-distance traffic; announced that the surveys and calculations in connection with a scheme for electrifying the whole of the L.B. and S.C. Railway Company's services between London and Brighton were already far advanced; mentioned that such a transformation would allow of a 10 to 15-minute service to Brighton and of the 52-mile journey being done by non-stop trains in about 45 minutes, or by stopping trains in about 60 minutes; and declared that "the equipment of this line if, as he hoped would be the case, it were carried out, would be epoch-making in the history of British railways."

Thus the whole subject of inland transport is now so much "in the air" that the story of its gradual and varied development, as here told—and this, too, for the first time on the lines adopted in the present work—should form a useful contribution to the available literature on one of the most important of present-day problems.

EDWIN A. PRATT.

December 12, 1911.

CONTENTS

A HISTORY

OF

INLAND TRANSPORT AND

COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The gradual improvement, throughout the centuries, of those facilities for internal communication which reached their climax in the creation of the present system of railways has constituted a dominating factor alike in our industrial and in our social advancement as a people.

Until transport had provided a ready means alike of collecting raw materials and of distributing food supplies and manufactured articles, industries of the type familiar to us to-day were practically impossible; and until convenient and economical means of travel were afforded, England had to be considered less as a nation than as a collection of more or less isolated communities, with all the disadvantages, social and moral as well as economic, necessarily resulting; while the social and moral progress facilitated by improved means of communication reacted, in turn, on the industries by creating new wants for manufacturers and workers to supply.

To the right understanding of the position occupied by our National Industries, it is thus necessary that the special significance of internal communication and its development should, at the outset, be clearly realised from the point of view, not alone of present-day circumstances, but, also, of conditions that either preceded the industries themselves—so far checking their growth that industrial development in Great Britain came at a much later date than in many countries on the Continent of Europe—or else aided materially in the expansion of industries as the disadvantages and drawbacks began to disappear.

That industries existed when internal communication was still in a primitive stage in this country is true enough; but they were "domestic" rather than "national," and it was not until the advent of better means of transport that it became possible for them to begin to pass from the one stage to the other, and, at the same time, to exercise so important an influence on our advancement as a nation. It is no less true that British commerce, conducted by ships obtaining ready access to foreign ports by traversing ocean highways, had made much greater progress at an early period in our history than industries dependent on inland highways that were then either non-existent or scarcely passable; yet, though navigation might advance still further, and though navigators might discover still more new countries, commerce could not hope to attain to the expansion it subsequently underwent until the industries whose operations were to be facilitated by improvement in land communication supplied the merchants with the home commodities which they required for sale or exchange in the markets of the world. Whatever, again, the natural resources of a country—and such resources have certainly been great in our own—they may be of little material value until they can be readily moved from the place where they exist to the place where they can be used; and even then it is necessary that the cost of transport shall not be unduly high.

Transport and communication by land and water have thus become what Prof. J. Shield Nicholson rightly calls, in his "Principles of Political Economy," "the bases of industrial organisation"; and it is to industrial organisation that a country such as ours has been indebted in a pre-eminent degree both for its material prosperity and for the position it occupies to-day among the nations of the world. But just as British engineers long regarded the subject of road construction and road repairs as beneath their notice, and left such work to be done by any parish "surveyor," subsidised pauper or "Blind Jack of Knaresboro'," who thought fit to engage in it, so have most writers of history, while zealously recording the actions of kings, of diplomatists, of politicians, and of warriors who may have made a great stir in their day but who took only a very small share in the real and permanent progress of the British people, bestowed only a passing reference—and sometimes not even that—on questions of trade and transport which have played a far more important part in our social and national advancement.

The history of railways has already been told by various writers. But the history of railways is only the last chapter in the history of inland transport and communication; and, though that last chapter is of paramount importance, and will here receive full recognition, it is essential that those who would form a clear idea of the position as a whole should begin the story at the beginning, and trace the course of events leading up to the conditions as they exist to-day.

CHAPTER II

BRITAIN'S EARLIEST ROADS

It has been assumed in some quarters that, because the main routes of travel in this country did not have to pass over lofty mountains, as in Austria and Switzerland, therefore the construction of roads here was, or should have been, a comparatively easy matter. But this is far from having been the case, the earliest opening of regular lines of communication by road having been materially influenced by certain physical conditions of the land itself.

The original site of London was a vast marsh, extending from where Fulham stands to-day to Greenwich, a distance of nine or ten miles, with a breadth in places of two or two and a half miles. The uplands beyond the Thames marshes were covered with dense forests in which the bear, the wild boar, and the wild ox roamed at will. Essex was almost entirely forest down to the date of the conquest. Nearly the whole expanse of what to-day is Sussex, and, also, considerable portions of Kent and Hampshire, were covered by a wood—the Andred-Weald, or Andreswald—which in King Alfred's time is said by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been 120 miles long and 30 miles broad. Here it was that, until even these great supplies were approaching exhaustion, the iron industry established in Sussex in the thirteenth century obtained the wood and the charcoal which were exclusively used as fuel in iron-making until the second half of the eighteenth century, when coal and coke began to be generally substituted. Wilts, Dorset and other southern counties had extensive woodlands which were more or less depleted under like conditions. Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire all had extensive woods. Sherwood Forest extended over almost the whole of Nottinghamshire. In Derbyshire, as shown by the Domesday Survey, five hundreds out of six were heavily wooded, and nineteen manors out of twenty-three had wood on them. "In Lancashire," says Charles Pearson, in the notes to his "Historical Maps of England During the First Thirteen Centuries," "if we distinguish forest from wood, and assume that the former was only wilderness, we still have official evidence for believing that a quarter of a million acres of the land between Mersey and Ribble was covered with a network of separate dense woods."

Altogether, it is calculated by various authorities that in the earliest days of our history about one third of the surface of the soil in the British Isles was covered with wood, thicket, or scrub. Of the remainder a very large proportion was fen-land, marsh-land or heath-land. "From the sea-board of Suffolk and Norfolk," says the Rev. W. Denton, in "England in the Fifteenth Century," "and on the north coast almost to the limits of the great level, stretched a series of swamps, quagmires, small lakes and 'broads.'" A great fen, 60 miles in length and 40 miles in breadth, covered a large proportion of the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. A great part of Lancashire, Mr Denton further states, was a region of marshes and quaking mosses, while "from Norwich to Liverpool, and from the mouth of the Ouse at Lynn to the Mersey, where it falls into the Irish sea, a line of fen, uncultivated moors and morasses stretched across England and separated the northern counties from the midland districts, the old territory of Mercia."

Much of the surface, again, was occupied by hills or mountains separated by valleys or plains through which some 200 rivers—many of them far more powerful streams than they are to-day—flowed towards the sea. As for the nature of much of the soil of England, the early conditions are further recalled by Daniel Defoe who, in describing the "Tour through the Whole Isle of Great Britain" which he made in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, speaks of "the soil of all the midland part of England, from sea to sea," as "a stiff clay or marly earth" for a breadth of 50 miles, at least, so that it was not possible to go north from London to any part of Britain without having to pass through "these terrible clays," which were, he says, "perfectly frightful to travellers."

It was under conditions such as these that Britain obtained her first roads; and it was, also, conditions such as these that were to affect more or less the future history of inland communication in England, adding largely to the practical difficulties experienced in making provision for adequate transport facilities.

Inasmuch as a great number of chariots were used by the Britons in their attempt to resist the invasion of Cæsar, it may be assumed that there were even then in this country roads sufficiently broad and solid on which such chariots could run; and though evidence both of the use of wattles in the making of roads over clayey soil and of a knowledge on the part of the early Britons of the art of paving has been found, the British chariot-roads were so inefficiently constructed that few traces of them have remained.

The earliest British roads were, however, probably of the nature of tracks rather than of durable highways; and they may have been designed less for the purposes of defence against invasion than in the interests of that British trade which, even then, was an established institution in the land.

Writing in "Archæologia," vol. xlviii (1885), Mr Alfred Tylor expresses the view that the civilisation of the Britons was of a much higher character in some respects than has till recently been supposed. From the fact that Pytheas of Marseilles, a Greek traveller who lived B.C. 330, and visited Britain, described the British-made chariots, he thinks we may assume that the Britons had discovered the art of smelting and working tin, lead and iron, and that they used these materials in the making both of chariots and of weapons. But they produced for export, as well as for domestic use. Tin, more especially, was an absolute necessity in Europe in the bronze age for use in the making of weapons both for the chase and for war, and the metallurgical wealth of Britain afforded great opportunities for trading, just as it subsequently gave the country the special importance it possessed in the eyes of the Roman conquerors.

To the pursuit of such trading the Britons, according to Mr Tylor, were the more inspired by a desire to obtain, in return for their metals the amber which, as the favourite ornament of prehistoric times, then constituted a most important article of commerce, but was obtainable only in the north of Europe. The early importance of amber in Europe is proved, Mr Tylor says, by its presence in many parts of Europe throughout the long neolithic age, and, therefore, long prior to the bronze age; and it was mainly to facilitate the exchange of metals for this much-desired amber that the Britons made roads or tracks from the high grounds which they generally chose for their habitations (thus avoiding alike the forests, the fens and the marshes), down to the ports from which the metals were to be shipped to their destination. Mr Tylor says on this point:—

"The first British tin-commerce with the Continent in prehistoric times moved, either on packhorses or by chariots, in hilly districts, towards Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, that is, in the direction from west to east; then by sea from the eastern British shipping ports, of which Camulodunum on the Stour, close to the Thames (Colchester) is a type, to the Baltic. Thus at first the 'tin' used to find its way partly by land and partly by sea from Cornwall to the mouths of the Elbe and Vistula, there to meet the land caravans of the Baltic amber commerce from the north of Europe to the south.... When the land route throughout Gaul was established the tin had to go across the English Channel, not to Brittany, across the rougher and wider part, but to Normandy. The Isle of Wight was nearer Normandy, and a suitable entrepôt for the coasters meeting the fleets of ocean trading ships.[^[1]]...

"Iron and lead were, also, valuable British productions, and could easily reach the Isle of Wight by coasting steamers or by the British or Roman roads via Salisbury or Winchester....

"All ancient roads to British shipping ports were, of course, British.... Without roads it would be impossible to get over the low, often clay, grounds, or to reach the seaports in chariots, as the seaports were constantly in the clay.... It was impossible to reach the shipping-ports, which are all at low levels, without roads, as the clay and sand would be impassable for chariots. Of course packhorses could travel where chariots could not, but if the main roads were made for chariots they would be equally good for packhorses."

Mr Tylor thinks there is the greater reason for assuming that a considerable trade had thus been developed between Britain and the Continent because Tacitus alludes to a British prince who had amassed great wealth by transporting metals from the Mendips to the Channel coast; but our main consideration is the evidence we get of the fact that Britain's earliest roads appear to have owed their origin to the development of Britain's earliest trade.

Two, at least, of the four great roads to which the designation "Roman" has been applied followed, in Mr Tylor's opinion, the line of route already established by the Britons under the conditions here indicated. Certain it is that, although the Romans always aimed at building their roads in straight lines, and troubled little about ascents and descents, they followed the British plan of keeping the routes to high and dry ground, whenever practicable, in order to have a better chance of avoiding alike the woods, the bogs, the clays, the water-courses and the rivers.

Skilled road-builders though they were, the Romans shrank, in several instances, Pearson tells us, from "the tremendous labour of clearing a road through a forest where the trees must be felled seventy yards on either side to secure them from the arrows of a lurking foe." Thus the great military roads marked in the Itinerary of Antonine always, if possible, avoided passing through a forest. The roads to Chichester went by Southampton in order to avoid the Andred-Weald of Sussex, and the road from London to Bath did not take the direct route to Wallingford because, in that case, it would have required to pass through twenty miles of forest in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Later on, however, as the Roman rule became more firmly established, the making of roads through forests became unavoidable, and much destruction of timber followed, while the fact that the trees thus felled were left to rot on the ground alongside the roads helped to create the quagmires and "mosses" which were to be so great a source of trouble to road-makers in future generations.

As regards the routes taken by the Roman roads, Mr. Tylor says:—

"The Romans made a complete system of permanent inland roads to connect the Continent with the military posts, London, York, Colchester, Chester, Uriconium, Gloucester, Winchester, Silchester, Porchester and Brading, and chief trading towns with each other. At commanding points along or near these roads the Romans constructed camps, and so placed their legions as to protect the centres of metallurgical industry and the roads leading to them.... The Romans did not originate the sites of many new seaport towns or towns on large, navigable rivers, and, when they did so, as in the case of London, Richborough, Uriconium, Rochester, Canterbury, it was for strategical reasons, or indirectly connected with the traffic in minerals, the great industry of Britain during the Roman occupation as it was before it.... Silchester ... was forty-five miles from London, and was on high ground away from river or forests, and not far from the junction of a number of land-routes. It was on dry ground on which waggons could travel. It was convenient for roads giving access to Cornwall for tin; to the Mendips for lead, copper or brass; Gloucester and South Wales for iron; and from these termini there were routes passable to the east and south coasts of England."

From all this it would seem that the mineral wealth and the trading interests which had inspired the line of route of the earliest British roads were, side by side with military considerations, leading factors in the particular direction given to the Roman roads that followed them.

