Old Roads and New Roads

“Because he knew a fearful fiendDid close behind him tread.”

The man-at-arms in the days of Border-war was a more formidable obstacle to progress than a wilderness of spectres. In the reign of Edward the Confessor the great highway of Watling Street was beset by violent men. If you travelled in the eastern counties, the chances were that you were snapped up by a retainer of Earl Godwin, and if in the district now traversed by the Great Northern Railway, Earl Morcar would in all likelihood arrest your journey, and without so much as asking leave clap a collar round your neck, with his initials and yours scratched rudely upon it, signifying to all men, by those presents, that in future your duty was to tend his swine or rive his blocks. Outlaws, dwelling in the forests or in the deep morass which girded the road, pounced upon the traveller on the causeway, eased him of his luggage if he carried any, and if there was no further occasion for his services, they either let him down easily into the next quagmire, or if they were, for those days, gentlemanly thieves, left him standing, as Justice Shallow has it, like a “forked radish,” to enjoy the summer’s heat or the winter’s cold. The cross and escallop shell of the pilgrim were no protection: “Cucullus non fecit monachum” in the eyes of these minions of the road; or rather, perhaps, the hood gave a new zest to the wrongs done to its wearer by these “uncircumcised Philistines.” Convents, the abodes of men professing at least to be peaceful, were obliged to keep in pay William of Deloraine to mate with Jock of Thirlstane: and ancient citizens were fain to put by their grave habiliments, and “wield old partisans in hands as old.” There is extant an agreement made between Leofstan, Abbot of St. Albans, and certain barons, by which the Abbot agrees to hire, and the barons to let, certain men-at-arms for the security of the Abbey, and for scouring the forests. Savage capital punishments – impalement, mutilation, hanging alive in chains – were inflicted on the marauders, who duly acknowledged these attentions by yet more atrocious severities upon the wayfarers who had the ill luck to be caught by them.

The insecurity of the old roads necessarily affected the manners of the time. He should have been a hardy traveller who would venture himself “single and sole,” when he might journey in company. The same cause which leads to the formation of the caravans of Africa and Asia, led to the collection of such goodly companies of pilgrims as wended their way from the Tabard in Southwark to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury; and the pursuit of travelling under difficulties produced for all posterity the most delightful of the poems of the great father of English verse.

Travelling in companies, in times when it was next to impossible to be on “visiting terms with one’s neighbours,” tended greatly to the improvement of social intercourse, and to the erection of roomy and comfortable inns for the wayfarers. It took Dan Chaucer only a few hours to be on the best footing with the nine and twenty guests at the Tabard.

“Befelle that, in that season3 on a day,In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,Redy to wenden on my pilgrimageTo Canterbury with devout corage,At night was come into that hostelrieWel nine and twentie in a compagnieOf sondry folk, by aventure yfalleIn felawship; and pilgrimes were they alle,That toward Canterbury wolden ride.The chambres and the stables weren wide,And wel we weren esed attè beste.And shortly, whan the sonne was gone to resteSo hadde I spoken with hem everich on,That I was of hir felawship anon.”

But the tenants of the waste and the woodland were not the only lords of the highway. The Norman baron drew little profit from the natural produce of his ample domains. In his way he was a staunch protectionist; but he left agriculture very much to take care of itself, and looked to his tolls, his bridges, and above all to his highways, for a more rapid return of the capital he had invested in accoutring men-at-arms, squires, and archers. We know, from ‘Ivanhoe,’ how it fared with Saxons, Pilgrims, and Jews, whose business led them near the castles of Front de Bœuf or Philip de Malvoisin: and we are certain that the Lady of Branksome kept, an expensive establishment, who were expected to bring grist to the mill of the lord or lady of the demesne, by turning out in all weathers and at all hours, whenever a herd of beeves or a company of pilgrims were descried by the watchers from Branksome Towers. For it must have taken no small quantity of beef and hides to furnish the Branksome retainers in dinners and shoe- and saddle-leather; since —

“Nine and twenty knights of fameHung their shields in Branksome Hall:Nine and twenty squires of nameBrought them their steeds to bower from stall:Nine and twenty yeomen tallWaited duteous on them all:They were all knights of mettle true,Kinsmen to the bold Buccleugh.”

