The well-known scene from the Inn Yard, Rochester, in Henry IV. illustrates all this, as also the scarcity of clocks, and the necessity the inhabitants were under to use any means at hand for ascertaining the time of day or night. The discomfort the picture presents will remind any one of travelling in America where the train has to be met at night, or early in the morning, and is detained probably by snow or an accident. The disjointed conversation and weariness are wonderfully portrayed.
1st Carrier (with a lantern). Heigh ho! An’t be not four by the day, I’ll be hanged; Charles’s wain is over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed. What, Ostler, etc.
The discontent and querulousness are well shown; the carrier says—
“I prythee, Tom, beat Cut’s saddle, put a few flocks in the point; the poor jade is wrung in the withers out of all cess.”
His companion, who joins them, says—
“This house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died.”
and the first carrier, who seems all through to be of a more lively turn, adds,
“Poor fellow! never joyed since the price of oats rose; it was the death of him.”
The condition of the roads may be gathered from the fact, that though these men had not more than some thirty miles to travel, they did not expect to finish the journey till night. One of them had a “gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger to be delivered as far as Charing Cross,” and the other was carrying live turkeys to London, yet the carrier says, in answer to Gadshill, that he hopes to be in London “time enough to go to bed with a candle;” but there seems to have been little improvement even up to the end of last century, when a gentleman of landed property, journeying from Glastonbury to Sarum in his carriage, requested his footman to provide himself with a good axe to lop off any branches of trees that might obstruct the progress of his vehicle. Indeed nobody knows what benefactors to their race such men as Telford and Macadam have been.