by Ian Mortimer
Presuming you don’t have enough money to buy your own coach, what other options do you have? You can hire one: standard London rates are 18d for the first hour and 12d per hour after that.40 Alternatively you can catch a stagecoach. This is truly radical: an efficient public transport system, open to anyone who can pay and much faster than those lumbering old carriers mentioned earlier. Nor is the excitement lost on contemporaries. Edward Chamberlayne has this to say on the subject in 1676:
There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and women of better rank, to travel from London to almost any great town of England, and to almost all the villages near this great city, that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stagecoaches, wherein one may be transported to any place; sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from damaging one’s health or body by hard jogging or over violent motion, and this not only at a low price, about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed as that the posts in some foreign countries make not more miles in a day; for the stage coaches, called Flying Coaches, make forty or fifty miles in a day, as from London to Oxford or Cambridge, and that in the space of twelve hours, not counting the time for dining, setting forth not too early, nor coming in too late.41
It all sounds rather wonderful. So what is the reality?
A fledgling stagecoach network already exists in 1660. You can buy a journey from London to any of a few dozen major towns on major routes: Dover in the south-east; Exeter in the south-west; Bristol in the west; Chester in the north-west; and Edinburgh in the far north. They depart regularly – coaches bound for Exeter, Chester and York leave every Monday, Wednesday and Friday – but their slowness and expense are significant drawbacks.42 They rarely exceed 30 miles per day, even in summer. The 70-mile journey from London to Dover via Canterbury takes two days, which is only a little faster. And sometimes there are delays: in November 1661 it takes a stagecoach four hours to cover just the 17 miles between Canterbury and Sittingbourne.43 Thus the network in 1660 does not yet have the ‘velocity’ that Chamberlayne’s 1676 account suggests. Nor is it as cheap as he claims. Fares to Exeter, Chester and York are indeed about a shilling for every five miles – £2 in summer or £2 5s in winter – but on top of this you will have to tip the coachman or, rather, coachmen, because on long distances there will be three or four drivers.44 The passengers also have to pay for the drivers’ beer at each inn. And you will need to pay for your own meals during your journey. Slowness thus means greater expense.
For this reason, the Flying Coaches, which start with the London– Oxford route in 1669, are significant advances in transport efficiency. In truth, they only ‘fly’ between March and September; in winter they revert to the usual two-day journeys. Even in the summer their speeds are only about 5mph. But they introduce a new sense of urgency to public transport. The widespread advertising of a 59-mile daily service to Oxford does wonders for the trade as a whole. It pushes many other carriers towards greater efficiency: the London–Chester connection is reduced to five days’ travelling (46 miles per day), and the 65-mile route from London to Northampton is occasionally covered in a single day.45 The reduction in time leads to lower costs to passengers and much greater demand. This in turn attracts others to the business and creates more competition. In 1681 you can catch a stagecoach from London to any one of 88 towns in Britain, and that number is rapidly increasing: it will be 180 towns in 1705.46
It is when you get into a stagecoach that you might start to have your doubts about this form of transport. Just try travelling in a cheap six-seater that has been made to take eight passengers. Ned Ward journeys from London to Stourbridge Fair with five women, an infant and an old man, in a ‘dirty, lumbering, wooden hovel’, and describes his experience as the vehicle sets off over a cobbled street:
The rest of the company, being most of ’em pretty burly, had made a shift to leave me a nook in the back part of the coach, not much wider than a chair for a jointed baby. I nestled and I squeezed and drew in my sides like a fat man going through a narrow stile, till with much ado, I had wedged in my buttocks between the side of the coach and the hip of a bouncing blowsabella, who sat next to me …
