THE STAGE-WAGGONS AND WHAT THEY CARRIED: HOW THE POOR TRAVELLED
We have now arrived at the time when the goods traffic became a
prominent feature of the road.
The precursor of all public vehicles was the carrier’s waggon, a
conveyance of hoary antiquity, intended in the first instance for the
carriage of heavy goods, but finding room for those wayfarers who were
too poor to own or hire a horse, or possibly too infirm to sit one even
if their means sufficed. At least a hundred and fifty years before
the earliest stage-coach was put on the road, the waggon, the poor
man’s coach, was creaking and groaning on its tedious way at a pace of
little more than two miles an hour. The stage-waggon, in fact, came
into use about 1500, and the first glimpse and earliest notice of the
carrier’s and stage-waggon business introduces us to a very celebrated
waggoner indeed, by far the most notable of all his kind--none other,
in fact, than Thomas Hobson, the carrier between Cambridge and London,
the grand original of the Chaplin & Hornes, the Pickfords, the Carter
Patersons, and Suttons of succeeding generations. Hobson’s London
place of call was the “Bull,” Bishopsgate Street Within. When the
business was founded is not on record, but it was old-established
and prosperous when he succeeded to it on the death of his father in
1568. Under the terms of his father’s will he inherited, among other
things, the vehicle with which the carrying trade was conducted, the
“cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things thereunto
belonging, with the nag.” It is quite evident from this that one cart
or waggon sufficed for all the commerce between London and Cambridge
at that time. If he did not choose to take these things, he was to
have £30 instead, the equivalent of their value, which--taking into
consideration the fact that the purchasing power of money at that time
would be about six times that of our own--was therefore £180. The
“nag” specified in the will was, of course, the horse ridden by the
waggoner by the side of the eight-horse waggon team. In old prints of
stage-waggons we see that the waggoner did not usually drive his team
from the waggon holding the reins, but rode a pony, and, wielding a
whip of formidable length, urged on the much-suffering beasts through
mud and ruts.
Hobson senior had been a man of wealth and consideration, and his son
increased both. In his father’s lifetime he had gone continually back
and forth with the waggon, and so continued to go until his death,
January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year. He was, as his father had
been before him, not merely a carrier between Cambridge and London, but
the only one, and specially licensed by the University. He conveyed
the letters, too, and had a very lucrative business of letting out
saddle-horses. In those days, before coaches had come into existence,
and when able-bodied men, despising the slow progress of the waggon,
rode horseback, his stable of forty horses, “fit for travelling, with
boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without
going from college to college to borrow,” was in great request. From
his determination to allow no picking and choosing, and his refusing
to allow any horse to be taken out of its proper turn, first arose
that immortal proverb, “Hobson’s Choice, that or none”--in other
words, no choice whatever. University witlings made great play with
Hobson, and when at last he died, quite a sheaf of lyrical epitaphs on
him appeared, from the well-known ones by Milton to the more obscure
exercises of anonymous versifiers.[D]
[D] For a detailed notice of Hobson, with a portrait of him,
see the _Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road_, pp. 10–12,
32, 140, 157–166.
The business of stage-waggoning obtained its first specific notice
so late as 1617, when Fynes Morison, in his _Itinerary_, mentioned
the “carryers, who have long covered waggons, in which they carry
passengers from place to place; but this kind of journey is so tedious
by reason they must take waggon very early and come very late to their
innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in
this sort.”
How early they were accustomed to start, and how late would come
to their inns, may be gathered from the great classic instance in
Shakespeare, where the two carriers in the First Part of _King Henry
the Fourth_ are discovered in the innyard at Rochester preparing to
set forth for London. It is two o’clock in the morning, and London
but thirty miles away, yet it will not be earlier than “time to go to
bed with a candle” before that gammon of bacon and those two razes of
ginger are delivered at Charing Cross.
Shakespeare, of course, here wrote, not of the manners and customs of
Henry the Fourth’s time, but of what he had himself heard and seen,
and what might so be seen and heard on any day, early in the morning,
in the yard of any considerable hostelry in the kingdom. He has fixed
for ever, in his deathless pages, the road life that existed when the
sixteenth century was drawing to its close.
