

Transcribed from the 1852 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price,
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                OLD ROADS
                                   AND
                                NEW ROADS.


                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

        "MESSER LUDOVICO, DOVE AVETE COGLIATO TANTE COGLIONERIE?"

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                    CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.

                                * * * * *

                                  1852.

                                PRINTED BY
                 JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,
                          LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.




PREFACE.


GENTLE READER,

If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after
the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally
disappointed.  Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route
proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide.  This book
aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw.  Let men
"bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed," consult those oracles of
swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor.  We
desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional
tedium of rapid movement.  We move to our journey's end by sundry
old-fashioned circuitous routes.  Grudge not, while you are whirled along
a New Road, to loiter mentally upon certain Old Roads, and to consider as
you linger along them the ways and means of transit which contented our
ancestors.  Although their coaches were slow, and their pack-saddles hard
as those of the Yanguesan carriers of La Mancha, yet they reached their
inns in time, and bequeathed to you and me--Gentle Reader--if we have the
grace to use them, many pithy and profitable records of their wayfaring.
The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift:
neither is the most rapid always the pleasantest journey.  Horace
accompanied Maecenas on very urgent business, yet he loitered on the way,
and confesses his slackness without shame--

    "Hoc iter ignavi divisimus, altius ac nos
    Praecinctis unum: minus est gravis Appia tardis."

It was, he says, more comfortable to take his time.  Is our business more
pressing than his was?  It can hardly be, seeing that he wended with a
company whose errand was to prevent the two masters of the world from
coming to blows.  In comparison with such a mission, who will put the
buying of a cargo of cotton, or arriving an hour before a public meeting
begins, or catching a pic-nic party just in the nick of time?  St.
Bernard rode from sunrise to sunset along the Lake Leman without once
putting his mule out of a walk; so much delectation the holy man felt in
beholding the beauty of the water and the mountains, and in "chewing the
cud of his own sweet or bitter fancies."  And good Michel Seigneur de
Montaigne took a week for his journey from Nice to Pisa, although his
horse was one of the smartest trotters in Gascony, merely for the
pleasure he felt in following the by-lanes.  And did not Richard Hooker
receive from Bishop Jewell his blessing and his walking-staff, and yet
with such poor means of speed he thought not of the weary miles between
Exeter and Oxford, but trudged merrily with a thankful heart for the good
oak prop, and the better blessing?  Much less content with his journey
was Richard when he rode to London on a hard-paced nag, that he might be
in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul's.  And was not this, the
hastier of his journeys, the most unlucky in his life, seeing that it
brought him acquainted with that foul shrew, Joan, his wife, who made his
after-days as bitter to him, patient and godly though he were, as
wormwood and coloquintida?  Are not these goodly examples, Christian and
Heathen?  Let the Train rush along, you and I will travel at our own
pace.

Neither shall you, if you will be ruled by your present guide, saunter
along the roads of Britain alone, or on known and extant ways only.  Are
there not roads which never paid toll, roads in the waste, roads
travelled only in vision, roads once traversed by the feet of myriads,
yet now overgrown by the forest, or buried deeply in the marsh?  Shall we
not for awhile be surveyors of these forgotten highways, and pause beside
the tombs of the kings, or consuls, or Incas, who first levelled them?
The world has moved westward with the daily motion of the earth.  Yet, in
the far East lie the most ancient highways--whose pavements once echoed
with the hurrying feet of Nimrod's outposts or the trampling of
Agamemnon's rear-guard.  It were well to mark how that ancient chivalry
sped along their causeways.

Nor, on our devious route, shall baiting-places be wanting.  Drunken
Barnaby stayed not oftener to prove the ale than we will do:--

    "AEgre jam relicto rure
    _Securem Aldermanni_--_bury_
    Primo petii, qua exosa
    Sentina, HOLBURNI ROSA
    Me excepit, ordine tali
    Appuli GRYPHEM VETERIS BAILEY:
    Ubi experrectum lecto
    TRES CICONIAS indies specto,
    Quo victurus, donec aestas
    Rure curas tollet maestas:
    Ego etiam et Sodales
    Nunc _Galerum Cardinalis_
    Visitantes, vi Minervae
    Bibimus ad _Cornua Cervi_."

Our inns may not always be found at the roadside; and we may possibly
ever and anon seem to have missed the track altogether.  Yet we will come
into the main line in the end, and, I trust, part with kindly feelings,
when the time has come for saying

                              SISTE VIATOR.