We, at every swog, kneaded our elbows in one another’s sides, till I had the ill fortune to so raise the old gentleman’s spleen that he grinned and snarled like a towzer at a bone when a strange dog is near him, being ready to bite my nose off … In a little time we got off the stones [cobbles] and had done cursing of the pavier, and then began to swim as easily along the road as a Gravesend barge in fair weather, though wedged as close in one by another as a barrel of red herrings.47
Another point against coaches is that they can be dangerous. While anyone travelling on a highway is vulnerable to attack by brigands, those travelling by coach are especially susceptible, even on the streets of a city. An old trick is for one man to stop a coachman to ask him for directions and for his accomplice to snatch whatever he can, from the occupants of the coach, through the open window. The thieves then make their getaway through the warren of narrow lanes.48 Out on the open road, travellers are even more at risk. You are miles from anywhere, your robber is mounted and armed, while you sit helplessly in a slow-moving coach. Both John Evelyn and Celia Fiennes run into highwaymen in the course of their travels. And while you have probably only heard of a few famous brigands, there are hundreds of them up and down the country. A report compiled in the reign of Charles II names nineteen highwaymen known to be active in East Anglia alone. One of them, William Dowsing, is a gentleman who rents Shotley Hall in Suffolk from Sir Henry Felton, MP. Another is a butcher by trade; another a physician.49 But the real danger is the first-timer, the nervous desperado who, with a starving family and a couple of accomplices, has hit upon the idea of robbing a coach in order to clear his debts. Lack of experience in such matters means that many men panic and shoot, when they should simply flee.
Then there is the danger of a road-traffic accident. Although your coach itself might be going no more than 8mph, you can imagine the danger posed to pedestrians in a narrow street by the hooves and the swinging weight of the cab. The coachman and his passengers are at risk too, especially from overturning on corners. John Evelyn’s coach overturns in October 1666, and the smashed glass injures his son.50 Even the royal family has to put up with the odd upset. In the early hours of 8 March 1669 the royal coach tips over in Holborn on the way to Newmarket. The torches fixed to the coach do not light the street well enough, it hits a rut and over it goes, with the king, the duke of York, the duke of Monmouth and Prince Rupert (the king’s nephew) tossed about inside.51 On this occasion, no one is injured – although I would not like to have been that coachman afterwards. Other dangers presented by coaches include putting your head through the window of a coach to greet a friend, only to find there is glass in it; falling out of the coach because the door is not shut properly and being run over by the rear wheels; and going to a stately home in a coach where the coachman is plied with alcohol by the servants and is consequently unable to drive – a misfortune that befalls John Evelyn and Lord Howard.52
HORSES
If you are intending to travel off the beaten track, you will need a horse. The same thing applies if you want to travel fast, or simply travel with dignity – high-status people don’t walk through the dust and mud of the highways. Buying a steed, though, can be tricky. There are hundreds of horse fairs and markets up and down the country, but there is no guarantee that you will get your money’s worth. When Willem Schellinks goes to Smithfield to buy horses he finds ‘clear enough proof of the dishonesty of this horse market, as our horses were really nothing special and therefore [we] overpaid by half … They were miserable beasts.’53 Ned Ward describes horse dealers as
A sort of Smithfield fox … who swear every morning by the bridle that they will never suffer from any man a knavish trick or ever do an honest one. They … have a rare faculty of swearing a man out of his senses, lying him out of hi
s reason and cozening him out of his money. If they have a horse to sell that is stone blind, they’ll call a hundred gods to witness he can see as well as you can … And if he be twenty years old, they’ll swear he comes but seven next grass, if they find the buyer has not judgement enough to discover the contrary.54
Clearly, buying horses in the seventeenth century is somewhat like buying second-hand cars in the twenty-first.
