“THE MACHINE.” A.D. 1640-1750.
These intruders,[14] whose number John Cressel says is “at least 2,000,” paid no £5, and took bread from the mouths of the four hundred licensed hackney coachmen.
[14] Owing to the profitable nature of the business these unlicensed hackney coaches increased until on November 30, 1687, a Royal Proclamation was issued appointing new Commissioners with authority to make an end of them.
John Cressel’s purpose in writing his pamphlet was to call the attention of Parliament to the necessity which, in his opinion, existed for the suppressing all or most of the stage coaches and caravans which were then plying on the roads; and incidentally he gives some interesting particulars concerning the stage coach service of his time. Taking the York, Chester and Exeter coaches as examples, he says that each of these with forty horses apiece carry eighteen passengers per week from London.[15] In the summer the fare to either of these places was forty shillings and in winter forty-five shillings; the coachman was changed four times on the way, and the usual practice was for each passenger to give each coachman one shilling.
[15] The stage coach carried six passengers, and a coach left London for each of the towns named three times a week.
The journey—200 miles—occupied four days. These early “flying coaches” travelled faster than their successors of a later date. The seventeenth century London-Exeter coach did the journey, one hundred and seventy-five miles, in ten days, whereas in 1755, according to “Nimrod,” proprietors promised “a safe and expeditious journey in a fortnight.”
The “short stages,” i.e., those which ran between London and places only twenty or thirty miles distant, were the hackney coaches which had not been fortunate enough to obtain licenses under Charles II.’s Act. These were drawn by four horses and carried six passengers, making the journey to or from London in one day. There were, John Cressel states, stage coaches running to almost every town situated within twenty or twenty-five miles of the capital; and it is worth observing that at this date letters were sent by coach. Coaches ran on both sides of the Thames from Windsor and Maidenhead, and “carry all the letters, little bundles and passengers which were carried by watermen.”
This writer’s arguments against coaches are worthless as such, but they throw side lights on the discomforts of travel at the time. He considered it detrimental to health to rise in the small hours of the morning to take coach and to retire late to bed. With more reason he enquired,
“Is it for a man’s health to be laid fast in foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in mire; and afterwards sit in the cold till fresh teams of horses can be procured to drag the coach out of the foul ways? Is it for his health to travel in rotten coaches and have their tackle, or perch, or axle-tree broken, and then to wait half the day before making good their stage?”