Part 4

The journey—200 miles—occupied four days. These early “flying coaches” travelled faster than their successors of a later date. The seventeenth century London-Exeter coach did the journey, one hundred and seventy-five miles, in ten days, whereas in 1755, according to “Nimrod,” proprietors promised “a safe and expeditious journey in a fortnight.”

The “short stages,” _i.e._, those which ran between London and places only twenty or thirty miles distant, were the hackney coaches which had not been fortunate enough to obtain licenses under Charles II.’s Act. These were drawn by four horses and carried six passengers, making the journey to or from London in one day. There were, John Cressel states, stage coaches running to almost every town situated within twenty or twenty-five miles of the capital; and it is worth observing that at this date letters were sent by coach. Coaches ran on both sides of the Thames from Windsor and Maidenhead, and “carry all the letters, little bundles and passengers which were carried by watermen.”

This writer’s arguments against coaches are worthless as such, but they throw side lights on the discomforts of travel at the time. He considered it detrimental to health to rise in the small hours of the morning to take coach and to retire late to bed. With more reason he enquired,

“Is it for a man’s health to be laid fast in foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in mire; and afterwards sit in the cold till fresh teams of horses can be procured to drag the coach out of the foul ways? Is it for his health to travel in rotten coaches and have their tackle, or perch, or axle-tree broken, and then to wait half the day before making good their stage?”

John Cressel was prone to exaggeration, but there is plenty of reliable contemporary evidence to show that his picture of the coach roads was not overdrawn. Yet when this advocate for the suppression of coaches seeks to rouse public sentiment, he reproaches those men who use them for effeminacy and indulgence in luxury! One of his quaintest arguments in favour of the saddle horse is that the rider’s clothes “are wont to be spoyled in two or three journies”; which is, he urges, an excellent thing for trade as represented by the tailors.

John Cressel, it will be gathered from this, viewed the innovation from a lofty stand-point. He describes the introduction of stage coaches as one of the greatest mischiefs that have happened of late years to the King. They wrought harm, he said:

(1) By destroying the breed of good horses, the strength of the nation, and making men careless of attaining to good horsemanship, a thing so useful and commendable in a gentleman.

(2) By hindering the breed of watermen who are the nursery for seamen, and they the bulwarks of the kingdom.

(3) By lessening His Majesty’s revenues; for there is not the fourth part of saddle horses either bred or kept now in England that there was before these coaches set up, and would be again if suppressed.

Travelling on horseback was cheaper than by coach. The “chapman” or trader could hire a horse from the hackneyman at from 6s. to 12s. per week. John Cressel estimates that a man could come from “York, Exeter or Chester to London, and stay twelve days for business (which is the most that country chapmen usually do stay), for £1 16s., horse hire and horse meat 1s. 2d. per day.” From Northampton it cost 16s. to come to London on horseback, from Bristol 25s., Bath 20s., Salisbury 20s. or 25s., and from Reading 7s.

If men would not ride, John Cressel urged them to travel in the long waggons which moved “easily without jolting men’s bodies or hurrying them along as the running coaches do.” The long waggon was drawn by four or five horses and carried from twenty to twenty-five passengers. He proposed that there should be one stage per week from London to each shire town in England; that these should use the same team of horses for the whole journey, that their speed should not exceed thirty miles a day in summer and 25 in winter, and that they should halt at different inns on each journey to support the innkeeping business. If these proposals were carried out, the writer thought stage coaches would “do little or no harm.”

John Cressel’s pamphlet was answered by another from the pen of a barrister, who showed up the futility of his arguments and deductions, but did not find great fault with his facts and figures.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HIGH ROADS.

It is commonly believed that the introduction of stage coaches produced the first legislative endeavour to improve the country roads; this is not the case: nor had the sufferings of travellers by “long waggon” any influence upon legislators if comparison of dates be a reliable test; for it was not until 1622 that any attempt was made to save the roads. In that year James I. issued a Proclamation in which it was stated that inasmuch as the highways were ploughed up by “unreasonable carriages,” and the bridges shaken, the use of four-wheeled carts for carrying goods and agricultural produce was forbidden, carts with two wheels only being allowed.

In 1629 Charles I. issued a Proclamation confirming that of his father, and furthermore forbidding common carriers and others to convey more than twenty hundredweight in the two-wheeled vehicles which were lawful, and also forbidding the use of more than five horses at once; the avowed object being to prevent destruction of the road.

We may fairly reason from the terms of this Proclamation that it was recognised that on occasion five horses might be required to draw one ton along the roads; and from this we can form our own idea of the condition to which traffic and rains might reduce the highways.