Contemporary with, but originating even earlier than, the stage-waggons
were the pack-horses, which dated from a time when even the
broad-wheeled wains would have sunk hopelessly in the mud of the best
roads in the country. By pack-horse, at an earlier date than 1500,
all goods, and even such heavy articles as building-stone, coals and
timber, were carried, for the very eloquent reason that, before the
passing of the first General Highway Act, in 1555, which was the first
obligation upon the parishes to repair and maintain the roads, nothing
had been done to keep them in repair for many centuries; and the
parishes, with the best will in the world, could not at once retrieve
them from their desperate condition. Wheeled traffic had been unknown
until the early stage-waggons appeared, and those few who travelled
otherwise than afoot or on their own horses were content to mount the
pack-saddle of a patient and long-suffering pack-horse, themselves
only a degree less long-suffering and patient. Then the etymology of
the words “travel” and “journey” was abundantly justified; for it was
sorrow and hard labour to leave one’s own fireside, and a day’s journey
was--what the word “journey” implies--the passing from place to place
within the hours of daylight. No one dared travel the roads when night
had fallen, and it was not until the eighteenth century had dawned that
coaches began to run by night as well as day.
In far parts of the country and on the by-roads the pack-horse train
lasted an incredible time. Wheeled conveyances of any kind were,
generally speaking, impossible on any but the principal roads. The
farmers and higglers who had occasion to transport heavier loads
than it was possible for horses to carry, used a primitive kind of
sledge, formed of tree-trunks, of which the light tapering ends formed
the shafts and the heavy bodies of the trunks the runners. Thus the
building materials were of old often carried or dragged, with much
friction and waste of effort, to their destination. In Devon and
Cornwall these truly savage makeshifts were called by the peculiarly
descriptive name of “truckamucks.”
When Smollett, the novelist, travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh
and on to London as a young man, in 1739, he rode pack-horse as far
as Newcastle, for the simple reason that between Glasgow and the
Tyne there was neither coach, cart, nor waggon on the road; and in
Yorkshire, Cumberland, Devon and Cornwall, and the like extreme corners
of the land, where remoteness from the world and the rugged nature of
the country conspired to exclude wheels, the packman and his small but
sturdy breed of laden horses alone kept the rural districts supplied
with their barest requirements until the first years of the nineteenth
century were come. The old packmen’s and drovers’ ways, narrow and
winding to avoid the turnpike-gates that once took toll of all but the
foot-passenger, may still be traced on the Yorkshire wolds, along the
shoulders of the Westmorland and Cumberland fells, and by the rivers
and moors of Devon and Cornwall. Often they are not even lanes, but
only precipitous and rocky tracks, eloquent of those old times that
are commonly pictured so rosy, but were really very grey and dour.
Here and there the sign of the “Pack Horse” still survives, and marks
the old houses of entertainment once frequented by the packmen of that
vanished past. The “Pack Horse” at Chippenham and those two old houses
at Turnham Green, the “Old Pack Horse” and the “Pack Horse and Talbot”
were halting-places of the packmen who travelled the Bath Road. The
last-named house is now little more than an ordinary London “public,”
but it still displays a picture-sign, copied from an old original,
showing a pack-horse with a talbot by his side; the “talbot” being the
old English hound, something between a foxhound and a bloodhound, a
fierce creature who guarded his master’s property from the thieves and
dangers of all kinds that then befell so constantly along the roads, or
even at the often ill-famed inns by the wayside.
An attempt to supplant the pack-horses between London and Shrewsbury
was made in 1737, by the establishment of the “Gee-ho.” Facts relating
to this conveyance are of especial interest, because we are told the
circumstances that led to it being put on the road. It seems, then,
that until that year Shrewsbury had known no other than a pack-horse
service, which set out from and came to what was then the “Pheasant,”
now the “Lion and Pheasant,” Inn on Wyle Cop, in that town. A Mrs.
Warner, a widow, was landlady, and apparently pack-horse proprietor as
well. A shrewd fellow named Carter, a soldier who had been billeted at
the inn, made love to the widow, married her, and managed the business.
Let us hope they were both happy and successful. At any rate, Carter
started the “Gee-ho” as the first conveyance to ply between Shrewsbury
and London. It was a stage-waggon, drawn by eight horses, with two
others in reserve to pull it out of those sloughs that might then be
confidently expected on the way. It was advertised to go to or from
London in seven, eight, or nine days in either direction, according to
the condition of the roads.
