This resource paper was started on 7 September 2005 to draw together any references I could find to packhorses and early transport. Packhorses are referred to by every historian of early history but there is remarkably little hard evidence. This paper is an attempt to trawl some of the more obscure sources and could be useful to anyone interested in the subject.

DEFINITION OF ‘COMMON CARRIER’.

Common Carrier

In years gone by a traveller might end at night up in a village. There would be a single supplier of, say hostelry (only one inn), or transport, or food or mail. In each case, if the local supplier refuses to co-operate, the traveller, or even a village native, could be left high and dry. He might starve, or freeze to death. A common law rule came to be accepted therefore that certain service providers, and suppliers could not refuse to trade with individuals. Subject only to the ability to pay for the services, the provider had a legal obligation to provide his service as requested. In the circumstances of the time, where a supplier was likely to be, in effect a monopoly supplier, it would be wrong to allow him to withhold his service.

An immediate consequence was the asking of the question. 'What if the person I assist is a criminal?' The answer was that the supplier would be forgiven any liability for providing the assistance, provided only that the service provider did not know of the criminality involved. As years went by, the doctrine became more refined, and, in English law fell by the wayside. In general it was replaced with statutory provisions - most notably for telephone companies and the mail.

Where does this leave us? A common carrier was somebody who was not to be held liable in law for what he 'carries'. In return, he was to be expected to carry whatever he was requested to carry. This privilege however was allowed because the person given the privilege had a monopoly which required that privilege, and because the service supplied was a necessity.

[From the website of swarb.co.uk solicitors.]

EXTRACTS FROM THE BARCROFT MEMORANDA.

The Memoranda Book of Ambrose Barcroft 1689 to 1693 and the Account Book of Thomas Barcroft 1693 to 1732. [This document can be found on oneguyfrombarlick.co.uk ]

“Biographical details relating to Ambrose and Thomas Barcroft are to be found in the preface to ‘A High Constable’s Register. 1681 edited by R S France MA. Published in Vol. 107 (1955) of the Transactions of the Historic Society, and in ‘Barcroft Family Records’ by Emma T Runk, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1910. Documents in the Lancashire Record Office have provided the additional information that in 1650 (presumably on the occasion of his marriage to Martha Thompson of Middlethorpe near York.) Ambrose and Martha had an annual rent of £30 settled on them by his father, Thomas (1607 to ?) and Ambrose is here described as ‘Ambros [sic] Barcroft of York, Merchant. He was then within a few days of his 21^st birthday and from this period onwards many of the documents referring to him are connected with his business transactions in the buying and selling of wool and in lending considerable sums of money.

Apart from the eminence which he attained in his appointment as High Sheriff of the Blackburn Hundred in 1681 he served as Constable of Colne on several occasions and repeatedly filled Parish Offices in Colne. The minute books of the Meetings for Sufferings of the Society of Friends of Marsden records in 1674; ‘About the same time, John Emmott, Constable and Ambrose Barcroft, Overseer and George Barnard, Steeplehouse Warden of Colne 5/- fine took from John Moon of Colne, shoemaker, two pairs of shoes worth 7/- and returned nothing again.’ This entry is particularly interesting because Ambrose had a family of cousins in Ireland who were of some note amongst the Quakers and one of whom, John Barcroft, (c.1663 to 1723) became an itinerant Quaker preacher of wide renown and visited Ambrose at Noyna in 1690 and on later occasions. By this time the Quakers were very numerous in North East Lancashire and John was also visiting Friends in Skipton, Colne, Trawden and Marsden.

The exact date when Ambrose settled in Colne after his marriage has not been ascertained but he lived variously at Noyna Hall, Foulridge and in Colne itself, at Colne Hall. Two years before his death Ambrose moved back to Colne and felt moved to write in his memoranda book; ‘We removed from Noyna to Colne to dwell there. The Lord bless, preserve and prosper us! Amen.’ However, for the most part in the papers of the Barcroft family he is referred to as of Colne Hall. This building, demolished in 1867 stood on a site in our present Albert Road, opposite to the Post Office. Until the death of Ambrose, Thomas (1652 to 1732) his only son, lived at Foulridge Hall but afterwards is referred to as of Noyna until his death. Ambrose left no will but in April 1693 Thomas was appointed administrator of the Estate of Ambrose Barcroft (Filed at the Prerogative Court of York) and later, in 1696, Thomas was bound under a Tuition Bond to ‘Well and thoroughly educate and bring up Ambrose Barcroft (1681 to 1724) – natural and lawful son of Thomas Barcroft above bounden…’ Thomas is meticulously careful in his record of expenses incurred in the education of his son and even enters his son’s board, not to mention that of his horses, when young Ambrose is at home from school. This concern for accuracy led to some trouble for in 1699 Thomas enters in his accounts ‘Paid, 3^rd of December to Sir Christopher Greenfield for drawing a bill in Chancery against Henry Wolton [sic] who will allow nothing for my son’s maintenance, £1-10-0.”