As for the Roman roads themselves, so admirably were they built that some of those laid down in ancient Rome and in France have been in use for from 1500 to 2000 years, while remains of Roman roads found in Britain, buried deeply under the debris of centuries, have still borne striking evidence of the solid manner in which they were first constructed.

But the point that here arises for consideration is, not only the high quality of the great roads the Romans built in Britain, but the broad-minded policy by which the builders themselves were influenced. The provision of a system of scientifically constructed roads wherever they went was, primarily, part of the Roman plan of campaign in the wars of aggrandisement they carried on; but it was further designed to aid in developing the resources of the country concerned, while it was, also, carried out in Britain by the Roman State itself, on lines embracing the transport conditions of the country as a whole, and in accordance with a unified and well-planned system of internal communication on "national" lines such as no succeeding administration attempted either to follow or to direct.

Thus the great Roman roads, connecting the rising city on the Thames and the commercial centre of Britain with every part of the island, were remarkable, not only because they represented an art which was to disappear with the conquerors themselves, but, also, because they had been directly created, and were directly controlled, by a central authority as the outcome of a State road policy itself fated in turn to disappear no less effectually. The almost invariable practice in this country since the departure of the Romans has been for the State, instead of following the Roman example, and regarding as an obligation devolving upon itself the provision of adequate means of intercommunication between different parts of the country, to leave the burden and responsibility of making such provision to individual citizens, to philanthropic effort, to private enterprise, or to local authorities. The result has been that not only, for successive generations, were both the material progress and the social advancement of the English people greatly impeded, but the actual development of such intercommunication was to show, far too often (1) a lamentable want of intelligence and skill in meeting requirements; and (2) a deficiency of system, direction and co-ordination as regards the many different agencies or authorities concerned in the results actually secured.

CHAPTER III

ROADS AND THE CHURCH

Following the departure of the Romans, not only road-making but even road-repairing was for several centuries wholly neglected in this country. The Roman roads continued to be used, but successive rulers in troublesome times were too busily engaged in maintaining their own position or in waging wars at home or abroad to attend to such prosaic details as the repairing of roads, and they had, apparently, still less time or opportunity for converting into roads hill-side tracks which the Romans had not touched at all.

In proportion, too, as the roads were neglected, the bridges of the earlier period got out of repair, fell in altogether, or were destroyed in the social disorders of the time. So the mediæval ages found the means of internal communication by land probably worse in Britain than in any other country in western Europe.

The State having failed to acquit itself of its obligations, the Church took up the work as a religious duty. The keeping of roads in repair came to be considered, as Jusserand says in "English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages," "a pious and meritorious work before God, of the same sort as visiting the sick and caring for the poor." Travellers were regarded as unfortunate people whose progress on their toilsome journeys it was Christian charity to assist. In these circumstances the religious houses of the period took over the task of making or repairing both roads and bridges, the faithful being encouraged to assist in the good work, either through gifts or with personal labour, by the concession to them of special indulgencies. Jusserand tells, for instance, how Richard de Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, 1311-1316, remitted part of the penalties on the sins of those who did good work in helping to make smooth the way of the wanderer, his episcopal register containing frequent entries of 40-day indulgencies granted to contributors to the road-repair funds. There were benefactors, also, who left to the monasteries lands and houses the proceeds of which were to be applied to the same public purpose; while in proportion as the monasteries thus increased the extent of their own landed possessions they became still more interested in the making and repairing of roads in the neighbourhoods in which the lands they had acquired were situated.

In those days, in fact, people bequeathed not only land, or money, but even live stock for the repair of roads just as they left gifts for ecclesiastical purposes, or as people to-day make bequests to charitable institutions. The practice continued until, at least, the middle of the sixteenth century, since in the Sixth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission there will be found (page 422) the last will and testament, dated May 16, 1558, of John Davye, in which the testator says:—

"I leve and bequeithe a cowpell of oxson that I boughte the laste yere to the building of Moulde Church where I dwell; And I bequieth a bullocke that I boughte of the Royde unto the mendynge of the hye waie betwixte my howse and the Molld."

Bequests of money or lands were also made for the construction or the maintenance of bridges, or for the freeing of bridges from toll so that the poor could cross without payment; and one of the duties of the bishops, when making their visitations, was to enquire whether or not the funds thus left were being applied to the purposes the donors intended.

On the Continent of Europe a religious order was founded, in the twelfth century, for the building of bridges. It spread over several countries and built some notable bridges—such, for instance, as that over the Rhone at Avignon; though there is no trace, Jusserand tells us, of these Bridge Friars having extended their operations to this country. It was, however, from them that laymen learned the art of bridge-building, and in Britain, as in Continental countries, bridges came to be considered as pious works, to be put under the special charge of a patron saint. To this end it was customary to build a chapel alongside an important bridge—as in the case of the old London Bridge that replaced the original wooden structure by Peter Colechurch, "priest and chaplain," itself having had a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Sovereigns or great landowners gave generous gifts for the endowment of such bridges. Although, too, there was no special order of bridge-building friars in England, guilds and lay brotherhoods, animated by the religious spirit, were formed in the reign of Richard II. (1377-1399) for the repair of roads and bridges, just as, in turn, the ordinary trading guilds which were the forerunners of the corporate bodies set up in towns undertook to "maintain and keep in good reparacion" bridges which had become "ruinous," and, also, to attend to the "foul and dangerous highways, the charge whereof the town was not able to maintain."[^[2]]

It became customary, also, for hermits to take up their habitation in cells along the main thoroughfares, and to occupy themselves with looking after the roads, trusting to the alms of passers-by for a little worldly recompense. In one instance, at least, a hermit was allowed to put up a toll-bar—the first on record in this country—and collect compulsory payments from persons using the roads he mended. This was in 1364, when Edward III. made a decree authorising "our well-beloved William Phelippe the hermit" to set up a toll-bar on the lower slope of Highgate Hill, on the north side of London, and levy tolls for the repair of the "Hollow Way" from "our people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde."

Jusserand sums up the situation at this period by saying that "The roads in England would have been entirely impassable ... if the nobility and the clergy, that is to say, the whole of the landed proprietors, had not had an immediate and daily interest in possessing passable roads."

There came, however, a period of decline in religious fervour. The laity grew less disposed to give or to bequeath money, land or cattle for road-repair purposes, however much the offer of indulgences in return therefor might be increased from days to months or even to years; and the clergy, in turn, became more remiss in acquitting themselves of the obligations they had assumed as road-repairers. They accepted the benefactions, and they granted the indulgences; but they showed increasing laxity in carrying out their responsibilities. The roadside hermits, also, gathered in so much in the way of contributions, voluntary or compulsory, from passers-by that they ate and drank more than hermits ought to do, grew fat and lazy, and too often left the roads to look after themselves.

What, therefore, with neglected roads and dilapidated bridges, the general conditions of travel went from bad to worse. Church Councils, says Denton, were summoned and adjourned because bishops feared to encounter the danger of travelling along such roads. Oratories were licensed in private houses, and chapels of ease were built, because roads were so bad, especially in winter, that the people could not get to their parish churches. The charter, 47 Edward III., 1373, by which the city of Bristol was constituted a county, states that this was done in order to save the burgesses from travelling to Gloucester and Ilchester, "distant thirty miles of road, deep, especially in winter time, and dangerous to passengers." On many different occasions, too, the members of the House of Commons, assembled for a new session, could transact no business because the Peers had been detained by the state of the roads and the difficulty of travelling, and Parliament was, therefore, adjourned.

The general conditions grew still worse with the impoverishment of the monasteries by which the main part of the work had—however negligently—been done since the end of the Roman régime. As will be shown later on, various statutes had gradually imposed more and more the care of the roads on the laity, and it was upon them that the full responsibility fell with the eventual dissolution, first of the lesser, and next of the greater, monasteries by Henry VIII.

CHAPTER IV

EARLY TRADING CONDITIONS

Rivers constituted, in the Middle Ages, the most important means of inland transport. Most of our oldest towns or cities that were not on the route of one of the Roman roads were set up alongside or within easy reach of some tidal or navigable stream in order, among other reasons, that full advantage could be taken of the transport facilities the waterways offered. So were monasteries, castles, and baronial halls, while the locating of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge on the Thames and the Cam respectively rendered them accessible by sea and river to Scottish and other students from the north who could hardly have made their way thither by land.[^[3]]

It was, however, only a limited number of inland places that could be reached by water, and other towns or settlements were wanted. The trading opportunities of the latter were at first restricted to the packhorse, few of the roads being then adapted for even the most primitive of agricultural waggons. Long lines of packhorses, with bales or panniers slung across their backs, made their way along roads or bridle paths often inadequate to allow of two strings of loaded horses to pass one another, so that many a quarrel arose, when two teams met, as to which should go into the mud to allow the other to pass along the path proper.

Traders sending wool or other commodities by the same route were in the habit of making up companies in order to secure mutual protection against robbers, and they armed themselves and their servants as if going to battle. Like precautions were taken by merchants from the north when they started on their annual business journeys to London—journeys so full of peril that they were not begun until the merchant had made his will and earnestly commended himself to the protection both of St. Botolph and of his own patron saint. The "commercial travellers" of that day carried their samples or their wares in a bag lying across their horse's back, thus qualifying for the designation of "bagmen" by which they were to become known.

In the Middle Ages everyone rode except the very poor, and they had to be content to trudge along on foot. Kings and nobles, princes and princesses, gentlemen and ladies, merchants and bagmen all travelled on horseback. Women either rode astride until the introduction of side-saddles, in the fourteenth century, or else rode in pillion fashion.

The main exception to riding on horseback, in the case of ladies or of the sick or infirm, was the use of litters attached to shafts to which two horses, one in front and one behind the litter, were harnessed. Sometimes, also, "passengers" were carried in the panniers of the packhorses, instead of goods.

Certain main routes, and especially those favoured by pilgrims—such as that between London and Canterbury—must have been full of animation in those days; but, speaking generally, no one then travelled except on business or under the pressure of some strong obligation.

Down to the end of the fourteenth century England was purely an agricultural country, and her agricultural products were exclusively for home, if not for local or even domestic consumption, with the one exception of wool, which was exported in considerable quantities to Flanders and other lands then dependent mainly on England for the raw materials of their cloth manufactures. In our own country manufactures had made but little advance, and they mainly supplied the requirements, in each instance, of a very limited area.

England was, indeed, in those days, little more than a collection of isolated communities in which the various householders, more especially in villages at a distance from any main road or navigable river, had to provide for their own requirements to a great extent. Of retail shops, such as are now found in the most remote villages, there were none at all at a period when the replenishing of stocks would have been impossible by reason of difficulties in transport; so that while the country as a whole was mainly agricultural, there were more craftsmen in the villages, and there was greater skill possessed by individuals in the production of domestic requirements than would to-day be found among agricultural populations accustomed to depend on the urban manufacturer or the village stores for the commodities their forefathers had to make, to raise or to supply for themselves.

Each family baked its own bread, with flour ground at the village mill from the wheat or the rye grown on the family's own land or allotment; each brewed its own ale—then the common beverage at all meals, since tea and coffee had still to come into vogue; and each grew its own wool or flax, made its own cloth and clothing, and tanned its own leather. What the household could not do for itself might still be done by the village blacksmith or the village carpenter. Alike for ribbons, for foreign spices, for luxuries in general, and for news of the outer world the household was mainly dependent on the pedlar, with his stock on his back, or the chapman, bringing his collection of wares with him on horseback; though even these welcome visitors might find it impossible to travel along roads and footpaths reduced by autumn rains or winter snows to the condition of quagmires.

In these conditions many a village or hamlet became isolated until the roads were again available for traffic, and rural households prepared for the winter as they would have taken precautions against an impending siege. Most of the meat likely to be required would be killed off in the late autumn and salted down—salt being one of the few absolute necessities for which the mediæval household was dependent on the outside world; while families which could not afford to kill for themselves would purchase an animal in common and share the meat. Stores of wheat, barley and malt were laid in; honey was put on the shelves to take the place of the sugar then almost unknown outside the large towns; logs were collected for fuel and rushes for the floors; and wool and flax were brought in to provide occupation for the women of the household. In the way of necessaries the provision made by each self-dependent family, or, at least, by each self-contained community, was thus practically complete—save in the one important item of fresh vegetables, the lack of which, coupled with the consumption of so much salt meat, was a frequent source of scurvy. Millstones for the village mill might, like the salt, have to be brought in from elsewhere; but otherwise the villagers had small concern with what went on in the great world.

Such trading relations as the average village had with English markets or with foreign traders were almost exclusively in the hands of the lord of the manor, one of whose rights—and one not without significance, from our present point of view—it was to call upon those who held land under him, whether as free men or as serfs, to do all his carting for him. This was a condition on which both villeins and cottars had their holdings; and though, in course of time, the lord of the manor might relieve his people of most of the obligations devolving upon them, this particular responsibility still generally remained. "Instances of the commutation of the whole of the services," says W. J. Ashley, in the account of the manorial system which he gives in his "Introduction to English Economic History and Theory," "occur occasionally as early as 1240 in manors where the demesne was wholly left to tenants. The service with which the lord could least easily dispense seems to have been that of carting; and so in one case we find the entry as to the villeins, 'Whether they pay rent or no they shall cart.'"