In 1661 the restrictions on cart traffic were modified by Charles II.’s Proclamation, which permitted carts and waggons with four wheels, and drawn by ten or more horses, to carry sixty or seventy hundredweight, and forbade more than five horses to be harnessed to any four-wheeled cart unless the team went in pairs. The orders issued thus by Proclamation were made law by two Acts of Charles II. in 1670; the second of which forbade the use of more than eight horses or oxen unless harnessed two abreast.

In 1663 the first turnpike gate was erected; this novelty was put on the Great North Road to collect tolls for repair of the highway in Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdon, where in places it had become “ruinous and almost impassable.” The turnpike was so unpopular that for nearly a century no gate was erected between Glasgow and Grantham.

Nothing more clearly proves the badness of the roads in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than the number of patents granted to inventors for devices calculated to prevent carriages from over-turning. The first invention towards this end was patented in 1684, and between that date and 1792 nine more patents were granted for devices to prevent upsetting, or to cause the body of the vehicle to remain erect though the wheels turned over.

Few thought it worth trying to discover a method of improving the roads which caused accidents. In 1619, one John Shotbolt took out a patent for “strong engines for making and repairing of roads”; another was issued in 1699 to Nathaniel Bard, who also protected “an engine for levelling and preserving roads and highways”; and in the same year Edward Heming was granted a patent for a method of repairing highways “so as to throw all the rising ridges into the ruts.” History omits to tell us what measure of success rewarded these inventions: if the Patent Specification files form any guide to an opinion, inventors gave up in despair trying to devise means of keeping the roads in order, for not until 1763 does another ingenious person appear with a remedy thought worthy of letters patent.

Repairs to the highways were effected by forced labour when their condition made improvement absolutely necessary. Thus, in 1695, surveyors were appointed by Act of Parliament to require persons to work on the road between London and Harwich, which in places had become almost impassable. Labourers were to be paid at local rates of hire, were not to be called upon to travel more than four miles from home, nor to work more than two days in the week: nor were they liable to be summoned for road-mending during seed, hay and harvest-time. This Act also revised the system of tolls on vehicles: any stage, hackney, or other coach and any calash or chariot was to pay 6d. toll; a cart 8d. and a waggon 1s.

The Company of Coach and Coach Harness Makers was founded in 1677 by Charles II. The foundation of the company shows that the trade of coach-building was by this time large and important, while the interest taken by the King must have given an impetus to the business. We have evidence that coaches of English build were appreciated on the Continent in an old “List of the Names of all the Commodities of English Product and Manufacture that was Exported to France from England during what may be called the Interval of Peace from Christmas, 1698, to Christmas, 1702.” The list includes both coaches and harness for coaches.

In this connection it is to be observed that by the terms of its charter the Coachmakers’ Company was empowered to seek out and destroy bad work wherever they might find such. Under these conditions it is not surprising that English workmanship became famous.

Hyde Park, as Pepys and other writers show us, was the best place in London to see the coaches of the gentry. In an undated petition, submitted by “a great number of licensed hackney coachmen,” there is reference to the “four hundred licensed coachmen in Hyde Park,” from which it might be inferred that these formed a body of license-holders distinct from the four hundred licensed by Charles II. in 1663.

HACKNEY CABS AS A SOURCE OF REVENUE.

In 1694, when the Parliament was hard pressed for money to carry on the French war, the London cabs or hackney coaches were more heavily taxed under a new system of licenses; the number licensed to ply for hire was raised from 400 to 700, and for each license, which held good for twenty-one years, the sum of £50 was to be paid down, while £4 per annum was to be paid as “rent.” All stage coaches in England and Wales were to pay a tax of £8 a year. This Act confirmed the old tariff of fares for hackney coaches in London (_see_ p. 42), and the prohibition against plying on Sundays, which had been in force since 1662, was partially withdrawn. The new Act allowed 175 cabs to ply for hire on Sundays; the Commissioners were enjoined to arrange matters so that the 700 licensed cabmen should be employed in turn on Sunday.

This Act caused great discontent among the original 400 licensed coachmen, as it made them equally liable with the additional 300 licensees to the £50 impost; their grievances found vent in a petition, wherein they prayed that they, the Original Four Hundred, might be “incorporated” (presumably as a guild or company), and that all stage coaches running between London and places thirty miles therefrom might be suppressed.

The Act of 1693 compelled the hackney coachman to carry a fare ten miles out of London if required, and doubtless the uncertainty of finding a “fare” to bring back was partly owing to the short stages, which ran on every road.

The five Commissioners who were appointed to carry out the provisions of this law discharged their duties with no greater integrity than their predecessors. Yet another Petition from the 700 hackney coachmen refers incidentally to the circumstance that in 1694 three of the five were dismissed for accepting bribes from tradesmen who wanted licenses; the petition also prays for better regulations to control the “many hundred coaches and horses let for hire without license, likewise shaises, hackney chairs and short stages.”

