"The Benefit of these Turnpikes appears now to be so great, and the People
in all Places begin to be so sensible of it, that it is incredible what
Effect it has already had upon Trade in the Counties where the Roads are
completely finished; even the Carriage of Goods is abated, in some Places,
6d. per hundred Weight, in others 12d. per hundred, which is abundantly
more Advantageous to Commerce than the Charge paid amounts to....
"Besides the benefits accruing from this laudable Method we may add, The
Conveniency to those who bring fat Cattle, especially Sheep, to London in
the Winter from the remoter counties of Leicester and Lincoln, where they
are bred: For before, the Country Graziers were obliged to sell their
Stocks off in September and October when the Roads began to be bad, and
when they generally sell cheap; and the Butchers {89}and Farmers near
London used to engross them, and keep them till December and January, and
then sell them, though not an Ounce fatter than before, for an advanced
price to the Citizens of London; whereas now the Roads are in a Way to be
made everywhere passable the City will be serv'd with Mutton almost as
cheap in the Winter as in the summer, and the profit of the advance will be
to the Country Graziers, who are the original Breeders and take all the
Pains.
"This is evidenc'd to a Demonstration in the Counties where the Roads are
already repair'd, from whence they bring their fat Cattle, and particularly
their Mutton, in Droves, from Sixty, Seventy or Eighty Miles without
fatiguing, harrassing or sinking the Flesh of the Creatures, even in the
Depth of the Winter."
Whether or not the fat cattle and the sheep were really able to do their
long walk to London without fatigue and loss of flesh, it is certain that
the naturally bad condition of the roads leading to London was made worse
by the "infinite droves of black cattle, hogs and sheep" which passed along
them from Essex, Lincolnshire and elsewhere. When the roads were being
continually trodden by the feet of large heavy bullocks, "of which," says
Defoe, "the numbers that come this way"--that is, out of Lincolnshire and
the fens--"are scarce to be reckon'd up," the work done by the turnpike
commissioners in the summer was often completely spoiled in the winter.
Among, therefore, the many advantages of the rail transport of to-day we
may reckon the fact that the roads and highways are no longer worn to the
same extent as before by cattle and sheep on their way to the London
markets.
Defoe alludes, also, to the influence of improved communications on the
development of the fish industry, with the subsidiary advantage of
improving the food supplies of the people, saying, in this connection--
"I might give Examples where the Herrings which are not the best Fish to
keep, used, even before these Reparations were set on foot, to be carried
to those Towns, and up to Warwick, Birmingham, Tamworth and Stafford, and
though they frequently stunk before they got thither, yet the people were
so eager for them, that they bought them up at a dear Rate; whereas when
the Roads are every where good they will come in less Time, by at least two
Days in Six of what they {90}used to do, and an hundred times the quantity
will be consumed."
Until, again, the advent of better roads, food supplies and
provender--peas, beans, oats, hay, straw, etc.--for London were brought in
on the backs of horses. In proportion as the roads improved and were made
available for carts and waggons the area of supply widened, and the
counties immediately adjoining London even petitioned Parliament against
the extension of turnpikes into the remoter counties. These other counties,
they alleged, would, from the cheapness of their labour, be able to sell
their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than the nearer counties,
and would reduce the rents and ruin the cultivation in the latter. Here, of
course, the producer wanted protection against competition, and wished to
retain the benefit of his geographical advantage. The broader view as to
the effect of improved communications on national progress in general was
expressed by Adam Smith. In Book I., chapter xi., Part I., of his "Wealth
of Nations," he says:--
"Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of
carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with
those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the
greatest of all improvements. They encourage the cultivation of the remote,
which must always be the most extensive circle of the country. They are
advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in
its neighbourhood. They are advantageous even to that part of the country.
Though they introduce some rival commodities into the old market, they open
many new markets to its produce. Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to
good management, which can never be universally established but in
consequence of that free and universal competition which forces everybody
to have resource to it for the sake of self-defence."
The conditions under which the traders of the country in general conducted
their business was, naturally, influenced, if not altogether controlled, by
the conditions of locomotion.
