This Bath coach would seem to have set the fashion in nomenclature, for in April 1669 a “Flying Coach” began to fly between Oxford and London. It was, it will be noticed, a “coach,” and not a “machine”; the term “machine” did not come into general use until about seventy years later. But although the Oxford coach did not call itself by so high-sounding a title, it made a better pace than the Bath affair, doing the fifty-four miles in one day, between the hours of six o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening. Moreover, its fare—twelve shillings, reduced two years later to ten—was somewhat cheaper. Perhaps one was always charged higher rates on the fashionable Bath Road.
How, in this thirteen years’ interval between 1657 and 1669, had the older stages progressed? The Chester stage was going its way, promising to do the distance in five days, but taking six—a sad falling off from the original four; of the others, presumably continuing, we hear nothing further, and of new ventures there is not a whisper. Yet it is surely not to be supposed that, at a time when coaches ran to Bath, to York, to Coventry, and to Norwich, such a place (for instance) as Bristol would be without that convenience. For Bristol was then what Glasgow is now—the second city. London came first, with its half a million inhabitants; Bristol came next, with some 28,000, and Norwich third, with 27,000. It is, then, only fair to assume that other coaches existed of whose story nothing has survived. A strong reason for coming to this conclusion is found in the publication in 1673 of Cresset’s violent tirade against coaches, not, surely, called forth apropos of the already old-established stages, but provoked, doubtless, by some sudden increase, of which we, at this lapse of time, know nothing. What brief John Cresset could have held for the innkeepers and horse-breeders, and for the other trades supposed to be injuriously affected by the increase of stage-coaches, we know not, nor, indeed, anything of Cresset himself, except that he lived in the Charterhouse.
Between London, York, Chester, and Exeter he calculated that a total number of fifty-four persons travelled weekly, making a grand total for those roads of 1,872 such travellers in a year. A brief examination of his arithmetic shows—as we have already pointed out—that the coaches of that age lay up for the winter months.
His indictment of coaches is to be found in his Grand Concern of England Explained, and is very vigorous indeed, and—as we see it nowadays—extravagantly silly:—
“Will any man keep a horse for himself and another for his servant all the year round, for to ride one or two journeys, that at pleasure, when he hath occasion, can slip to any place where his business lies for two or three shillings, if within twenty miles of London, and so proportionately to any part of England? No, there is no man, unless some noble soul that seems to abhor being confined to so ignoble, base, and sordid a way of travelling as these coaches oblige him to, and who prefers a public good before his own ease and advantage, that will keep horses.”
According to this vehement counsel for the suppression of stage-coaches, they brought the country gentlemen up to London on the slightest pretext—sometimes to get their hair cut—-with their wives accompanying them; and when they were both come to town, they would “get fine clothes, go to plays and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love for pleasure that they are uneasy ever after.
“Travelling in these coaches can neither prove advantageous to men’s health or business, for what advantage is it to men’s health to be called out of their beds into their coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in them from place to place till one, two, or three hours within night, insomuch that sitting all day in the summer time stifled with heat and choked with dust, or in the winter time starving or freezing with cold, or choked with filthy fogs? They are often brought to their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get a supper, and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men’s health or business, to ride all day with strangers oftentimes sick, or with diseased persons, or young children crying, to whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of their boxes and bundles? Is it for a man’s health to travel with tired jades, to be laid fast in the foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in mire, afterwards to sit in the cold till teams of horses can be sent to pull the coach out?”
Cresset was also of opinion that the greater number of the many roadside inns would lose their trade owing to the rapidity of coach-travelling. Here, at least, he exceeded his brief, for coaches by no means attained so speedy a rate of travel as that reached by horsemen. Thoresby, ten years later, is a case in point. He was wont to travel horseback between Leeds and London in four days, but when he journeyed from York to London in the coach, no greater distance than from Leeds, it took six days. Swift, too, in 1710, rode from Chester to London in five days; when the degenerating Chester stage, which had started to perform it in 1657 in four days, had already taken one additional day, and was about to take another. Cresset, summing up such objectionable things as “rotten coaches” and traces, and coachmen “surly, dogged, and ill-natured,” advocated the total suppression of such methods of travelling, or at least—counsels of moderation prevailing—of most of them. In conclusion, he proposed that coaches should be limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and forwards once a week.
Unhappily for Cresset’s peace of mind, coaches did not decay. Nor did they wilt and wither before the onslaught of another writer, who, under the pen-name of “A Country Tradesman,” published a pamphlet in 1678, called The Ancient Trades Decayed, Repaired Again. According to this writer, if coaches were suppressed, more wine and beer would be drunk at the inns, to the great increase and advantage of the Excise; and the breed of horses would be improved, in consequence of the gentlemen who then rode in coaches being obliged to return to horse-riding.
In 1673, in an announcement of stages to York, Chester, and Exeter, the journey to Exeter is put at “eight days in summer, ten in winter.” Here was at least one coach that had already begun to run throughout the year, but its summer performance justified the remarks of those ancients who, seeing the original “four-days” announcement of 1658, had shaken their heads and suspected it would never last.