The “shaise” or chaise was evidently a vehicle of a different type from the hackney coach. The post-chaise for hire was introduced into England about this time from France by John, a son of Mr. Jethro Tull, the famous agriculturist who in 1733 published a work, entitled “Horse Hoeing Husbandry,” which attracted great attention and laid the foundation of the use of implements in farming and improvements in methods of cultivation. In 1740 John Tull was granted a patent for a sedan chair fixed on a wheel carriage for horse draught.

MANNERS OF THE CABMAN.

The licensed coachmen had good grounds for complaint, as we learn from an edict issued in 1692 by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen that the law was systematically evaded; in that year only 160 hackney coachmen applied for licenses and the number plying in the streets was about one thousand. The men were a turbulent set; several, we read, were indicted for “standing of their coaches [in the streets] as a common nuisance, for assaulting constables and tradesmen who attempt to remove them from before their shops.” There were no side walks for foot-passengers in those days, and thus the standing coach might be so placed as to block the entrance to a shop.

Mons. Misson has the following passage concerning the hackney coachman; it is interesting as an illustration of contemporary manners:—

“If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart. The gentleman pulls off his sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed, which happens almost always, that goes for payment, but if he is the _beator_ the _beatee_ must pay the money about which they quarrelled. I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street, the widest part of the Strand, with such a fellow whom he lamm’d most horribly.”

The same author says that the London squares are enclosed with railings to keep the coaches from crossing them.

CAB DRIVING A LUCRATIVE OCCUPATION.

It has been remarked on a previous page that the hackney coachman drove a thriving business; how profitable it was we may learn from two petitions which were evoked by Queen Anne’s Act of 1710, which increased the number of licenses to 800 on payment of 5s. a week, such licenses to hold good for thirty-two years. Seven hundred coaches were more than profitable employment could be found for, if we might believe the inevitable petition put in against this Act; but nevertheless the new 800 licensees joined in petitioning that their licenses “may again be made assets” as under the Act of 1694. “In consideration of which, notwithstanding the rent of 5s. per week, we most humbly offer to raise £16,000 as a fine of £20 on each license for the use of His Majesty King George.”

That there was money to be made in the business is shown even more clearly by a petition submitted by James, Lord Mordington and others about this time. The petitioners offer to “farm the 800 hackney coaches which are now thought necessary” at £6 per license for 21 years; they were also prepared to pay £2,000 a year during that period, on which the King might raise a sum of £20,000; to pay £500 a year to the orphans of the City of London; and also to raise and equip a regiment of foot at a cost of £3,000!

The Act of 1710, it should be observed, altogether removed the prohibition against plying on Sunday. It licensed 200 hackney chairs and fixed the chair tariff at two-thirds of that in force for the coach (1s. for one and a half miles, and 1s. 6d. for two miles). An injunction to the Commissioners to fix at the Royal Exchange a table of distances must have been appreciated by the users of hackney coaches in London. It also repeated the injunction to use horses of fourteen hands at least; which repetition seems to have been very necessary, as Misson remarks that the regulation at the time of his visit was “but ill obeyed.”

It was about this time that a curious system of wig stealing was adopted by the London thieves. We read in the _Weekly Journal_ of March 30, 1713, that:—

“The thieves have got such a villainous way now of robbing gentlemen, that they cut holes through the backs of hackney carriages, and take away their wigs or the fine headdresses of gentlewomen.”

The writer counsels persons travelling alone in a hackney coach to sit on the front seat to baffle the thieves.

In vol. 3 of the _Carriage Builders’ and Harness Makers’ Art Journal_ (1863) was published an advertisement from an old newspaper; this was thought by the contributor who discovered it to be the first advertisement of the practical application of springs to coaches; it refers to a patent granted for fourteen years to Mr. John Green in 1691:—

“All the nobility and gentry may have the carriages of their coaches made new or the old ones altered, after this new invention, at reasonable rates; and hackney and stage coachmen may have licenses from the Patentees, _Mr. John Green_ and _Mr. William Dockwra_, his partner, at the rate of 12_d._ per week, to drive the roads and streets, some of which having this week began, and may be known from the common coaches by the words Patent Coach being over both doors in carved letters. These coaches are so hung as to render them easier for the passenger and less labour to the horses, the gentleman’s coaches turning in narrow streets and lanes in as little or less room than any French carriage with crane neck, and not one third part of the charge. The manner of the coachman’s sitting is more convenient, and the motion like that of a sedan, being free from the tossing and jolting to which other coaches are liable over rough and broken roads, pavements or kennels. These great Conveniences (besides others) are invitation sufficient for all persons that love their own ease and would save their horses draught, to use these sort of carriages and no other, since these carriages need no alteration.”