Contents

Introduction                                         1
The most Ancient Roads                               2
The Assyrian Roads                                   4
Caligula's Whim                                      5
Carthaginian Roads                                   6
Grecian Roads                                        7
Roman Roads                                          8
Celtic and Germanic Roads                           13
Roads in the Dark Ages                              15
Insecurity of Travelling                            16
The Norman Barons                                   17
Speed in Travelling                                 22
Caesar's Journeys                                   23
Fast Bishops                                        24
Roman Senators                                      25
Wolsey's Speed                                      26
Lord Peterborough                                   27
Travelling Charges                                  28
Petruchio's Horse                                   29
Cotton's Ride                                       32
Tour in Derbyshire                                  33
Speed in Travelling                                 37
Wakes and Fairs                                     39
Roman Compitalia                                    39
The Fairs of the East                               40
Obstructions to Trade                               41
Expenses and Retinues                               42
Ancient Travellers                                  43
The Family Coach                                    48
A Journey to London                                 50
Highwaymen                                          53
The Boston Mail                                     54
Arms and the Men                                    55
The Decay of Beggars                                56
The Mendicant Orders                                57
Highway Legislation                                 58
Roadside Inns                                       59
Roadside Meals                                      60
Stage Coaches                                       61
Dangers of the Road                                 62
Voltaire and his Companions                         63
Running Footmen                                     64
Out-runners                                         65
The Judge and the Bar                               66
Road-making                                         67
Tolls and Turnpikes                                 68
Miry Roads                                          69
Travelling in Search of a Sister                    70
Tardiness of News                                   72
Post Chaises                                        73
French Postilions                                   74
The Pedlar                                          75
The Son of Mercury                                  76
The Packman's Ghost                                 77
Wordsworth's Pedlar                                 78
A Coachman's Dirge                                  79
Compensation for Speed                              80
Goodly Prospects                                    81
The Inns of England                                 82
English Innkeepers                                  83
English Horses                                      84
Old Roads of the Continent                          86
Ser Brunetto                                        87
Roads of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France         88
Roads of Asia                                       90
The March up and down                               91
The Early Travellers                                92
The Wilderness of Lop                               94
Hebrew Travellers                                   94
A Jewish Road-book                                  96
Inns of Cathay                                      98
Tartar Post-houses                                  99
The Khan's Foot-posts                              100
The Roads of the Incas                             101
New Roads                                          104
Work and Pain                                      106
Work and Wages                                     107
Reaction and its inconveniences                    108
Sydney Smith                                       110
Keeping Troth                                      111
Conclusion                                         112

OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS.


We have histories of all kinds in abundance,--and yet no good History of
Roads.  "Wines ancient and modern," "Porcelain," "Crochet work,"
"Prisons," "Dress," "Drugs," and "Canary birds," have all and each found
a chronicler more or less able; and the most stately and imposing volume
we remember ever to have turned over was a history of "Button-making:"
you saw at once, by the measured complacency of the style, that the
author regarded his buttons as so many imperial medals.  But of roads,
except Bergier's volumes on the Roman Ways, and a few learned yet rather
repulsive treatises in Latin and German, we have absolutely no readable
history.  How has it come to pass that in works upon civilization, so
many in number, so few in worth, there are no chapters devoted to the
great arteries of commerce and communication?  The subject of roads does
not appear even on that long list of books which the good Quintus Fixlein
_intended_ to write.  Of Railways indeed, both British and foreign, there
are a few interesting memorials; but Railways are one branch only of a
subject which dates at least from the building of Damascus, earliest of
recorded cities.

Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations
comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting
it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons
have not essayed "this great argument," since they generally rush in,
where their betters fear to tread.  A history of roads is, in great
measure indeed, a history of civilization itself.  For highways and great
cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also
the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man.
Actuated by the one--the centripetal instinct--the shepherd races of Asia
founded their great capitals on the banks of the Euphrates and the
Ganges: impelled by the other--the centrifugal instinct--they passed
forth from their cradle in the Armenian Highlands, westward as far as the
Atlantic, and eastward as far as the Pacific.  We have indeed indications
of roads earlier than we have accounts of cities.  For ages before
Arcadian Evander came as a "squatter" to Mount Palatine, was there not
the great road of the Hyperboreans from Ausonia to Delphi, by which, with
each revolving year, the most blameless of mankind conveyed to the Dorian
Sun-god their offerings?  And as soon as Theseus--the organizer of men,
as his name imports--had slain the wolves and bears and the biped
ruffians of the Corinthian Isthmus, did he not set up a direction-post,
informing the wayfarer that "this side was Peleponnesus, and that side
was Ionia"?  Centuries of thought and toil indeed intervened between the
path across the plain or down the mountain-gorge and the Regina Viarum,
the Appian Road; and centuries between the rude stone-heap which marked
out to the thirsting wayfarer the well in the desert, and the stately
column which told the traveller, "This is the road to Byzantium."

In the land of "Geryon's sons," the paths which scaled the sierras were
attributed to the toils of Hercules.  In Boeotia, at a most remote era,
there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its
intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the "long
process" of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with "the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse," the royal house of Labdacus.  We have
some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along
which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have
no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton
saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not
Sin and Death been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand
years?

From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto--and Milton
also vouches for the fact,--all things lost on earth are to be found,
could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the
cost of one or two Fathers of the Church.  It would inform us of many
things very pleasant and profitable to be known.  Among others it would
probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road
which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red
Sea.  This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close
boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations.  And the
Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs
to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was

          --"much I wis
    To the annoyance of King Amasis."

But it is bootless to pine after knowledge irretrievably buried in
oblivion.  Otherwise we might fairly have wished to have stood beside
King Nebuchadnezzar when he so unadvisedly uttered that proud vaunt which
ended in his being condemned to a long course of vegetable diet.  For
doubtless he gazed upon at least four main roads which entered the walls
of Babylon from four opposite quarters:--

    "From Arachosia, from Candaor east,
    And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs
    Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales:
    From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains
    Of Adiabene, Media, and the south
    Of Susiana, to Balsara's havens."

We pass over as a mad imperial whim Caligula's road from Baiae to
Puteoli, partly because it was a costly and useless waste of money and
labour, and partly because that emperor had an awkward trick of flinging
to the fishes all persons who did not admire his road.  It was a bad
imitation of a bad model--the road with which Xerxes bridled the
"indignant Hellespont."  Both the Hellespontine and the Baian road
perished in the lifetime of their founders; while the Simplon still
attests the more sublime and practical genius of Napoleon.  We should
have also greatly liked to watch the Cimbri and Ambrones at their work of
piling up those gigantic earth-mounds in Britain and in Gaul, which,
under the appellation of Devil's-<DW18>s, are still visible and, as
monuments of patient labour and toil, second only to the construction of
the Pyramids.

The physiognomy of races is reflected in their public works.  The warm
climate of Egypt was not the only cause for the long paven corridors
which ran underground from temple to temple,