Smollett’s description of how Roderick Random and Strap easily
overtook the waggon journeying to London along the Great North Road
naturally leads to an inquiry why, if being ill-provided with money
and only lightly burdened with luggage, they, in common with others,
preferred to pay for the doubtful privilege of going slower than they
could easily walk. The reason, perhaps, lay partly in that lack of
appreciation of scenery which characterised the period. Poets had not
yet seen fit to rhapsodise upon the beauties of nature, and artists had
not begun to paint them. Both were in thrills of the most exquisite
rapture on the subject of shepherds and shepherdesses, but their Arcady
was bounded by bricks and mortar. Strephon and Chloe wore silk and
satin, red-heeled shoes and wigs, and patched and powdered amazingly.
Theirs was a bandbox Arcady, a pretty bit of make-believe of the kind
pictured by Watteau; and though they found much poetry in lambs, they
knew nothing of the wintry horrors experienced by the genuine shepherds
in the lambing season, and, indeed, nothing of nature outside the
well-ordered parks and formal gardens of the great. All classes alike
looked with horror upon natural scenery, regarded the peasantry as
barbarians, and left the towns with reluctance and dismay.
With feelings of this kind animating the time, it is not surprising
that even humble wayfarers, ill able to spare the money, should
have sought the shelter and the society that the interior of the
stage-waggons afforded. Other reasons existed, little suspected by
the present generation, whose great main roads, at any rate, are well
defined and excellently well kept. No one, nowadays, once set upon the
great roads to York and Edinburgh, to Exeter, to Portsmouth, Dover or
Bath, need ask his way. It is only necessary to keep straight ahead.
In those old days, however, when travellers could describe the visible
road as being a narrow track three feet wide, _occasionally_ rising
out of the profound depths of mud and water on either side, no one
who could afford to pay would walk, even assuming the very doubtful
physical possibility of struggling through such sloughs afoot.
In 1739 two Glasgow merchants, going horseback from Glasgow by
Edinburgh to London, found no turnpike road until they had gone
three-quarters of their journey, and were come to Grantham. Up to that
point they travelled on a narrow causeway, and met from time to time
strings of pack-horses, thirty to forty in a gang, carrying goods.
The leading horse of each gang carried a bell, to give warning to
travellers coming from an opposite direction. The narrow causeway not
affording room to pass, the horsemen were obliged to make room for the
pack-horses and plunge into the mud, out of which they sometimes found
it difficult to get back upon the road again. Those were the times
when coachmen, often finding the old roads impassable, would make new
routes for themselves across a country not merely strange to turnpike
roads, but still largely open and unenclosed. Travellers then dare not
go alone, if only for a very well-founded fear of losing their way,
just as Pepys, years before, often did when travelling in his carriage
to Bath, to Oxford, Salisbury and elsewhere. He is found paying a
guide 22s. 6d. to show him and his coachman the way between Newport
Pagnell and Oxford; 3s. 6d. for another to guide him from Hungerford
to Market Lavington, and, indeed, after he had experienced the awful
seventeenth-century mischance of losing his way two or three times
through having economised and neglected to provide this necessary aid,
guides everywhere. Travellers then achieved what we moderns are apt to
think wonderful things in thus losing themselves. Pepys actually missed
his way on the Bath Road between Newbury and Reading, and Thoresby lost
himself riding on the Great North Road between Doncaster and York in
1680; in his diary fervently thanking God that he found it again.
Although, by an early Act of William III.’s reign, the justices were
ordered to erect guideposts at the cross-roads, and road surveyors were
to be fined 10s. if the provisions of the Act were not complied with,
such posts (except perhaps on the road to Harwich, so often travelled
by the Third William on his journeys to and from the Continent) were
conspicuously lacking for many generations yet to come, and no one ever
seems to have heard of country surveyors being fined for not performing
the duty thus laid upon them. An exception to this picture of an
uncharted wilderness thus presented is found in the diary of Celia
Fiennes, who in the last decade of the seventeenth century travelled
through England on horseback, and especially remarked the Lancashire
cross-roads between Wigan and Preston being furnished with “hands
pointing to each road, with ye names of ye great towns on.” The fact of
her thinking the circumstance worth noting shows us how uncommon it was
for roads to be signposted.