When the traveller carried money in his purse, or the merchant had store of Sheffield whittles or Woodstock gloves in his pack, the lowest dungeon in the castle of the Bigods was his doom; and he was a lucky man who came out again from those crypts which now so much delight our archæological associations, with a tithe of his possessions, or with his proper allowance of eyes, hands, and ears.

Even on the Roman roads, with their good accommodation of pavement, milestones, and towns, journeys were for the most part performed on foot or horseback. For before steel springs were invented, it was by no means pleasant to ride all day in a jolting cart – and the most gorgeous of the Roman carrucæ, or coaches, was no better. Pompous and splendid indeed – to pass for a moment from Norman and Saxon barbarism – must have been the aspect of the Queen of Roads within a few leagues of the capital of the world; splendid and pompous as it was to the actual beholder, it is perhaps seen to best advantage in the following description by Milton —

“Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and seeWhat conflux issuing forth, or entering in;Prætors, proconsuls to their provincesHasting or on return, in robes of state,Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power,Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;Or embassies from regions far remote,In various habits, on the Appian road,Or on the Æmilian.”

As a pendant to this breathing picture oftan Old Road at the gate of the “vertex omnium civitatum,” we subjoin a note from Gibbon: —

“The carrucæ or coaches of the Romans were often of solid silver, curiously carved and engraved, and the trappings of the mules or horses were embossed with gold. This magnificence continued from the reign of Nero to that of Honorius: and the Appian Road was covered with the splendid equipages of the nobles who came out to meet St. Melania, when she returned to Rome, six years before the Gothic siege. Yet pomp is well exchanged for convenience; and a plain modern coach, that is hung upon springs, is much preferable to the silver and gold carts of antiquity, which rolled on the axle-tree, and were exposed, for the most part, to the inclemency of the weather.”4

The Anglo-Saxon generally travelled on horseback. The Jews were restricted to the ignobler mule. The former indeed had a species of carriage; and horse-litters, probably for the use of royal or noble ladies and invalids, are mentioned by Matthew Paris and William of Malmesbury. Wheel-carriages appear to have multiplied after the return of the Crusaders from Palestine – partly, it may be inferred, because increased wealth had inspired a taste for novel luxuries, and partly because the champions of the Cross had imbibed in the Holy War some of the prejudices of the infidels, and had grown chary of exposing to vulgar gaze their dames and daughters on horseback.5

The speed of travelling depends upon the nature and facilities of the means of transit. Herodotus mentions a remarkable example of speed in a Hemerodromus, or running-post, named Phidippides, who in two days ran from Athens to Sparta, a distance of nearly 152 English miles, to hasten the Laconian contingent, when the Persians were landing on the beach of Marathon. Couriers of this order, trained to speed and endurance from their infancy, conveyed to Montezuma the tidings of the disembarkation of Cortes; and so imperfect were the means of communication at that era in Europe, that the Spaniards noted it as a proof of high refinement in the Aztecs to employ relays of running postmen, from all quarters of their empire to the city on the Great Lake. The speed of a Roman traveller was probably the greatest possible before the invention of carriage-springs and railways. We have some data on this head. The mighty Julius was a rapid traveller. He continually mentions his summa diligentia in his journal of the Gaulish Wars. The length of journeys which he accomplished within a given time, appears even to us at this day, and might well therefore appear to his contemporaries, truly astonishing. A distance of one hundred miles was no extraordinary day’s journey for him. When he did not march with his army on foot, – as he often seems to have done, in order to set his soldiers an example, and also to express that sympathy with them which gained him their hearts so entirely – he mostly travelled in a rheda. This was a four-wheeled carriage, a sort of curricle, and adapted to the carriage of about half a ton of luggage. His personal baggage was probably considerable, for he was a man of most elegant habits, and sedulously attentive to his personal appearance. The tessellated flooring of his tent formed part of his impedimenta, and, like Napoleon, he expected to find amid the distractions of war many of the comforts and conveniences of his palace at Rome. He reached the Sierra Morena in twenty-three days from the date of his leaving Rome; and he went the whole way by land. The distance round the head of the Gulf of Genoa and through the passes of the Pyrenees is 850 leagues; and although the Carthaginians had once been masters of Spanish Navarre, the roads were far from regular or good. The same distance would now be accomplished in twelve days by a general and his mounted staff. From the usual rapidity with which the great Proconsul travelled, Cowley, in his Essay on ‘Procrastination,’ extracts a moral, or, as his Puritan contemporaries would have phrased it, a “pious use.” “Cæsar,” he says, “the man of expedition above all others, was so far from this folly (procrastination), that whensoever in a journey he was to cross any river, he never went out of his way for a bridge, or a ford, or a ferry, but flung himself into it immediately, and swam over; and this is the course we ought to imitate, if we meet with any stops in our way to happiness.” In the time of Theodosius, Cæsarius, a magistrate of high rank, went post from Antioch to Constantinople. He began his journey at night, was in Cappadocia, 165 miles from Antioch, the ensuing evening, and arrived at Constantinople the sixth day about noon. The whole distance was 725 Roman, or 665 English miles.

