full of snow, and, which was worse, upon a continued ice almost, the melted snow being frozen again, that made it dangerous and very troublesome; so that I was more fatigued with this last twenty miles than all the journey besides. My horse slipped dangerously often, and once fell quite down (as I was leading him into Wentbrigg), but, blessed be God! we arrived safe at our desired habitations betwixt two and three, and found our families well.1 Travellers in that age consulted in place of 'Bradshaw,' Ogilby's 'Britannia Depicta, or Correct Coppy of Mr. Ogilby's Actual Survey of all ye Direct & Principal Cross Roads in England and Wales, very neatly executed,' but to what extent the perusal of such works benefited them may be questioned. 'Cursed roads, as all Cheshire,' says Mrs. Bradshaw, of Gosworth Hall, near Congleton, in that county, writing in August 1727.2 Lord Hervey, writing under date of June 18, 1743, from Ickworth Park to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu :— I find the farther one goes from the capital, the more tedious the miles grow and the more rough and disagreeable the way. I know of no turnpikes to mend them; medicine pretends to be such, but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake; they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt as bad as they find it, if not worse.3 With the roads in this deplorable condition, communication and intercourse were almost at a standstill. A journey any little distance from home was a serious undertaking, so serious, indeed, that it often meant the inditing of a last will and testament before it was undertaken. Bad as the roads were in the summer-time when clouds of dust blinded the traveller in every direction, infinitely worse were they at such times as the waters were out or after a heavy fall of rain, when the chances were that wayfarers, after crawling along at a pace of two or three miles an hour in constant fear of sticking fast in a quagmire, had to brave the impetuous force of the current of some river that had overflowed its banks, the strong barely escaping with their lives, the weak often perishing in the stream. The complaints lodged against the roads after touring and the Diary, ed. Hunter, ii. 43-4. 2 Howard Corresp. ed. Croker, i. p. 270. writing of accounts of touring became fashionable in England were legion, and it must be confessed that they were not lodged without reason. Even the home counties, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Surrey, partook largely of the nature of bogs. Daniel Defoe, in a series of letters published in 1724, descriptive of his 'Tour through Great Britain,' which he undertook in April 1722, is very outspoken with reference to the roads he traversed. in the county of Sussex. Sometimes (he wrote) I have seen one tree on a carriage which they call here a tug, drawn by two and twenty oxen, and even then, this carried so little a way, and then thrown down and left for other tugs to take up and carry on, that sometimes it is two or three years before it gets to Chatham; for if once the rains come in, it stirs no more that year, and sometimes a whole summer is not dry enough to make the roads passable.' In the same letter he says: Going to church at a country village not far from Lewes, I saw an ancient lady-and a lady of very good quality I assure youdrawn to church in her coach with six oxen; nor was it done in frolic or humour, but mere necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it.' Jonas Hanway, the philanthropist, has left on record that he found the road lying between Godalming and Petersfield in August 1755 a dreary waste, and states that he pursued his journey from Epsom along a cross ugly road of clay, which seemed to be passable only in dry weather.3 In 1727 George II. and Queen Caroline, in endeavouring to reach "St. James's Palace from Kew, were obliged to pass the whole night on the road, and when between Hammersmith and Fulham, owing to the upsetting of their coach, the royal pair were thrown out bodily into the road. So late as 1736 Lord Hervey complains that 'the road between the court suburb of Kensington and Piccadilly is grown so infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud.' Dr. Cleland, in his 'Statistical Account of Glasgow,' quotes 2 Ibid. p. 60. Defoe, Tour, i. 59. * Journal of Eight Days' Journey, Letter lxii. A Memoirs. an extract from the scrapbook of a gentleman named Bannatyne, who states that he was told by two gentlemen of his acquaintance, named Thomson and Glassford, that when in 1739 they journeyed from Glasgow to London on horseback, no turnpike road greeted their eyes till they came to Grantham, which lies within 110 miles of London. Up to that point they travelled on a narrow causeway, with an unmade soft road each side of it. They met from time to time strings of packhorses, from thirty to forty in a gang, the mode by which goods seemed to be transported from one part of the country to another. The leading horse of the gang carried a bell to give warning to travellers coming in an opposite direction; and when the two wayfarers met these trains of horses, with their packs across their backs, the causeway not affording room, they were obliged to make way for them and plunge into the road, out of which they sometimes found it difficult to get back again upon the causeway. Acts of Parliament followed each other in quick succession, so that the immediate charge of maintaining them was levied upon travellers, the necessary funds being raised by means of