Old Roads and New Roads

by William Bodham Donne

time, appears even to us at this day, and might well therefore appear to his contemporaries, truly astonishing. A distance of one hundred miles was no extraordinary day’s journey for him. When he did not march with his army on foot,—as he often seems to have done, in order to set his soldiers an example, and also to express that sympathy with them which gained him their hearts so entirely—he mostly travelled in a rheda. This was a four-wheeled carriage, a sort of curricle, and adapted to the carriage of about half a ton of luggage. His personal baggage was probably considerable, for he was a man of most elegant habits, and sedulously attentive to his personal appearance. The tessellated flooring of his tent formed part of his impedimenta, and, like Napoleon, he expected to find amid the distractions of war many of the comforts and conveniences of his palace at Rome. He reached the Sierra Morena in twenty-three days from the date of his leaving Rome; and he went the whole way by land. The distance round the head of the Gulf of Genoa and through the passes of the Pyrenees is 850 leagues; and although the Carthaginians had once been masters of Spanish Navarre, the roads were far from regular or good. The same distance would now be accomplished in twelve days by a general and his mounted staff. From the usual rapidity with which the great Proconsul travelled, Cowley, in his Essay on ‘Procrastination,’ extracts a moral, or, as his

Puritan contemporaries would have phrased it, a “pious use.” “Cæsar,” he says, “the man of expedition above all others, was so far from this folly (procrastination), that whensoever in a journey he was to cross any river, he never went out of his way for a bridge, or a ford, or a ferry, but flung himself into it immediately, and swam over; and this is the course we ought to imitate, if we meet with any stops in our way to happiness.” In the time of Theodosius, Cæsarius, a magistrate of high rank, went post from Antioch to Constantinople. He began his journey at night, was in Cappadocia, 165 miles from Antioch, the ensuing evening, and arrived at Constantinople the sixth day about noon. The whole distance was 725 Roman, or 665 English miles.

Gibbon describes bishops as among the most rapid of ancient travellers. The decease of a patriarch of Alexandria or Antioch caused the death of scores of post-horses, from the rate at which anxious divines hurried to Constantinople to solicit from the Emperor the vacant see. On the whole however, in respect of speed in travelling, the Greeks and Romans were but slow coaches; and these exceptional instances merely serve to prove the general slackness of their pace. A Roman nobleman indeed, with all the means and appliances which his wealth could purchase, and with the positive advantage of the best roads in the world, travelled generally with such a ponderous train, that

the heavy-armed legions with their parks of artillery might well advance as rapidly as an Olybrius or Anicius of the Empire. “In their journeys into the country,” says Ammianus, “the whole body of the household marches with their master. In the same manner as the cavalry and infantry, the heavy and the light armed troops, the advanced guard and the rear, are marshalled by the skill of their military leaders; so the domestic officers who bear the rod, as an ensign of authority, distribute and arrange the numerous train of slaves and attendants. The baggage and wardrobe move in the front; and are immediately followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior ministers, employed in the service of the kitchen and of the table. The main body is composed of a promiscuous crowd of slaves, increased by the accidental concourse of idle or dependent plebeians.”

At an even earlier period, in the age of Nero, before luxury had made the gigantic strides which distinguished and disgraced the Byzantine Court, Seneca records three circumstances relative to the journeys of the Roman nobility. They were preceded by a troop of Numidian light horse who announced by a cloud of dust the approach of a great man. Their baggage-mules transported not only the precious vases, but even the fragile vessels of crystal and murra, which last probably meant the porcelain of China and Japan. The delicate faces of the young slaves were covered with a medicated

crust or ointment, which secured them against the effects of the sun and frost. Rightly did the Romans name their baggage impedimenta. A funeral pace was the utmost that could be expected from travellers so particular about their accommodations as these luxurious senators. Of a much humbler character was the state observed by the monarchs who succeeded to portions of the empire of the Cæsars. The Merovingian kings, when they employed wheel carriages at all, rode in wains drawn by bullocks; the Bretwaldas of the Saxon kingdoms went to temple or church on high festivals in the same cumbrous fashion; and “slow oxen” dragged the standard of the Italian Republics into the battle-field.

With the disuse or breaking up of the great Roman Viæ in our island, the difficulty and delay of travelling increased, and more than thirteen centuries elapsed before it was again possible to journey with any tolerable speed. Wolsey indeed, it is well known, by the singular rapidity with which he conveyed royal letters to and from Brussels, galloped swiftly up the road of royal favour: and by his fast style of living at home afterwards galloped even more swiftly down again. Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, was noted for his incessant restlessness, and his rapid mode of passing from one land to another; but then he dispensed with all state and attendance, and rode like a post-boy from one end of Europe to another. As the readers

of Pope, Swift, and their contemporaries are daily becoming fewer in number, we venture to extract the Dean’s pleasant burlesque on this eccentric nobleman’s migratory habits.

“Mordanto fills the trump of fame,
The Christian worlds his deeds proclaim,
And prints are crowded with his name.

In journeys he outrides the post,
Sits up till midnight with his host,
Talks politics and gives the toast;

Knows every prince in Europe’s face,
Flies like a squib from place to place,
And travels not, but runs a race.

From Paris gazette à-la-main,
This day arrived, without his train,
Mordanto in a week from Spain.

A messenger comes all a-reek,
Mordanto at Madrid to seek;
He left the town above a week.

Next day the post-boy winds his horn,
And rides through Dover in the morn;
Mordanto’s landed from Leghorn.

Mordanto gallops on alone;
The roads are with his followers strown;
This breaks a girth and that a bone.

His body active as his mind,
Returning sound in limb and wind,
Except some leather lost behind.

A skeleton in outward figure,
His meagre corpse, though full of vigour,
Would halt behind him, were it bigger.

So wonderful his expedition,
When you have not the least suspicion
He’s with you like an apparition.”

The badness of the roads and the rude forms of