Hutton tells us in his "History of Birmingham" that the practice of the
Birmingham manufacturer for, perhaps, a hundred generations was to keep
within the warmth of his own forge. The foreign customer, therefore,
applied to {91}him for the execution of orders, and regularly made his
appearance twice a year.
Concerning the Manchester trade, Dr Aikin, in his "Description of the
Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester" (1795), says:--
"For the first thirty years of the present century, the old established
houses confined their trade to the wholesale dealers in London, Bristol,
Norwich, Newcastle, and those who frequented Chester fair.... When the
Manchester trade began to extend the chapmen used to keep gangs of
pack-horses, and accompany them to the principal towns with goods in packs,
which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging what was unsold in small
stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought back sheep's wool, which was
bought on the journey, and sold to the makers of worsted yarn at
Manchester, or to the clothiers of Rochdale, Saddleworth and the West
Riding of Yorkshire. On the improvement of the turnpike roads waggons were
set up, and the pack-horses discontinued; and the chapmen only rode out for
orders, carrying with them patterns in their bags. It was during the forty
years from 1730 to 1770 that trade was greatly pushed by the practice of
sending these riders all over the kingdom, to those towns which before had
been supplied from the wholesale places in the capital places before
mentioned."
Thus one effect of the improvement in communications was to allow of the
Manchester manufacturers establishing direct relations with retailers in
the smaller towns who had hitherto been supplied by the wholesale dealers
in the large towns, one set of profits being saved. Dr Aikin adds:--
"Within the last twenty or thirty years the vast increase of foreign trade
has caused many of the Manchester manufacturers to travel abroad, and
agents or partners to be fixed for a considerable time on the Continent, as
well as foreigners to reside at Manchester. And the town has now in every
respect assumed the style and manners of one of the commercial capitals of
Europe."
In an article headed "Change in Commerce," published in No. XI. of "The
Original," (1836), Thomas Walker gives ("by tradition," as he says) some
particulars as to the methods of business followed by a leading Manchester
merchant who was born there early in the eighteenth century {92}and
realised a sufficient fortune to be able to have a carriage of his own when
not half a dozen were kept in the town by persons connected with business.
"He sent the manufactures of the place into Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire,
Cambridgeshire, and the intervening counties, and principally took in
exchange feathers from Lincolnshire and malt from Cambridgeshire and
Nottinghamshire. All his commodities were conveyed on pack-horses, and he
was from home the greater part of every year, performing his journeys
entirely on horseback. His balances were received in guineas, and were
carried with him in his saddle-bags. He was exposed to the vicissitudes of
the weather, to great labour and fatigue, and to constant danger....
Business carried on in this manner required a combination of personal
attention, courage, and physical strength not to be hoped for in a
deputy.... The improvements in the way of carrying on commerce, and its
increase, may be attributed in a great degree to the increased facility of
communication, and the difference between the times I have alluded to and
the present is nearly as great as between a pack-horse and a
steam-carriage."
Walker also mentions that in the early days of the trader here referred to
Manchester was provided with wine by a wine merchant who lived at Preston
and carried his supplies to Manchester on horseback. The quantity then
consumed, however, was but small, as "men in business confined themselves
generally to punch and ale, using wine only as a medicine or on very
extraordinary occasions."
A no less interesting phase of the improvements being brought about, and
one to which I shall revert in the chapter on "The Canal Era," was found in
the influence of better communications on the social conditions of the
people.
That these conditions had been greatly prejudiced by the bad roads is
beyond all question. Villages which could be reached only with difficulty
in summer, and were isolated from the rest of the world for four or five
months in the autumn, winter and early spring, were steeped in ignorance
and superstition. True it is that in such communities as these the games,
sports, customs and traditions which represented the poetry of old English
life survived the longest, and have not even yet disappeared before the
march of Modern Progress. But no less {93}true is it that such communities
were the longest to foster that once popular belief in witchcraft which
meant, not merely the looking askance at any decrepit old creature who was
believed to have turned the milk sour in the pails, or to have stopped the
cows and ewes from breeding, but the putting to death of many thousands of
supposed "witches" in England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The total number of victims in the first eighty years of the
seventeenth century alone is estimated by Dr Charles Mackay, in "Memoirs of
Extraordinary Popular Delusions," at forty thousand! This particular mania
was certainly shared by Kings, Parliaments and ecclesiastics no less than
by ignorant villagers; but it decreased in proportion as general
intelligence increased, and the increase in general intelligence was
materially influenced by those improvements in locomotion and communication
which led to wider knowledge and a greater intermingling of the classes.