Gibbon describes bishops as among the most rapid of ancient travellers. The decease of a patriarch of Alexandria or Antioch caused the death of scores of post-horses, from the rate at which anxious divines hurried to Constantinople to solicit from the Emperor the vacant see. On the whole however, in respect of speed in travelling, the Greeks and Romans were but slow coaches; and these exceptional instances merely serve to prove the general slackness of their pace. A Roman nobleman indeed, with all the means and appliances which his wealth could purchase, and with the positive advantage of the best roads in the world, travelled generally with such a ponderous train, that the heavy-armed legions with their parks of artillery might well advance as rapidly as an Olybrius or Anicius of the Empire. “In their journeys into the country,” says Ammianus, “the whole body of the household marches with their master. In the same manner as the cavalry and infantry, the heavy and the light armed troops, the advanced guard and the rear, are marshalled by the skill of their military leaders; so the domestic officers who bear the rod, as an ensign of authority, distribute and arrange the numerous train of slaves and attendants. The baggage and wardrobe move in the front; and are immediately followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior ministers, employed in the service of the kitchen and of the table. The main body is composed of a promiscuous crowd of slaves, increased by the accidental concourse of idle or dependent plebeians.”

At an even earlier period, in the age of Nero, before luxury had made the gigantic strides which distinguished and disgraced the Byzantine Court, Seneca records three circumstances relative to the journeys of the Roman nobility. They were preceded by a troop of Numidian light horse who announced by a cloud of dust the approach of a great man. Their baggage-mules transported not only the precious vases, but even the fragile vessels of crystal and murra, which last probably meant the porcelain of China and Japan. The delicate faces of the young slaves were covered with a medicated crust or ointment, which secured them against the effects of the sun and frost. Rightly did the Romans name their baggage impedimenta. A funeral pace was the utmost that could be expected from travellers so particular about their accommodations as these luxurious senators. Of a much humbler character was the state observed by the monarchs who succeeded to portions of the empire of the Cæsars. The Merovingian kings, when they employed wheel carriages at all, rode in wains drawn by bullocks; the Bretwaldas of the Saxon kingdoms went to temple or church on high festivals in the same cumbrous fashion; and “slow oxen” dragged the standard of the Italian Republics into the battle-field.

With the disuse or breaking up of the great Roman Viæ in our island, the difficulty and delay of travelling increased, and more than thirteen centuries elapsed before it was again possible to journey with any tolerable speed. Wolsey indeed, it is well known, by the singular rapidity with which he conveyed royal letters to and from Brussels, galloped swiftly up the road of royal favour: and by his fast style of living at home afterwards galloped even more swiftly down again. Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, was noted for his incessant restlessness, and his rapid mode of passing from one land to another; but then he dispensed with all state and attendance, and rode like a post-boy from one end of Europe to another. As the readers of Pope, Swift, and their contemporaries are daily becoming fewer in number, we venture to extract the Dean’s pleasant burlesque on this eccentric nobleman’s migratory habits.