[SCG note: Ambrose Barcroft was a woollen clothier and landowner. He employed spinners and weavers and seems to have traded mainly with merchants in Lincolnshire.]

July (1689) 6^th.

A load of malt and another of wheat.

Cart loads of hay,[?] Little Ing – 7, Great Ing, 14. New Ing 13. River Ing 10. Great Flat Ings. [This entry proves that wheeled transport was being used in farming operations]

Same date: Sent by GJ to EA 4 pack cloths viz. 10-14-22-23. [GJ was the carrier and EA the recipient of this woollen cloth. No record of destination but much cloth was sent into Lincolnshire. ]

August 1689. 22^nd.

Sent 24 pack cloths into Lincolnshire viz 23 by Thomas Camshaw and one on Monday by Richard Boothman.

November 1690 10^th

I received a letter by a Liverpool carrier from Coz. John Barcroft dated 21^st October last. It was sent to Mr William Hurst near Black Horse in Liverpool.

March 1690 17^th

Paid James Browne of Thornton by the value to 2 coals lads that brought 5 loads of lime 1/-. Note he owed me when he left off bringing lime last year 25/6 or 51 loads of lime, but the lime he bringt being new that he brings I must pay somewhat more than 6d per load otherwise with the 1/- he would owe 53 loads.

24^th

Had from James Browne of Thornton 42 loads of lime vizt. 41 set upon the plowed in Slack and 1 load for house use. Note, he owed me a greater number of loads which I should have had last year at 6d per load but now allowing him 7d per load and he affirming there was not so much lime due to me as I reckoned. It comes that I have fewer loads but now we are clear. [from the price and the number these are packhorse loads]

April 1691. 27^th

This day 26 loads of coals in Kitchin at Colne, only some few used in these days past.

June 1691. 27^th

A load of wheat bought at Skipton. Cost with carriage [no amount] [cart load]

24^th

Richard Boothman went for Lincolnshire this day to buy wool for me etc. by whom I sent £156 as is said to be in the Book of Wool Bought – the 30^th Lawr. Spencer the Carrier went after him with two horses and took 15 pack cloths of mine.

July 1691. 15^th

Sent by Richard Boothman to pay for wool bought for me in Lincolnshire £70 vizt. 22 Guineas and a half Guinea is £24-3-9 [£23-12-6 by my reckoning. SG note.] and in silver money £45-16-3

16^th

Memd. I sent 15 pack cloths of my owne by RB into Lincolnshire about three weeks since 9 of which are already come back with wool and 6 remains there. And now I send by him 20 cloths being 10 of my owne (3 of which are of the 9 which comed back) 2 of Law. Ridehalgh, 1 marked LR red cloth, 3 of Roger Hartley (Slack) 1 RH red cloth, 1 RH ink and 1 RH red cloth with RHEO ink on the other side and 3 of James Tatt, 2 GT and one IT red L, and 2 of Henry Bests.

August 1691. 19^th

Sent by Henry Frankland and Lawrence Spencer 6 pack cloths into Lincolnshire for wool.

September 21 1691.

Having sent into Lincolnshire this summer several times as appears before in this book 44 pack cloths, I send this day by RB 9 more, in all 53. I have already 43 packs come and have 10 to come.

September 1692

21^st

Sent two pack cloths 28 and 26 by R.B. into Lincolnshire. Note, I have sent 18 in June and have received 12 packs so I shall now have 8 pack cloths there.

[End of Barcroft references.]

TWO CENTURIES OF INDUSTRIAL WELFARE. THE STORY OF THE LONDON (QUAKER) LEAD COMPANY. 1692-1905. Arthur Raistrick. Pub. 1977. 1977. ISBN 0 903485 13 3.