The same isolation fostered the belief in ghosts, goblins, wraiths, kelpies
and other inhabitants of the world of spirits, whose visitations or doings
probably formed a leading topic of conversation as the isolated family sat
round the fire in the long winter months, wives and daughters busy, no
doubt, with their distaffs, their spinning-wheel or their needlework, but
none the less able to tell or to listen to the favourite stories.
The whole conditions of existence were of the most circumscribed kind. Many
a village got no news at all of what was happening in the world except such
as the pedlar might bring, or, alternatively, might circulate through his
London-printed "broadsides," telling of some great victory, giving the last
dying speech of a noted highwayman, or recording the death of one ruler and
the succession of another, of which events the villagers might not hear for
two or even three months after they had occurred. "Whole generations," in
the words of Samuel Smiles ("Early Roads and Modes of Travelling"), "lived
a monotonous, ignorant, prejudiced and humdrum life. They had no
enterprise, no energy, little industry, and were content to die where they
were born."
In the Elizabethan era, and even later, inhabitants of the northern
counties were regarded by dwellers in the south as people among whom it
would be dangerous for them to go. {94}English navigators were entering on
voyages of discovery and conquest in distant seas, where they would
fearlessly encounter the enemies of England or the Indians of the New
World, at a time when their fellow-countrymen at home would have shrunk
from the perils of a journey across the wilds of Northumberland or of an
encounter with the supposed savages of Lancashire.
Even when it was a matter of visiting friends, journeys to distant parts of
the country were but rarely undertaken. In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for
December, 1752, it was remarked that English people were readily going to
France, where they spent in 1751 nearly £100,000; but though a rich citizen
in London who had relatives or friends in the west of England might hear of
their welfare half a dozen times in his life, by post, "he thinks no more
of visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nubia."
On the other hand, one result of this limitation in the facilities for home
travel was to give to many a county town a far greater degree of social
distinction that it can claim to-day.
Just as in mediæval times England had consisted of so many separate
self-governing and self-dependent communities, each with the house of the
lord of the manor as the "hub" of its own little universe, so--in the days
when communications had certainly, though still only relatively,
improved--did the county town become the recognised centre of social life
and movement for each and every county where there was any pretence to
social life at all. The country gentry, with their wives and daughters,
came to regard a visit to the county town, and indulgence there in a round
of balls, feasts, visits and functions, in the same light as a season in
London is regarded at the present date.
London in the seventeenth century, if not even down to the middle of the
eighteenth, was, for all practical purposes, as far away from the western
counties of England as London to-day is from Vienna or St. Petersburg.
Visits to the Metropolis were then, indeed, of extremely rare occurrence.
In Macaulay's sketch of "The State of England in 1685," forming chapter
iii. of his "History of England," there is a diverting account of what must
have happened to the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor when he
appeared in Fleet Street, to be "as easily distinguished from the resident
population {95}as a Turk or a Lascar," and to be subjected to numerous
"vexations and humiliations" until, enraged and mortified, he returned to
his mansion where "he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above
himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the
judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord
Lieutenant."
Adding to such "vexations and humiliations" the cost, the inconveniences
and the perils of a journey to London--perils, too, that arose from
highwaymen as well as from the roads themselves--the country gentleman was
generally content to seek his social distractions nearer home than London.
To quote again from Macaulay:--
"The county town was his metropolis. He sometimes made it his residence
during part of the year. At all events he was often attracted thither by
business and pleasure, by assizes, quarter sessions, elections, musters of
militia, festivals and races. There were the halls in which the judges,
robed in scarlet and escorted by javelins and trumpets, opened the King's
commission twice a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the
cattle, the wool and the hops of the surrounding country were exposed for
sale. There were the great fairs to which merchants came from London, and
where the rural dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar, stationery,
cutlery and muslin. There were the shops at which the best families of the
neighbourhood bought grocery and millinery."