To the lord of the manor, at least, the difficulties of road transport, whether in getting his surplus commodities to market or otherwise, must have appeared much less serious when he was thus able to call on his tenants to do his cartage.

In the towns the isolation may not have been so great as in the villages; but the urban trading and industrial conditions nevertheless assumed a character which could only have been possible when, owing to defective communications, there was comparatively little movement and competition in regard either to manufactures (such as they were) or to workers.

The period of internal peace and order which followed the Norman Conquest led, as Ashley has shown, to the rise in town after town of the merchant guild—an institution the purpose of which was to unite into a society all those who carried on a certain trade, in order, not only to assure for them the maintenance of their rights and privileges, but also to obtain for them an actual monopoly of the particular business in which they were interested. Such monopoly they claimed against other traders in the same town who had not entered into the combination, and still more so against traders in other towns. The latter they regarded as "foreigners" equally with the traders from Flanders and elsewhere.

The merchant guilds were found in all considerable towns in the eleventh century, and they were followed, a century later, by craft guilds which aimed, in turn, at securing a monopoly of employment for their own particular members.

Coupled with the guilds there was much local regulation of the prices and qualities of commodities through the setting-up of such institutions as the "assize" of ale, of bread and of cloth; while the justices had, in addition, considerable powers in regard to fixing the rates of wages and the general conditions of labour.

All this system of highly-organised Protection, not so much for the country as a whole as for each and every individual town in the country, might serve in comparatively isolated communities; but it could not prevail against increased intercourse, the growing competition of developing industries, a broader area of distribution for commodities made in greater volume, and a wider demand for foreign supplies. It was thus doomed to extinction as these new conditions developed; but it nevertheless exercised an important influence on our national advancement, since it was the impulse of corporate unity, fostered by the merchant guilds, and strengthened by the system of manorial courts for the enforcement of the local laws and customs in vogue in each separate manor before the common law of the land was established, that led to so many English towns securing, from King or overlord—and notably in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the influence of the merchant guilds was especially great—those charters which so powerfully stimulated the growth of the great towns, of English citizenship, of individual freedom, and of national prosperity. Ashley well says, in this connection:—

"Wide as were the differences between a civic republic of Italy, or an imperial city of Germany with its subject territory, and a little English market town, there was an underlying similarity of ideas and purposes. Each was a body of burghers who identified the right to carry on an independent trading or industrial occupation with the right of burgess-ship; who imposed restrictions on the acquisition of citizenship, with the object of protecting the interests of those already enjoying it; who acted together by market regulation and intermunicipal negotiation to secure every advantage they could over rival boroughs; who deemed it meet that every occupation should have its own organisation and its own representation in the governing authority, and who allowed and expected their magistrates to carry out a searching system of industrial supervision. Municipal magistracy was not yet an affair of routine, bound hand and foot by the laws of the State."

The general trade of the country in the Middle Ages was conducted mainly through markets and fairs.

Every town had its market and fixed market day, and such market served the purpose of bringing in the surplus produce of the surrounding agricultural district, the area of supply depending, no doubt, on the distance for which the state of the roads and the facilities for transport on them would allow of commodities being brought.

Held, as a rule, annually or half-yearly, fairs assumed much more important proportions than the (generally) weekly local markets. It was to the fairs that traders both from distant counties and from foreign countries brought wares and products not otherwise obtainable; and it was at the fairs that the foreign merchants, more especially, bought up the large quantities of wool which were to form their return cargoes. Whereas the business done at the local markets was mainly retail, that done at the fairs was, to a great extent, wholesale, and the latter represented the bulk of such transactions as would now be done on the public exchanges or in the private warehouses of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and other leading commercial centres.

Fairs were essentially the outcome of defective means of communication. Going back in their origin to the days of ancient Greece, they have been found in most countries in the earlier stages of society, or under conditions which have not allowed of (1) a ready distribution of commodities, (2) sufficiently advanced manufactures, or (3) the subdivision of trade over an adequately wide area. Fairs in England began to decay in exact proportion as communications and manufactures improved and retail trade expanded; so that to-day the survivals are either exclusively cattle fairs, sheep fairs, horse fairs, cheese fairs, and so on, or else are little more than pleasure fairs, with gingerbread stalls, shows and roundabouts for their chief attractions—mere reminiscences of old institutions which, in bygone days, were of supreme commercial importance.

They were, also, greatly influenced by religious festivals, whether in ancient Greece or in Europe. In Britain itself the commemoration of saints' days by the monasteries, the dedication festivals of churches or cathedrals, and the visitation of shrines by pilgrims brought together crowds of people whose assembling offered good opportunities for the opening up with them of a trade in commodities which they, in turn, might otherwise have some difficulty in procuring. It was, indeed, to the advantage of the Church to offer or to encourage the offering of such facilities, not only because there would thus be a greater inducement to people to come to the festivals or to visit the shrines, but also because when the fair was held on land belonging to the Church or connected with religious buildings there might be a substantial revenue gained from the tolls and charges paid by the traders. At one time the fairs were even held in churchyards; but this practice was prohibited in the 13th year of Edward I., and thenceforward they were held on open spaces, where stalls and tents could be erected for the accommodation of the goods on sale and of the persons who had brought them, various amusements being added, or encouraged, by way of affording further attractions. The land occupied might be that of the lord of the manor, but the fairs still continued to be held chiefly on Saints' days or on the occasion of Church festivals, the actual dates being generally so fixed as to allow of the foreign or other traders attending them to arrange a circuit. The time of year preferred for the holding of fairs was either the autumn, when people whose wants were not wholly met by pedlar or chapman would be providing against the stoppage of all traffic along the roads during the winter; or the spring, when they would want to replenish their depleted stocks. The localities mostly favoured were towns either on navigable rivers, giving access to a good stretch of country, or at the entrance to valleys whose inhabitants would be especially isolated during the winter months by their impassable roads and mountain tracks.

In course of time the fairs became, as shown by Giles Jacob, in his "Law Dictionary" (4th edition, 1809), "a matter of universal concern to the commonwealth," as well as a valuable monetary consideration to those who had the right to collect the tolls; and they were, in consequence, subjected to close regulation. No person could hold a fair "unless by grant from the King, or by prescription which supposes such grant"; the time during which it could be kept open was announced by proclamation, and rigidly adhered to; "just weight and measure" was enforced, and a "clerk of the fair" was appointed to mark the weights.

On the other hand every encouragement was offered to traders to attend the fairs. "Any citizen of London," says Jacob, "may carry his goods or merchandise to any fair or market at his pleasure." Mounted guards were, in some instances, provided on the main routes leading to the fair, in order to protect the traders from attack by robbers. Tolls were to be paid to the lord of the manor or other owner of the land on which a fair was held under a special grant; but if the tolls charged were "outrageous and excessive" (to quote again from Jacob), the grant of the right to levy toll became void, and the fair was thenceforth a "free" one. It was further laid down that persons going to a fair should be "privileged from being molested or arrested in it for any other debt or contract than what was contracted in the same, or at least, was promised to be paid there."

An especially curious feature of these old fairs was the so-called "Court of Pie Powder"—this being the accepted English rendering, in those days, of "pied poudré"—or "The Court of Dusty Feet." The court was one of summary jurisdiction, at which questions affecting pedlars or other (presumably) dusty-footed traders and their patrons, or matters relating to "the redress of disorders," could be decided by a properly constituted authority during the period of the holding of the fair in which such questions or matters arose.

Jacob says of this old institution:—

"It is a court of record incident to every Fair; and to be held only during the time that the Fair is kept. As to the jurisdiction, the cause of action for contract, slander, &c., must arise in the fair or market, and not before at any former fair, nor after the fair; it is to be for some matter concerning the same fair or market; and must be done, complained of, heard and determined the same day. Also the plaintiff must make oath that the contract, &c., was within the jurisdiction and time of the fair.... The steward before whom the court is held, is the judge, and the trial is by merchants and traders in the fair."

Such courts were as ancient as the fairs themselves, and they ensured a speedy administration of justice in accordance with what was recognised as merchants' law long before any common law was established. Supposed to have been introduced by the Romans, the "court of pie powder" was, according to Jacob, known by them under the name of "curia pedis pulverisati," while the Saxons called it the "ceapunggemot," or "the court of merchandise or handling matters of buying and selling." It was, of course, the Normans who introduced the later term of "pied poudré," which the English converted into "pie powder."

One of the most ancient, and certainly the most important, of all the English fairs was the Sturbridge fair, at Cambridge, so called from a little river known as the Stere, or the Sture, which flowed into the Cam.[^[4]]

Early records of this particular fair, according to Cornelius Walford, in "Fairs Past and Present," are to be found in a grant by King John in or about the year 1211. The fair is believed to have been originally founded by the Romans; but it may have acquired greater importance at the date of this particular charter by reason of what Cunningham, in his "Growth of English Industry and Commerce in the Early and Middle Ages," describes as the "extraordinary increase" of commerce in every part of the Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, coupled with the "improvements in navigation and in mercantile practice" which "went hand in hand with this development. Englishmen," he further tells us, "had but little direct part in all this maritime activity. Their time was not come; but the Italian merchants who bought English wool, or visited English fairs, brought them within range of the rapid progress that was taking place in South Europe."

From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century the export of wool, leather, lead, tin and other English commodities was in the hands almost exclusively of foreign merchants, who came here both to purchase these raw materials and to dispose of the products of their own or other countries; and Sturbridge Fair, as it happened, formed a convenient trading centre alike for foreign and for English traders, the question of inland communication being, in fact, once more the dominating factor in the situation.

Foreign goods destined for the fair were mostly brought, first, to the port of Lynn, and there transferred to barges in which they were taken along the Ouse to the Cam, and so on to the fair ground which, on one side, was bordered by the latter stream. Heavy goods sent by water from London and the southern counties, or coming by sea from the northern ports, reached the fair by the same route. Great quantities of hops brought to the fair from the south-eastern or midland counties by land or water were, in turn, despatched via the Cam, the Ouse and the port of Lynn to Hull, Newcastle, and elsewhere for consignment to places to be reached by the Humber, the Tyne, etc. Where water transport was not available the services of packhorses were brought into requisition until the time came when the roads had been sufficiently improved to allow of the use of waggons.

In his "Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain" Defoe gives a graphic account of Sturbridge Fair as he saw it in 1723. By that date it had become, in his opinion, "not only the greatest in the whole Nation, but in the World." It covered an area of about half a square mile, had shops placed in rows like streets, with an open square known as the Duddery, and comprised "all Trades that can be named in London, with Coffee-houses, Taverns, and Eating-houses innumerable, and all in Tents and Booths." He speaks of £100,000 worth of woollen manufactures being sold in less than a week, and of—

"The prodigious trade carry'd on here by Wholesale-men from London, and all parts of England, who transact their Business wholly in their Pocket-Books, and meeting their Chapmen from all Parts, make up their Accounts, receive Money chiefly in Bills, and take Orders: These, they say, exceed by far the sales of Goods actually brought to the Fair, and deliver'd in kind; it being frequent for the London Wholesale Men to carry back orders from their Dealers for ten Thousand Pounds-worth of Goods a man, and some much more. This especially respects those People, who deal in heavy Goods, as Wholesale Grocers, Salters, Brasiers, Iron-Merchants, Wine-Merchants and the like; but does not exclude the Dealers in Woollen Manufactures, and especially in Mercery Goods of all sorts, the Dealers in which generally manage their Business in this Manner:

"Here are Clothiers from Halifax, Leeds, Wakefield and Huddersfield in Yorkshire, and from Rochdale, Bury, &c. in Lancashire, with vast Quantities of Yorkshire Cloths, Kerseys, Pennistons, Cottons, &c., with all sorts of Manchester Ware, Fustians and Things made of Cotton Wooll; of which the Quantity is so great, that they told me there were near a Thousand Horse-packs of such Goods from that Side of the Country....

"In the Duddery I saw one Ware-house or Booth, with six Apartments in it, all belonging to a Dealer in Norwich Stuffs alone, and who, they said, had there above Twenty Thousand Pounds value in those Goods alone.

"Western Goods had their Share here, also, and several Booths were fill'd as full with Serges, Du-Roys, Druggets, Shalloons, Cataloons, Devonshire Kersies, &c., from Exeter, Taunton, Bristol, and other Parts West, and some from London also.

"But all this is still outdone, at least in Show, by two Articles, which are the Peculiars of this Fair, and do not begin till the other Part of the Fair, that is to say, for the Woollen Manufacture, begins to draw to a Close: These are the Wooll and the Hops: As for the Hops there is scarce any price fix'd for Hops in England till they know how they fell at Sturbridge Fair: the Quantity that appears in the Fair is indeed prodigious.... They are brought directly from Chelmsford in Essex, from Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent and from Farnham in Surrey; besides what are brought from London, the Growth of those and other places."

In the North of England, Defoe continues, few hops had formerly been used, the favourite beverage there being a "pale smooth ale" which required no hops. But for some years hops had been used more than before in the brewing of the great quantity of beer then being produced in the North, and traders from beyond the Trent came south to buy their hops at Cambridge, taking them back to Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and even to Scotland. Of wool, according to the same authority, the quantity disposed of at a single fair would be of the value of £50,000 or £60,000.