“Mordanto fills the trump of fame,The Christian worlds his deeds proclaim,And prints are crowded with his name.In journeys he outrides the post,Sits up till midnight with his host,Talks politics and gives the toast;Knows every prince in Europe’s face,Flies like a squib from place to place,And travels not, but runs a race.From Paris gazette à-la-main,This day arrived, without his train,Mordanto in a week from Spain.A messenger comes all a-reek,Mordanto at Madrid to seek;He left the town above a week.Next day the post-boy winds his horn,And rides through Dover in the morn;Mordanto’s landed from Leghorn.Mordanto gallops on alone;The roads are with his followers strown;This breaks a girth and that a bone.His body active as his mind,Returning sound in limb and wind,Except some leather lost behind.A skeleton in outward figure,His meagre corpse, though full of vigour,Would halt behind him, were it bigger.So wonderful his expedition,When you have not the least suspicionHe’s with you like an apparition.”

The badness of the roads and the rude forms of wheel-carriages added to the expense of travelling. A canon of Salisbury Cathedral may now travel to London at a cost which is scarcely felt by his prebendal income: but in the days of Peter of Blois the whole proceeds of a stall were inadequate to the expenses of such a journey. In the thirteenth century a bishop of Hereford was detained at Wantling by lack of money for post-horses, and but for the aid of some pious monastery or peccant baron in the neighbourhood, who seized the opportunity of compounding for his sins, the successor of the apostles must, like the apostles, have completed his journey on foot.

In the fourteenth century roads were so far improved, that jobbing horses became a regular business, and the licenses for hackneys and guides added to the returns of the exchequer. A fare of twelvepence was paid for horse-hire from Southwark to Rochester; and sixpence was the charge of conveyance from Canterbury to Dover. We do not know the rate at which the equestrians travelled. Ancient Pistol informs us that “the hollow-pampered jades of Asia could go but thirty miles a-day.” But these cattle seem to have been like Jeshurun, fat and perchance kicking, and accustomed to the tardy pace of Asiatic pomp.

Shakspeare and Steele both expatiate on the casualties incident to riding upon hired horses. Petruchio and Catherine, like Dr. Samuel Johnson and Hetty, made their wedding tour on horseback; and each trip ended with a similar result – the temporary obedience of the fair brides to the marital yokes. After this fashion Grumio tells the story of the connubial ride: – “We came down a foul hill, my master riding behind my mistress.” “Both on one horse?” says Curtis, apparently unacquainted with the fashion of pillions. “What’s that to thee?” rejoins Grumio. “Tell thou the tale. But hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how her horse fell, and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how miry a place; how she was bemoiled; how he left her with the horse upon her; how he beat me because her horse stumbled; how she waded through the dirt to pluck him off me; how he swore; how she prayed; how I cried; how the horses ran away; how her bridle was burst; how I lost my crupper.”

That Petruchio rode a hired horse is rendered probable by the wretched character of his steed and its furniture. Hudibras or Don Quixote were not worse mounted than was the Shrew-tamer: seeing that his horse was “hipped with an old mothy saddle, the stirrups of no kindred; besides, possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a headstall of sheep’s leather; which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots; one girt six times pieced, and a woman’s crupper of velure, here and there pieced with packthread.”6