Defoe, in his "Tour," affords us some interesting glimpses of the social
life of various country towns in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century. Dorchester he describes as "indeed a pleasant town to live in....
There is," he says, "good company and a good deal of it," and he thinks "a
man that coveted a retreat in this world might as agreeably spend his time,
and as well, in Dorchester" as in any town he knew in England. Exeter was
"full of gentry and good company." He has much to say in praise of social
life in Dorsetshire. In Plymouth "a gentleman might find very agreeable
society." Salisbury had "a good deal of good manners and good company." The
"neighbourhood" of "Persons of Figure and Quality" caused Maidstone to be
"a very agreeable place to live in," and one where a "Man of Letters and
Manners" would always "find suitable Society both to Divert and Improve
himself," the town being, in fact, one of "very great {96}Business and
Trade, and yet full of Gentry, of Mirth, and of Good Company." King's Lynn,
the head-quarters of so important a shipping business in those days, he
found "abounding in very good company," while of York he writes: "There is
abundance of good Company here, and abundance of good Families live here,
for the sake of the good Company and cheap living; a Man converses here
with all the World as effectually as at London; the Keeping up of
Assemblies among the younger Gentry was first set up here, a thing other
Writers recommend mightily as the Character of a good Country and of a
Pleasant Place."
The general effect, from a social standpoint, of the combination of better
roads and better coaches is well told in an essay "On the Country Manners
of the Present Age," published in the "Annual Register" for 1761. The
writer has much to say that is of interest from the point of view of the
present work, but the following extracts must suffice:--
"It is scarce half a century since the inhabitants of distant counties were
regarded as a species almost as different from those of the Metropolis as
the natives of the Cape of Good Hope.... Formerly a journey into the
country was considered almost as great an undertaking as a voyage to the
Indies. The old family coach was sure to be stowed with all sorts of
luggage and provisions; and perhaps in the course of the journey a whole
village together with their teams, were called in to dig the heavy vehicle
out of the clay, and to drag it to the next place of wretched accommodation
which the road afforded. Thus they travelled like the caravan over the
deserts of Arabia, with every disagreeable circumstance of tediousness and
inconvenience. But now the amendments of the roads with the many other
improvements of travelling have in a manner opened a new communication
between the several parts of our island.... Stage-coaches, machines, flys
and post chaises are ready to transport passengers to and fro, between the
metropolis and the most distant parts of the Kingdom. The lover now can
almost literally annihilate time and space, and be with his mistress before
she dreams of his arrival. In short the manners, fashions, amusements,
vices and follies of the metropolis now make their way to the remotest
corners of the land as readily and speedily, along the turnpike road, as,
of old, Milton's Sin and Death, by means {97}of their marvellous bridges
over the Chaos from the infernal regions to our world.
"The effects of this easy communication have almost daily grown more and
more visible. The several great cities, and we might add, many poor country
towns, seem to be universally inspired with the ambition of becoming the
little Londons of the part of the country in which they are situated."
But if the easy communication rendered possible by turnpike roads and
flying coaches conferred on the country towns a hope of becoming so many
little Londons, the day was to come when a still easier communication by
means of railway lines and express trains was to take provincial residents
just as readily to the great and real London, and so deprive not a few
provincial centres of much of that social life and distinction which the
improved transport facilities had brought them.
In London itself, as may also be learned from Defoe, the betterment of the
roads around the metropolis led to the citizens flocking out in greater
numbers than ever to take lodgings and country houses in "towns near
London," which many people having business in the City had not been able to
do before because of the trouble involved in riding to and fro on the bad
roads. We are told, further, of the consequent increase in the rent of
houses, and of the greater number of dwellings being built, in places the
roads to which had thus been improved, as compared with other suburban
districts to which the turnpike system had not yet been extended.
We have here the beginnings of that creation of a Greater London which has
since undergone such enormous developments, and has led to the almost
complete disappearance of the custom, once in vogue in the City of London,
of a merchant or tradesman living on the same premises as those in which he
carried on his business.
Of the various circumstances that led to the eventual decline and fall of
the turnpike system, which, with all its faults and short-comings, had at
least helped to bring about the improvements in trade, transport and social
conditions here described, I shall speak in Chapter xxiii.
{98}CHAPTER XII