In writing on this same Sturbridge fair, Thorold Rogers says, in his "History of Agriculture and Prices":—

"The concourse must have been a singular medley. Besides the people who poured forth from the great towns ... there were, beyond doubt, the representatives of many nations collected together to this great mart of medieval commerce. The Jew, expelled from England, had given place to the Lombard exchanger. The Venetian and Genoese merchant came with his precious stock of Eastern produce, his Italian silks and velvets, his store of delicate glass. The Flemish weaver was present with his linens of Liége and Ghent. The Spaniard came with his stock of iron, the Norwegian with his tar and pitch. The Gascon vine-grower was ready to trade in the produce of his vine-yard; and, more rarely, the richer growths of Spain, and, still more rarely, the vintages of Greece were also supplied. The Hanse towns sent furs and amber, and probably were the channels by which the precious stones of the East were supplied through the markets of Moscow and Novgorod. And perhaps by some of those unknown courses, the history of which is lost, save by the relics which have occasionally been discovered, the porcelain of the farthest East might have been seen in many of the booths. Blakeney, and Colchester, and Lynn, and perhaps Norwich, were filled with foreign vessels, and busy with the transit of various produce; and Eastern England grew rich under the influence of trade. How keen must have been the interest with which the franklin and bailiff, the one trading on his own account, the other entrusted with his master's produce, witnessed the scene, talked of the wonderful world about them, and discussed the politics of Europe!

"To this great fair came, on the other hand, the woolpacks which then formed the riches of England and were the envy of outer nations. The Cornish tin-mine sent its produce.... Thither came also salt from the springs of Worcestershire ... lead from the mines of Derbyshire and iron, either raw or manufactured, from the Sussex forges. And besides these, there were great stores of those kinds of agricultural produce which, even under the imperfect cultivation of the time, were gathered in greater security, and therefore in greater plenty, than in any other part of the world, except Flanders."

Other leading fairs, besides that of Sturbridge, included Bartholomew Fair, in London, and those of Boston, Chester and Winchester; while Holinshed says of the conditions in the second half of the sixteenth century, "There is almost no town in England but hath one or two such marts holden yearlie in the same." In the case of Bartholomew Fair, its decay was directly due to the fact that there came a time when English manufacturers could produce cloth equal in quality to that from Bruges, Ghent and Ypres which had been the chief commodity sold at this particular fair, thenceforward no longer needed. But the eventual decline alike of Sturbridge and of most of the other fairs carrying on a general trade was mainly due to the revolutionary changes in commerce, industry and transport to which improved facilities for distribution inevitably led.

CHAPTER V

EARLY ROAD LEGISLATION

It was in the year A.D. 411 that the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain, and it was not until 1555, or 1144 years after their departure, that the first general Act was passed, not for the construction, but for the repair of roads in this country. In the meantime such further construction or repairing as was actually done had been left to the Church, to private benevolence, to landowners acting either voluntarily or in accordance with the conditions on which they held their estate, or to the inefficient operation of the common law obligation that the inhabitants of a parish must repair the highways within the same.

A writer in 1823, William Knight Dehany, of the Middle Temple, in a book on "The General Turnpike Acts," comes to the conclusion, after careful research into the records of this early period, that "With the exception of the principal roads communicating with the important sea ports and fortresses of the Kingdom (probably the four great roads formed either by the Romans or Saxons), the other highways were but tracks over unenclosed grounds, where the passenger selected his path over the space which presented the firmest footing and fewest impediments, as is the case in the present day in forests and wastes in remote situations." He considers that when packhorses only were used for the transport of burdens, the state of the roads was not a subject of much interest and importance; but certain it is that the subject became more acute when the greater traffic that resulted from expanding trade and commerce led to the roads getting into an even worse condition than they had been in previously.

The earliest road legislation that can be traced was an Act passed in 1285, in the reign of Edward I., directing that on highways leading from one market town to another "there be neither dyke, tree nor bush whereby a man may lurk to do hurt within two hundred feet on either side of the way"; but this measure was designed for the protection of travellers against robbers, and had no concern with the repair of the roads. In 1346 tolls were imposed, by authority of Edward III., for the repair of three roads in London, namely, "the King's highway between the hospital of St. Giles and the bar of the old temple (in Holborn)"; what is now Gray's Inn Road ("being very much broken up and dangerous"), and another road, supposed to be St. Martin's Lane. These tolls, according to Macpherson's "Annals of Commerce" (1805) were to be imposed for a period of two years upon all cattle, merchandise and other goods passing along the roads in question; they were fixed at the rate of one penny in the pound on the value of the animals or goods taxed, and they were to be paid by all persons, except, curiously enough, "lords, ladies, and persons belonging to religious establishments or to the Church." Then, in 1353, "the highway between Temple-bar and Westminster being already rendered so deep and miry by the carts and horses carrying merchandise and provision at the staple that it was dangerous to pass upon it," the King required the owners of houses alongside to repair the road in consideration of the increased value of their property owing to the establishment of the staple.[^[5]]

Reference has already been made (page [13]) to the concession by Edward III. to "Phelippe the hermit" of the right to impose tolls for the repair of the road on Highgate Hill. Macpherson further says, under date 1363:—

"The equitable mode of repairing the roads by funds collected from those who used them was now so far established that we find, besides the renewals of the tolls for the Westminster road almost annually, tolls granted this year for the road between Highgate and Smithfield, for that from Wooxbridge (Uxbridge) to London, and for the venel called Faytor (Fetter) lane in Holburn."

In the reign of Henry VIII. the first Statutes relating to particular highways were passed, a lord of the manor in Kent, and another in Sussex, being empowered to construct certain new roads, at their own expense, and then enclose the old ones for which the new would be substituted; but the Act of 2 and 3 Philip and Mary c. 8, passed in 1555, was the first Highway Act in this country which applied to roads in general.

"Commerce," says Macpherson, "beginning to increase considerably in the reign of Queen Mary, and the old roads being much more frequented by heavy carriages" (a term applied at this time to wheeled vehicles of any description), the Act was passed with a view to securing a much-needed improvement. After declaring, in a preamble, that the roads had become "both very noisome and tedious to travel in and dangerous to all passengers and carriages," the Act directed that constables and churchwardens in every parish should, during Easter week in each year, "call together a number of the parochians" and choose two honest persons to serve for twelve months as surveyors and orderers of works for amending parish highways leading to any market town. These surveyors were authorised to require occupiers of land to attend each Midsummer with wains, or carts, in proportion to their holdings, such carts being furnished, after the custom of the country, with oxen, horses or other cattle and necessaries, and to be in charge of two able men. All other householders, cottagers and labourers, able to work and not being servants hired by the year, were to furnish work in their own persons, or by deputy, bringing with them "such shovels, spades, pikes, mattocks and other tools and instruments as they do make their own fences and ditches withall." Work was to be carried on for four days, of eight hours each, unless otherwise directed by the supervisors; and constables and churchwardens were "openly in the Church to give knowledge" of appointed days. Fines for default were to be imposed at leets or quarter-sessions.

This Act was to remain in operation for seven years. In 1562 it was continued by 5 Eliz. c. 13, which, in addition to giving compulsory powers to obtain materials for road repairs, increased the "statute" labour, as it came to be called, from four to six days each year.

This principle of compulsory labour on the roads was—subject to various modifications in regard to alternative assessments—to remain in operation until the passing of the General Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by highway rates. The labour itself, though it brought about an improvement on the previous road conditions, was from the first far from satisfactory, judging from the references made to it by Holinshed. The roads, he says, were very deep and troublesome in winter; the obligation in regard to six days' labour on them was of little avail, since the rich evaded their duty, and the poor loitered so much that scarcely two days' work was done out of the six; while the surveyors, instead of applying the labour to the amendment of roads from market town to market town, bestowed it on particular spots the repair of which conduced to their own convenience. Nor, it seems, was the power conferred on the justices to punish surveyors and parishioners if they failed in their duty of much practical avail.

No further general legislation concerning roads was passed until the Restoration, when, says Macpherson, "The vast increase of commerce and manufactures and of the capital city of London, with the concomitant increase of luxury, brought in such numbers of heavy-wheel carriages as rendered it by degrees impracticable, in most cases, for parishes entirely to keep their own part of the roads in a tolerable condition, more especially in the counties lying near London and in the manufacturing counties."

Petitions had been received from the inhabitants of various districts throughout the country praying that steps should be taken for the betterment of their roads, with the view of facilitating intercommunication, and it became evident that some more effective system for the construction and repairing of roads must be adopted.

In 1662 Parliament passed an Act (14 Car. II., c. 6) which stated that, inasmuch as former laws and statutes for mending and repairing public highways had been found ineffectual, by reason whereof, and the extraordinary burdens carried on waggons and other carriages, divers highways had become dangerous and almost impassable, churchwardens and constables or tithing men in every parish were directed to choose surveyors yearly on the Monday or Tuesday in Easter week, giving public notice thereof in church immediately after the end of the morning prayer. These surveyors were to view the highways, estimate the cost of the necessary repairs, and, with the help of two or more substantial householders, apportion the cost among persons assessed to the poor rate and owners of all classes of property exclusive of "household stuff," the stock of goods in a shop being assessed as well as the shop itself, and the personal belongings of a householder equally with the dwelling he occupied.

There was further brought about, in 1663, the definite establishment, by law, of that system of toll-taking, by means of turnpikes, the principle of which had, as we have seen, already been adopted in a few isolated instances. Macpherson speaks of the system as "the more equitable and effectual method of tolls, paying at the toll-gates (called turnpikes) by those who use and wear the roads"; and this was the view that generally prevailed at the time. He records as follows, under date 1663, the passing of this first English Turnpike Act:—

"The antient fund for keeping the roads of England repaired was a rate levied on the land holders in proportion to their rents, together with the actual service of the men, the carts, and horses of the neighbourhood for a limited number of days. But now, by the increase of inland trade, heavy carriages and packhorses were so exceedingly multiplied that those means of repairing the roads were found totally inadequate; neither was it just that a neighbourhood should be burdened with the support of roads for the service of a distant quarter of the Kingdom. It was therefore necessary to devise more effective and, at the same time, more equitable means of supporting the public roads, and the present method of making and repairing the roads at the expense of those who actually wear them and reap the benefit of them was now first established by an Act of Parliament (15 Car. II., c. 1.) for repairing the highways in the shires of Hartford, Cambridge and Huntingdon, by which three toll-gates (or turn-pikes) were set up at Wadesmill, Caxton and Stilton."

The highways here in question formed part of the Great North Road to York and Scotland, and the preamble of the Act stated that this "ancient highway and post-road" was, in many places, "by reason of the great and many loads which are weekly drawn in the waggons through the said places, as well as by reason of the great trade of barley and malt that cometh to Ware, and so is conveyed by water to the city of London ... very ruinous, and become almost impassable, insomuch that it is become very dangerous to all his Majesty's liege people that pass that way." The Act required the justices in each of the three counties to appoint surveyors who were to provide road materials and require of persons chargeable under the general law that they should send waggons and supply labour in accordance with their obligations, any extra work done by them being paid for at the usual rates in force in the district. The surveyors were, also, to appoint collectors of tolls who were empowered to levy, at the toll-gates (one of these being in each of the three counties) "for every horse, one penny; for every coach, sixpence; for every waggon, one shilling; for every cart, eightpence; for every score of sheep or lambs, one half-penny, and so on in proportion for greater numbers; for every score of oxen or neat cattle, five pence; for every score of hogs, twopence"; but no person, having once paid toll, and returning the same day with the same horse or vehicle, or with cattle, was to pay a second time. The Act was to remain in operation for eleven years; though it was, of course, then renewed.

How the turnpike system, thus introduced, was subsequently developed throughout the land will be shown later.

Charles II., whether he personally influenced the Act of 1663 or not, showed in a very practical way his interest in the opening up of the country to improved communications. In 1675 a remarkable work was published by John Ogilby, Cosmographer Royal, under the title of "Britannia; A Geographical and Historical Description of the Roads of England and Wales." The book consisted of 100 double-page sheets of road maps, giving, in scroll fashion, every mile of route for eighty-five roads or itineraries, and showing distances in each case, together with a description of each route, written in considerable detail. The maps, without the letterpress, were published in the same year in a separate volume, under the title of "Itinerarium Angliæ"; and in 1699 the descriptive matter, without the maps, was reprinted in the form of a handbook, under the title of "The Traveller's Guide."

In his dedication of "Britannia" to King Charles II. the author says: "Influenced by Your Majesty's Approbation and Munificence, I have attempted to Improve our Commerce and Correspondency at Home by Registering and Illustrating Your Majesty's High-Ways, Directly and Transversly, as from Shore to Shore, so to the Prescribed Limits of the Circumambient Ocean, from this Great Emporium and Prime Center of the Kingdom, Your Royal Metropolis."

"The Traveller's Guide" is described as "A most exact Description of the Roads of England, being Mr Ogilby's Actual Survey and Mensuration by the Wheel of the Great Roads from London to all the considerable Cities and Towns in England and Wales, together with the Cross Roads from one City or Eminent Town to another"; while in the preface the author throws more light on the previous reference to his Majesty's munificence, saying:—

"This Description of England was undertaken by the Express Command of King Charles II., and it was at his Expence that Mr Ogilby with great exactness performed an Actual Survey and Mensuration by the Wheel of all the Principal Roads of England."

