The annual reappearance of the early stage-coaches was a much greater event to the villagers and townsfolk of the more remote shires than we moderns might suppose, or feel inclined to believe, without inquiry. But we must consider the winter isolation of such places in those remote times, and then some faint glimmering sense of their aloofness from the world will give us an understanding of the relief with which they again saw real strangers from the outer world. In the long winter months, when days were short and roads only to be travelled by the most daring horsemen, spurred to the rash deed only by the most urgent necessity, the passing stranger was rare, and excited remark, and the company in the inn parlour or by the ingle-nook discussed him, both because of his rarity and by reason of their own raw material for the making of conversation being run very low indeed. We should be more thankful than we generally are that our lot was not cast in a seventeenth-century village, for winter in such surroundings was dulness incarnate. Because they could not obtain fodder to keep the sheep and cattle in good condition through the winter, the farmers and graziers of that time killed them before that season set in, and the villagers lived upon salted meat. Every house had its salt-beef tub and its bacon-cratch under the kitchen ceiling, well stocked with hams and sides; but vegetables were so scarce as to be practically unobtainable.
Every household brewed its own beer and kept a stock of cider, and most housewives were cunning in the preparation of metheglin, a sickly-sweet and heavy drink that revolts the modern palate, but was then greatly appreciated. Evenings were not long, even though it grew dark before four o’clock, for folks went to bed by seven or eight. There was little inducement to sit up late, because only the feeblest illumination was possible to any but the very rich, and the yeomen, the farmers and the cottagers had to rest content with the dim sputtering glimmer of the tallow dips that every eight or ten minutes required the attentions of the snuffers. “When the night cometh,” we read in the Bible, “no man can work”; but that is a statement which, literally true at the time when the Bible was done into English, can now only be read and understood figuratively. No one could work by the artificial illumination then possible.
Conceive, then, the joy with which returning spring was greeted—spring, that brought back light and fresh food and intercourse with the world, outside the rural parish. Mankind had travelled far from those prehistoric times of annual terror, when the ignorant savage saw the sun’s light going out with the coming of winter, and so, with abject fear, passed the darkling months until the vernal solstice brought him hope again. No one in the Old England of two hundred and fifty years ago trembled lest the sun should not return at his appointed time; but when the sap rose and the birds began to sing again, and warmth and light had begun to replace the fogs and mists of winter, the hearts of all rejoiced.
May Day was then the great merrymaking festival, but the first coach that ventured along the roads, now beginning to set after the winter’s rains, had a welcome of its own. At Sutton-on-Trent, on the Great North Road, the springtide custom of welcoming the early coaches was royally observed, and kept up for many years. No coach, during a whole week of jollity, was suffered to proceed through that jovial village without it halted and ate and drank as only Englishmen could then drink and eat. Guards, coachmen and passengers were freely feasted, willy-nilly. Young and old plied them with the good things, spread out upon a tray covered with a beautiful damask napkin, and heaped with plum-cakes, tartlets, gingerbread, and exquisite home-made bread and biscuits; while ale, currant and gooseberry wines, cherry brandy, and occasionally spirits, were eagerly pressed upon the strangers. Half a dozen damsels, all enchanting young people, neatly clad, rather shy, but courteously importunate, plied the passengers.
Thoresby records a similar custom at Grantham, near by, on one of his journeys. Under date of May 4th, 1714, he says: “We dined at Grantham, and had the usual solemnity, being the first passage of the coach this season; the coachman and horses decked with ribbons and flowers, and the town music and young people in couples before us.” The “town music” was what we should nowadays call the Town Band.
When such courtesies obtained along the roads the coachmen and guards would have been churlish not to have, in some prominently visible manner, done honour to the season. And, indeed, May Day and springtime decorations were features on most coaches. The coachman’s whipstock was ornamented with gay ribbons and bunches of flowers, while the coachman himself wore a floral nosegay that rivalled a prize cabbage in size. The guard was no less remarkable a figure, and his horn was wreathed with the most lively display of blossoms. Festoons of flowers and sprays of evergreens so draped and covered the coach that the insides, peering out upon the festivities, very closely resembled those antic figures, the “Jacks-in-the-Green,” that used on May Day to prance and make merry from the midst of an embowering canopy of foliage, even so late as thirty years ago, in London streets. The horses, too, bore their part. Their new harness and saddle-cloths, the rosettes and wreaths of laurel on their heads, smartened them up so that even the animals themselves were conscious of the occasion, and bore themselves with becoming pride.
