[43] 9 Anne, cap. 10.
[44] 9 Anne, cap. 10, § 35.
[45] "The additional tax has never answered in proportion to the produce of the revenue at the time it took place, the people having found private conveyances for their letters, which they are daily endeavouring to increase, notwithstanding all the endeavours that can be used to prevent them."—Statement by the Postmasters-General, 20th May 1718 (British Official Records).
[46] H. Joyce, History of the Post Office, p. 145.
[47] 9 Anne, cap. 10, § 39.
[48] 3 Geo. III, cap. 75, § 1.
[49] "An important legal decision, with which the Post Office had only the remotest concern, an improved system of expresses following as a natural consequence from circumstances over which the Post Office had no control, a simple contrivance to facilitate the posting of letters (i.e. the aperture), and an acceleration of the mail between London and Edinburgh—this as the record of forty or fifty years' progress is assuredly meagre enough; and yet we are not aware of any omission."—H. Joyce, ibid., p. 184.
[50] "A letter between Bath and London would be a London letter, and a letter from one part of the country to another which in course of transit passed through London would be a country letter. A bye or way letter would be a letter passing between any two towns on the Bath Road and stopping short of London—as, for instance, between Bath and Hungerford, between Hungerford and Newbury, between Newbury and Reading, and so on; while a cross post letter would be a letter crossing from the Bath road to some other—as, for instance, a letter between Bath and Oxford."—Ibid., p. 147.
[51] 9 Anne, cap. 10, § 18.
[52] "To give a slight idea of the nature of this conveyance: The Bye and Way Letters were thrown promiscuously together into one large Bag, which was to be opened at every Stage by the Deputy, or any inferior Servant of the House, to pick out of the whole heap what might belong to his own delivery, and the rest put back again into this large Bag, with such Bye Letters as he should have to send to distant places from his own Stage. But what was still worse than all this, it was then the constant practice to demand and receive the postage on all such Letters before they were put into any of the Country Post Offices. Hence (from the general temptation of destroying these Letters for the sake of the Postage) the joynt mischief of embezling the Revenue and interrupting and obstructing the commerce, fell naturally in, to support and inflame one another. Indeed, they were then risen to such a height, and consequently the discredit and disrepute of this conveyance grown so notorious, that many Traders and others in divers parts of the Kingdom had recourse to various contrivances of private and clandestine conveyance for their speedier and safer correspondence; whereby it became unavoidable but that other branches of the Post Office revenue should be greatly impair'd, as well as this ...