Only the waggoners who constantly used the roads could with certainty
find their way; and so, and for fear of the highwaymen and the
footpads and other hedgerow rascals to whom the smallest plunder was
not despicable, the waggon was a welcome friend to the poor. Safety
was thought to lie in numbers; although it is true that, in the
moment of trial, even a waggonful of able-bodied travellers would
commonly surrender their few valuables to the first demand of a single
highwayman, whose pistol was probably unloaded, and, even if primed,
generally refused to “go off” when fired. It is not unnatural to
prefer to be robbed in company with a number of others, rather than
to be the solitary victim. For these reasons, therefore, even the
able-bodied and unencumbered often chose to tediously travel with
the women, the infirm, and those whose luggage compelled. Smollett’s
humorous description of the stage-waggon and the follies and foibles
of its very mixed passengers is the classic authority for this stratum
of road life. The sham captain, really a quondam valet, braggart
before the timorous, but shaking with the fear of death upon him when
the pretended highwayman appears; his wife, aping a gentility as mean
as it is transparently false; the money-loving and peace-loving but
satirical Jew; the lively Miss Jenny, and the waggoner, are all types,
slightly caricatured, but true to the life of the period. Putting aside
the question as to whether such people could be conjured out of his
inner consciousness without some basis of fact, we must consider that
Smollett, writing of his own time, would not for his own sake be likely
to draw a picture which would seem a forced or unnatural representation
of the wayfaring life of the period. Thus, when he makes his characters
journey for five days in this manner, and brings them on the sixth to
an inn where the landlord gives the meal they had bespoken to three
gentlemen who had just arrived, we think we learn something of the
contempt with which almost every one looked down upon passengers by
stage-waggons. The gentlemen themselves said: “The passengers in the
waggon might be d----d; their betters must be served before them;
they supposed it would be no hardship on such travellers to dine on
bread-and-cheese for one day.” And the poor devils certainly would have
gone without their meal had it not been for that good fellow Joey, the
waggoner, who, entering the kitchen of the inn with a pitchfork in his
hand, swore he would be the death of any man who should pretend to
seize the victuals prepared for the waggon. “On this,” says Smollett,
“the three strangers drew their swords, and, being joined by their
servants, bloodshed seemed imminent, when the landlord, interposing,
offered to part with his own dinner, for the sake of peace,” which
proposal was accepted, and all ended happily.
[Illustration: THE WAGGON, 1816.
_After Rowlandson._
]
Such was the picture of travel by stage-waggon it was possible to
present to the public in 1748 as a reasonably accurate transcript of
road-life.
It was at that time the usual practice among a party of travellers
by waggon to elect a chairman on setting out. The one thus set above
his fellows arranged with the waggoner where they were to halt during
the day, settled with the innkeepers an inclusive charge for meals
and accommodation, and was treasurer, paymaster, umpire, and general
referee in all disputes. Thus was the ancient original idea of
government in larger communities--government solely for the welfare of
the community itself--reproduced in these poor folk.
The gradual replacement of the pack-horses by heavy waggons began on
the most frequented roads about the third decade of the eighteenth
century. Twelve Turnpike Acts for the improvement of local roads had
been passed in the ten years between 1700 and 1710. They increased by
seventy-one in the next ten years, and no fewer than two hundred and
forty-five came into existence between 1730 and 1760, followed from
1760 to 1770 by a hundred and seventy-five more. The great number of
five hundred and thirty Acts in seventy-five years shows both the
crying needs of the age and the energy with which the problem of
road-improvement was grasped by Parliament. If the resulting betterment
of the roads was not so great as it should have been, that was due
rather to the unbusinesslike methods by which the turnpike trustees
despatched their business, and not to the Government.
Aikin, writing of Manchester and its history, tells how the trade of
that town, carried on of old by chapmen, owning gangs of pack-horses,
began to increase in 1730, consequent upon the improvement of the
roads. Waggons were set up, and the chapmen, instead of setting
forth with their goods for sale, only rode out for orders, carrying
patterns with them in their saddle-bags. Thus the commercial traveller,
familiar in all the years between 1730 and the present time, came into
existence. During the forty years from 1730 to 1770, says Aikin, the
trade of Manchester was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these
“riders,” as they were called, all over the kingdom. The goods they
sold by sample were delivered in bulk by the waggons.
