OLD COACHING BILL, PRESERVED AT THE “BLACK SWAN,” YORK.
It still took four days, as it had done when first established close upon half a century before. Clearly times and coaches alike moved slowly.
That York even then displayed its sub-metropolitan character will be seen from the footnote to the handbill, relating to the Newcastle coach. Local services apparently radiated from the city to Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, and other places.
Meanwhile, other provincial towns had not been idle, and we must needs make a slight divergence here to give an outline of what Glasgow was attempting in local intercommunication. Nothing thus early was on the road between Glasgow and London, but strenuous efforts were made to link Glasgow and Edinburgh (forty-four miles apart) together by a public service so early as 1678, when Provost Campbell and the magistrates of Glasgow agreed with William Hoorn, of Edinburgh, for a coach to go on that road once a week: “a sufficient strong coach, drawn by sax able horses, whilk coach sall contine sax persons and sall go ance ilk week, to leave Edinburgh ilk Monday morning, and to return again (God willing) ilk Saturday night.” To travel those forty-four miles was, therefore, the occupation of three days. Even thus early we see the beginnings of that spirit of municipal enterprise which has in modern times carried Glasgow so far. Now the local tramway, water, gas, and electric lighting authority, she, so early as the seventeenth century, essayed a public service of coaches.
Like much else in early coaching history, this is merely a fragment; but again, in 1743, Glasgow is found returning to the question, in an attempt of the Town Council to set up a stage-coach or “lando,” to go once a week in winter and twice in summer. The attempt failed, and it was not until 1749 that the first conveyance to ply regularly between Glasgow and Edinburgh was established. This was the “Caravan,” which made the passage in two days each way. It was succeeded in 1759 by the “Fly,” which brought the time down to a day and a half.
In 1697, according to an entry in the diary of Sir William Dugdale, under date of July 16th, a London and Birmingham coach, by way of Banbury, was then running; but such isolated references are quite obscured by the flood of light thrown upon coaching by the work of De Laune, The Present State of London, dated 1681. In his pages is to be found a complete list of all the stage-coaches, carriers, and waggons to and from London in that year. The carriers and waggons are very numerous, and there are in all 119 coaches, of which number between sixty and seventy are long-distance conveyances, the remainder serving places up to twenty or twenty-five miles from London. In that list we find that, although a marvellous expansion of coaching had taken place, some of the places already catered for in 1658 are abandoned. The Edinburgh stage does not appear, and nothing is to be found on that road farther north than York. The reason for the omission was, doubtless, that York, then relatively a more important place than now, had its own well-organised coaching businesses. Travellers from London for Edinburgh would secure a place to York, and, arriving there, book again by a York and Edinburgh coach. The Edinburgh stage from London, once a fortnight, is, indeed, not heard of again until 1734.
Many of the coaches mentioned by De Laune went twice and thrice a week, and a large proportion of those to places not beyond twenty or twenty-five miles from London made double journeys in the day. Thus Windsor had no fewer than seven coaches, six of them in and out daily. The age, it will be conceded, was not without enterprise. But the omissions are striking; Okehampton, Plymouth, and Cornwall, included in the purview of the pioneers of 1658, are not mentioned. Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Leicester, Hereford and others were outside their activities. No one, it seemed, wanted to go to Glasgow; Manchester men were content to ride horseback; Leeds, now numbering some 430,000 inhabitants, and increasing by 2,000 a year, was a town of only 7,000, and the clothiers rode to York and caught the London coach there. To Bath and Bristol, however, there were five coaches; to Exeter, four; to Guildford, three; to Cambridge, Braintree, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Gloucester, Lincoln and Stamford, Norwich, Oxford, Portsmouth, Reading, Saffron Walden, and Ware, two each.
Despite the four coaches between Exeter and London mentioned by De Laune in 1681, the Mayor of Lyme Regis, having in October 1684 urgent official business in London, is found, in company with one servant, hiring post-horses from Lyme to Salisbury. It is quite clear that if there had been a coach serving at the time, he would have caught it at Charmouth, a mile and a half from that little seaport; but there was, for some unexplained reason, a break in the service, and it was not until Salisbury was reached, sixty miles along the road, that he found a stage. The coach fare from Salisbury to London for self and servant was 30s., and he spent, “at several stages, to gratify coachmen,” 4s. 6d.
With the existence of such a volume of trade as that disclosed by De Laune, it is not surprising to find that the scolding voices of opponents to coaching had by this time died down to a mere echo. Instead of reviling coaches, the writers of the age extolled their use and convenience. Thus Chamberlayne, in the 1684 edition of his Present State of Great Britain, the Whitaker’s Almanack of that period, says: “There is of late such an admirable commodiousness for both men and women to travel from London to the principal towns in the country, that the like hath not been known in the world; and that is by stage-coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place, sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging of one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over-violent motion, and this not only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed in one hour as that the post in some foreign countries cannot make but in one day.” Those foreign countries have our respectful sympathy, for Chamberlayne in thus extolling our superiority was singing the praises of four miles an hour!
From the limbo of half-forgotten things we drag occasional references to coaches towards the close of the seventeenth century. In April 1694 a London and Warwick stage was announced to go every Monday, to make the journey in two days, “performed (if God permit) by Nicholas Rothwell”; and in 1696 the “Confatharrat” coach was already spoken of as a familiar object on the London and Norwich road. All we know of the “Confatharrat” is that it came to the “Four Swans,” in Bishopsgate Street Within. Its curious name is probably the seventeenth-century spelling of the word “confederate,” and the coach itself was, no doubt, run by an association, or “confederacy,” of owners and innkeepers, in succession to some unlucky person who singly had attempted it and failed.