Steele (Tatler, No. 231) has borrowed, without any acknowledgement, from ‘Taming the Shrew,’ most of the circumstances of his story; yet his adoption of them shows that such a mode of travelling was still in common use in the seventeenth century. After the honey-moon was over, the bridegroom made preparations for conveying his new spouse to her future abode. But “instead of a coach and six horses, together with the gay equipage suitable to the occasion, he appeared without a servant, mounted on a skeleton of a horse which his huntsman had, the day before, brought in to feast his dogs on the arrival of their new mistress, with a pillion fixed behind, and a case of pistols before him, attended only by a favourite hound. Thus equipped, he, in a very obliging, but somewhat positive manner, desired his lady to seat herself on the cushion; which done, away they crawled. The road being obstructed by a gate, the dog was commanded to open it; the poor cur looked up and wagged his tail: but the master, to show the impatience of his temper, drew a pistol and shot him dead. He had no sooner done it, but he fell into a thousand apologies for his unhappy rashness, and begged as many pardons for his excesses before one for whom he had so profound a respect. Soon after their steed stumbled, but with some difficulty recovered; however, the bridegroom took occasion to swear, if he frightened his wife so again, he would run him through! And, alas! the poor animal, being now almost tired, made a second trip; immediately on which the careful husband alights, and with great ceremony first takes off his lady, then the accoutrements, draws his sword, and saves the huntsman the trouble of killing him: then says he to his wife, ‘Child, prithee take up the saddle;’ which she readily did, and tugged it home, where they found all things in the greatest order, suitable to their fortune and the present occasion.” This veracious history proceeds to say that, after this practical lesson, the lady was ever remarkable for a sweet and compliant temper.

Cotton’s – “cheerful hearty Mr. Cotton” – description of a post-horse may be less familiarly known to the reader than either of the preceding descriptions of the inconveniences of riding post: it describes a journey from the neighbourhood of Bakewell to Holyhead, about the year 1678.

“A guide I had got, who demanded great vails,For conducting me over the mountains of Wales:Twenty good shillings, which sure very large is;Yet that would not serve, but I must bear his charges:And yet for all that, rode astride on a beast,The worst that e’er went on three legs, I protest.It certainly was the most ugly of jades:His hips and his rump made a right ace of spades;His sides were two ladders, well spur-galled withal;His neck was a helve, and his head was a mall;For his colour, my pains and your trouble I’ll spare,For the creature was wholly denuded of hair,And, except for two things, as bare as my nail, —A tuft of a mane and a sprig of a tail.Now such as the beast was, even such was the rider,With head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider;A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat,The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat:But now with our horses, what sound and what rotten,Down to the shore, you must know, we were gotten;And there we were told, it concerned us to ride,Unless we did mean to encounter the tide.And then my guide lab’ring with heels and with hands,With two up and one down, hopped over the sands;Till his horse, finding the labour for three legs too sore,Foled out a new leg, and then he had four.And now, by plain dint of hard spurring and whipping,Dry-shod we came where folks sometimes take shipping.And now hur in Wales is, Saint Taph be hur speed,Gott splutter hur taste, some Welsh ale hur had need:Yet surely the Welsh are not wise of their fuddle,For this had the taste and complexion of puddle.From thence then we marched, full as dry as we came,My guide before prancing, his steed no more lame,O’er hills and o’er valleys uncouth and uneven,Until, ’twixt the hours of twelve and eleven,More hungry and thirsty than tongue can well tell,We happily came to St. Winifred’s well.”

Cotton’s ride to Holyhead was not however nearly so diversified in its adventures as a journey from Hardwick to Bakewell about the same period, described by Edward, son of Sir Thomas Browne, the worthy knight and physician of Norwich.

A tour in Derbyshire, in the year 1622, was indeed no light matter. Our ancestors were much in the right to make their wills before encountering the perils of a ride across the moors. We are constrained to abridge the author’s narrative, but the main incidents of it are preserved in our transcript.

