But in those comparatively early times the historian finds no mention of the “Hastings” Road at all. Travellers very rarely wanted to journey from London to that fisher village; and it is the road to Rye for which the inquirer after these things must look in the classic seventeenth-century pages of Ogilby’s “Britannia.” In that very elaborate and accurate work, published in 1675, the Hastings Road appears as the “road to Rye,” and thus, after Flimwell, 44¾ miles down, where it makes as straight as may be for that once-busy port, the chance pilgrim for Hastings had to find his way across country as best he could by the directions of the country folk.
It is twenty miles from Flimwell to Hastings, and as I do not suppose the rustics were nearly so well informed then as now as to routes and distances, and as their knowledge on those matters is even now not profound, I think we shall do well to feel sorry for that wayfarer of long ago, thus left without a guide.
By the time the coaching age had arrived, and the road-books of Cary and Paterson and a host of others began to be published, the “Hastings” Road, rather than the road to Rye, had been invented, but still the way lay over London Bridge, and was measured from the south side of it, whence the distance is 63½ miles.
The traveller of to-day would probably find Westminster Bridge Road, St. George’s Road, and the New Kent Road the best way out of London, but it will be allowed that the best is bad.
As the imagination—whatever may be the facts—refuses to associate the Borough High Street and the Old Kent Road with the sylvan beauties of the road to Hastings, I do not propose here to recount the description of those beginnings, given already in the pages of the Dover Road; but will, as Astley of the Circus suggested to the mere dramatist, literally “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses,” i.e., a consideration of the coaching history of the road.
II
The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,” and was looked down upon accordingly.
It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of riding in coaches.
Thus the early glimpses of the road reveal Nathaniel Field, carrier, plying in 1681 between Tonbridge and the “Queen’s Head” Inn, Southwark, once a week, together with another carrier, unnamed, a competitor in the business. In the same year “Richard Cockett’s Waggon” came twice weekly to the “Spur,” Southwark, from “Sunnock, in Kent”; and from “Brumly in Kent” came thrice a week “Widow Ingerham’s Waggon,” to the “King’s Arms in Barnaby Street, Southwark,” together with “William and Daniel Woolf’s Waggon,” on the same days.
There is sufficient evidence in the diary of Samuel Jeake, junior, of Rye, that there was no coach further than Tonbridge, or Tunbridge Wells, in 1682; for he tells us that, journeying from Rye to London on May 22nd of that year, “I rode with my wife and mother-in-law for diversion, and came thither on the 23rd; had hot and dry weather.” Returning on June 23rd, they went “from London in the stage-coach to Tonbridge; and on the 24th, Saturday, came to Rye at night.”