CHAPTER V
THE STAGE-WAGGONS AND WHAT THEY CARRIED: HOW THE POOR TRAVELLED

We have now arrived at the time when the goods traffic became a prominent feature of the road.

The precursor of all public vehicles was the carrier’s waggon, a conveyance of hoary antiquity, intended in the first instance for the carriage of heavy goods, but finding room for those wayfarers who were too poor to own or hire a horse, or possibly too infirm to sit one even if their means sufficed. At least a hundred and fifty years before the earliest stage-coach was put on the road, the waggon, the poor man’s coach, was creaking and groaning on its tedious way at a pace of little more than two miles an hour. The stage-waggon, in fact, came into use about 1500, and the first glimpse and earliest notice of the carrier’s and stage-waggon business introduces us to a very celebrated waggoner indeed, by far the most notable of all his kind—none other, in fact, than Thomas Hobson, the carrier between Cambridge and London, the grand original of the Chaplin & Hornes, the Pickfords, the Carter Patersons, and Suttons of succeeding generations. Hobson’s London place of call was the “Bull,” Bishopsgate Street Within. When the business was founded is not on record, but it was old-established and prosperous when he succeeded to it on the death of his father in 1568. Under the terms of his father’s will he inherited, among other things, the vehicle with which the carrying trade was conducted, the “cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things thereunto belonging, with the nag.” It is quite evident from this that one cart or waggon sufficed for all the commerce between London and Cambridge at that time. If he did not choose to take these things, he was to have £30 instead, the equivalent of their value, which—taking into consideration the fact that the purchasing power of money at that time would be about six times that of our own—was therefore £180. The “nag” specified in the will was, of course, the horse ridden by the waggoner by the side of the eight-horse waggon team. In old prints of stage-waggons we see that the waggoner did not usually drive his team from the waggon holding the reins, but rode a pony, and, wielding a whip of formidable length, urged on the much-suffering beasts through mud and ruts.

Hobson senior had been a man of wealth and consideration, and his son increased both. In his father’s lifetime he had gone continually back and forth with the waggon, and so continued to go until his death, January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year. He was, as his father had been before him, not merely a carrier between Cambridge and London, but the only one, and specially licensed by the University. He conveyed the letters, too, and had a very lucrative business of letting out saddle-horses. In those days, before coaches had come into existence, and when able-bodied men, despising the slow progress of the waggon, rode horseback, his stable of forty horses, “fit for travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow,” was in great request. From his determination to allow no picking and choosing, and his refusing to allow any horse to be taken out of its proper turn, first arose that immortal proverb, “Hobson’s Choice, that or none”—in other words, no choice whatever. University witlings made great play with Hobson, and when at last he died, quite a sheaf of lyrical epitaphs on him appeared, from the well-known ones by Milton to the more obscure exercises of anonymous versifiers.[D]

[D] For a detailed notice of Hobson, with a portrait of him, see the Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road, pp. 10–12, 32, 140, 157–166.

The business of stage-waggoning obtained its first specific notice so late as 1617, when Fynes Morison, in his Itinerary, mentioned the “carryers, who have long covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from place to place; but this kind of journey is so tedious by reason they must take waggon very early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.”

How early they were accustomed to start, and how late would come to their inns, may be gathered from the great classic instance in Shakespeare, where the two carriers in the First Part of King Henry the Fourth are discovered in the innyard at Rochester preparing to set forth for London. It is two o’clock in the morning, and London but thirty miles away, yet it will not be earlier than “time to go to bed with a candle” before that gammon of bacon and those two razes of ginger are delivered at Charing Cross.

Shakespeare, of course, here wrote, not of the manners and customs of Henry the Fourth’s time, but of what he had himself heard and seen, and what might so be seen and heard on any day, early in the morning, in the yard of any considerable hostelry in the kingdom. He has fixed for ever, in his deathless pages, the road life that existed when the sixteenth century was drawing to its close.

Contemporary with, but originating even earlier than, the stage-waggons were the pack-horses, which dated from a time when even the broad-wheeled wains would have sunk hopelessly in the mud of the best roads in the country. By pack-horse, at an earlier date than 1500, all goods, and even such heavy articles as building-stone, coals and timber, were carried, for the very eloquent reason that, before the passing of the first General Highway Act, in 1555, which was the first obligation upon the parishes to repair and maintain the roads, nothing had been done to keep them in repair for many centuries; and the parishes, with the best will in the world, could not at once retrieve them from their desperate condition. Wheeled traffic had been unknown until the early stage-waggons appeared, and those few who travelled otherwise than afoot or on their own horses were content to mount the pack-saddle of a patient and long-suffering pack-horse, themselves only a degree less long-suffering and patient. Then the etymology of the words “travel” and “journey” was abundantly justified; for it was sorrow and hard labour to leave one’s own fireside, and a day’s journey was—what the word “journey” implies—the passing from place to place within the hours of daylight. No one dared travel the roads when night had fallen, and it was not until the eighteenth century had dawned that coaches began to run by night as well as day.