CHAPTER VI

EARLY CARRIAGES

The carts that succeeded the early British and Roman war chariots, and enabled the villeins and cottars to do the obligatory "cartage" for the lord of the manor, were heavy, lumbering vehicles, with wheels hewn out of solid pieces of wood, and were used for private transport rather than transport for hire. The latter came in with the "wains" or "long waggons" of England's pioneer road carriers. These long waggons, according to Stow, were brought into use about the year 1564, up to which time—save for the horse litters and the agricultural carts—the saddle-horse and the packhorse had been the only means of travelling and conveying goods. The long waggon developed into a roomy covered vehicle, capable of accommodating about 20 passengers in addition to merchandise; it had broad wheels adapted to the roads; and it was drawn, at a walking pace, by six, eight, or more horses which (except on such long journeys as that from London to Wigan) accompanied it for the entire journey. As the forerunner of the stage-coach it was, at first, generally used not only for the heavier classes of goods (lighter qualities, and especially so when greater speed was required, still going by packhorse), but, also, by such travellers as either could not, or preferred not to, travel on horseback.

The waggons made regular journeys between London, Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, Gloucester, and other towns. It was in the long waggon that many a traveller in the seventeenth century made the journey between London and Dover, either going to or returning from the Continent[^[6]]; and, though, because of this Continental traffic, the Dover road was probably kept in as good a condition as any in the country, the long waggon went at so slow a pace that in 1640 the journey to Dover often took either three or four days.

To Bristol, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, long waggons were despatched three times a week, as follows:—

It should, however, be remembered that both the long waggon and the stage-coach which succeeded it travelled only by day, remaining for the night at some wayside inn where, in coaching language, it "slept."

When Charles Leigh wrote "The Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire and the Peak of Derbyshire," published in 1700, the London waggons went as far north as Wigan and Standish, where they took in cargoes of coals for sale on the return journey. North of Wigan nearly all the trade was carried on by strings of packhorses or by carts. Kendal was the principal packhorse station on this line of road, sending large trains of packhorses as far south as Wigan, and over the hills, northward, to Carlisle and the borders of Scotland.

In 1753, according to "Williamson's Liverpool Memorandum Book" for that year, the Lancashire and Cheshire stage waggons left London every Monday and Thursday, and were ten days on the journey in summer and eleven in the winter. At that time no waggon or coach from the south could get nearer to Liverpool than Warrington, owing to the state of the roads. The general mode of travelling was on horseback. Four owners of post-horses in London advertised in 1753 that they started from the "Swan-with-Two-Necks," Lad Lane, every Friday morning with a "gang of horses" for passengers and light goods, and arrived in Liverpool on the following Monday evening, this being considered very good time.

The conditions of transport between London and Edinburgh in 1776, when Adam Smith published his "Wealth of Nations," may be judged from the following references thereto which he makes in a comparison between the cost of land transport and the cost of sea transport:—

"A broad-wheeled waggon, attended by two men, and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks' time carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near four ton weight of goods. In about the same time a ship navigated by six or eight men, and sailing between the ports of London and Leith, frequently carries and brings back two hundred ton weight of goods. Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water carriage, can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh as fifty broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses."

The long waggon, supplementing alike the packhorse and the coach, which carried the lighter and more urgent commodities, continued, right down to the railway age, the means by which the great bulk of the general merchandise of the country was transported where carriage by water was not available. It remained, also, in favour with the poorer classes of travellers until late in the eighteenth century, when the stage coaches reduced their fares to such proportions that there was no longer any saving in going by the slower conveyance.

Private carriages, as an alternative alike to the horse litter and to riding on horseback, seem to have been introduced into this country, from the Continent, about the middle of the sixteenth century. In his "History of the Origin and Progress of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames" Henry Humpherus says that at her coronation, in 1553, Queen Mary rode in a chariot drawn by six horses, followed by another in which were "Lady Elizabeth, her sister, and Lady Ann of Cleves." He further states that in 1565 a Dutchman, Guylliam Boonen, presented to Queen Elizabeth a "coach" which was considered a great improvement on the "chariot or waggon" used at the coronation of Queen Mary. But the pioneer carriages of this date were little better than gorgeously decorated springless carts, to be ridden in along the worst of roads, and so uncomfortable that in an audience she had with the French Ambassador in 1568, Queen Elizabeth told him of "the aching pains" she was suffering in consequence of having been "knocked about" a few days before in a coach which had been driven too fast along the streets. All the same, these private "coaches" must have come into more general use by the end of the sixteenth century, since we find Stow saying in his "Survey of London" (1598):—

"Of old times coaches were not known in this island.... But now of late years the use of coaches, brought out of Germany, is taken up and made so common that there is neither distinction of time nor difference of people observed; for the world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot."

Fynes Moryson, Gent., in the "Itinerary" he published (1617) in the reign of James I., recording various journeys he had made, also alludes to this greater use of private "coaches," and he gives some interesting details as to the general conditions of travel at that period. He says:—

"Sixtie or seventy yeeres agoe, Coaches were very rare in England, but at this day pride is so far increased, as there be few Gentlemen of any account (I mean elder Brothers) who have not their Coaches, so as the streetes of London are almost stopped up with them.... For the most part Englishmen, especially in long journies, used to ride upon their owne horses. But if any will hire a horse, at London they used to pay two shillings the first day, and twelve, or perhaps eighteene pence a day, for as many dayes as they keepe him, till the horse be brought back home to the owner, and the passenger must either bring him backe, or pay for the sending of him, and find him meate both going and comming. In other parts of England a man may hire a horse for twelve pence the day.... Likewise Carriers let horses from Citie to Citie.... Lastly, these Carryers have long covered Waggons, in which they carry passengers from City to City: but this kind of journeying is so tedious, by reason they must take waggon very earely, and come very late to their Innes, as none but women and people of inferiour condition, or strangers (as Flemmings with their wives and servants) use to travell in this sort."

These long covered waggons began to be supplemented, in 1640 or thereabouts, by stage coaches, the advent of which is thus recorded by a contemporary writer, Dr Chamberlayne:—

"There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns of 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 one's health and one's body by hard jogging or over-violent motion on horse back, 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 the foreign post can but make in one day."

The "admirable commodiousness" which thus beat the world's record of that date was a vehicle without either springs or windows, which carried four, six or eight passengers inside. Over the axle there was a great basket for luggage and a few outside passengers, who made themselves as comfortable as they could among the bags and boxes, a few handfuls of straw being, in their case, the only concession to luxury. The earliest coaches carried neither passengers nor luggage on the roof, this arrangement coming into vogue later. In order that people should not be deterred from travelling in these conveyances by fear of highwaymen, it was announced, in the case of some of them, that the guards were armed and that the coaches themselves were "bullet proof."

As against the eulogy of Dr Chamberlayne it might be mentioned that the introduction of stage-coaches was regarded with great disfavour by another writer, John Cressett, who published, in 1672, a pamphlet entitled "The Grand Concern of England Explained in Several Proposals to Parliament" (reprinted in Harleian Miscellany, vol. viii.). Cressett evidently belonged to those adherents to "good old times" conditions who are opposed to all innovations; but his pamphlet affords much information as to the general conditions of travel at the time he wrote.

Cressett asked, among other things, "that a stop be put to further buildings in and about London"; "that brandy, coffee, mum, tea and chocolate may be prohibited"; and "that the multitude of Stage-coaches and caravans may be suppressed." It is with the last-mentioned demand, only, that we have here any "grand concern." In amplifying it he recommends "That the Multitude of Stage-coaches and Caravans now travelling upon the Roads may all, or most of them, be suppressed, especially those within forty, fifty, or sixty Miles of London, where they are no Way necessary."

The indictment he prefers against the coaches is in the following terms:—

"These Coaches and Caravans are one of the greatest Mischiefs that hath happened of late Years to the Kingdom, mischievous to the Publick, destructive to Trade, and prejudicial to Lands:

"First, By destroying the Breed of good Horses, the Strength of the Nation, and making Men careless of attaining a good Horsemanship, a Thing so useful and commendable in a Gentleman.

"Secondly, By hindering the Breed of Watermen, who are the Nursery for Seamen, and they the Bulwark of the Kingdom.

"Thirdly, By lessening his Majesty's Revenues."

Alluding to the effect of coach-riding on the individual, he says:—

"Stage-coaches ... effeminate his Majesty's Subjects who, having used themselves to travel in them, have neither attained Skill themselves nor bred up their Children to good Horsemanship, whereby they are rendered incapable of serving their Country on Horseback, if Occasion should require and call for the same; for hereby they become weary and listless when they ride a few Miles, and unwilling to get on Horseback; not able to endure Frost, Snow, or Rain, or to lodge in the Fields."

These last-mentioned words, "or to lodge in the fields," are especially suggestive of what might happen in those days to travellers on horseback. The writer goes on to say:—

"There is such a lazy Habit of Body upon Men, that they, to indulge themselves, save their fine clothes, and keep themselves clean and dry, will ride lolling in one of them, and endure all the Inconveniences of that Manner of Travelling rather than ride on Horseback."

He grieves over the fact that there were not "near so many coach-horses either bred or kept in England" as there were saddle-horses formerly, and he mentions the interesting fact that the York, Chester and Exeter stage-coaches, with 40 horses a-piece, carried eighteen passengers a week to each of those three places from London, and brought the same number back—a total of 1872 for the year. His plea that, but for the coaches, this number of travellers would have required, with their servants, "at least 500 horses," instead of the 120 which sufficed for the coaches, no longer concerns us; but his figures as to the extent of the travel in 1673 between London and cities of such importance—even in those days—as York, Chester and Exeter, are certainly interesting. One learns from the pamphlet that there were, in addition, stage coaches then going to "almost every town within 20 or 25 miles of London."

The writer also sought to discredit coaches on the ground that they were—bad for trade! "These Coaches and Caravans," he said, "are destructive to the Trade and Manufactures of the Kingdom, and have impoverished many Thousands of Families, whose subsistence depended upon the manufacturing of Wool and Leather, two of the Staple Commodities of the Kingdom." It was not only that saddlers and others were being cast on the parish, but tailors and drapers were also suffering because in two or three journeys on horseback travellers spoiled their clothes and hats—"Which done, they were forced to have new very often, and that increased the consumption of the manufactures, and the employment of the Manufacturers, which travelling in Coaches doth no way do."

All this must have seemed grave enough to the good alarmist; but there was still worse to come, for he goes on to say that—

"Passage to London being so easy, Gentlemen come to London oftener than they need, and their Ladies either with them, or, having the Conveniences of these Coaches, quickly follow them. And when they are there, they must be in the Mode, buy all their Cloaths there, and go to Plays, Balls, and Treats, where they get such a Habit of Jollity and a Love to Gayety and Pleasure, that nothing afterwards in the Country will serve them, if ever they should fix their minds to live there again; but they must have all from London, whatever it costs."

Fearing, perhaps, that these various arguments might not suffice to discredit the coaches, the pamphleteer has much to say about the discomforts of those conveyances:—

"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 these Coaches, an Hour before Day in the Morning, to be hurried in them from Place to Place till one Hour, two or three within Night; insomuch that, after sitting all Day in the Summertime stifled with Heat and choaked with Dust; or in the Winter-time starving and freezing with cold, or choaked with filthy Fogs, they are often brought into 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....

"Is it for a Man's Health to travel with tired Jades, and to be laid fast in the foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in Mire; afterwards sit in the Cold, till Teams of Horses can be sent to pull the Coach out? Is it for their Health to travel in rotten Coaches, and to have their Tackle, or Pearch or Axle-tree broken, and then to wait three or four hours, sometimes half a day, to have them mended, and then to travel all Night to make good their Stage?"

And so on, and so on, until we come to the moral of the story, which is that people should refuse to patronise such innovations as stage-coaches, keep to the ways of their forefathers, and do their travelling on horseback. If they could not do that, and needs must ride in a vehicle, let them be content with the long coaches (i.e. long waggons) which were "More convenient than running coaches ... for they travel not such long journeys, go not out so early in the Morning, neither come they in so late at night; but stay by the Way, and travel easily, without jolting Men's Bodies or hurrying them along, as the running Coaches do."

But the denunciations, arguments and vigorous pleadings of this "Lover of his Country," as the author of "The Grand Concern" called himself, were all of no avail. The march of progress had taken another step forward, and England found it had now entered definitely on the Coaching Era.

CHAPTER VII

LOADS, WHEELS AND ROADS

Before dealing more fully with the development of coaches and coaching and of vehicular traffic in general, it will be desirable to revert to the new perplexities which such development brought to those who were concerned with the care of the roads, and see in what way it was endeavoured to meet them.

In Macpherson's "Annals of Commerce" the following is given under date 1629:—

"The great increase of the commerce of England of late years very much increased the inland carriage of goods, whereby the roads were more broken than heretofore. King Charles issued his proclamation, confirming one of his father's in the 20th year of his reign, for the preservation of the public roads of England, commanding that no carrier or other person whatsoever shall travel with any waine, cart or carriage with more than two wheels nor with above the weight of twenty hundred; nor shall draw any waine, cart or other carriage with above five horses at once."