What do you have to pay for a quality mount? The high cost of horses for noblemen’s coaches has already been mentioned. Occasionally Lord Bedford will pay as much as £50 for a riding mount, such as the bay gelding he buys in 1671; he pays £38 for a strawberry stallion the same year.55 Ordinary people do not go to this level of expenditure. All of the twenty-two horses owned by a Buckinghamshire esquire are worth less than £9.56 A gentleman living in Lincoln has three horses and a colt worth a total of £30 – significantly more valuable than the six working horses on a farm he owns, which are worth a total of £18.57 A yeoman might spend £5 on a horse, a tradesman £3 or so. The bottom of the scale is represented by the poor beasts that hauliers and carriers use for pulling their caravans. One Bristol haulier in 1686 has ten ‘ordinary’ horses, valued at an average of £2 3s each. Those owned by the widow of another Bristol haulier in 1689 are all past their prime: one ‘old flea-bitten nag’ is worth £1 10s; ‘an old clubfooted bay gelding’, £1 15s; ‘an old brown hollow-backed nag’, £1 15s; and ‘a lame one-eyed brown mare’, £1.58 Blind horses are not suitable for riding, only for adding power as part of a team.
An alternative to all this expense is to hire a horse. This is a booming trade at this time, and has been since about 1630.59 Rates vary from place to place: some people hire horses from inns, others from private individuals. In a number of places in Berkshire the rate is set at 1d per mile. However, in other localities you can get a standard day-rate of 12d.60 Another form of horse hire is to ride with the post, stopping every 10–15 miles for a fresh mount. Although this is fast, it is much more expensive: 3d per mile, plus 4d per mile to the post boy (who will return the horse to its station). Schellinks rides with the post from Southwark to Rye in April 1663: he does the first 20 miles in three and a half hours (5¾mph), despite having to dismount and lead his horse down a steep hill near Farnborough.61 Pepys also rides with the post one day in January 1661: he leaves London after 2 9 p.m. and reaches Rochester by 6 p.m., covering the 29 miles in less than four hours (7¼mph). Six months later, riding again with the post, he manages 55 miles in nine hours (6mph).62 A young Ralph Thoresby travels the 204 miles from London to Leeds in just four days in February 1678 – even though the days are short and the roads muddy.63
Inland Waterways
Seventeenth-century people think of rivers as the arteries by which heavy loads can be conveyed over long distances efficiently and cheaply. They are also a quick and relatively safe way for individuals to travel. The trouble is that not everyone lives near a major river, and so a journey often has to integrate road and river transport. There is also the problem that many rivers are tidal, which leaves little flexibility as to the departure time of a ship or ferry. If there are insufficient passengers when the time comes to set sail, the boat master may decide to hang on for the next tide. You may well be in your stagecoach, willing it on to catch your ferry, despite the pouring rain and rutted roads, only to find that when you get to your point of embarkation there won’t be a sailing today after all.
The 57-mile journey from Canterbury to London neatly illustrates why you should not think of roads and rivers as alternatives but as complementary forms of transport. If you are travelling in early November 1661, for example, you’ll need to get up before daybreak to make sure you catch the stagecoach at 7 a.m. By 1 p.m. you’ll be in Sittingbourne, where the coachman will stop for an hour for you to have a meal. Then he’ll take you via Rochester to Gravesend, arriving by 6.30 p.m. Here you will have just enough time for supper at the King’s Head and to book yourself a place on the Long Ferry up the Thames to London. Your conveyance will be a tilt-boat – a large covered barge (a ‘tilt’ being an awning) – that is either rowed by men in the boat itself or pulled by a separate rowing boat of four oarsmen. If you’re lucky, and the wind and tide are favourable, the journey should take about four hours, so you might reach Billingsgate by midnight.64 Why take the trouble of changing to the boat, you might ask, rather than taking the stagecoach all the way? The answer lies in the fact that the stagecoach will not set out until the next day, and then it will take five hours to complete the journey to London, so you’ll need to pay 12–18d for a bed in Rochester or Gravesend, plus the extra 5s for the coach. Travelling all the way by coach will thus cost you an extra 6s 6d and delay you by twelve hours or so.
