Old Roads and New Roads

It was one of Samuel Johnson’s wishes that he might be driven rapidly in a post-chaise, with a pretty woman, capable of understanding his conversation, for his travelling companion. The smartness of the English postboy was emulated in France, – not, as might have been expected, by his professional brethren, who until very recently retained their ponderous jackboots, three-cornered hats, and heavy knotted whips, but by the younger members of la haute noblesse. To look like an English jockey or postilion, was long the object of fashionable ambition with Parisian dandies. “Vous me crottez, Monsieur,” said poor patient Louis XVI. to one of these exquisite centaurs, as he rode beside the royal carriage near Versailles. “Oui, Sire, à l’Anglaise,” rejoined the self-satisfied dandy, understanding his majesty to have complimented his trotting (trottez), and taking it as a tribute to the skill of his imitation.

Pedlars and packhorses were a necessary accompaniment of bad and narrow roads. The latter have long disappeared from our highways; the former linger in less-frequented districts of the country, but miserably shorn of their former importance. A licensed hawker is now a very unromantic personage. His comings and goings attract no more attention among the rustics or at the squire’s hall than the passing by of a plough or a sheep. The fixed shop has deprived him of his utility, and daily newspapers of his attractions. He is content to sell his waistcoat or handkerchief pieces; but he is no longer the oracle of the village inn or the housekeeper’s room. In the days however when neither draper’s nor haberdasher’s wares could be purchased without taking a day’s journey at the least through miry ways to some considerable market-town, the pedlar was the merchant and newsman of the neighbourhood. He was as loquacious as a barber. He was nearly as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. He had his winter circuit and his summer circuit. He was as regular in the delivery of news as the postman; nay, he often forestalled that government official in bringing down the latest intelligence of a landing on the French coast; of an execution at Tyburn; of a meteor in the sky; of a strike at Spitalfields; and of prices in the London markets. He was a favourite with the village crones, for he brought down with him the latest medicines for ague, rheumatism, and the evil. He wrote love-letters for village beauties. He instructed alehouse politicians in the last speech of Bolingbroke, Walpole, or Pitt. His tea, which often had paid no duty, emitted a savour and fragrance unknown to the dried sloe-leaves vended by ordinary grocers. He was the milliner of rural belles. He was the purveyor for village songsters, having ever in his pack the most modern and captivating lace and ribbons, and the newest song and madrigal. He was competent by his experience to advise in the adjustment of top-knots and farthingales, and to show rustic beaux the last cock of the hat and the most approved method of wielding a cane. He was an oral ‘Belle Assemblée.’ He was full of “quips and cranks and wreathed smiles.” ‘Indifferent’ honest, he was not the less welcome for being a bit of a picaroon. Autolycus, the very type of his profession, – and such as the pedlar was in the days of Queen Bess, such also was he in the days of George II., – was littered under Mercury, and a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. His songs would draw three souls out of one weaver. His pack was furnished with

“Lawn, as white as driven snow;Cyprus, black as e’er was crow;Gloves, as sweet as damask roses,Masks for faces and for noses;Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,Perfume for a lady’s chamber;Golden quoifs and stomachersFor my lads to give their dears;Pins and poking-sticks of steel, —What maids lack from head to heel.”

Then did he chant after the following fashion, at “holy-ales and festivals” —

“Will you buy any tape,Or lace for your cape,My dainty duck, my dear – a?Any silk, any thread,Any toys for your head,Of the new’st and fin’st, fin’st wear – a?Come to the pedlar,Money’s a meddler,That doth alter all men’s wear – a!”

One accident in pedlar life was some drawback to its general pleasantness. He often bore not only a great charge of goods, but of gold also. His steps were dogged by robbers, and many a skeleton, since disinterred in solitary places, is the mortal framework of some wandering merchant who had met with foul play on his circuit. The packman’s ghost too is no unusual spectre in many of our shires.

How important a personage among the dramatis personæ of rural life the pedlar was, at even a recent period, in the northern counties of England, may be inferred from Wordsworth’s choice of him for the hero of his ‘Excursion.’ Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But “the vagrant merchant under a heavy load,” being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet’s home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet’s choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. Wordsworth’s pedlar indeed was no Bryce Snailsfoot, nor Donald Bean, nor even such a one as was first cousin to Andrew Fairservice, but rather, by virtue of a poetic diploma, a philosopher of the ancient stamp. For

“From his native hillsHe wandered far; much did he see of men,Their manners, their enjoyments and pursuits,Their passions and their feelings; chiefly thoseEssential and eternal in the heart,That, ’mid the simpler forms of rural lifeExist more simple in their elements,And speak a plainer language. In the woods,A lone enthusiast, and among the fields,Itinerant in this labour, he had passedThe better portion of his time; and thereSpontaneously had his affections thrivenAmid the bounties of the year, the peaceAnd liberty of nature; there he keptIn solitude and solitary thought,His mind in a just equipoise of love.”

