Читать книгу The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York - Charles G. Harper - Страница 5

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There was once an American who, with cheap wit, expressed a fear of travelling in the little island of Great Britain, lest he should accidentally fall over the edge of so small a place. It is quite evident that he never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.

You have to perform that journey to realise that this is, after all, not so very small an island. It is not enough to have been wafted between London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance. We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.

There are a North Road and a Great North Road. Like different forms of religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways. The North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine Way which led to Lincoln. It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London.

The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London. It was measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just remarked, the North Road merged into it. From London to Hadley Green, just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are identical.

In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done, from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went.

We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. In the comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago, they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming was not so sure a thing.

These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice. From the highest to the lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut, every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from sheer necessity. No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.

We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery. If a love of the wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this sense. The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were, doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found nothing beautiful in mountain ranges. Their successors, however, during four hundred years had leisure and plentiful opportunities of cultivating taste, and travel was highly organised among them. A milliare, or milestone, was placed at every Roman mile—4854 English feet—and “mansiones,” or posting-stations, at distances varying from seven to twenty miles.

Roman roads were scientifically constructed. The following was the formula:—

I.	Pavimentum, or foundation. Fine earth, hard beaten in.
II.	Statumen, or bed of the road. Composed of large stones, sometimes mixed with mortar.
III.	Ruderatio. Small stones, well mixed with mortar.
IV.	Nucleus. Formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded brick, or tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay.
V.	Summum Dorsum. Surface of the paved road.

So thoroughly well was the work done that remains of these roads are even now discovered, in a perfect condition, although buried from six to fifteen feet, or even deeper, beneath the present surface of the land, owing to the hundreds of years of neglect which followed the abandonment of Britain, and the decay of Roman civilisation; a neglect which allowed storms and the gradual effects of the weather to accumulate deposits of earth upon these paved ways until they were made to disappear as effectually as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the hail of ashes and lava that hid those cities from view for eighteen hundred years.

When that great people, the Romans, perished off the face of the earth, and none succeeded them, their roads began to decay, their bridges and paved fords were broken down or carried away by floods, and the rulers of the nation were for over five hundred years too busily engaged in subduing rebellions at home or in prosecuting wars abroad to attend to the keeping of communications in proper repair. Social disorder, too, destroyed roads and bridges that had survived natural decay and the stress of the elements. Even those roads which existed in otherwise good condition were only fair-weather highways. They were innocent of culverts, and consequently the storm-water, which nowadays is carried off beneath them, swept across the surface, and either carried it away or remained in vast lakes on whose shores wayfarers shivered until the floods had abated. Thieves and murderers were the commonplaces of the roads, and signposts were not; so that guides—who at the best were expensive, and at the worst were the accomplices of cutthroats, and lured the traveller to their haunts—were absolutely necessary.

To the relief of travellers in those times came the Church, for the civil and secular power had not begun even to dream of road-making. The Church did some very important things for travellers, praying for them, and adjuring the devout to include them in their prayers for prisoners and captives, the sick, and others in any way distressed. The very word “travel” derives from travail, meaning labour or hardship. This alone shows how much to be pitied were those whose business took them from their own firesides.

But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very admirable, and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself in a very special sense. It granted indulgences to those who by their gifts or their bodily labour helped to repair the highways, and licensed hermits to receive tolls and alms from travellers over roads and bridges constructed by the brethren, those revenues going towards the upkeep of the ways. Benefactors to the Church frequently left lands and houses, whose proceeds were to be applied for the same purpose; and for many years this trust was respected, and all the road and bridge building and repairing was done by the religious. By degrees, however, this trust was, if not betrayed, allowed to gradually fall into neglect. False hermits set up in remote places, away from the eyes of the bishops, and living idle and dissolute lives on the alms they received, allowed roads and bridges alike to fall into decay. These vicious, unlicensed hermits were great stumbling-blocks to the godly in those times. They were often peasants or workmen, who had observed how fat and idle a living was that gained by those among the licensed who had betrayed their trust and fared sumptuously on alms unearned, and so went and set up in the eremitical profession for themselves. They fared well on bacon, had “fat chekus,” toasted themselves before roaring fires in their too comfortable cells, and lived “in ydelnesse and ese,” frequenting ale-houses and even worse places. Accordingly many of them were eventually removed, or suffered various punishments, and the neighbouring monasteries placed others in their stead.

By this time, however, the bishops and abbots, whose broad acres had often come to them in trust for the welfare of the traveller, began to forget their obligations. It was, of course, a natural process: the possessions of the religious houses had grown enormously, but so also had their hospitality to all and sundry. Travellers had increased, and as it was a rule of conduct with the great abbeys to not only relieve the poor, but also to entertain the great in those days before the rise of the roadside hostelry, their resources must have been well exercised. Meanwhile the statutes of the country had gradually been imposing the care of the roads upon the laity, and at the time when the greater and lesser monasteries were dissolved, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, parishes and landowners were chiefly concerned in endeavouring to comply with their new and strange obligations in keeping their ways passable. Of course they did not succeed, and equally of course, because it was impossible that they could, the pains and penalties threatened for foul and dangerous roads were not enforced.

