CHAPTER V.

ROADS AND TRAVELLING IN ENGLAND TOWARDS THE END OF LAST CENTURY.

The progress made in the improvement of the roads throughout England was exceedingly slow. Though some of the main throughfares were mended so as to admit of stage-coach travelling at the rate of from four to six miles an hour, the less frequented roads continued to be all but impassable. Travelling was still difficult, tedious, and dangerous. Only those who could not well avoid it ever thought of undertaking a journey, and travelling for pleasure was out of the question. A writer in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' in 1752 says that a Londoner at that time would no more think of travelling into the west of England for pleasure than of going to Nubia.

But signs of progress were not awanting. In 1749 Birmingham started a stage-coach, which made the journey to London in three days.*[1] In 1754 some enterprising Manchester men advertised a "flying coach" for the conveyance of passengers between that town and the metropolis; and, lest they should be classed with projectors of the Munchausen kind, they heralded their enterprise with this statement: "However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester!"

Fast coaches were also established on several of the northern roads, though not with very extraordinary results as to speed. When John Scott, afterwards Lord Chancellor Eldon, travelled from Newcastle to Oxford in 1766, he mentions that he journeyed in what was denominated "a fly," because of its rapid travelling; yet he was three or four days and nights on the road. There was no such velocity, however, as to endanger overturning or other mischief. On the panels of the coach were painted the appropriate motto of Sat cito si sat bene—quick enough if well enough—a motto which the future Lord Chancellor made his own.*[2]

The journey by coach between London and Edinburgh still occupied six days or more, according to the state of the weather. Between Bath or Birmingham and London occupied between two and three days as late as 1763. The road across Hounslow Heath was so bad, that it was stated before a Parliamentary Committee that it was frequently known to be two feet deep in mud. The rate of travelling was about six and a half miles an hour; but the work was so heavy that it "tore the horses' hearts out," as the common saying went, so that they only lasted two or three years.

When the Bath road became improved, Burke was enabled, in the summer of 1774, to travel from London to Bristol, to meet the electors there, in little more than four and twenty hours; but his biographer takes care to relate that he "travelled with incredible speed." Glasgow was still ten days' distance from the metropolis, and the arrival of the mail there was so important an event that a gun was fired to announce its coming in. Sheffield set up a "flying machine on steel springs" to London in 1760: it "slept" the first night at the Black Man's Head Inn, Nottingham; the second at the Angel, Northampton; and arrived at the Swan with Two Necks, Lad-lane, on the evening of the third day. The fare was 1L. l7s., and 14 lbs. of luggage was allowed. But the principal part of the expense of travelling was for living and lodging on the road, not to mention the fees to guards and drivers.

Though the Dover road was still one of the best in the kingdom, the Dover flying-machine, carrying only four passengers, took a long summer's day to perform the journey. It set out from Dover at four o'clock in the morning, breakfasted at the Red Lion, Canterbury, and the passengers ate their way up to town at various inns on the road, arriving in London in time for supper. Smollett complained of the innkeepers along that route as the greatest set of extortioners in England. The deliberate style in which journeys were performed may be inferred from the circumstance that on one occasion, when a quarrel took place between the guard and a passenger, the coach stopped to see them fight it out on the road.

Foreigners who visited England were peculiarly observant of the defective modes of conveyance then in use. Thus, one Don Manoel Gonzales, a Portuguese merchant, who travelled through Great Britain, in 1740, speaking of Yarmouth, says, "They have a comical way of carrying people all over the town and from the seaside, for six pence. They call it their coach, but it is only a wheel-barrow, drawn by one horse, without any covering." Another foreigner, Herr Alberti, a Hanoverian professor of theology, when on a visit to Oxford in 1750, desiring to proceed to Cambridge, found there was no means of doing so without returning to London and there taking coach for Cambridge. There was not even the convenience of a carrier's waggon between the two universities. But the most amusing account of an actual journey by stage-coach that we know of, is that given by a Prussian clergyman, Charles H. Moritz, who thus describes his adventures on the road between Leicester and London in 1782:—

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

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

"This continual fear of death at last became insupportable to me, and, therefore, no sooner were we crawling up a rather steep hill, and consequently proceeding slower than usual, then I carefully crept from the top of the coach, and was lucky enough to get myself snugly ensconced in the basket behind."'O,Sir, you will be shaken to death!' said the black-a-moor; but I heeded him not, trusting that he was exaggerating the unpleasantness of my new situation.And truly, as long as we went on slowly up the hill it was easy and pleasant enough; and I was just on the point of falling asleep among the surrounding trunks and packages, having had no rest the night before, when on a sudden the coach proceeded at a rapid rate down the hill.Then all the boxes, iron-nailed and copper-fastened, began, as it were, to dance around me; everything in the basket appeared to be alive, and every moment I received such violent blows that I thought my last hour had come.The black-a-moor had been right, I now saw clearly; but repentance was useless, and I was obliged to suffer horrible torture for nearly an hour, which seemed to me an eternity.