Lucian, in his vision of Hades, beheld the Shades of the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian’s hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and “imperial Cæsar dead and turned to clay” a hawker of petty wares. It was easier to fit the shadows of monarchs with employment than it would be to find business for departed coachmen. “A coachman, Sir,” said one of these worthies to ourselves, who was sorrowfully contemplating the approaching day of his extinction by a nearly completed railway, – “a coachman, if he really be one, is fit for nothing else. The hand which has from boyhood – or rather horsekeeper-hood – grasped the reins, cannot close upon the chisel or the shuttle. He cannot sink into a book-keeper, for his fingers could as soon handle a lancet as a pen. His bread is gone when his stable-door is shut.” We attempted to console him by pointing out that it was a law of nature for certain races of mankind to become extinct. Were not the Red Men fading away before the sons of the White Spirit? Was not the Cornish tongue, and were not the old Cornish manners, for ever lost to earth, on the day when the old shrewish fishwife, Dolly Pentrath, departed this life towards the middle of the reign of King George III.? Seeing these things are so, and that “all beneath the moon doth suffer change,” why should coachmen endure for ever? But our consolation was poured into deaf ears, and some two years afterwards we recognized our desponding Jehu under the mournful disfigurements of the driver of a hearse. The days of pedlars and stage-coachmen have reached their eve, and look not for restoration. They are waning into the Hades of extinct races, with the sumpnours and the limitours of the Canterbury Pilgrims.

We have described some of the difficulties and dangers to which travellers were subjected in the days of Old Roads. Yet the ancient Highways were not without their attending compensations. Pleasant it was to travel in company, as Chaucer voucheth: pleasant to linger by the way, as Montaigne testifies. To meditative and imaginative persons there was delight in sauntering through a fair country, viewing leisurely its rivers, meadows, hills, and towns. Burton prescribes travelling among his cures for melancholy, and he would not have recommended railway speed or even a fast coach to sad and timid men. His advice presupposed sober progress, gliding down rivers, patient winding round lofty hills, contemplation by woodsides and in green meadows, relaxation not tension of nerve and brain. “No better physick,” he says, “for a melancholy man than change of aire and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions. Leo Afer speakes of many of his countrymen so cured without all other physick. No man, saith Lipsius, in an epistle to Phil. Lanoius, a noble friend of his, now ready to make a voyage, can be such a stock or stone, whom that pleasant speculation of countries, cities, towns, rivers, will not affect. For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled, a kinde of prisoner, and pity his case, that from his cradle to old age beholds the same still; insomuch that Rhasis doth not only commend but enjoyn travell, and such variety of objects to a melancholy man, and to lye in diverse innes, to be drawn into severall companies. A good prospect alone will ease melancholy, as Gomesius contends. The citizens of Barcino, saith he, are much delighted with that pleasant prospect their city hath into the sea, which, like that of old Athens, besides Ægina, Salamina, and other pleasant islands, had all the variety of delicious objects; so are those Neapolitanes and inhabitants of Genua, to see the ships, boats, and passengers go by, out of their windows, their whole cities being sited on the side of an hill like Pera by Constantinople. Yet these are too great a distance: some are especially affected with such objects as be near, to see passengers go by in some great road-way or boats in a river, in subjectum forum despicere, to oversee a fair, a market-place, or out of a pleasant window into some thoroughfare street to behold a continual concourse, a promiscuous rout, coming and going.”

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.10 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 groundIn 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’dThat 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 therewithalWhether death would me befall.Nor was wonder, for aroundFull three hundred miles of ground,Right across on every sideLay the desert bare and wide.”11

As Ser Brunetto was despatched on very urgent business, it may be presumed that he was journeying by the most direct road which he could find. Until the reign of Charlemagne indeed there were but few towns, and consequently few roads, in Germany. The population generally was widely spread over the surface of the land. “A house, with its stables and farm-buildings,” says Mr. Hallam, “surrounded by a hedge or inclosure, was called a court, or as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage: the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a Pagus, or district.” There was indeed little temptation or need to move from place to place, when nearly every article of consumption was produced or wrought at home. For several centuries there is perhaps not a vestige to be discovered of any considerable manufacture. Each district furnished for itself its own articles of common utility. Rich men kept domestic artizans among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their clothes made by the women upon their farms. The weaver, the smith, and the currier were often born and bred on the estate where they pursued their several crafts.