By 1750, the gradual introduction of two classes of vehicles between
the common stage-waggon and the stage-coach had begun. The first of
these intermediate types was the Shrewsbury and London “Flying Stage
Waggon,” announced to begin flying from Shrewsbury, October 22nd, 1750,
to reach London in five days, winter and summer. As Shrewsbury is 152
miles from London, this meant thirty miles a day. Welsh flannels, and
consignments of butter and lard and miscellaneous goods, shared this
vehicle with the passengers. There was nothing in the build of this new
comer on the road to distinguish it from the common stage-waggons, and
it only progressed the quicker because, following the newly-established
practice of the coaches of that period, it changed horses at places on
the way, instead of making the whole journey with one--often tired and
exhausted--team. The other type of vehicle was the “caravan” or “long
coach,” the next step higher in the social scale. A “caravan” was put
on the road between Shrewsbury and London at the close of 1750. It was
an affair greatly resembling modern gipsy-vans, and was fitted inside
with benches for eight, twelve, or even, at a pinch, eighteen persons.
It was drawn by “six able horses,” and professed to reach London in
four days, but often occupied the whole of five. The fare to London
by “caravan” was 15s.--rather less than a penny-farthing a mile. A
six-horsed conveyance answering to this description, but uncovered, is
pictured by Rowlandson fifty-six years later, on a road not specified
by him.
In April 1753 the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach” began to ply
between those places and London, completing the distance in three and
a half days; fare 18s. Here, evidently, were several social grades;
and when the Shrewsbury stage-coach of the same year, charging a
guinea for an inside place, and the “Machine” of 1764, with a limited
number of seats at 30s., each came on the scene, the several degrees
of contempt with which all these classes of travellers, from those at
twopence-farthing a mile down to those others at a penny-farthing,
regarded one another and the lowest class, whose shilling a day or
halfpenny a mile was the lowest common denominator in stage-waggon
travelling, must have been curious certainly, if not edifying, to
witness. The usual alternative of a halfpenny a mile or a shilling a
day gives about twenty-four miles as a day’s journey for the common
stage-waggon, and as the Flying Waggon was advertised to go at the
rate of thirty miles a day, six miles a day was therefore the measure
of the superiority in speed of one over the other. But the accumulated
contempt of all those social scales for the occupant of the common
waggon did not rest there, any more than it began with the passengers
of the “Machine.” Just as the lordly and gentle folk who had travelled
in their own chariots looked down even upon the loftiest heights of
stage-coach travelling, so did the poor folk of the waggons unload
their weight of contempt upon those poorest of the poor, who, having
nothing to lose, feared no one--except perhaps the parish constable,
apt to be arbitrary and not always able to distinguish between a
penniless but honest wayfarer and a rogue and vagabond. Frequently
these travellers in the lowest stratum saw the highwayman approach,
not merely without fear but with a certain pleasurable anticipation;
because your true knight of the road had a certain generous code
of morals, and while he robbed the rich, gave to the needy--a thing
perhaps counted to him for righteousness by that recording angel who
effaced the record of Uncle Toby’s hasty imprecation with a kindly
obliterating tear.
[Illustration: THE STAGE-WAGGON, 1820.
_After J. L. Agasse._
]
The general increase of heavy traffic soon after the middle of the
eighteenth century did not escape the notice of those responsible for
the condition of the roads. Incompetent road-surveyors, ignorant of
the science of road construction and employing unsuitable materials
and unskilled labour, saw the highways they had mended with mud,
road-scrapings and gravel continually falling into ruts and sloughs,
often from twelve to eighteen inches deep. Seeking any cause for this
rather than their ignorance of the first rudiments of construction,
they naturally discovered it in the passage of the heavily-weighted
waggons, and raised an outcry against them accordingly. To an age that
saw no better method of mending the roads than that of raking mud on
to them and throwing faggots and boulder-stones upon that basis, this
seemed reasonable enough, and Parliament was at length persuaded to
authorise discriminatory rates to be imposed by the turnpike trusts
upon carts and waggons whose wheels were not of a certain breadth.