“This day broke very rudely upon us. I never travelled before in such a lamentable day both for weather and way, but we made shift to ride sixteen mile that morning, to Chesterfield in Derbyshire, passing by Bolsover Castle, belonging to the Earl of Newcastle, very finely seated upon a high hill; and missing our way once or twice, we rode up mountain, down dale, till we came to our inn, when we were glad to go to bed at noon. It was impossible to ride above two mile an hour in this stormy weather: but coming to our inn, by the ostler’s help having lifted our crampt legs off our horses, we crawled upstairs to a fire, when in two hours’ time we had so well dried ourselves without and liquored ourselves within, that we began to be so valiant as to think upon a second march; but inquiring after the business, we received great discouragement, with some stories of a moor, which they told us we must go over. We had by chance lighted on a house that was noted for good drink and a shovel-borde table, which had invited some Derbyshire blades that lived at Bakewell, but were then at Chesterfield about some business, to take a strengthening cup before they would encounter with their journey home that night. We, hearing of them, were desirous to ride in company with them, so as we might be conducted in this strange, mountainous, misty, moorish, rocky, wild country; but they, having drank freely of their ale, which inclined them something to their countrie’s natural rudeness, and the distaste they took at our swords and pistols with which we rid, made them loth to be troubled with our companies, till I, being more loth to lose this opportunity than the other (one of which had voted to lie in bed the rest of the day), went into the room and persuaded them so well, as they were willing, not only to afford us their company, but stayed for us till we accoutred ourselves. And so we most courageously set forward again, the weather being not one whit better, and the way far worse; for the great quantity of rain that fell, came down in floods from the tops of the hills, washing down mud, and so making a bog in every valley; the craggy ascents, the rocky unevenness of the roads, the high peaks, and the almost perpendicular descents, that we were to ride down: but what was worse than all this, the furious speed that our conductors, mounted upon such good horses, used to these hills, led us on with, put us into such an amazement, as we knew not what to do, for our pace we rode would neither give us opportunity to speak with them or to consult with one another, till at length a friendly bough that had sprouted out beyond his fellows over the road, gave our file leader such a brush of the jacket as it swept him off his horse, and the poor jade, not caring for its master’s company, ran away without him: by this means, while some went to get his courser for him, others had time to come up to a general rendezvous; and concluded to ride more soberly: but I think that was very hard for some of these to do. Being all up again, our light-horsed companions thundered away, and our poor jades, I think, being afraid, as well as their masters, to be left alone in this desolate wide country, made so much haste as they could after them; and this pace we rid, till we lost sight of one another. At last our leaders were so civil, when it was almost too late, to make another halt at the top of one of the highest hills thereabout, just before we were to go to the moor: and I was the last that got up to them, where, missing one of my companions who was not able to keep up with us, I was in the greatest perplexity imaginable, and desiring them to stay awhile, I rid back again, whooping and hallooing out to my lost friend; but no creature could I see or hear of, till at last, being afraid I had run myself into the same inconvenience, I turned back again towards the mountaineers, whom when I had recovered, they told me ’t was no staying there, and ’t were better to kill our horses than to be left in those thick mists, the day now drawing to an end: and so setting spurs to their horses, they ran down a precipice, and in a short time we had the favour to be rained on again, for at the top of this hill we were drencht in the clouds themselves, which came not upon us drop by drop, but cloud after cloud came puffing over the hill as if they themselves had been out of breath with climbing it. Here all our tackling failed, and he that fared best was wet to the skin, these rains soaking through the thickest lined cloak: and now we were encountering with the wild moor, which, by the stories we had been told of it, we might have imagined a wild bore. I am sure it made us all grunt before we could get over it, it was such an uneven rocky track of road, full of great holes, and at that time swells with such rapid currents, as we had made most pitiful shift, if we had not been accommodated with a most excellent conductor; who yet, for all his haste, fell over his horse’s head as he was plunging into some dirty hole, but by good luck smit his face into a soft place of mud, where I suppose he had a mouth full both of dirt and rotten stick, for he seemed to us to spit crow’s nest a good while after. Now, being forced to abate something of their speed, I renewed my acquaintance with two of our new companions, and made them understand how we had left a third man behind us, not being able to ride so fast, and how our intentions were to stay at their own town with them this night, who now overjoyed to see an old acquaintance, were so kind and loving that what with shaking hands, riding abreast, in this bad way, and other expressions of their civilities, they put me in as much trouble with their favour as before they had put me to inconvenience by their rudeness: yet, by this means, I procured them to ride so easily as I led my horse down the next steep hill, on the side of which lay a vast number of huge stones, one intire stone of them being as big as an ordinary house: some of the smaller they cut into mill-stones. Passing the river – Derwent – which then ran with the strongest current that ever I beheld any, we climbed over another hill, a mile up and a mile down, and got to Bakewell a little after it was dark.”