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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the early carriers, and even the later stage-waggons were only occasionally advertised in the newspapers of the past. Thus, turning to Sussex, we only hear of “Thomas Smith, the Old Lewes Carrier,” in a reference to him after his death. How many years he had jogged along the green Surrey and Sussex lanes on his weekly journeys between Southwark and Lewes we know not. He died in 1746, and his widow carried on the business, according to her advertisement in the Lewes Journal:—

“THOMAS SMITH, the Old Lewes Carrier, being dead, the business is now continued by his widow, Mary Smith, who gets into the ‘George Inn,’ in the Borough, Southwark, every Wednesday in the afternoon, and sets out for Lewes every Thursday morning by eight o’clock, and brings Goods and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick, and all places adjacent at reasonable rates. Performed (if God permit) by Mary Smith.”

No mention yet, it will be observed, of Brighton, that little fisher-village of Brighthelmstone which presently was to rival fashionable Bath. The waggon went no farther than Lewes; and the first public conveyance to Brighton appears to have been the “Brighthelmstone Stage” of May 1756, running as an extension of the “London and Lewes One-Day Stage.”

Speed was by no means sought upon these old waggon-journeys. Quite apart from their usual inability to go, under the most favourable circumstances, at more than about four miles an hour, they were exempt from passenger-duty, on all travellers carried, only when the rate of progression did not exceed that speed.

Thus, although the Brighton waggon owned by Tubb and Davis in 1770 had a rival conveyance put on the road in 1776 by Lashmar & Co., both continued at the old pace. Both went by way of East Grinstead and Lewes, and took three days to perform the fifty-eight miles, Lashmar’s waggon leaving the “King’s Head,” Southwark, every Tuesday at 3 a.m., and arriving at the “King’s Head,” Brighton, on Thursday afternoons. Goods and parcels were carried at the rates of 2s. 6d. and 3s. per cwt.

Malachy Postlethwayt’s Dictionary of Trade, a work published in 1751, gives some eloquent details on this subject of the carriage of goods. Comparing that year, when turnpikes had improved the roads, with the bad ways of thirty or forty years earlier, it is stated that where six horses could in former times scarcely draw 30 cwt. sixty miles, they could then draw 50 or 60 cwt. Carriage, too, was cheaper by 30 per cent. than before. In 1750 there were from twenty-five to thirty waggons sent weekly from Birmingham to London, carrying goods at from £3 to £4 a ton; thirty years earlier the cost had been £7 a ton. Between Portsmouth and London freights had fallen from £7 to £4 or £5; and between Exeter and London and other towns in the west of like distance from £12 to £8. Postlethwayt cited these figures with pride, but he argued that the heavy waggons wore out the roads, and that they did not pay sufficient toll. The manufacturers, he thought, got too much advantage out of these low freights, and although the public thereby could purchase goods more cheaply, they paid their savings all out again in the heavy repairs of the highway and the consequent extravagant highway rates rendered necessary. Railway rates, we may here remark, are a source of much bitter discussion to-day, but they are fifteen times less than the reduced rates of 1750.

Even in the last days of the road, when railways had already begun to stretch the length and breadth of the land, the waggons on the less important highways continued very much as they had been accustomed to do; but with the second decade of the nineteenth century a demand for the quicker conveyance of goods arose on those great roads that gave access from the important manufacturing towns to London, or from London to the chief seaports. With this demand, in the improved condition of those roads, it now became for the first time possible to comply. On less frequented routes—roads leading to agricultural districts and sleepy old towns and villages that produced nothing for distant markets and wanted little from them—the common stage waggon and the flying waggon lingered. The Kendal Flying Waggon of 1816, pictured by Rowlandson, halting at a wayside inn to take up or set down goods and passengers and to change horses, lasted well on into the railway age; but in places nearer to and in more direct communication with the commerce of great cities, the type was early supplemented by later contrivances.

The first of these were the “Fly Vans,” of which the swift conveyances of Russell & Co., van proprietors, trading between London and the West of England, were typical. They were built on the model of the wooden hooded van seen in London streets at the present time, but considerably larger than now common. Russells had for many years continued a service of stage-waggons between the port of Falmouth and the Metropolis. Drawn by the then usual team of eight horses, augmented by two, or even four, more on many of the hills that make the west-country roads a constant succession of ups and downs, they had brought heavy goods and luggage that distance in twelve days, at the rate of three miles an hour, carrying passengers at a halfpenny a mile. But with the coming of the nineteenth century they found the stage-coaches, with their “rumble-tumbles,” beginning to carry people at a slightly higher fare, and performing the whole distance of 269 miles in three days and nights. Even the poorest found it cheaper to pay the higher fare and save the delays and expenses of the other nine days, and so Messrs. Russell found one branch of their trade decaying. They accordingly, about 1820, put their “Fly Vans” on the road, vehicles which did the journey in the same time as the ordinary stage-coaches of that period, and, running night and day, continued so to set forth and come to their journey’s end until the railway came and presently made away with fly vans, stage-coaches and mails alike.

A sign of the times immediately preceding railways was the appearance of the heavy covered luggage and goods vans, exclusively devoted to that class of traffic and carrying no passengers. How the heavy goods of Birmingham and other great towns were then conveyed along the roads is shown in the curious and very interesting old painting, engraved here, of Pickford & Co.’s London and Manchester Luggage Van. The roads between London and the great manufacturing towns at length became crowded with goods, and had it not been for the railways, they must at an early date have become altogether inadequate, and an era of great highway improvement and widening have set in, notwithstanding that quite two-thirds of the goods traffic at that time was water-borne, and went by those canals with which the genius of Brindley and Telford, and the enterprise of the Duke of Bridgewater and others, had half a century earlier intersected the trade routes and manufacturing centres of the country.

It is at once instructive and interesting here to glance at the figures prepared by the promoters of the London and Birmingham Railway, opened in 1838, by which they argued the pressing need of a railway, which should carry cheaper and quicker. They gave several sets of estimates, whose discrepancies are to be accounted for by the increasing volume of traffic; but, to reduce their figures to round numbers, it seems that in the year before the line was begun, the annual average of goods despatched between Birmingham and London was 144,000 tons, carried at rates of from fivepence to sixpence a mile per ton by the “Fly-boats” on the canal and by the vans and waggons. By canal the annual expenditure was £227,000, by road £113,000. Passengers, numbering 488,342, at an average of twopence a head per mile on the 109 miles, spent £447,646 in travelling.