In 1773, one James Sharp, of Leadenhall Street, advertised his invention of a “rolling waggon,” whose rollers (in place of wheels) were of this breadth of sixteen inches, and proceeded to state that “two late Acts of Parliament” allowed all carriages moving upon rollers of that gauge to be drawn by any number of horses or cattle, and further, that they were allowed to carry eight tons in summer and seven in winter, and to pass toll-free for the term of one year from Michaelmas 1773, and after that time to pay only half toll. Clearly, then, in the great mass of legislation for roads and traffic there was then a limit existing for loads and for teams. It only remained for the wisdom of the time to enact laws giving a bonus to every waggon whose wheels exceeded a breadth of two feet—thus making every such vehicle its own road-repairer—for the absurdity to be complete. There had, indeed, already arisen a bright genius with a somewhat similar idea, for in 1763 Bourne published his design of a four-wheeled waggon whose front axletree was to be so much shorter than the hind one that the foremost wheels would make a track inside the hinder. The breadth of wheel, indeed, was not to be more than fifteen inches, but the combined breadth of all four planned thus would flatten out no less than a five-foot width of road, and the heavier the contents of the waggon, so much better for the proper rolling of the way. But this ingenious person took no account of the extra difficulty of haulage, and the consequently larger teams that would be required for this engine of his. It never came into use, nor did the rival invention of another amiable theorist meet a better fate. This device set out to deal with the problem of soft and rutted roads by fixing heavy iron rollers under the frame of a waggon. While the vehicle progressed along good roads these rollers were not brought into contact with the ground, but as soon as the wheels began to sink into foul and miry ways, the rollers came into touch with the surface, and at the same time prevented any further sinking and flattened out all irregularities.
Turnpike roads, being then things “new-fangled” and unusual, were of course disapproved of by all that very numerous class who distrust any change. Doubtful of their own ability to hold their own in any order of things newer than that in which they have been brought up, any change must to them be for the worse. The waggoners to a man were numbered in this class, and, apart from the tolls to be paid on the new roads, objected to them as new. An entertaining contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1752 consulted “the most solemn waggoner” he could find between London and Bath. This was one “Jack Whipcord,” who, like every one else, preferred to go round by “a miserable waggon-track called ‘Ramsbury Narrow Way.’ Jack’s answer was, that roads had but one object—namely, waggon-driving; that he required but five feet width in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest might go to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be damned, and not run gossipping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi. 16.[E] Thus,” says the writer, “finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a profane country wag, I left him, dissatisfied.”
[E] “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”
We are not to suppose, from this imaginary “Jack Whipcord,” that waggoners were generally of a dour and unpleasant nature. Indeed, the consensus of opinion to be collected from old-world literature shows that, as a class, they were pleasant and light-hearted. M. Samuel de Sorbière, a distinguished Frenchman who visited England in 1663 and has left a very entertaining account of his travels, paints a charming little cameo portrait of the waggoner who was in charge of the six-horse stage-waggon by which he travelled from Dover to Gravesend. The horses were yoked one before the other, and beside them walked the waggoner, “clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and was a merry fellow, who fancied he made a figure and seemed mightily pleased with himself.” “Joey,” too, the waggoner already glimpsed in Roderick Random, was sprightly and light-hearted; and we have the evidence of that old English ballad, the “Jolly Waggoner,” that men of this trade were conventionally regarded as devil-me-care fellows, own brothers in disposition to sailors, always represented as jolly, even in the old days when rations were scanty and bad and rope’s endings plentiful. This jollity is insisted upon, even by the old wayside signs of the country inns. Now and again you may find the sign of the “Jolly Anglers,” while on the Portsmouth Road the “Jolly Drovers” is to be seen, and on the Exeter Road the “Jolly Farmer,” a creature vanished from this country and utterly unknown these forty years and more; but only the waggoners and the sailors are usually known by that adjective. Rarely, indeed, is the sailor described in any other way. In a few instances he may be “Valiant,” but ninety times in every hundred he is “Jolly.”
According to the second verse of the “Jolly Waggoner,” his cheerfulness was invincible:—
It is a cold and stormy night: I’m wetted to the skin,
But I’ll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn,
And then I’ll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Sing wo! my lads, sing wo!
Drive on, my lads, gee-ho!
For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do-o-o?
He knew something of all kinds of weather, and met all kinds of men in his daily journeys, and thus early became something of a philosopher, looking forward for nothing beyond his nightly inn, in whose kitchen he was well known and esteemed, alike for his own qualities and the news and parcels he brought from the outer world on the other side of the distant hills. With a sack over his shoulders and peace in his mind, he could greet the rainy days with joke and song, or endure even the wintry horrors of December and January with equanimity; yet when spring was come and grass grew green and the bare, ruined boughs of the trees began to be clothed again with leaves, not even the old heathen Greeks and Romans in their Floralia celebrated the coming again of the sun with more heartiness. His horses and himself were decked with ribbons on May Day, his sweetheart had some longed-for present from the Great City, and not even the blackbird on the hawthorn spray sang a merrier tune, as he drove his team along their steady pace.
It is not a little difficult to pronounce an opinion upon the fares which the poor folk paid by stage-waggon. Prices varied widely. On the Great North Road in 1780, between London and Edinburgh, the measure was, indeed, not by miles but by days; but as the journey took fourteen days, and the fare was a shilling a day, and the distance covered was 396 miles, we can figure it out at about twenty-eight miles a day at something less than a halfpenny a mile. Early stage-waggons to Cambridge, however, appear to have exacted three-halfpence a mile, and moved with incredible slowness, taking two and a half days to perform the fifty-one miles, and sleeping two nights upon the road. On the Bath Road the waggon-fare seems to have been something less than a penny a mile.
We have already seen something of the old waggon-life, as shown by Smollett: let us now inquire into the costs and charges of the journey, apart from the fare. How did these humble folk eat and drink, and how did they lodge for the night when the waggon came to its inn at sunset? Sometimes they slept in the shelter of the waggon itself, under the substantial covering of the great canvas tilt, snugly curled up in the hay and straw, and barricaded by the crates and boxes that formed part of the load—not an altogether uncomfortable, if certainly too promiscuous, a sleeping arrangement. At other times the stable-lofts of the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries, mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides) existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the “basket,” did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the waggons, to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was their portion. Swift himself, that terrible genius of the eighteenth century, who knew the extremities of obscurity and fame, of penury and affluence, was, in his early days, of this poor company. When a young man, travelling from the house of his patron, Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, to see his mother at Leicester, he rode in the waggon, and slept at “the penny hedge-inns,” where they were not above letting a bed for the night to a young man so unusually particular as to pay sixpence extra for clean sheets and a bed to himself—an exclusive arrangement, it would appear, not within the everyday philosophy of those humble caravanserais. He whom not only later ages, but even his contemporaries, unite in acclaiming a genius, generally chose to take his food with waggoners, ostlers, and persons of that station. The superfine Lord Orrery, who recorded these facts, and tells us that Swift “delighted in scenes of low life,” says he “dined” with them; but if Lord Orrery had been as well acquainted with humble circles he would have known that the low people in them do not “dine” at all; they just “have dinner.”
