But the Government did not for any length of time directly collect these duties. They were farmed out by the Inland Revenue Department, just as the turnpike tolls were farmed by the Turnpike Trustees, and men grew rich by buying these tolls and duties at annual auctions, relying for their profit on the increased vigilance they would cause to be exercised. The Jews were early in this field. In the golden era of coaching a man named Levy farmed tolls and duties to the annual value of half a million sterling.
But to return to our horsemen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the country gentlemen, the members of Parliament, the judges on circuit, every hale and able-bodied man of means sufficient, rode his horse, or hired one on his journeys, for the reason that carriages could only slowly and with great difficulty and expense be made to move along the distant roads. The passage from Pennant’s recollections, quoted at the head of this chapter, shows the miseries made light of by the single gentlemen, and endured by those married ones whose wives rode behind them on a pillion and clutched them convulsively round the waist as the horse stumbled along.
Nor did stage-coaches immediately change this time-honoured way of getting about the country, for there existed an aristocratic prejudice against using public vehicles. Offensive persons who never owned carriages of their own were used to give themselves insufferable airs when journeying by coach, and hint, for the admiration or envy of their fellow-passengers, that an accident had happened to their own private equipage. Satirists of the time soon seized upon this contemptible resort of the snob, and used it to advantage in contemporary literature. Thus we find the committeeman’s wife in Sir Robert Howard’s comedy explaining her presence in the Reading coach to be owing to her own carriage being disordered, adding that if her husband knew she had been obliged to ride in the stage he would “make the house too hot to hold some.”
Here and there we find exceptions to this general rule. In the coach passing through Preston in 1662, one Parker was fellow-traveller with “persons of great qualitie, such as knightes and ladyes”; and on one occasion in 1682 the winter coach on its four days’ journey between Nottingham and London had for passenger Sir Ralph Knight, of Langold, Yorks; but the single gentlemen in good health continued for years after the introduction of stage-coaches to go on horseback, and when their families came to town they usually took the family chariot, and either contracted with stable-keepers for horses on the way, or else, taking their most powerful horses from the plough, harnessed four or six of them to their private vehicle, and so, with the driving of their best ploughman, came to the capital in state, much to the amusement of the fashionables of Piccadilly and St. James’s.