The argument was that the broader the wheels, the greater would be
the distribution of weight, and consequently the road would be less
injured. It was an argument based, correctly enough, upon natural laws,
and the age was not educated to the point of seeing that roads should
be made to the measure of the traffic they might be called upon to
bear, rather than that the build of vehicles should be altered to suit
the disabilities of the roads themselves. So, from 1766, a series of
Turnpike Acts began, containing clauses by which narrow wheels were
penalised and broad ones relieved. Tolls were not uniform throughout
the country, but although those one Trust would be authorised to levy
might, from some special circumstance, be higher than others, they
ranged within narrow limits. Generally, a four-wheeled waggon drawn by
four horses, with wheels of a less breadth than six inches, would pay a
shilling on passing a turnpike gate; with wheels measuring six inches
broad and upwards, the toll would be ninepence; and with a breadth of
nine inches and upwards, sixpence. Not at every gate was payment of
tolls made in those old days. Payment made at one generally “freed”
the next, and sometimes others as well; but here again there was no
general rule. Special circumstances made some trusts liberal and others
extremely grasping.
A width of sixteen inches for waggon wheels was very generally urged
and adopted, and thus it is that in old pictures of this period the
great wains have so clumsy an appearance, looking, indeed, as though
the wainwrights had not yet learned their business, and from ignorance
built more solidly than the loads carried gave any occasion for.
In 1773, one James Sharp, of Leadenhall Street, advertised his
invention of a “rolling waggon,” whose rollers (in place of wheels)
were of this breadth of sixteen inches, and proceeded to state that
“two late Acts of Parliament” allowed all carriages moving upon
rollers of that gauge to be drawn by any number of horses or cattle,
and further, that they were allowed to carry eight tons in summer and
seven in winter, and to pass toll-free for the term of one year from
Michaelmas 1773, and after that time to pay only half toll. Clearly,
then, in the great mass of legislation for roads and traffic there was
then a limit existing for loads and for teams. It only remained for the
wisdom of the time to enact laws giving a bonus to every waggon whose
wheels exceeded a breadth of two feet--thus making every such vehicle
its own road-repairer--for the absurdity to be complete. There had,
indeed, already arisen a bright genius with a somewhat similar idea,
for in 1763 Bourne published his design of a four-wheeled waggon whose
front axletree was to be so much shorter than the hind one that the
foremost wheels would make a track inside the hinder. The breadth of
wheel, indeed, was not to be more than fifteen inches, but the combined
breadth of all four planned thus would flatten out no less than a
five-foot width of road, and the heavier the contents of the waggon,
so much better for the proper rolling of the way. But this ingenious
person took no account of the extra difficulty of haulage, and the
consequently larger teams that would be required for this engine of
his. It never came into use, nor did the rival invention of another
amiable theorist meet a better fate. This device set out to deal with
the problem of soft and rutted roads by fixing heavy iron rollers under
the frame of a waggon. While the vehicle progressed along good roads
these rollers were not brought into contact with the ground, but as
soon as the wheels began to sink into foul and miry ways, the rollers
came into touch with the surface, and at the same time prevented any
further sinking and flattened out all irregularities.
Turnpike roads, being then things “new-fangled” and unusual, were of
course disapproved of by all that very numerous class who distrust any
change. Doubtful of their own ability to hold their own in any order
of things newer than that in which they have been brought up, _any_
change must to them be for the worse. The waggoners to a man were
numbered in this class, and, apart from the tolls to be paid on the
new roads, objected to them as new. An entertaining contributor to the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ in 1752 consulted “the most solemn waggoner” he
could find between London and Bath. This was one “Jack Whipcord,” who,
like every one else, preferred to go round by “a miserable waggon-track
called ‘Ramsbury Narrow Way.’ Jack’s answer was, that roads had but one
object--namely, waggon-driving; that he required but five feet width
in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest might go
to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be damned,
and not run gossipping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no
improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi.
16.[E] Thus,” says the writer, “finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a
profane country wag, I left him, dissatisfied.”
[E] “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths,
where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find
rest for your souls.”
We are not to suppose, from this imaginary “Jack Whipcord,” that
waggoners were generally of a dour and unpleasant nature. Indeed,
the consensus of opinion to be collected from old-world literature
shows that, as a class, they were pleasant and light-hearted. M.