When you get to London and look at the Thames you will see just how important river transport is to seventeenth-century people. There are tilt-boats and tide-boats, barges and wherries, hoys and ketches scattered all across the wide surface of the lapping water or, at low tide, heeling over awkwardly on a mud bank. Naval frigates are mixed in with coasters and merchantmen from all over the world. At Queenhithe there are boats arriving on a regular basis from Reading, Windsor, Maidenhead and all the other towns upstream. So many ships are waiting to unload at the twenty legal wharves on the north bank of the river that some of them have to be unloaded into small ships called lighters, which then ferry the goods ashore.
Among all these practical vessels you might see some unusual ones – the gilt royal barge, for example, or the similarly splendid craft used by the lord mayor and aldermen of the city. Noblemen also have their own barges, with twenty or thirty liveried oarsmen and a dining room with glass windows for the owner and his guests.65 The word ‘yacht’ enters the English language in August 1660 when the city of Amsterdam sends a present of the 66ft Mary to Charles II. Pepys admires it greatly on arrival but, the following year, he sees a yacht built by the Kentish shipbuilder Peter Pett and decides that it is even better.66 The king agrees and commissions a total of twenty-five yachts over the course of his reign. Several of them – the Cleveland, the Portsmouth and the Fubbs – are named after those other pleasure-vessels of his: his mistresses.67
Wherries are by far the most common boats on the Thames – there are more than 2,000 of them. They are sharp-bowed 22ft rowing boats that serve as river taxis, with room for five passengers. Those operated by a single waterman are called ‘scullers’; those with two oarsmen are known as ‘oars’.68 Oars are faster than scullers (unsurprisingly) and therefore cost twice as much. Fares are 1d for a straight river crossing (2d for oars), and from 2d (or 4d) for a short journey up or down the river. Oars will charge you 8d for a one-way trip to Greenwich (12d if against the tide). Carrying people straight across the river is one of the mainstays of their business as there is still only one bridge; if you are at Temple or the Tower it is a long way to walk to cross on foot. There is only one ferry at this time too – the Horseferry – which runs between Lambeth and Westminster. Fares for this start at 2d for a man and a horse and increase to 1s 6d for a coach and two horses, 2s for a coach and four, and 2s 6d for a coach and six. Although the lord mayor petitions the king in 1663 for permission to establish another ferry, he is turned down. His attempt the following year to persuade the king to replace the Horseferry with a stone bridge is likewise ignored. Thus the wherries continue to ply their trade back and forth across the river, protected by royal benign neglect.
In the past, transport on the river after dark was forbidden. Nowadays it is permissible when the passengers are personally known to the watermen and are ‘of honest conversation’. Nevertheless Willem Schellinks believes that it is unsafe to travel by night on the river because of the river pirates, who attack the boats and ‘beat up the passengers, demanding their money’.69 Pepys, however, has no such worries; he often uses wherries to get home after a late night in Greenwich or attending to business in Whitehall. One moonlit night he takes a wherry from Westminster and the waterman tells him some baw
dy stories about what has gone on in his boat. Once, he says, he carried a lady from Putney on just such a moonlit night as this. As he was rowing her along in the darkness, she bade him lie down in the boat and make love to her, which he did.70 Given what we know about Samuel Pepys, it’s a surprise he wasn’t tempted to become a night-time waterman himself.
Travelling by water is not without its challenges. It is easy to slip on the wet wooden stairs when heading down to the river at low tide, or to lose your footing as you step into a wherry or fall out of it when it is hit by a big wave. The last of these misfortunes puts an end to Major George Ansely in April 1660: a non-swimmer, with heavy boots and coat pockets full of silver, he doesn’t stand a chance when his wherry goes down.71 After a terrible gale in January 1666 Pepys looks across the river and cannot see a single boat afloat except those that have broken loose of their moorings. In February 1698 the Long Ferry from Gravesend overturns in a storm with sixty people on board, only seven of whom survive.72
Then of course there is the small matter of seasickness. Willem Schellinks describes setting out from Gravesend one morning in December 1661 with seventeen companions in a lighthorseman (a large rowing boat which also has a sail):