tolls. This led to the erection of numerous barriers consisting of either poles or bars, swung on pivots one way or the other, as the tolls were paid. What followed? The roads continued to be almost as bad as ever. The money levied was more than double the amount of that which was necessary for executing the work, which was always done in a slovenly manner, and sometimes not even performed at all. It was very mortifying to the country gentlemen to be compelled to contribute towards the repair of roads which continued to be as bad, if not worse, than they had been before the turnpike system had been adopted. Complaints reached the legislative assembly from all quarters. They at length assumed book form. At two meetings of the Royal Society, in the winter of 1736-7, Robert Phillips read an able 'Dissertation concerning the present state of the high roads of England, especially of those near London; that was afterwards embodied in a volume, in which he showed that the methods employed in mending the turnpike roads about London, for more than twenty years past, had generally proved ineffectual. The Tyburn road comes in for the largest share of abuse, it being well known by travellers, says Phillips, that in the Summer tho' the Road be level and smooth, yet they are suffocated and smother'd with Dust; and towards the Winter, between wet and dry, there are deep Ruts full of Water with hard dry Ridges, which make it difficult for Passengers to cross by one another without overturning; and in the winter they are all Mud, which rises, spues, and squeezes into the Ditches; so that the Ditches and Roads are full of Mud and Dirt all alike, and all of a level.1 Demagogues now began to travel about the country, pointing their morals and adorning their tales by assuring their hearers that the erection of turnpikes was part of a covert design on the part of the Government to enslave the people and to deprive them of their liberty. In many parts of the country there was a decided refusal to pay toll, and during the months of July and August 1749 organised bands of rioters, similar to those organised by the Rechabites of our own times, demolished all the turnpike gates on the roads leading to and from Bristol, repeating their experiment as fast as the gates were re-erected. The contagion spread, and it was found necessary to quarter troops in many districts, to repress the disturbances. The passing of a general Turnpike Act in the year 1755, which rendered the construction of turnpikes compulsory all over the country, was one of the most important events in the history of the century. Turnpikes thus became for many years the principal mode of supporting the heavy expenses incurred in the repair of the roads, and contributed in no inconsiderable degree towards the gradual internal improvement of England. When turnpikes were introduced, one Chapple, a political economist of the day, predicted that two of the innumerable consequences which would inevitably arise from turnpike roads would be 'a rise in the price of oats,' and a 'reacting fall in the price of wheat.' 2 It might very reasonably be sup Dissertation, p. 45. 2 Cottle's Malvern Hills, &. i. 91. posed that the effects of this measure would have been a most marked improvement in the state of the roads. Far from it. In 1767, and the five years which followed, Arthur Young, an eminent Suffolk agriculturist, undertook several tours through England with the object of ascertaining the principles of agricultural science, the state of the manufactures, the methods. employed in cultivating the soil, the wages of labour, the prices of food, and the general condition of the peasantry. A record of the first of these tours was published anonymously by him in a series of letters in 1767, and contains much interesting information relative to the state of the turnpike roads in the reign of George III. Setting out from the little town of Wells in Norfolk, Young traversed the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Bucks, Oxon, Gloucester, Monmouth, Glamorgan, Somerset, Wilts, and Hants-roughly speaking, a distance of 600 miles. Numerous are the anathemas which this shrewd observer hurls at the highways over which he and his steed were obliged to journey. I chiefly travelled (he writes in one of the letters) upon turnpikes, of all which, that from Salisbury to four miles the other side of Romsey towards Winchester, is without exception the finest I ever saw. The trustees highly deserve all the praise that can be given by everyone who travels it. With this road Young considered that 'the great one to Barnet' ought to be 'ranked.' After that 'the Kentish one,' succeeded by those 'to Chelmsford and Uxbridge' respectively. Next he ranks 'the eighteen miles of finished road from Cowbridge in Glamorganshire to six miles this side of Cardiff.' As to all the rest (he continues), it is a prostitution of language to call them turnpikes; I rank them nearly in the same class with the dark lanes from Billericay to Tilbury Fort. Among the bad ones, however, some parts of the road from Telsford to Gloucester are much better than the unmended parts from Gloucester to the good road on this side of Cardiff. The latter is all terrible; but then it is a great extenuation to observe that they have been at work but two years. Much more to be condemned is the execrable muddy road from Bury to Sudbury in Suffolk, in which I was forced to move as slow as in any unmended lane in Wales. For ponds of liquid dirt, and a scattering of loose flints just sufficient |