The position of Rome as the ecclesiastical metropolis of the world caused both a general and periodical recourse of embassies, deputations, pilgrims, and travellers to the Italian peninsula, yet we cannot discover that any especial conveniences were provided for the wayfarers. Even in the great and solemn years of the Jubilee the roads were merely patched up, and the bridges temporarily repaired by the Roman government, and only in such places as had become actually impassable. The floating capital of the more commercial of the Italian Republics was employed rather upon their docks and arsenals than upon their roads and causeways. Venice indeed, which for central vigour was the most genuine offspring of Imperial Rome, paved its continental possessions with broad thoroughfares. But neither Padua, Ravenna, nor Florence followed the example of the Adriatic Queen. On the contrary, Dante, when in his descent to Hell he meets with any peculiarly difficult or precipitous track, frequently compares it to some road well known to his countrymen, which fallen rocks had blocked up, or a wintry flood had rendered impermeable. Spain presented, as it presents at this day, to the engineer, almost insurmountable difficulties. The Moorish provinces of the south alone possessed any tolerable roads; nor were the ways of Arragon or Castile mended after the wealth of Mexico and Peru had been poured into the Spanish exchequer. Portugal owed its first good roads in modern times to its good king Emmanuel; and the Dutch and Flemings, the most commercial people of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, found in their rivers and canals an easier transit than roads would have afforded them, for the wares which they brought from Archangel on the one hand and from the Spice Islands on the other. The military restlessness of France indeed led to the earlier formation of great roads. Yet France was a land long divided in itself; and the Duchies of Burgundy and Bretagne had little in common with the enterprising spirit of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Upon the whole the roads of England, bad as they were, were at least upon a par with those of the Continent.

In this retrospect, hasty and imperfect as it is, we must not pass over the roads of Asia. And here ancient history affords us at least glimpses of definite knowledge. In that portion of the Asiatic continent which is seated between the Euxine Sea, the chain of Mount Taurus, and the Ægean, the crowded population, the activity of the Greek colonies, and the necessity for direct communication with the interior and seat of government, led to the construction of good and uniform highways. In the Ionian Revolt large bodies of troops were readily brought to bear upon the insurgents, and the preparations of Xerxes for his invasion of Greece cannot have been made without a previous provision of military roads. An exact scale of taxation was drawn up by Darius Hystaspes for all the provinces of his vast empire; and as the system survived the extinction of the royal house of Persia, and was adopted by the Macedonian conquerors in all its more important details, it may be inferred that such system worked with tolerable regularity and success. But as the tithes and tolls of Persia were paid both in money and in kind, it is obvious that the communication between the capital and satrapies of the empire must have been well organized. Such organization implies the existence of main roads radiating from Sousa and Ecbatana. Nor are we left to conjecture only. The establishment of running posts and couriers was a distinguishing feature of the Persian empire; and the speed at which they journeyed from the sea-coast or the banks of the Hyphasis to the seat of government proves that the roads were in good order and the stations and relays of runners well ascertained. The Anabasis of Cyrus – his “march up” the country – affords another proof. The narrative of Xenophon, in its earlier portions at least, and so long as the ten thousand Greeks kept to the main roads, resembles in the precision with which it marks distances and stations a Roman Itinerary or a Bradshaw’s Guide. On this day, says the historical captain of mercenaries, we marched seven parasangs and bivouacked in an empty fort; on such a day we marched five parasangs and encamped in a pleasant park or ‘paradise’ of the great king. It is only after the Greeks have been forced from the ‘Road-down’ by the clouds of Persian cavalry, that they enter upon more rugged and devious mountain-paths. The account of Xenophon is confirmed by Arrian in his history of Alexander’s Anabasis; and so long as the Macedonian conqueror was within the bounds of Persia proper, we rarely meet with any impediments to his progress arising out of the badness of the roads.

We have made some mention of the more conspicuous of ancient travellers. But travelling, either for business or pleasure, among the moderns, dates from the era of the Crusades. The barriers of the East were once again thrown open by that general ferment in the European world. Piety, the passion of enterprise, the dawning instincts of commerce, a new thirst for exotic luxuries, all contributed to inspire a desire for exploring the seats of the most ancient civilization. To this desire and to its effects we owe some of the most graphic and entertaining of modern writings. If we were, through any misadventure, sent to jail, we would stipulate for permission to carry into our cell Hakluyt’s Voyages. The narratives of modern travellers are often learned, more often flimsy, and from the universality of locomotion, much given, like the prayers of the old Pharisees, to tedious repetitions. A tour in Greece or Italy now affects us with unutterable weariness. A journey from London to York affords more real novelty than many of these excursions. Sir Charles Fellows or Mr. Layard write in the spirit of the old travellers, and we would willingly wander any-whither with George Borrow. But, for the most part, the art of writing travels is lost – its imaginativeness, its credulity, its cherishing of mystery, and its proneness to awe. The old travellers are never sentimental – and sentiment is the very bane of road-books, – and they never describe for description’s sake. The world was much too wonderful in their eyes for such unprofitable excursions of fancy. Beauty and danger, difficulty and strangeness, novel fashions and unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to them “as a banner broad unfurled,” and inscribed with mystic signs and legends. They were not whirled about from place to place: they had leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery; they journeyed with their lives in their hands, and were often yoke-fellows with hunger and nakedness, and the fury of the elements. Luckily for us who read their narratives, they were most unscientific, and ascribed the howling of the night-wind, the bursting of icebergs, the noise of tempests, and the echoes that traverse boundless plains after great heats, or are imprisoned in rock and fell, to the voice of demons exulting or lamenting to each other. We now cross the desert with nearly as much ease as we hail an omnibus, or book ourselves for Paris. But such was not the spirit in which Marco Polo, in the thirteenth, century, traversed the wilderness of Lop.