The King Charles here spoken of was, of course, Charles I., and the 20th year of the reign of his father, James I., takes us back to 1623. That year, therefore, gives us the date for the starting of a policy, not of adapting the roads to the steadily increasing traffic, but of adapting the traffic to the roads; and this policy, as far as successive rulers and governments were concerned (efforts in the way of actual road betterment being left almost exclusively to individual initiative or private enterprise), was persevered in more or less consistently for a period of close on two centuries.

The State policy here in question was applied mainly in two directions: (1) the restriction to a certain weight of the loads carried; and (2) the enforcing of regulations as to the breadth of wheels. The former alone is mentioned in the references just made to the proclamations of Charles I. and James I.; and it may be explained that the stipulation as to not more than five horses being attached to any cart or waggon was itself a precaution against the drawing of what were regarded as excessive loads. Such precautions were renewed after the Restoration, when, as we have seen, there began to be a considerable expansion of trade. By 13 & 14 Chas. II., c. 6, it was laid down that no waggon, wain, cart or carriage carrying goods "for hire" should be drawn by more than seven horses or eight oxen, or carry more than 20 cwt. between October 1 and May 1, or more than 30 cwt. between May 1 and October 1, thus modifying the earlier regulations, while it further enacted that no wheels should have rims exceeding four inches in breadth; but by 22 Chas. II., c. 12, the maximum number of horses allowed to any vehicles was again reduced to five; and by 30 Chas. II., c. 5, the words "for hire" were deleted, the restrictions being applied to all vehicles carrying goods.

From the time of the accession of William and Mary, every few years saw fresh Acts of Parliament becoming law, changing, deleting or adding to regulations previously laid down as to weight of loads, number of horses, the order in which they should be harnessed, the breadth of the tires, the position of the wheels, the kind of nails to be used for fastening the tires, and so on, until it becomes practically impossible to follow the complicated changes from time to time, if not actually from year to year. These changes more especially applied to the number of horses or oxen by which carts and waggons could be drawn, and efforts were made to enforce the ever-varying regulations by exceptionally severe penalties. The Act 5 Geo. I., c. 11, for example, authorises any person to seize and keep possession of such number of horses as might be attached to a carter's waggon in excess of six, or to a cart, for hire, in excess of three; though 16 Geo. II, c. 29, states that, as the restriction of three horses to a cart, under the Act of Geo. I., had been found inconvenient for farmers, and highly detrimental to the markets of the Kingdom, the number could be increased to four.

In reference to these legislative restrictions on the number of horses a farmer might attach to a single cart, it is said in "A General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire," by Joseph Plymley, Archdeacon of Salop (1803): "Were farmers permitted to draw any number of horses, it would be of great public utility in lowering the price of these animals, which is now enormously high. The law, as it now stands, acts as a prohibition to farmers breeding horses; for a breeding mare, or a colt under five years old, is not fit to draw one of four in a waggon, with no more than 60 bushels of barley or wheat, which is the common load of the Shropshire or Staffordshire farmers, neither being more than two tons.... Another evil occasioned by the law is that such farmers are obliged to keep horses of the largest size, which consume the produce of much land by eating a large quantity of corn." Whereas good waggon-horses could formerly be bought at from £10 to £15 each, they were then, "by their scarcity," costing from £25 to £35 each. Coach-horses cost "from £40 to £60."

The various provisions in respect to number of horses or oxen per cart or waggon failed to keep down the loads to a weight suited to the deficiencies of the roads—which deficiencies had continued, notwithstanding the turnpikes—and a further step was taken under 14 Geo. II., c. 42, which authorised turnpike trustees not only to erect weighing machines but to impose an additional toll of twenty shillings per cwt. on any waggon which, together with its contents, had a total weight exceeding 60 cwt. By Geo. II., c. 43, the trustees were authorised to levy the same additional toll on any vehicle drawn by six horses.

In addition to adopting these various restrictions on the weights carried, Parliament had devoted much attention to the construction of the vehicles employed. One of the provisions of an Act passed in 1719 was a regulation in respect to the breadth of the wheel-rims, or "fellies," and the use thereon of rose-headed nails, these being regarded as injurious to the roads; though in the following year came another Act which recited that as the extending of these regulations to waggons that did not travel for hire had been found detrimental to farmers and others, and, also, to the markets of the Kingdom, they were repealed—only, however, to be revived, by 18 Geo. II., c. 33, in 1745.

Parliament was now to devote much more attention to the subject of broad wheels; and how this came about is explained by Daniel Bourn in a pamphlet entitled, "A Treatise upon Wheel Carriages" (1763), the main purpose of which was to expound to the world the excellences of what the writer described as "that noble and valuable machine, the broad-wheeled waggon." He gives the following account of the origin of the said machine:—

"The first set of broad wheels made use of on roads in this Kingdom were erected by Mr James Morris, of Brock-Forge, near Wiggan in Lancashire; who having a deep bad road to pass with his team advised with me upon the subject; I mentioned the making of the fellies of his wheels of an uncommon width: He accordingly made his first set thirteen inches, and the next year another of nine inches in the sole; and his travelling with these to Liverpool, Warrington and other places, was took notice of by some persons of distinction, particularly Lord Strange, and Mr Hardman, Member for Liverpool, &c., who after making strict enquiries of Mr Morris, concerning their nature and properties, reported their utilities to the House, which occasioned an Act of Parliament being made in their favour....

"Therefore let us congratulate ourselves on making thus far so happy a progress; and as the publick roads continue to mend and improve, as they polish and smooth, and arrive nearer perfection, so let us try if the carriage that travels this road may not continue to improve too, and receive a similar degree of perfection."

The Act of Parliament referred to by Bourn was, presumably, that of 26 Geo. II., c. 30, which laid down that—with certain exceptions—no cart or waggon should be allowed on any turnpike road at all unless the "fellies" of each and every wheel had a breadth of at least nine inches, the penalty for a breach of this enactment being a fine of £5, with one month's imprisonment in default of payment, and forfeiture of one of the horses, together with its harness, to the sole use and benefit of the person making the seizure. As a further encouragement of such wheels, the trustees of turnpike roads were required to accept reduced tolls for all vehicles having wheels of a breadth of nine inches. Two years later a further Act (28 Geo. II., c. 17), set forth that, the former statutes relating to cart-wheels not having answered the good purposes intended, it was now provided that for a period of three years from June 24, 1753, waggons having 9-inch wheels were to be allowed to pass free through every turnpike in the Kingdom, the trustees being authorised to protect themselves against loss from such free passage by imposing higher tolls on all carts and waggons the wheels of which were not nine inches in width.

The idea in having these broad wheels was that they would not only be less injurious to the roads than the narrow wheels, but would even tend to keep the roads in good order by helping to smooth and consolidate them in the same way as would be done by garden rollers. Mr Bourn, who was an enthusiast on the subject, even proposed to have cart and waggon wheels made of cast iron with a breadth of sixteen inches! He says in his pamphlet:—

"I would recommend having the wheels made in the following manner:—

"Let there be run out of cast iron at the founders hollow rims or cylinders, about two feet high, sixteen inches broad or wide, and from one to near two inches in thickness, according to the design or necessity of the proprietor, and the burden he intends them to bear. Let the space, or cavity between these cylinders be filled up solid with a block of wood, through the center of which insert your arbor or gudgeon, and leave it two inches and six eighths at each end longer than the cylinder; which parts must be round, and about two inches thick, being the pivots, and when the whole is well wedged the wheel is compleat.

"Here then is a solid wheel, which answers all the intentions of the garden roller; now can anything be conceived that would have so happy a tendency upon the roads? to render them smooth and even to harden and encrust the surface, and make it resemble a terrass walk? I say, can anything be equal to these kind of cast iron rollers to produce the foregoing effects?"

Without adopting Mr Bourn's 16-inch cast-iron garden rollers, the carriers of the period did, apparently, adopt the 9-inch wheels favoured by Parliament; but as they found that, with 9-inch wheels, they could carry much heavier weights, there had to be a further resort to legislation directed to a limitation of loads. This was done by 5 Geo. III., c. 38,[^[7]] while under 6 Geo. III., c. 43, turnpike trustees were directed to issue orders to their collectors not to allow any waggon or other four-wheeled carriage having wheels of less than 9 inches in breadth to pass through a toll-gate when drawn by more than four horses without seizing one of the horses. By 13 Geo. III., c. 84, the reduced tolls already conceded to 9-inch wheels were extended to 6-inch wheels, and it was further provided that waggons with 16-inch wheels should pass toll free for a year, and then pay only one-half of the tolls to be paid by 6-inch wheeled waggons.

In order to give still further encouragement to the use of 16-inch wheels, an Act passed in the following year provided that any waggon having wheels of those dimensions should pass toll-free for five years instead of one, and pay only half toll afterwards.

Among the many other Acts that followed, mention may be made of 55 Geo. III., c. 119, which gives an especially good idea of the infinite pains taken by the Legislature to adapt the construction of vehicles to the apparently hopeless deficiencies of the roads. The Act authorised road trustees to exempt certain vehicles from tolls for overweight "provided such Waggon, Cart or other such Carriage shall have the Soles or Bottoms of the Fellies of all the Wheels thereof of the Breadth of Six inches, or of Nine Inches, or of Sixteen Inches or upwards, and be cylindrical, that is to say, of the same Diameter on the Inside next the Carriage as on the outside, so that when such Wheels shall be rolling on a flat or level Surface, the whole Breadth thereof shall bear equally on such flat or level Surface; and provided that the opposite Ends of the Axletrees of such Waggon, Cart or other Carriage, so far as the same shall be inserted in the respective Naves of the Wheels thereof, shall be horizontal and in the continuance of one straight Line, without forming any Angle with each other; and so that in each pair of Wheels belonging to such Carriage, the lower Parts, when resting on the Ground, shall be at the same distance from each other as the upper Parts of such Pair of Wheels: Provided always," etc.

Under 3 Geo. IV., c. 126 (1822) no waggon or cart with wheels of less breadth than 3 in. was to be used on any turnpike road from the 1st of January, 1826, under a penalty of not exceeding £5 for the owner and not exceeding forty shillings for the driver; but this provision was repealed by 4 Geo. IV., c. 95 (1823), "in compliance," says Dehany, "with a cry raised on the part of the farmers and agriculturists, who, in petitions and complaints against the Act, put forward this clause as a principal grievance."

The broad-wheel policy of successive Governments evoked a good deal of criticism from others besides farmers and agriculturists, who themselves seem to have been reduced from time to time by the ever-changing regulations and restrictions to a condition almost of despair. In speaking of the roads in the parish of Eccles, Dr Aikin, writing in 1795, says in his "Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester" that although "much labour and a very great expense of money" had been expended on them, they still remained in a very indifferent state owing to the immoderate weights drawn in waggons and carts, and he adds: "To prevent this, vain and useless are all the regulations of weighing machines; and the encouragement of broad and rolling wheels still increases the evil, which must soon destroy all the best roads of Great Britain."

The general effect of the legislation in question was, also, thus commented on by William Jessop in an article on "Inland Navigation and Public Roads," published in vol. vi. of the "Georgical Essays" (1804):—

"I do not know anything in this country ... that has been more neglected than the proper construction of wheel carriages and the formation of roads. It has been generally acknowledged that for carriages of burden broad wheels, which will roll the roads, are the most eligible; and by the exemptions which have been granted to those who use broad wheels, the legislature has certainly looked forward to the benefits to be expected from the use of them; but never was a proposition more misunderstood, or an indulgence more abused. Of all the barbarous and abominable machines that have been contrived by ignorance, and maintained by vulgar prejudice, none have equalled the broad-wheeled carriages that are now in use; instead of rolling the roads, they grind them into mud and dust."

Not alone cart-wheels, but even cart-wheel nails, engaged the serious attention of Parliament, and formed the subject of special legislation. The Act 18 Geo. II., c. 33, provided, among other things, that the streaks or tires of wheels were to be fastened with flat, and not rose-headed, nails; and an Act passed in 1822, in the reign of George IV., directed that when the nails of the tire projected more than a quarter of an inch from the surface of the tire the owner of the waggon should pay a penalty of £5 and the driver one of forty shillings for every time such vehicle was drawn on a turnpike road; though an amending Act, passed the following year, reduced the penalties to "any sum not exceeding" forty shillings for the owner and twenty shillings for the driver.

Towards the end of the long period here in question it began to be realised that what was wanted, after all, was an adaptation of the roads to the traffic rather than an adaptation of the traffic to the roads; but the change in policy was not definitely effected until two practical-minded men, John Loudon McAdam and Thomas Telford, had introduced, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first attempt at really scientific road-making which had been made in this country since the departure of the Roman legions in the early part of the fifth century.

CHAPTER VIII

THE COACHING ERA

Whilst the Legislature had been actively engaged in endeavouring to adapt wheeled vehicles to roads, the number of vehicles of various types using the roads had greatly increased as the result of expanding trade and travel, combined with the further stimulus offered by that system of turnpike roads the story of which will be told in later chapters.

