In far parts of the country and on the by-roads the pack-horse train lasted an incredible time. Wheeled conveyances of any kind were, generally speaking, impossible on any but the principal roads. The farmers and higglers who had occasion to transport heavier loads than it was possible for horses to carry, used a primitive kind of sledge, formed of tree-trunks, of which the light tapering ends formed the shafts and the heavy bodies of the trunks the runners. Thus the building materials were of old often carried or dragged, with much friction and waste of effort, to their destination. In Devon and Cornwall these truly savage makeshifts were called by the peculiarly descriptive name of “truckamucks.”
When Smollett, the novelist, travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh and on to London as a young man, in 1739, he rode pack-horse as far as Newcastle, for the simple reason that between Glasgow and the Tyne there was neither coach, cart, nor waggon on the road; and in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Devon and Cornwall, and the like extreme corners of the land, where remoteness from the world and the rugged nature of the country conspired to exclude wheels, the packman and his small but sturdy breed of laden horses alone kept the rural districts supplied with their barest requirements until the first years of the nineteenth century were come. The old packmen’s and drovers’ ways, narrow and winding to avoid the turnpike-gates that once took toll of all but the foot-passenger, may still be traced on the Yorkshire wolds, along the shoulders of the Westmorland and Cumberland fells, and by the rivers and moors of Devon and Cornwall. Often they are not even lanes, but only precipitous and rocky tracks, eloquent of those old times that are commonly pictured so rosy, but were really very grey and dour. Here and there the sign of the “Pack Horse” still survives, and marks the old houses of entertainment once frequented by the packmen of that vanished past. The “Pack Horse” at Chippenham and those two old houses at Turnham Green, the “Old Pack Horse” and the “Pack Horse and Talbot” were halting-places of the packmen who travelled the Bath Road. The last-named house is now little more than an ordinary London “public,” but it still displays a picture-sign, copied from an old original, showing a pack-horse with a talbot by his side; the “talbot” being the old English hound, something between a foxhound and a bloodhound, a fierce creature who guarded his master’s property from the thieves and dangers of all kinds that then befell so constantly along the roads, or even at the often ill-famed inns by the wayside.
An attempt to supplant the pack-horses between London and Shrewsbury was made in 1737, by the establishment of the “Gee-ho.” Facts relating to this conveyance are of especial interest, because we are told the circumstances that led to it being put on the road. It seems, then, that until that year Shrewsbury had known no other than a pack-horse service, which set out from and came to what was then the “Pheasant,” now the “Lion and Pheasant,” Inn on Wyle Cop, in that town. A Mrs. Warner, a widow, was landlady, and apparently pack-horse proprietor as well. A shrewd fellow named Carter, a soldier who had been billeted at the inn, made love to the widow, married her, and managed the business. Let us hope they were both happy and successful. At any rate, Carter started the “Gee-ho” as the first conveyance to ply between Shrewsbury and London. It was a stage-waggon, drawn by eight horses, with two others in reserve to pull it out of those sloughs that might then be confidently expected on the way. It was advertised to go to or from London in seven, eight, or nine days in either direction, according to the condition of the roads.
Smollett’s description of how Roderick Random and Strap easily overtook the waggon journeying to London along the Great North Road naturally leads to an inquiry why, if being ill-provided with money and only lightly burdened with luggage, they, in common with others, preferred to pay for the doubtful privilege of going slower than they could easily walk. The reason, perhaps, lay partly in that lack of appreciation of scenery which characterised the period. Poets had not yet seen fit to rhapsodise upon the beauties of nature, and artists had not begun to paint them. Both were in thrills of the most exquisite rapture on the subject of shepherds and shepherdesses, but their Arcady was bounded by bricks and mortar. Strephon and Chloe wore silk and satin, red-heeled shoes and wigs, and patched and powdered amazingly. Theirs was a bandbox Arcady, a pretty bit of make-believe of the kind pictured by Watteau; and though they found much poetry in lambs, they knew nothing of the wintry horrors experienced by the genuine shepherds in the lambing season, and, indeed, nothing of nature outside the well-ordered parks and formal gardens of the great. All classes alike looked with horror upon natural scenery, regarded the peasantry as barbarians, and left the towns with reluctance and dismay.
With feelings of this kind animating the time, it is not surprising that even humble wayfarers, ill able to spare the money, should have sought the shelter and the society that the interior of the stage-waggons afforded. Other reasons existed, little suspected by the present generation, whose great main roads, at any rate, are well defined and excellently well kept. No one, nowadays, once set upon the great roads to York and Edinburgh, to Exeter, to Portsmouth, Dover or Bath, need ask his way. It is only necessary to keep straight ahead. In those old days, however, when travellers could describe the visible road as being a narrow track three feet wide, occasionally rising out of the profound depths of mud and water on either side, no one who could afford to pay would walk, even assuming the very doubtful physical possibility of struggling through such sloughs afoot.