At last we came to another hill, when, quite shaken to pieces, bleeding, and sore, I ruefully crept back to the top of the coach to my former seat.'Ah, did I not tell you that you would be shaken to death?' inquired the black man, when I was creeping along on my stomach.But I gave him no reply.Indeed, I was ashamed; and I now write this as a warning to all strangers who are inclined to ride in English stage-coaches, and take an outside at, or, worse still, horror of horrors, a seat in the basket.

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

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

"I looked, and certainly felt, like a crazy fool when we arrived at London in the afternoon."*[3]

[Image] The Basket Coach, 1780.

Arthur Young, in his books, inveighs strongly against the execrable state of the roads in all parts of England towards the end of last century. In Essex he found the ruts "of an incredible depth," and he almost swore at one near Tilbury. "Of all the cursed roads, "he says, "that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism, none ever equalled that from Billericay to the King's Head at Tilbury. It is for near twelve miles so narrow that a mouse cannot pass by any carriage. I saw a fellow creep under his waggon to assist me to lift, if possible, my chaise over a hedge. To add to all the infamous circumstances which concur to plague a traveller, I must not forget the eternally meeting with chalk waggons, themselves frequently stuck fast, till a collection of them are in the same situation, and twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out one by one!"*[4] Yet will it be believed, the proposal to form a turnpike-road from Chelmsford to Tilbury was resisted "by the Bruins of the country, whose horses were worried to death with bringing chalk through those vile roads!"

Arthur Young did not find the turnpike any better between Bury and Sudbury, in Suffolk: "I was forced to move as slow in it," he says, "as in any unmended lane in Wales.For, ponds of liquid dirt, and a scattering of loose flints just sufficient to lame every horse that moves near them, with the addition of cutting vile grips across the road under the pretence of letting the water off, but without effect, altogether render at least twelve out of these sixteen miles as infamous a turnpike as ever was beheld." Between Tetsworth and Oxford he found the so-called turnpike abounding in loose stones as large as one's head, full of holes, deep ruts, and withal so narrow that with great difficulty he got his chaise out of the way of the Witney waggons."Barbarous" and "execrable" are the words which he constantly employs in speaking of the roads; parish and turnpike, all seemed to be alike bad.From Gloucester to Newnham, a distance of twelve miles, he found a "cursed road," "infamously stony," with "ruts all the way.

" From Newnham to Chepstow he noted another bad feature in the roads, and that was the perpetual hills; "for," he says, "you will form a clear idea of them if you suppose the country to represent the roofs of houses joined, and the road to run across them." It was at one time even matter of grave dispute whether it would not cost as little money to make that between Leominster and Kington navigable as to make it hard.Passing still further west, the unfortunate traveller, who seems scarcely able to find words to express his sufferings, continues:—

"But, my dear Sir, what am I to say of the roads in this country! the turnpikes! as they have the assurance to call them and the hardiness to make one pay for? From Chepstow to the half-way house between Newport and Cardiff they continue mere rocky lanes, full of hugeous stones as big as one's horse, and abominable holes. The first six miles from Newport they were so detestable, and without either direction-posts or milestones, that I could not well persuade myself I was on the turnpike, but had mistook the road, and therefore asked every one I met, who answered me, to my astonishment, 'Ya-as!' Whatever business carries you into this country, avoid it, at least till they have good roads: if they were good, travelling would be very pleasant."*[5]

At a subsequent period Arthur Young visited the northern counties; but his account of the roads in that quarter is not more satisfactory. Between Richmond and Darlington he found them like to "dislocate his bones," being broken in many places into deep holes, and almost impassable; "yet," says he, "the people will drink tea!" —a decoction against the use of which the traveller is found constantly declaiming. The roads in Lancashire made him almost frantic, and he gasped for words to express his rage. Of the road between Proud Preston and Wigan he says: "I know not in the whole range of language terms sufficiently expressive to describe this infernal road. Let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally propose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it as they would the devil; for a thousand to one they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breakings-down.

They will here meet with ruts, which I actually measured, four feet deep, and floating with mud only from a wet summer. What, therefore, must it be after a winter? The only mending it receives is tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose than jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner. These are not merely opinions, but facts; for I actually passed three carts broken down in those eighteen miles of execrable memory."*[6]

It would even appear that the bad state of the roads in the Midland counties, about the same time, had nearly caused the death of the heir to the throne. On the 2nd of September, 1789, the Prince of Wales left Wentworth Hall, where he had been on a visit to Earl Fitzwilliam, and took the road for London in his carriage. When about two miles from Newark the Prince's coach was overturned by a cart in a narrow part of the road; it rolled down a slope, turning over three times, and landed at the bottom, shivered to pieces. Fortunately the Prince escaped with only a few bruises and a sprain; but the incident had no effect in stirring up the local authorities to make any improvement in the road, which remained in the same wretched state until a comparatively recent period.