Those old customs are, as a matter of course, gone. Coaches no longer dash through the old “thoroughfare” villages; and when, with the advent of spring, the motorist appears upon the road, the villagers, rather than welcoming his appearance, curse him for the clouds of dust he leaves behind. Motor-cars, they tell us, are to repeople the old coaching-roads, whose prosperity is, through them, to return, and the picturesque old wayside inns, with their memories of the coaching age, are to once again experience the rush of business. It may be so, but no one will regret the fact more than the lover of Old England, who, in the repeopling of the roads, sees their modernising inevitable, and the equally inevitable bringing “up to date” of those quaint, quiet, and comfortable hostelries so dear to the genuine tourist. It is true, they do not dine you elaborately—as your extravagant motorist complains—but life is not all chicken and champagne, and it will be a sorry day when the plain man, fleeing the gaudy glories of hotels at fashionable resorts, finds the unsophisticated inns of the countryside remodelled on the same plan. Already the picturesqueness of the old roads is threatened. They are, if you please, too hilly, too narrow, or not straight enough for that new tyrant of the highways, the owner of a high-powered motor-car, and plans have actually been drawn up by irresponsible busybodies for straight and broad new tracks, or for the remodelling of the old roads on the same principle. Roadside trees and avenues keep the surface damp and muddy after rain, and so, as rubber-tyred cars are apt to skid and side-slip on mud, the same voices call for the abolition of wayside trees. Old England is in a parlous state, when these things can be advocated and no indignant protests rise.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
| 1610. | Patent granted for an Edinburgh and Leith waggon-coach. |
| 1648. | Southampton weekly stage casually mentioned. |
| 1657. | Stage-coaches introduced: the London and Chester Stage. |
| 1658. | First Exeter Stage. |
| ” | First York and Edinburgh Stage. |
| 1661. | First Oxford Stage. |
| ” | Glass windows first used in carriages: the Duke of York’s carriage. |
| 1662. | Only six stage-coaches said to have been existing. |
| 1665. | Norwich Stage first mentioned. |
| 1667. | Bath Flying Machine established. |
| ” | London and Oxford Coach, in 2 days, established. |
| 1669. | London and Oxford Flying Coach, in 1 day, established. |
| 1673. | Stages to York, Chester, and Exeter advertised. |
| 1679. | London and Birmingham Stage, by Banbury, mentioned. |
| 1680. | “Glass-coaches” mentioned. |
| 1681. | Stage-coaches become general: 119 in existence. |
| 1706. | London to York in 4 days. |
| 1710 (about). | Stage-coaches provided with glazed windows. |
| 1730. | “Baskets” or “rumble-tumbles” introduced about this period. |
| 1734. | Teams of horses changed every day, instead of coaches going to end of journey with same animals. |
| ” | Quick service advertised: Edinburgh to London in 9 days. |
| 1739. | According to Pennant, gentlemen who were active horsemen still rode, instead of going by coach. |
| 1742. | London to Oxford in 2 days. |
| ” | London to Birmingham, by Oxford, in 3 days. |
| 1751. | London to Dover in 1½ days. |
| 1753. | Outsides carried on Shrewsbury Stage. |
| 1754. | London and Manchester Flying Coach in 4½ days. |
| ” | Springs to coaches first mentioned: the Edinburgh Stage. |
| ” | London and Edinburgh in 10 days. |
| 1758. | London and Liverpool Flying Machine in 3 days. |
| 1760. | London and Liverpool Leeds Flying Coach advertised in 3 days: took 4. |
| 1763. | London and Edinburgh only once a month, and in 14 days. |
| 1776. | First duty on stage-coaches imposed. |
| 1780. | Stage-coaches become faster than postboys. |
| 1782. | Pennant describes contemporary travelling by light post-coaches as “rapid journeys in easy chaises, fit for the conveyance of the soft inhabitants of Sybaris.” |
| 1784. | Mail-coach system established. |
| 1800 (about). | Fore and hind boots, framed to body of coach, become general. |
| ” | Coaches in general carry outside passengers. |
| 1805. | Springs under driving-box introduced. |
| 1819. | “Patent Safety” coaches come into frequent use, to reassure travelling public, alarmed by frequent accidents. |
| 1824. | Rise of the fast day-coaches: the Golden Age of coaching. |
| ” | Stockton and Darlington Railway opened: first beginnings of the railway era. |
| 1830. | Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened: coaching first seriously threatened. |
| 1838. | London and Birmingham Railway opened: first great blow to coaching; coaches taken off Holyhead Road as far as Birmingham. |
| 1839. | Eastern Counties Railway opened to Chelmsford. |
| 1840. | Great Western Railway opened to Reading. |
| ” | London and Southampton Railway opened to Portsmouth: coaches taken off Portsmouth Road. |
| 1841. | Great Western Railway opened to Bath and Bristol: coaches taken off Bath Road. |
| ” | Brighton Railway opened: coaching ends on Brighton Road. |
| 1842. | Last London and York Mail-coach. |
| 1844. | Great Western Railway opened to Exeter: last coaches taken off Exeter Road. |
| 1845. | Railways reach Norwich. |
| ” | Eastern Counties Railway opened to Cambridge. |
| 1846. | Edinburgh and Berwick Railway opened. |
| 1847. | East Anglian Railway opened to King’s Lynn. |
| 1848. | “Bedford Times,” one of the last long-distancecoaches withdrawn. |
| ” | Eastern Counties Railway opened to Colchester. |
| ” | Great Western Railway opened to Plymouth. |
| 1849. | Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway opened. |
| 1850. | Chester and Holyhead Railway opened. |
| 1874. | Last of the mail-coaches: the Thurso and Wick Mail gives place to the Highland Railway. |