and spurriers would be ruined by hundreds; that numerous inns, at which mounted travellers had been in the habit of stopping, would be deserted, and would no longer pay any rent; that the new carriages were too hot in summer and too cold in winter; that the passengers were grievously annoyed by invalids and crying children; that the coach sometimes reached the inn so late that it was impossible to get supper, and sometimes started so early that it was impossible to get breakfast. On these grounds it was gravely recommended that no public coach should be permitted to have more than four horses, to start oftener than once a week, or to go more than thirty miles a day. It was hoped that, if this regulation were adopted, all except the sick and the lame would return to the old mode of travelling. Petitions embodying such opinions as these were presented to the King in council from several companies of the City of London, from several provincial towns, and from the justices of several counties. We smile at these things. It is not impossible that our descendants, when they read the history of the opposition offered by cupidity and prejudice to the improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in their turn.*

In spite of the attractions of the flying coaches, it was still usual for men who enjoyed health and vigour, and who were not encumbered by much baggage, to perform long journeys on horseback. If the traveller wished to move expeditiously he rode post. Fresh saddle horses and guides were to be procured at convenient distances along all the great lines of road. The charge was threepence a mile for each horse, and fourpence a stage for the guide. In this manner, when the ways were good, it was possible to travel, for a considerable time, as rapidly as by any conveyance known in England, till vehicles were propelled by steam. There were as yet no post chaises; nor could those who rode in their own coaches ordinarily procure a change of horses. The King, however, and the great officers of state were able to command relays. Thus Charles commonly went in one day from Whitehall to Newmarket, a distance of about fifty-five miles through a level country; and this was thought by his subjects a proof of great activity. Evelyn performed the same journey in company with the Lord Treasurer Clifford. The coach was drawn

* John Cresset's Reasons for suppressing Stage Coaches, 1672. These reasons were afterwards inserted in a tract, entitled "The Grand Concern of

England explained, 1673." Cresset's
attack on stage coaches called forth some
answers which I have consulted.

CHAP.

III.

СНАР.
III.

Highway

men,

by six horses, which were changed at Bishop Stortford and again at Chesterford. The travellers reached Newmarket at night. Such a mode of conveyance seems to have been considered as a rare luxury confined to princes and ministers.*

Whatever might be the way in which a journey was performed, the travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable risk of being stopped and plundered. The mounted highwayman, a marauder known to our generation only from books, was to be found on every main road. The waste tracts which lay on the great routes near London were especially haunted by plunderers of this class. Hounslow Heath, on the Great Western Road, and Finchley Common, on the Great Northern Road, were perhaps the most celebrated of these spots. The Cambridge scholars trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses on Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of Falstaff. The public authorities seem to have been often at a loss how to deal with the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the Gazette, that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being highwaymen, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be paraded at Newgate in riding dresses: their horses would also be shown; and all gentlemen who had been robbed were invited to inspect this singular exhibition. On another occasion a pardon was publicly offered to a robber if he would give up some rough diamonds, of immense value, which he had taken when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that the eye of the government was upon them. Their criminal connivance, it was affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the roads with impunity. That these suspicions were not without foundation, is proved by the dying speeches of some penitent robbers of that age, who appear to have received from the innkeepers services much resembling those which Farquhar's Boniface rendered to Gibbet.†

It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of the highwayman that he should be a bold and skilful rider,

Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.; North's Examen, 105.; Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 9, 10. 1671.

See the London Gazette, May 14. 1677, August 4. 1687, Dec. 5. 1687.

The last confession of Augustin King, who was the son of an eminent divine, and had been educated at Cambridge but was hanged at Colchester in March 1688, is highly curious.