This advertisement is the more noteworthy as it clearly refers to some kind of turning head; however valuable the improvements thus offered, the springs at least do not appear to have been appreciated, for their use did not become general till the latter half of the eighteenth century.

COACHES AND ROADS IN QUEEN ANNE’S TIME.

From the advertisements in old newspapers we obtain some particulars of the speed made by stage coaches in the early part of the eighteenth century. In 1703, when the roads were good, the coach from London to Portsmouth did the journey, about ninety miles, in fourteen hours. In 1706, the York coach left London on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, performing the 200 mile journey in four days; each passenger was allowed 14 lbs. of luggage and overweight was charged for at 3d. per lb. In winter the cross-roads were execrable, as appears from the _Annals of Queen Anne_ (London, 1704). In December, 1703, the King of Spain slept at Petworth in Sussex, on his way from Portsmouth to Windsor, and Prince George of Denmark went to meet him there: concerning the journey one of the Prince’s attendants writes:—

“We set out at six o’clock in the morning to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches (save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire) til we arrived at our journey’s end. “’Twas hard service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day without eating anything and passing through the worst ways that I ever saw in my life; we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our coach, which was the leading, and his highnesse’s body-coach would have suffered very often if the nimble boors of Sussex had not frequently poised it or supported it with their shoulders from Godalmin almost to Petworth; and the nearer we approached to the Duke’s house the more unaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost us six hours time to conquer them, and indeed we had never done it if our good master had not several times lent us a pair of horses out of his own coach, whereby we were enabled to trace out the way for him.”

COACHING IN GEORGE I.’S AND GEORGE II.’S REIGNS.

Markland,[16] referring to the above passage, states on the authority of a correspondent that in 1748 persons travelling from Petworth to Guildford were obliged to make for the nearest point of the great road from Portsmouth to London; plainly indicating that the main arteries of traffic were much superior to the cross-roads.

[16] _Remarks on the Early Use of Carriages in England._

Dean Swift, writing to Pope on August 22, 1726, refers to the “closeness and confinement of the uneasy coach.” At this period there was still considerable prejudice against the use of carriages by men who were physically able to ride, as appears from a letter written by Swift to his friend Mr. Gay, on September 10, 1731:—

“If your ramble was on horseback I am glad of it on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage coaches and your friends’ coaches; for you are as arrant a cockney as any hosier in Cheapside ... you love twelve-penny coaches too well, considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half-a-crown a day ... a coach and six horses is all the exercise you can bear.”

The reference to Mr. Gay’s income indicates that the saddle was a much cheaper means of travelling than the coach. Six horses seem to have been the number used in private coaches during the first half of the eighteenth century, if we may judge by the frequency with which Swift refers to “to coach and six.”

An agreement made in 1718 between a Mr. Vanden Bampde and Charles Hodges, a job-master, is worth noticing. Under this contract Hodges undertook to maintain for Mr. Bampde “a coach, chariot, and harness neat and clean, and in all manner of repair at his own charge, not including the wheels.” If the coachman should break the glass when the carriage was empty, Hodges was to make good the damage. He was to supply at a charge of 5s. 6d. a day, a pair of “good, strong, serviceable, handsome well-matched horses of value between £50 and £60”; also a “good, sober, honest, creditable coachman,” who, with the horses, should attend as Mr. Bampde or his lady might require in London or Westminster. If Mr. Bampde went into the country Hodges was to find him one or more pairs of horses at half-a-crown per pair per day extra.

DEAN SWIFT ON COACHES AND DRIVERS.

The hackney coachmen appear to have been quite as independent and offensive a class in Swift’s time as they were in Pepys’. Writing from Dublin on July 8, 1733, he compares the advantages of residence in that city with residence in London, and gives prominence to the following items:—

“I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts and carriages round this town; who dare not insult me like your rascally waggoners or coachmen, but give me the way.”

It may be observed here that there was still plenty of work for the wherrymen on the Thames in the middle of the eighteenth century. Swift writes on April 16, 1760, praying Mr. Warburton to leave London and pay him a visit at Twickenham, and by way of inducement he adds: “If the press be to take up any part of your time, the sheets may be brought you hourly thither by my waterman.”

The Dean’s _Humorous Advice to Servants_ contains some sarcastic observations addressed to the coachman, which shed light upon what we must suppose was the usual character of that servant. He is advised that “you are strictly bound to nothing but to step into the box and carry your lord and lady;” and he is enjoined to take every opportunity of drinking. The following passage shows how wheels of carriages suffered from the battering on the roads:—