A curious pamphlet on the condition of the roads in the seventeenth century is that written by Thomas Mace, one of the “clerks” of Trinity College, Cambridge, and published in 1675. Mace, there is no doubt, was a man born out of his time. Had circumstances been propitious, he might have become another and an earlier Macadam. His pamphlet, written both in prose and verse, and addressed to the king, is styled The Profit, Conveniency, and Pleasure for the Whole Nation, and is “a Discourse lately presented to His Majesty concerning the Highways of England; their badness, the causes thereof, the reasons of these causes, the impossibility of ever having them well mended according to the old way of mending; but may most certainly be done, and for ever so maintained (according to this New Way) substantially, and with very much ease.”

We find here, as in other publications until the mid-eighteenth century was well past, that the country was for the most part unenclosed, so that when the traffic had worn the old tracks into deep ruts, or when mud had rendered them impassable, the wagons, carts, and laden horses were taken round by the nearest firm spots. “Much ground,” says our author, “is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extremely perplexing and cumbersome both to themselves and to all horse travellers.”

These pickings and choosings were the original cause of the still existing twists and turns in many of our roads. When we see an old road winding snake-like through a flat country, with no hills or other obvious reasons for its circuitous course, we may, in most cases, safely attribute this apparent indecision and infirmity of purpose to these ancient difficulties, thus perpetuated.

This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even fatal affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung across their horses’ backs from one part of the country to the other, and between the market-folk and those who travelled on horseback and coaches. Mace would himself seem to have experienced some of these contentions as to who should take the clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes with great bitterness about “these disturbances, daily committed by uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in contesting for the way.”

“Hundreds of pack-horses,” he continues, “panniers, whifflers, coaches, wagons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others,” fought and schemed for precedence; and a horseman, his horse already exhausted by a long and tedious journey, might, at the entrance to a town, especially on market day, be compelled to go out of his way twenty times in one mile, owing to the peevishness of these whifflers and market-folk. “I have often known many travellers,” he continues, “and myself very often, to have been necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing cart or wagon, on most beastly and unsufferable wet wayes, to the great endangering of our horses and neglect of public business: nor durst we adventure to stirr (for most imminent danger of those deep rutts and unreasonable ridges) till it has pleased Mr. Carter to jog on, which we have taken very kindly.”

His plan was to once get the roads in good repair, and then, he says, with the employment of “day men” to every five miles or so, they could be easily kept in order. The prospect induces him to rise to poetry:

“First, let the ways be regularly brought

To artificial form, and truly wrought;

So that we can suppose them firmly mended,

And in all needful points, the work well ended,

That not a stone’s amiss; but all complete,

All lying smooth, round, firm, and wondrous neat.”

So far good. But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy the good work:

“Then comes a gang of heavy-laden wains

Of carts and wagons, spoiling all our pains.”

But he is ready for this. His proposed “day men” by at once filling up the ruts would make the damage good. All these things he commends to the notice of his Majesty with the concluding lines:

“There’s only one thing yet worth thinking on,

Which is, to put this work in execution.”

That it was not “put into execution” is a matter of history.

We have seen that Mace calls the road to Scotland a “highway,” and the terms “highroad” or “highway” are common enough; but what really is a highroad? or rather, how did the term originate? Such a road is usually understood to be a main artery of traffic between important towns, but that was not precisely the original meaning, which indicated the physical character of the road rather than its geographical status. “High roads” were originally in fact, causeways constructed across, and above the level of, marshes and low-lying lands, and the term was therefore excellently descriptive. The changed meaning no doubt arose from the fact that, as it would scarcely ever have been worth while to build embanked roads for the purpose of connecting obscure villages out of the way of trade, consequently the “high ways” and the “high roads” only came into existence between important centres. But this highly specialised meaning was destroyed when Turnpike Acts and Highway Acts began to be passed. The first Turnpike Act, one relating to the road to the North, referred to the Shoreditch, Stamford Hill, Ware, and Royston route, which joined the Great North Road at Alconbury Hill. It was passed in 1663, and authorised a toll-gate at Stilton, among other places. In the preamble to this Act we find the road spoken of as “the ancient highway and post-road leading from London to York and so into Scotland.” Later Acts providing for the collection of tolls on the main roads and for the formation of Turnpike Trusts, whose business it was to collect those tolls and with them keep the “turnpike” roads in repair, named them “turnpike roads”; while other legislation, culminating in the General Highway Act of William the Fourth, perpetrated a delightful paradox by especially designating by-roads “highways.” The cardinal difference, in the eyes of the law, was that a turnpike road was a main line of communication, to be maintained in proper order throughout its length by taxes collected from the users of the road; while highways were only local roads for local use and to be maintained by the respective parishes in which they were situated. The ways in which these parish roads were kept in repair were sufficiently curious. “Statute labour” preceded highway rates, and was so called from a statute of Philip and Mary providing for parish road-surveyors, and for men, horses, carts, and materials to be supplied by the farmers at their orders, for repairs. “Statute labour” survived in a fashion until the passing of the General Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by rates. In later days parishes united and formed Highway Boards, just as they formed Poor Law Unions; and choosing a surveyor, levied a common highway rate. These surveyors were not always, nor often, competent men. They were, in fact, generally elected by the Boards or the Vestries from some necessitous inhabitants little above the status of the broken-down old men who were paid a trifle to break or spread stones in order to keep them from being burdens to the parish in the workhouse. These surveyors were appointed and work done in fear of the parishes being indicted and heavily fined for the dangerous condition of their roads, but it is obvious that they must have been very badly repaired in those times. Nowadays the roads are all highways, since the turnpikes have been abolished, and their repair, outside the boroughs, is the business of the County Councils.