The vehicle that first performed in this country the functions of a public coach in transporting a number of passengers from one place to another was, of course, the long waggon, of which an account has already been given. Stage-coaches began to come into use about the year 1659, when, as shown by the "Diary" of Sir William Dugdale, there was a Coventry coach on the road. The three coaches a week between London and York, Chester and Exeter, spoken of by John Cressett as running in 1673, carrying their six passengers apiece on each journey, went, at that time, only in summer, on account of the roads; and even in the summer it was no unusual thing for the passengers to have to walk miles at a time because the horses could not do more than drag the coach itself through the mire. The usual speed was from four to four and a half miles an hour.

The first stage-coach between London and Edinburgh ran in 1658. It went once a fortnight, and the fare was £4. In 1734 a weekly coach from Edinburgh to London was announced. It was to do the journey in nine days, "or three days sooner than any coach that travels that road"; but either such rapid travelling as this was a piece of bluff on the part of the advertiser or the conditions of travel went from bad to worse since in 1760 the Edinburgh coach for London left only once a month, and was from fourteen to sixteen days on the way. The fact that one coach a month sufficed to carry all the passengers is sufficiently suggestive of the very small amount of travel by land between London and Scotland that went on even in the middle of the eighteenth century. Fourteen days for the journey between London and Edinburgh was then considered a very reasonable time-allowance. In 1671 Sir Henry Herbert had said in the House of Commons, "If a man were to propose to convey us regularly to Edinburgh in coaches in seven days, and bring us back in seven more, should we not vote him to Bedlam?"[^[8]]

In 1712 a fortnightly coach from Edinburgh to London was advertised to "perform the whole journey in thirteen days without any stoppages (if God permits), having eighty able horses to perform the whole journey." The fare was £4 10s. with a free allowance of 20 lbs. of luggage. In 1754 the Edinburgh coach left on Monday in winter and on Tuesday in summer, arrived at Boroughbridge (Yorkshire) on Saturday night, started again on Monday morning, and was due to reach London on the following Friday.

In 1774 Glasgow had been brought within ten days of London. The arrival of the coach was then regarded as so important an event that a gun was fired off when it came in sight, to let the citizens know it was really there. A 10-day coach to London was also running from Edinburgh to London in 1779, an advertisement in the Edinburgh Courant of that year stating that such a coach left every Tuesday, that it rested all Sunday at Boroughbridge, and that "for the better accommodation of passengers" it would be "altered to a new genteel two-end coach machine, hung upon steel springs, exceedingly light and easy."

York was a week distant from London in 1700; but on April 12, 1706, there was put on the road, to run three times a week, a coach which, said the announcement made respecting it, "performs the whole journey in four days (if God permits)." The time of starting on the first day was five o'clock in the morning.

The proprietors of a coach that ran between London and Exeter in 1755 promised their patrons "a safe and expeditious journey in a fortnight"; though this record was improved on before the end of the century, the time being reduced to ten days. Exeter is a little over 170 miles from London, and the journey can be done to-day, by rail, in three hours.

From London to Portsmouth took, in 1703, fourteen hours, "if the roads were good."

The Oxford coach in 1742 left London at 7 a.m., arrived at High Wycombe at 5 p.m., remained there for the night, and reached Oxford the following day.

By 1751 travelling between London and Dover had so far improved that it was accomplished in two days by stage-coach, instead of three or four days by long waggon. The coach left London every Wednesday and Friday at four in the morning; the passengers dined at Rochester, stayed for the night at Canterbury, and were due at Dover "the next morning, early." The announcements made in respect to this coach state that "there will be a conveniency"—that is, a basket—"behind, for baggage and outside passengers."

The advancement made by the stage-coach over the long waggon was, however, satisfactory for a time only. By about 1734 the stage-coach itself began to find a rival in what was called "the flying coach," otherwise a stage-coach which travelled at accelerated speed. Thus the advent of a "Newcastle Flying Coach" was announced in the following terms:—

"May 9, 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 coach that travels the road, for which purpose eight stout horses are stationed at proper distances."

In 1754 a "flying coach" between Manchester and London was started by a group of Manchester merchants who, with the developing trade of those times, doubtless felt the need for improved facilities of travel. It was announced that "incredible as it may appear, this coach will actually arrive in London four days and a half after leaving Manchester."

If the person who wrote this advertisement could only come to life again, what would he be likely to say to the fact that London and Manchester are to-day only four hours apart, and that a London merchant, after doing a morning's work in the City, can leave Euston at noon, lunch in the train, be in Manchester by four o'clock, have two hours there, leave again at six, dine in the train, and be back in London by ten? On the other hand, what does the London merchant who can do these things (besides having the further advantages of the telegraph and the long-distance telephone) think of the business conditions in 1754, when the quickest communications between London and Manchester were by a coach doing the journey in the then "incredible" time of four days and a half?

The enterprise of Manchester naturally stimulated that of Liverpool, and three years later it was announced that from June 9, 1757, "a flying machine on steel springs" would make the journey between Warrington and London in three days. The roads between Liverpool and Warrington being still impassable for coaches, the Liverpool passengers had to go on horseback to Warrington the day previous to the departure of the coach from that town. Manchester got a three-day coach to London in 1760. Seven years later communication by stage-coach was opened between Liverpool and Manchester, six or even eight horses being required to drag through the ruts and sloughs a heavy, lumbering vehicle which, going three days a week, then took the whole day to make the journey. In 1782 the time between Liverpool and London was 48 hours.

Down to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no direct communication by coach between Birmingham and London. The Birmingham merchant or resident who wanted to travel to London by coach, instead of on horseback, had to go four miles by road to Castle Bromwich, and there await the coach from Chester to London. In 1747, however, Birmingham got a coach of its own, and this vehicle, it was announced, would run to London in two days "if the roads permit,"[^[9]] but the roads around Birmingham were still in a deplorable condition when William Hutton published his "History" of the town. He says that from Birmingham, as from a grand centre, there radiated twelve roads to as many towns; but on most of them one could not travel with safety in times of floods, the water, owing to the absence of causeways and bridges, flowing over the road higher than the stirrup of one's horse. At Saltley in the year 1779 he had had to pass through what was really a dangerous river. A mile from Birmingham, on the Lichfield road, a river remained without a bridge until 1792. The road to Walsall had been "lately made good," and that to Wolverhampton was much improved; but he speaks of the road to Dudley, twelve miles in length, as "despicable beyond description," and says the "unwilling traveller" was obliged to go two miles about, through a bad road, to avoid a worse. The roads to Stratford and Warwick were "much used and much neglected," and the one to Coventry could "only be equalled by the Dudley Road."

"A flying machine on steel springs" from Sheffield to London was started in 1760. It "slept" at Nottingham the first night, at Northampton the second, and arrived in London on the third day. Leeds showed equal enterprise.

The Bath coach, "hung on steel springs," was in 1765 doing the journey in 29 hours, the night being spent at Andover. The improvement of the Bath road allowed of Burke reaching Bristol from London in 24 hours in the summer of 1774; but his biographer mentions, by way of explaining how he accomplished this feat, that he "travelled with incredible speed." By 1795, however, Bath had been brought within a single day's journey of London, the traveller who started from the Angel, at the back of St. Clements Danes, at four o'clock in the morning, being due at Bath at eleven o'clock at night. The journey between Dover and London was also reduced to one day, a "flying machine" leaving at four a.m. and reaching its destination in the evening.

By 1784, in fact, flying coaches had become quite common, and their once incredible speeds even came to be regarded as far from satisfactory for travellers to whom time was of importance.

The immediate reason, however, for the next development arose through the defective postal arrangements. Hitherto the mails had been carried either by post-boys, whose contract time was five miles an hour, or, in the case of short journeys, by veterans on foot whose rate of progress was much less, though it was then a common practice to make up urgent letters as parcels, and send them by the coaches. John Palmer, manager of a theatre at Bath, finding the mail was taking three days over a journey to London which he himself often did in one, submitted to Pitt, in 1783, a scheme for the running of mail coaches at the then equivalent to "express" speed. The permanent officials of the Post Office naturally regarded such a scheme, proposed by a rank outsider, as impracticable, if not absolutely absurd, and Palmer had a sturdy fight before he got his way. The experimental service started in 1784 was an immediate success, and when it became known that letters were being carried between Bristol and London in sixteen hours, every other important town or city in the country (Liverpool being one of the first to petition) wanted to have its own postal arrangements improved in the same way. Thus there was inaugurated a "mail-coach era," which was to continue unchecked until the first despatch of mails by railway in 1830.

The earliest of the mail-coaches travelled at a rate of about six miles an hour; but, as the roads were improved, the speed was increased to eight, nine, ten or even twelve miles an hour. The time for the Liverpool-London journey, for example, was eventually reduced to 30 hours in good weather and 36 hours in bad.

The running of these mail-coaches had a powerful influence on the whole question of road improvement, since the attainment of the best possible speed and the avoidance of delays in the arrival of the mails came to be regarded as matters of supreme importance; while more and more of the ordinary stage-coaches were put on for travellers to whom the lower fares[^[10]] were of greater concern than high rates of speed.

Mail coaches had the further good effect of stimulating great improvements in coach construction. The use of springs, in particular, allowed of a more compact vehicle, carrying luggage and outside passengers on the roof instead of relegating them to a basket "conveniency" behind. The competition, or, at least, the example of the mail-coaches had the further result of increasing the speed of the "flying" coaches, which now generally aimed at doing their eight or nine miles an hour; but here, again, much depended on the state of the roads.

Supplementary to the coaching there was the system of "posting," favoured by those who did not care to patronise public vehicles, and could afford the luxury of independent travel. In the earliest form of the posting system, that is, in the days when wheeled vehicles had not yet come into general use, and people did their journeys on horseback, travellers hired horses only at the recognised posting places; and Fynes Moryson, in his "Itinerary," narrating the conditions in 1617, says a "passenger" having a "commission" from the chief postmaster "shall pay 2½d. each mile for his horse and the same for his guide's horse; but one guide will serve the whole company, tho' many ride together." Travellers without a "commission" had to pay 3d. a mile. The guide, presumably, brought back the horses, and, also, really guided the traveller—a matter of no slight importance when the roads were often simply tracks over unenclosed spaces with no finger-posts to point the way.

Another form of posting was the hire from place to place of horses for use in private carriages; but the more general form was the hiring of both horse and post-chaise—a four-wheeled vehicle, accommodating, generally, three persons, and having a roof on which luggage could be strapped. Posting was a costly mode of travelling, only possible for people of wealth and distinction. Harper calculates that to "post" from London to Edinburgh must have cost at least £30; but it was no unusual thing, about the middle of the eighteenth century, for the Scotch newspapers to publish advertisements by gentlemen who proposed to "post" to London, inviting others to join them with a view to sharing the expense.

The condition of the streets in the towns being often no improvement on that of the roads in the country, the development of vehicular traffic, even there, was but slow. It was the example of Queen Elizabeth in riding in a "coach" through the streets of London that led to private carriages becoming fashionable, since, following thereon, "divers great ladies" had coaches made, and went about in them—much to the admiration of the populace, but much, also, to the concern of the Thames watermen, who regarded the innovation as one that foreshadowed for them a competition which did, indeed, become formidable, and even fatal, to their own occupation.

In those days and for long afterwards the Thames was the highway by means of which people of all classes went, whenever practicable, from one part of London to another, the main incentive to this general use of the river being the deplorable condition of the streets and roads. In his book on "England in the Fifteenth Century" the Rev. W. Denton tells how the King's serjeants-at-law, who dwelt in Fleet Street, and who pleaded at Westminster Hall, gave up an attempt to ride along the Strand because the Bishop of Norwich and others would not repair the road which ran at the back of their town houses. It was safer and more pleasant for lawyers to take a boat from the Temple stairs and reach Westminster by water. The Lord Mayor, on his election, not only went by water from the City to Westminster, to be received by the judges, but down to 1711, when a "Lord Mayor's Coach" was provided for him, rode on horseback from the Guildhall to London Bridge, where he embarked on the City barge, accompanied by representatives of the Livery Companies in their barges.

Transport on the Thames constituted a vested interest of great concern to the watermen, who had hitherto regarded as their special prerogative the conveyance of Londoners along what was then London's central thoroughfare; and the story of the way in which they met the competition of vehicular traffic in the streets is worth the telling because it illustrates the fact that each successive improvement in locomotion and transport has had to face opposition from the representatives of established but threatened conditions.

The great champion of the watermen was John Taylor (1580-1654), the "Water Poet," as he called himself. When the private carriages began to increase in number he expressed his opinion of them thus:—

"The first coach was a strange monster, it amazed both horse and man. Some said it was a great crab-shell brought out of China; some thought it was one of the pagan temples, in which cannibals adored the devil....

"Since Phaeton broke his neck, never land hath endured more trouble than ours, by the continued rumbling of these upstart four-wheeled tortoises.... A coach or carouch is a mere engine of pride, which no one can deny to be one of the seven deadly sins."

In 1601 sympathisers with the watermen succeeded in getting a Bill passed in the House of Commons "to restrain the excessive and superfluous use of coaches." It was thrown out by the House of Lords, though in 1614 the Commons, in turn, refused to pass a "Bill against outrageous coaches." In 1622 the Water Poet published a work, "An Errant Thief," etc., in which he dealt at length with the great injury that was being done to the watermen by the coaches, saying, among other things:—

"Carroches, coaches, jades and Flanders mares,

Do rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares;

Against the ground we stand and knock our heeles,

Whilst all our profit runs away on wheeles.