Samuel de Sorbière, a distinguished Frenchman who visited England in
1663 and has left a very entertaining account of his travels, paints
a charming little cameo portrait of the waggoner who was in charge
of the six-horse stage-waggon by which he travelled from Dover to
Gravesend. The horses were yoked one before the other, and beside them
walked the waggoner, “clothed in black and appointed in all things
like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and
was a merry fellow, who fancied he made a figure and seemed mightily
pleased with himself.” “Joey,” too, the waggoner already glimpsed in
_Roderick Random_, was sprightly and light-hearted; and we have the
evidence of that old English ballad, the “Jolly Waggoner,” that men of
this trade were conventionally regarded as devil-me-care fellows, own
brothers in disposition to sailors, always represented as jolly, even
in the old days when rations were scanty and bad and rope’s endings
plentiful. This jollity is insisted upon, even by the old wayside signs
of the country inns. Now and again you may find the sign of the “Jolly
Anglers,” while on the Portsmouth Road the “Jolly Drovers” is to be
seen, and on the Exeter Road the “Jolly Farmer,” a creature vanished
from this country and utterly unknown these forty years and more; but
only the waggoners and the sailors are usually known by that adjective.
Rarely, indeed, is the sailor described in any other way. In a few
instances he may be “Valiant,” but ninety times in every hundred he is
“Jolly.”
According to the second verse of the “Jolly Waggoner,” his cheerfulness
was invincible:--
It is a cold and stormy night: I’m wetted to the skin,
But I’ll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn,
And then I’ll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Sing wo! my lads, sing wo!
Drive on, my lads, gee-ho!
For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do-o-o?
He knew something of all kinds of weather, and met all kinds of men in
his daily journeys, and thus early became something of a philosopher,
looking forward for nothing beyond his nightly inn, in whose kitchen he
was well known and esteemed, alike for his own qualities and the news
and parcels he brought from the outer world on the other side of the
distant hills. With a sack over his shoulders and peace in his mind,
he could greet the rainy days with joke and song, or endure even the
wintry horrors of December and January with equanimity; yet when spring
was come and grass grew green and the bare, ruined boughs of the trees
began to be clothed again with leaves, not even the old heathen Greeks
and Romans in their Floralia celebrated the coming again of the sun
with more heartiness. His horses and himself were decked with ribbons
on May Day, his sweetheart had some longed-for present from the Great
City, and not even the blackbird on the hawthorn spray sang a merrier
tune, as he drove his team along their steady pace.
It is not a little difficult to pronounce an opinion upon the fares
which the poor folk paid by stage-waggon. Prices varied widely. On the
Great North Road in 1780, between London and Edinburgh, the measure
was, indeed, not by miles but by days; but as the journey took fourteen
days, and the fare was a shilling a day, and the distance covered was
396 miles, we can figure it out at about twenty-eight miles a day
at something less than a halfpenny a mile. Early stage-waggons to
Cambridge, however, appear to have exacted three-halfpence a mile, and
moved with incredible slowness, taking two and a half days to perform
the fifty-one miles, and sleeping two nights upon the road. On the Bath
Road the waggon-fare seems to have been something less than a penny a
mile.
We have already seen something of the old waggon-life, as shown by
Smollett: let us now inquire into the costs and charges of the journey,
apart from the fare. How did these humble folk eat and drink, and how
did they lodge for the night when the waggon came to its inn at sunset?
Sometimes they slept in the shelter of the waggon itself, under the
substantial covering of the great canvas tilt, snugly curled up in
the hay and straw, and barricaded by the crates and boxes that formed
part of the load--not an altogether uncomfortable, if certainly too
promiscuous, a sleeping arrangement. At other times the stable-lofts of
the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries,
mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides)
existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those
off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the “basket,”
did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the
waggons, to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and
bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw
of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was
their portion. Swift himself, that terrible genius of the eighteenth
century, who knew the extremities of obscurity and fame, of penury and
affluence, was, in his early days, of this poor company. When a young
man, travelling from the house of his patron, Sir William Temple, at
Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, to see his mother at Leicester,
he rode in the waggon, and slept at “the penny hedge-inns,” where
they were not above letting a bed for the night to a young man so
unusually particular as to pay sixpence extra for clean sheets and a
bed to himself--an exclusive arrangement, it would appear, not within
the everyday philosophy of those humble caravanserais. He whom not only
later ages, but even his contemporaries, unite in acclaiming a genius,
generally chose to take his food with waggoners, ostlers, and persons
of that station. The superfine Lord Orrery, who recorded these facts,
and tells us that Swift “delighted in scenes of low life,” says he
“dined” with them; but if Lord Orrery had been as well acquainted with
humble circles he would have known that the low people in them do not
“dine” at all; they just “have dinner.”
