“So three doors off the chaise was stayed, When they did all get in, Six precious souls, and all agog To dash through thick and thin.”
“In my journey to _London_,” wrote an indignant correspondent to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, early in 1747, “I travell’d from _Harborough_ to _Northampton_, and well was it that I was in a light Berlin, and six good horses, or I might have overlaid in that turnpike road. But for fear of life and limb, I walk’d several miles on foot, met 20 waggons tearing their goods to pieces, and the drivers cursing and swearing for being robb’d on the highway by a turnpike, screen’d under an Act of Parliament.” These turnpikes, or toll-gates, had been but lately established in England for the preservation of the roads. That they did very much immediate good, however, may be doubted. A few years afterwards an English traveller was grumbling at the superiority of the French roads over our own. “Nothing piques me more,” he wrote in an amusingly satirical passage, “than that a trumpery despotic Government, like France, should have enchanting roads from the capital to each remote part.” He seems to have taken trouble to find out the cause for so lamentable a difference, and for this purpose consulted “the most solemn looking waggoner on the road.”
“This prov’d to be _Jack Whipcord_ of _Blandford_. Jack’s answer was ‘That roads had but one object, namely, waggon-driving. That he requir’d but five feet wedth in a line [which he resolved never to quit], and all the rest might go to the d—— l. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be d—— and not run gossiping up and down the country. But, added _Jack_, we will soon cure them, for my brethren since the late act have made a vow to run our wheels in the coach quarter. We tack on a sixth or seventh horse at pleasure. What a plague would they send us to the galleys for this, as papishes do in beyond-sea countries.’”
The Act to which Jack referred had been passed in 1745. It followed upon the fact that while coaches, generally speaking, were in process of becoming lighter, carts and waggons were becoming much heavier. And so it had been proposed that no waggon should be drawn by more than four horses, no matter whether these were “in length, pairs or sideways,” and no cart should have more than three. Every horse above these numbers could be forfeited together “with all geers, bridles, halters, harness and accoutrements.” There were to be collectors of tolls, and gentlemen’s private carriages and purely agricultural waggons were to be exempt. Also certain roads, presumably those but lately laid down according to the best ideas of the time, were to be treated as outside the scope of the Act. And if the wheels of these heavy waggons and carts possessed “wheels bound with streaks or tire of the breadth of eight inches at least when worn and not set on with rose-headed nails,” they might likewise be exempt.