And whosoever but observes and notes

The great increase of coaches and of boates,

Shall find their number more than e'er they were

By halfe and more, within these thirty yeare;

Then watermen at sea had service still,

And those that stay'd at home had worke at will;

Then upstart hel-cart coaches were to seek,

A man could scarce see twenty in a weeke;

But now I think a man may dayly see

More than the wherrys on the Thames can be."

In the following year he published another work, "The World Runnes on Wheeles," in which he dealt further with the woes of the watermen. But the coaches continued to increase alike in number and in public favour, and the position of the watermen became still worse in 1625, when the already numerous private carriages were supplemented in London by hackney carriages let out for hire, though these did not, at first, exceed twenty in number, while they had to be hired direct from the stables of their owners.

In 1633 it was found that the river traffic was being prejudiced more and more by the greater use of vehicles in the streets. Whether or not in sympathy with the watermen, the Star Chamber issued an Order which said:—

"As to a complaint of the stoppage of the streets by the carriages of persons frequenting the play-house of the Blackfriars, their lordships, remembering that there is an easy passage by water unto that play-house, without troubling the streets, and that it is much more fit and reasonable that those which go thither should go by water, or else on foot, do order all coaches to leave as soon as they have set down, and not return till the play is over, nor return further than the west end of Saint Paul's Church Yard, or Fleet conduit; coachmen disobeying these orders to be committed to Newgate or Ludgate."

Opposition to the innovation of the coaches was, however, wholly unavailing, even when supported by Star Chamber intimations that people ought to be content to "go by water or else on foot"; and in 1634 permission was obtained for hackney coaches to ply in the streets for hire, instead of their having to remain, as heretofore, in the stables. The first public stand, for four carriages, with drivers in livery, was set up in the Strand, near Somerset House. A month or two later the watermen presented to Charles I. a petition in which they said:—

"The hackney coaches are so many in number that they pester and incumber the streets of London and Westminster, and, which is worst of all, they stand and ply in the terme tyme at the Temple gate, and at other places in the streets, and doe carry sometymes three men for fourpence the man, or four men for twelvepence, to Westminster or back again, which doing of this doth undoe the Company of Watermen."

The same year (1634) saw still another innovation, that of the sedan chair, which was to play so important a rôle in social life until towards the end of the eighteenth century, and was, in fact, not to disappear until even later, since there was a stand for sedan chairs still to be seen in St. James's Square in 1821. How the sedan chair came to be introduced is shown by a Royal Order issued as follows:—

"That whereas the streets of our cities of London and Westminster and their suburbs, are of late so much incumbered with the unnecessary multitude of coaches that many of our subjects are thereby exposed to great danger, and the necessary use of carts and carriages for provisions thereby much hindered; and Sir Sanders Duncombe's petition representing that in many parts beyond sea people are much carried in chairs that are covered, whereby few coaches are used among them; wherefore we have granted to him the sole privilege to use, let and hire a number of the said covered chairs, for fourteen years."[^[11]]

On January 19, 1635, there was issued a Royal Proclamation which said that—

"The great number of Hackney Coaches of late seen and kept in London, Westminster, and their suburbs, and the general and promiscuous use of coaches there, are not only a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest consort the Queen, the nobility, and others of place and degree, in their passage through the streets, but the streets themselves are so pestered and the pavements so broken up that the common passage is thereby hindered and made dangerous, and the price of hay and provender, &c., thereby made exceeding dear, wherefore we expressly command and forbid that no Hackney or hired coach be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, except they be to travel at least three miles out of the same; and also that no person shall go in a coach in the said streets except the owner of the coach shall constantly keep up four able horses for our service when required."

Vigorous efforts were made to enforce this proclamation, and the Water Poet was especially active in the matter, in the interests of his protégés, but all to no purpose. Two years later the King, "finding it very requisite for our nobility and gentry, as well as for foreign ambassadors, strangers and others" that the said restrictions should be withdrawn, was graciously pleased to sanction the licensing in London of fifty hackney coaches. Such attempts at limitation must, however, have been equally of no avail, since in 1652 there was another order, which set forth that not more than 200 should ply in the streets. In the following year the watermen sent a further petition to the House of Commons, and in 1654 the Protector issued an order limiting to 300 the number of hackney coaches to ply in London and Westminster and six miles round, while the number of hackney coach horses was not to exceed 600. Two years or so after this the watermen sent still another petition to the House of Commons. This petition of "the Overseers and Rulers of the Company of Watermen, together with their whole society," declared that their "trade or art of rowing on the water hath been long reputed very useful to the Commonwealth"; that the Company had, "ever since their incorporation, been a nursery to breed up seamen"; that, after serving "the Commonwealth's special service at sea," they found that "the art affordeth but a small livelihood to them, and that with hard labour"; and—

"That of late your petitioners' art is rendered more contemptible than formerly, and their employment much lessened and impoverished, by reason of the strange increase of hackney coaches, which have multiplied from about three hundred to a thousand, in eleven years last past, whereby people are discouraged from binding their sons apprentice to the trade of a waterman, and if remedy be not speedily had, there will not be a sufficient number of watermen to supply the service of the Commonwealth at sea,[^[12]] and also your petitioners and families utterly ruined.

"That of late some rich men about the city, keep very many hackney coaches to the great prejudice, as your petitioners humbly conceive, of the Commonwealth, in that they make leather dear, and their horses devour so much hay and corn; and also they do so fester the streets as that by sad experience divers persons are in danger of their lives, by reason of the unskilfulness of some of them that drive them, besides many other inconveniences which are too large to be here inserted."

Therefore the petitioners humbly prayed that Parliament would limit the number of such coaches.

No immediate action seems to have been taken; but, continuous complaints being made as to the obstructions caused by the hackney coaches, a proclamation was issued on November 7, 1660, by Charles II., to the effect that hackney coaches should no longer come into the streets to be hired. The proclamation had so little effect that on July 20, 1662, the watermen sent a petition to the House of Lords, once more recounting their grievances. The House named certain Lords who were to consider the matter and report; but Henry Humpherus, author of the "History of the Origin and Progress of the River Thames," has been unable to find that any report was made thereon. Soon after this the number of hackney coaches was increased (14 Chas. II., c. 2) to 400. In 1666, more complaints coming from the watermen, the House of Commons appointed a committee of inquiry.

In the winter of 1683-4 the disconsolate watermen had to suffer the indignity of seeing the Thames itself—their own special province—invaded by the drivers of hackney coaches! So severe was the frost that, as told by John Evelyn in his "Diary," the Thames was frozen over "so thick as to bear, not only streets of booths in which they roasted meat, and had divers shops of wares, quite across as in a town, but coaches, carts and horses," so that "coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs to and fro, as in the streets."

By 1685 the hackney coaches seem to have established their position as successful competitors of the watermen, an Act of Parliament which placed them on a recognised and regulated footing being passed in that year, while the number to be licensed was increased in 1694 to 700, in 1711 to 800, and in 1771 to 1000.

A still further blow was given to the interests of the watermen by the introduction from Paris, in 1820, of the "cabriolet," or "cab" as it came to be called; and yet another was dealt to them when, on July 4, 1829, Mr Shillibeer, the coach proprietor, ran the first omnibus from the Yorkshire Stingo, Paddington, to the City, and thus began a further new era in urban locomotion, supplanting, thereby, a good many of the hackney coachmen, just as they themselves had to so considerable an extent already supplanted the Thames watermen.

CHAPTER IX

THE AGE OF BAD ROADS

In the present chapter I propose to bring together the testimony of various contemporary writers with a view to enabling the reader thoroughly to realise those bad-road conditions from which, it was hoped, the country would at last be saved by the introduction of the system of turnpike roads inaugurated by the Act of 1663.

Evidence of the general character of English roads at the time the Act was passed, and, also, probably, for a considerable period afterwards, is afforded by the maps and descriptions of routes given by Ogilby in his "Britannia" (see page [33]). The maps indicate by means of lines and dots where the roads had been enclosed, by hedges or otherwise, on one side or both, and where they were still open. Taking the series of maps for the route from London to Berwick, and so on to Scotland, one finds that for a distance of about twenty-five or thirty miles from London, the road was then mostly enclosed; and from that point, through a large part of Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, only occasional stretches, mostly in the neighbourhood of towns, and often for lengths of no more than half a mile each, were enclosed either on one side of the road or both. The enclosures began again about six miles south of York, and continued for a short distance on the north of that city; but beyond York they became still more rare, and from Morpeth (Northumberland) to Berwick, a distance of about fifty miles, the total extent of enclosed road did not exceed six miles. Taking roads in the west, it is shown that in forty miles or so between Abingdon and Gloucester there was not a single enclosure.

What all this meant was that, where there had been no enclosure, the road was simply a track across commons, fens, marshes, heaths, etc., or through woods, where drivers of carts, waggons or coaches picked and chose to the best advantage, discarding an old path when it became a deep rut or was otherwise impassable, in favour of a new one alongside, or some distance away, and leaving the new one, in turn, when it got into the same state as the old.[^[13]]

The crossing of heaths and other open spaces was rendered the more difficult by the general absence of finger-posts.[^[14]] In some instances land-beacons were constructed as a guide to travellers. One which had a height of seventy feet, served as a landmark by day and was provided with a lantern at night, was raised in 1751 by Squire Dashwood on a dreary, barren and wholly trackless waste in the neighbourhood of Lincoln known as Lincoln Heath. The lantern was regularly lighted until 1788. The beacon itself stood until 1808, when it fell and was not rebuilt.

One especially important factor in the situation was the nature of the soil.

I have already mentioned, on page [5], Defoe's references in his "Tour" to this particular matter; but the description he gives of some of the roads which crossed the 50-mile belt of "deep stiff clay or marly" soil throws a good deal of light on the conditions of travel in his day. Thus, in dealing with the roads from London to the north, he says:—

"Suppose we take the great Northern Post Road from London to York, and so into Scotland; you have tolerably good Ways and hard Ground, 'till you reach Royston about 32, and to Kneesworth, a Mile farther: But from thence you enter upon the clays which, beginning at the famous Arrington Lanes, and going on Caxton, Huntington, Stilton, Stamford, Grantham, Newark, Tuxford (called for its Deepness Tuxford in the Clays), holds on 'till we come almost to Bautree, which is the first town in Yorkshire, and there the Country is hard and sound, being Part of Sherwood Forest.

"Suppose you take the other Northern Road, by St. Albans.... After you are pass'd Dunstable, which, as in the other Way is about 30 Miles, you enter the deep Clays, which are so surprisingly soft, that it is perfectly frightful to Travellers, and it has been the Wonder of Foreigners, how, considering the great Numbers of Carriages which are continually passing with heavy Loads, those Ways have been made practicable; indeed the great Number of Horses every Year kill'd by the Excess of Labour in those heavy Ways, has been such a Charge to the Country, that new Building of Causeways, as the Romans did of old, seems to me to be a much easier Expence. From Hockley to Northampton, thence to Harborough, and Leicester, and thence to the very Bank of Trent these terrible Clays continue; at Nottingham you are pass'd them, and the Forest of Sherwood yields a hard and pleasant Road for 30 miles together."

On the road to Coventry, Birmingham and West Chester he had found the clays "for near 80 miles"; on the road to Worcester "the Clays reach, with some intermissions, even to the Bank of the Severn," and so on with other roads besides.

Bourn, to whose "Treatise upon Wheel Carriages," published in 1763, earlier reference has also been made, said, among other things, in support of his scheme of broad-wheeled waggons:—

"So late as thirty or forty years ago the roads of England were in a most deplorable condition; those that were narrow were narrow indeed, often to that degree that the stocks of the wheels bore hard against the banks on each side, and in many places they were worn below the level of the neighbouring surface many feet, nay, yards perpendicular, and a wide-spreading, bushy hedge, intermixed with old half-decayed trees and stubbs, hanging over the traveller's head, intercepted the benign influence of the heavens from his path, and the beauties of the circumjacent country from his view, made it look more like the retreat of wild beasts and reptiles than the footsteps of men.

"In other parts, where the road was wide, it might be and often was too much so, and exhibited a scene of a different aspect. Here the wheel carriage had worn a diversity of tracks which were either deep, or rough and stony, or high or low, as mother nature had placed the materials upon the face of the ground; the spaces between these were frequently furzy hillocks or thorny brakes, through or among which the equestrian traveller picked out his entangled and uncouth steps. To these horrible, hilly, stony, deep, miry, uncomfortable, dreary roads the narrow wheel'd waggon seems to be best adapted, and these were frequently drawn by seven, eight, or even ten horses, that with great difficulty and hazard dragged after them twenty-five or thirty hundred, seldom more."

A writer in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for November, 1752, declares that the roads from London to Land's End, and even those as far as Exeter, Plymouth or Falmouth, were then still "what God left them after the flood"; while in comparing England with some of the Continental countries, he says:—

"Nothing piques me more than that a trumpery despotic government like France should have enchanting roads from the capital to each remote part of use. Some roads in Holland are very fine.... The republic of Berne hath made lately three or four magnificent roads, some of which are near 100 miles in length, and that, too, in a country to which Cornwall, Derbyshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland are perfect carpet ground."