Old Roads and New Roads

by William Bodham Donne

Indifferent roads and uneasy carriages, riding post, and dread of highwaymen, darkness or the inclemency of the seasons, led, as by a direct consequence, to the construction of excellent inns in our island. The superiority of our English hotels in the seventeenth century is thus described by the most picturesque of modern historians:—“From a very early period,” says Mr. Macaulay, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard, in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry, above all the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. [82] In the seventeenth

century, England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller sometimes in a small village lighted on a public-house, such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London. The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers. On the continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who crossed his threshold. In England he was a servant. Never was an Englishman more at home than when he took his ease in his inn.

“Many conveniences which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall in the seventeenth century, are to be found in our modern hotels. Yet on the whole it is certain that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our roads and conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be best where the means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate of travelling, the less important is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting-places for the travellers. A hundred and sixty years ago a person who came up to the capital from a remote county generally required twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights by the way. If he were a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Chester to London by the light of a single winter’s day. At present therefore a traveller seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest and refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into decay. In a short time no good houses of that description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure.”

Highwaymen, pedlars, inns, coachmen, and well-appointed coaches have now nearly vanished from our roads. Some of the more excellent breeds of English horses have gone with them, or will soon follow them. In another generation no

one will survive who has seen a Norfolk hackney. This race of sure-footed indefatigable trotters has already become so few in number that “a child may count them.” “The oldest inhabitant”—that universal referee with some persons on all disputed points—never set eye on a genuine Flemish coach-horse in England; and the gallant high-stepping hybrid—half thoroughbred, half hackney—which whirled along the fast coaches at the rate of twelve miles in the hour will in a few years be nowhere found. The art of ‘putting to’ four horses in a few seconds will become one of the ‘artes deperditæ;’ and the science of driving so as to divide equally the weight and the speed between the team, and to apportion the strength of the cattle to the variations of the road, will have become a tradition. Perfect as mechanism was the discipline of a well-trained leader. He knew the road, and the duty expected of him. Docile and towardly during his seven- or nine-mile stage, he refused to perform more than his allotted task. Attached to his yoke-fellow, he resented the intrusion of a stranger into his harness: and a mere change of hands on the box would often convert the willing steed into a recusant against the collar, whom neither soothing nor severity would induce to budge a step. Some suffering indeed has been spared to the equine world by the substitution of brass and iron for blood and sinews; but the poetry of the road is gone with the quadrigæ

that a few years ago tripped lightly and proudly over the level of the Macadamized road. No latter-day Homer will again indite such a verse as

“Ιππων μ’ ὠκυνπόδων ὰμφὶ κτύπος οῠατα βάλλει.”

The Four-in-hand Club is extinct, or, with those ancient charioteers at Troy, courses in Hades over meadows of asphodel.

Of the old roads of the Continent during the Dark and Middle Ages, we have little to record. The central energy of Rome had suffered collapse. Europe was partitioned into feeble kingdoms and powerful fiefs. War was the normal condition of its provinces; the sports of the field were unfavourable to agriculture, and directly opposed to the promotion of commerce and the growth of towns. So long as it was conducive to the pleasures of the manorial lord to keep large tracts of land uncultivated, it was contrary to his interests to form great thoroughfares. We have in the ‘Tesoretto’ of Brunetto a striking picture of the desolation of northern Spain in the thirteenth century. He thus describes his journey over the plain of Roncesvalles.

“There a scholar I espied,
On a bay mule that did ride.
Well away! what fearful ground
In that savage part I found.
If of art I aught could ken,
Well behoved me use it then.
More I look’d, the more I deem’d
That it wild and desert seem’d:
Not a road was there in sight;
Not a house and not a wight;
Not a bird and not a brute,
Not a rill, and not a root;
Not an emmet, not a fly,
Not a thing I mote descry:
Sore I doubted therewithal
Whether death would me befall.
Nor was wonder, for around
Full three hundred miles of ground,
Right across on every side
Lay the desert bare and wide.” [87]