[Illustration: THE ROAD WAGGON: A TRYING CLIMB.
_After J. Pollard._
]
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.
[Illustration: THE STAGE-WAGGON, 1816.
_By Rowlandson._
]
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.
[Illustration: PICKFORD’S LONDON AND MANCHESTER FLY VAN, 1826.
_After George Best._
]
To those who unfailingly see the wise direction of Providence in
everything, it would seem that Providence had thus raised up railway
engineers and capitalists at the psychological moment; but the views
of coach-proprietors, coachmen, guards, ostlers, innkeepers, and the
innumerable others depending in one way or another upon the road for a
living, did not, it is to be feared, look so complacently upon the new
era which in many instances ruined them. Nor, perhaps, did those who
were financially interested in canals ascribe the new order of things
to providential interposition.
That, indeed, is providential which advances one’s own interests and
preserves one’s well-being, but misfortunes are generally given a very
different ascription. The providential interpositions that benefited
one class inflicted very great hardship and loss upon another. The
canals that were, before the introduction of railways, very great and
keen competitors with the waggons, were frozen up in severe winters,
and all traffic along them stopped, and thus the whole of the carrying
trade went by road, greatly to the advantage of the turnpike trusts
and the owners of waggons. Indeed, severe winters, if unaccompanied
by snow, were in every way advantageous to the waggons, because the
frost-bound roads gave good going, while “open” winters made the
highways a sea of mud and almost impassable.
Although with the coming of the railways the stage-waggons swiftly
disappeared from such direct commercial routes as those between London
and Birmingham and London and Manchester, this ancient type of vehicle
lingered amazingly on the purely agricultural roads leading to the
Metropolis out of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. As the stage-waggon was the
earliest of old road vehicles, so also it was the last; and even when
the last coach came off the road, and people travelled only by train,
there were still left not a few of the old waggons continuing their
sober journeys, not in the least affected by the railways. They came
to and set out from London very much as they had been used to do two
hundred and forty years before, and resorted as of old to the ancient
inns that lingered in such strongholds of the old road-faring interest
as the Borough High Street, Aldgate and Whitechapel, and Bishopsgate
Street. It is true they carried passengers no longer, for when railway
travel came, and was cheap as well as speedy, there were none who could
afford the time taken of old by waggon. It was cheaper to pay a railway
fare, and thus save a day or even more. But with heavy goods it long
remained far otherwise, and even into the ’sixties it was possible to
see the lethargic waggons still ponderously coming to their haven out
of Kent and Sussex at the “Talbot” in the Borough (only demolished in
1870), from the Eastern Counties to the “Blue Boar” or the “Saracen’s
Head” in Aldgate, or from the North to the “Four Swans,” the “Bull,”
or the “Green Dragon,” in Bishopsgate Street Within, precisely as they
had done from the beginning, when Shakespeare was play-writing. They
were built in the same fashion as of yore. The immense canvas-covered
tilts had not changed their pattern, and their dim old horn lanterns
were genuine antiques; their wheels, as clumsy as ever they had been,
shrieked for grease and racked the ears of the lieges as they had
always done; and the lieges swore at the waggoners and the waggoners
cursed back at them in strange provincial dialects, just as their
respective ancestors had been wont to do for more generations than one
cares to count. The Londoner little imagined--because his imagination
on any subject is small--when he looked dully upon these old
conveyances, and the old inns to which they came, that he was gazing
upon a survival of the age of Elizabeth; and while he was thus failing
to realise the exquisite interest of what he saw, the “common stage
waggons,” as they were technically named by Act of Parliament, ceased
altogether off the face of the earth, and nearly all the old galleried
inns were swept away.