In 1739 two Glasgow merchants, going horseback from Glasgow by Edinburgh to London, found no turnpike road until they had gone three-quarters of their journey, and were come to Grantham. Up to that point they travelled on a narrow causeway, and met from time to time strings of pack-horses, thirty to forty in a gang, carrying goods. The leading horse of each gang carried a bell, to give warning to travellers coming from an opposite direction. The narrow causeway not affording room to pass, the horsemen were obliged to make room for the pack-horses and plunge into the mud, out of which they sometimes found it difficult to get back upon the road again. Those were the times when coachmen, often finding the old roads impassable, would make new routes for themselves across a country not merely strange to turnpike roads, but still largely open and unenclosed. Travellers then dare not go alone, if only for a very well-founded fear of losing their way, just as Pepys, years before, often did when travelling in his carriage to Bath, to Oxford, Salisbury and elsewhere. He is found paying a guide 22s. 6d. to show him and his coachman the way between Newport Pagnell and Oxford; 3s. 6d. for another to guide him from Hungerford to Market Lavington, and, indeed, after he had experienced the awful seventeenth-century mischance of losing his way two or three times through having economised and neglected to provide this necessary aid, guides everywhere. Travellers then achieved what we moderns are apt to think wonderful things in thus losing themselves. Pepys actually missed his way on the Bath Road between Newbury and Reading, and Thoresby lost himself riding on the Great North Road between Doncaster and York in 1680; in his diary fervently thanking God that he found it again.
Although, by an early Act of William III.’s reign, the justices were ordered to erect guideposts at the cross-roads, and road surveyors were to be fined 10s. if the provisions of the Act were not complied with, such posts (except perhaps on the road to Harwich, so often travelled by the Third William on his journeys to and from the Continent) were conspicuously lacking for many generations yet to come, and no one ever seems to have heard of country surveyors being fined for not performing the duty thus laid upon them. An exception to this picture of an uncharted wilderness thus presented is found in the diary of Celia Fiennes, who in the last decade of the seventeenth century travelled through England on horseback, and especially remarked the Lancashire cross-roads between Wigan and Preston being furnished with “hands pointing to each road, with ye names of ye great towns on.” The fact of her thinking the circumstance worth noting shows us how uncommon it was for roads to be signposted.
Only the waggoners who constantly used the roads could with certainty find their way; and so, and for fear of the highwaymen and the footpads and other hedgerow rascals to whom the smallest plunder was not despicable, the waggon was a welcome friend to the poor. Safety was thought to lie in numbers; although it is true that, in the moment of trial, even a waggonful of able-bodied travellers would commonly surrender their few valuables to the first demand of a single highwayman, whose pistol was probably unloaded, and, even if primed, generally refused to “go off” when fired. It is not unnatural to prefer to be robbed in company with a number of others, rather than to be the solitary victim. For these reasons, therefore, even the able-bodied and unencumbered often chose to tediously travel with the women, the infirm, and those whose luggage compelled. Smollett’s humorous description of the stage-waggon and the follies and foibles of its very mixed passengers is the classic authority for this stratum of road life. The sham captain, really a quondam valet, braggart before the timorous, but shaking with the fear of death upon him when the pretended highwayman appears; his wife, aping a gentility as mean as it is transparently false; the money-loving and peace-loving but satirical Jew; the lively Miss Jenny, and the waggoner, are all types, slightly caricatured, but true to the life of the period. Putting aside the question as to whether such people could be conjured out of his inner consciousness without some basis of fact, we must consider that Smollett, writing of his own time, would not for his own sake be likely to draw a picture which would seem a forced or unnatural representation of the wayfaring life of the period. Thus, when he makes his characters journey for five days in this manner, and brings them on the sixth to an inn where the landlord gives the meal they had bespoken to three gentlemen who had just arrived, we think we learn something of the contempt with which almost every one looked down upon passengers by stage-waggons. The gentlemen themselves said: “The passengers in the waggon might be d——d; their betters must be served before them; they supposed it would be no hardship on such travellers to dine on bread-and-cheese for one day.” And the poor devils certainly would have gone without their meal had it not been for that good fellow Joey, the waggoner, who, entering the kitchen of the inn with a pitchfork in his hand, swore he would be the death of any man who should pretend to seize the victuals prepared for the waggon. “On this,” says Smollett, “the three strangers drew their swords, and, being joined by their servants, bloodshed seemed imminent, when the landlord, interposing, offered to part with his own dinner, for the sake of peace,” which proposal was accepted, and all ended happily.
THE WAGGON, 1816. After Rowlandson.