1

and that his manners and appearance should be such as suited
the master of a fine horse. He therefore held an aris-
tocratical position in the community of thieves, appeared at
fashionable coffee houses and gaming houses, and betted with
men of quality on the race ground.* Sometimes, indeed, he -.
was a man of good family and education. A romantic
interest therefore attached, and perhaps still attaches, to the
names of freebooters of this class. The vulgar eagerly drank
in tales of their ferocity and audacity, of their occasional
acts of generosity and good nature, of their amours, of their
miraculous escapes, of their desperate struggles, and of their
manly bearing at the bar and in the cart. Thus it was
related of William Nevison, the great robber of Yorkshire,
that he levied a quarterly tribute on all the northern drovers,
and, in return, not only spared them himself, but protected
them against all other thieves; that he demanded purses in
the most courteous manner; that he gave largely to the poor
what he had taken from the rich; that his life was once
spared by the royal clemency, but that he again tempted his
fate, and at length died, in 1685, on the gallows of York.†
It was related how Claude Duval, the French page of the
Duke of Richmond, took to the road, became captain of a
formidable gang, and had the honour to be named first in a
royal proclamation against notorious offenders; how at the
head of his troop he stopped a lady's coach, in which there
was a booty of four hundred pounds; how he took only one
hundred, and suffered the fair owner to ransom the rest by
dancing a coranto with him on the heath; how his vivacious
gallantry stole away the hearts of all women; how his dex-
terity at sword and pistol made him a terror to all men;
how, at length, in the year 1670, he was seized when over-
come by wine; how dames of high rank visited him in prison,
and with tears interceded for his life; how the King would
have granted a pardon, but for the interference of Judge
Morton, the terror of highwaymen, who threatened to resign
his office unless the law were carried into full effect; and
how, after the execution, the corpse lay in state with all the

* Aimwell. Pray sir, han't I seen your In a ballad which is in the Pepysian face at Will's coffeehouse?

Gibbet. Yes, sir, and at White's too.Beaux' Stratagem.

+ Gent's History of York. Another marauder of the same description, named Biss, was hanged at Salisbury in 1695.

Library, he is represented as defending
himself thus before the Judge:

"What say you now, my honoured Lord,
What harm was there in this?
Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred
By brave, frechearted Biss.'

CHAP.

III.

CHAP.

III.

Inns.

pomp of scutcheons, wax lights, black hangings and mutes, till the same cruel Judge, who had intercepted the mercy of the crown, sent officers to disturb the obsequies.* In these anecdotes there is doubtless a large mixture of fable; but they are not on that account unworthy of being recorded; for it is both an authentic and an important fact that such tales, whether false or true, were heard by our ancestors with eagerness and faith.

All the various dangers by which the traveller was beset were greatly increased by darkness. He was therefore commonly desirous of having the shelter of a roof during the night; and such shelter it was not difficult to obtain. From

a very early period the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded, to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The Continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry, above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public house such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trouts fresh from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.† The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers.

* Pope's Memoirs of Duval, published
immediately after the execution. Oates's
Εἰκὼν βασιλική, Part I.

See the prologue to the Canterbury
Tales, Harrison's Historical Description

of the Island of Great Britain, and Pepys's account of his tour in the summer of 1668. The excellence of the English inns is noticed in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.

III.

On the Continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who CHAP. crossed the threshold. In England he was a servant. Never was an Englishman more at home than when he took his ease in his inn. Even men of fortune, who might in their own mansions have enjoyed every luxury, were often in the habit of passing their evenings in the parlour of some neighbouring house of public entertainment. They seem to have thought that comfort and freedom could in no other place be enjoyed with equal perfection. This feeling continued during many generations to be a national peculiarity. The liberty and jollity of inns long furnished matter to our novelists and dramatists. Johnson declared that a tavern chair was the throne of human felicity; and Shenstone gently complained that no private roof, however friendly, gave the wanderer so warm a welcome as that which was to be found at an inn.

Many conveniences, which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall in the seventeenth century, are in all modern hotels. Yet on the whole it is certain that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our roads and of our conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be best where the means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate of travelling, the less important is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting places for the traveller. A hundred and sixty years ago a person who came up to the capital from a remote county generally required, by the way, twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights. If he were a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable, and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Exeter to London by the light of a single winter's day. At present, therefore, a traveller seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest and refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into utter decay. In a short time no good houses of that description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure.

The mode in which correspondence was carried on between Post office, distant places may excite the scorn of the present generation; yet it was such as might have moved the admiration and envy of the polished nations of antiquity, or of the contemporaries of Raleigh and Cecil. A rude and imperfect establishment of posts for the conveyance of letters had been set