A report on general conditions at Gadlis [N. Wales] in 1708 says that the workmen are in good order, not allowed to swear, visit alehouses, or bring drink to the works, except from their own families……. In the North, the cupola at Ryton was within three miles of Newcastle, and as most of the ore used was purchased at first from independent miners, there was little need for rapid development of other than purely business relations. The agent at Ryton, Charles Alsopp, was an active Friend, often representing his Monthly and Quarterly, Meeting at Yearly Meeting, and regularly entertaining visiting Friends and ministers at his home. He visited the neighbouring works of Ambrose Crowley at Winlaton, and no doubt was actively impressed and inspired by the workmen's court and other 41 advanced " aspects of the Crowley works. Although Crowley was not a Friend, he was of Friends family and would have much in common with Alsopp and Wright, who visited him on several occasions. In his dealings with the miners of Alston Moor, Alsopp was brought up against the problems of isolation. The earliest mines the Company possessed in the area were around Tynehead, a place still very remote from all traffic, and inaccessible for a great part of the winter. Ore was carried from Tynehead by pack horse train to Ryton, over thirty-five miles of wild mountains and moors. Alsopp soon moved to improve the way, and spent some amount of time and money in developing a good road. Food was carried back by the pack train from Newcastle market to Tynehead, along with tools, clothing, etc.

The “pack horses” remained in use until the main road system was nearly completed, about 1826, and even then were continued between some of the out-of-the-way mines and smaller villages. The horses or ponies used were known locally as the “carrier galloways”, or, for shortness, as the “galls”. A pack train was made up of twelve to thirty animals, which moved along in single file, with one gall always the leader. The leader had a set of bells on his harness, the custom being one large bell in the middle of the collar and three small spherical bells on each side, the tradition being that these gave warning of the approach of a pack train in the narrow roads where passing was difficult. The custom is still remembered in most parts of the Pennines in the way in which children in their games will yoke up a long string of boys in tandem, to run as “belled horses”. There used to be very keen competition among the boys to have the post of “bell horse” or leader. The train of ponies generally had two attendants, a man and a boy, or more if the journey was to take a day or two and packs would have to be taken off at night and replaced next morning. The strings of galls usually travelled by fairly straight, well-known routes across the hills, the softer places being set with large stones, still a well-known feature of our Pennine pack horse roads. Where the track rises up a steep brow, being unpaved, a deep gully is soon worn which, in winter, becomes the bed of a stream. As one track became undesirable in that way, the galls would pass to one side and begin to make a parallel track. On the hill slopes above most of the mines and smelt mills these parallel sunk ways are still visible. It is obvious that the travelling by pack train was entirely dependent on the weather for speed, and that in bad winters the time taken, and consequently the food needed by the galls on a journey, were both increased. With softer ground, the loads had to be lighter, and so more ponies were used for the same bulk of goods carried. This explains why all carriage charges during the eighteenth century state the season of the year, as transport was nearly twice as costly in winter as in summer. Each gall carried from 2 to 3 cwt. The load was slung evenly on the animal's two sides, special saddles being used for the carriage of bulky goods like timber for the mines, or corn for the markets.[pp. 79/80]

In Derbyshire, the policy of the Company is seen after 1721, in the very friendly relations they maintained not only with their own workpeople, but with small independent miners, purchasing their ore at fair prices, making advances of money and tools to needy miners, and occasionally giving considerable technical advice and help. The difficulties of transport had forced on the Company the policy of building a smelt mill in every locality as near as possible to the mines, in order that the less bulk and weight of smelted lead should have the longer and more tedious journey from the mill to the market. The Derbyshire mines near Matlock were situated at a considerable distance from the port of shipment, Hull, and consequently the Derbyshire area felt most acutely the problem of transport. The lead was for many years carried by pack horse train across the hills to Bawtry on the Idle, a tributary of the Trent, and carried from there to Hull in barges. At an early date, the Company's agent, Joseph Whitfield, made considerable grants towards the costs of improving roads along that line, and also spent some money on building new roads between the mines and their smelt mill at Ashover.

The earliest contributions to roads in the Derbyshire area were simple contributions of £50 or £100 towards the cost of new roads, or subscriptions to parishes towards the repairs needed to roads already existing. Between their own mines and smelt mills, the Company made new roads, mainly for pony transport, coal and wood being carried to the smelt mills and mines, and ore and lead carried the other way. There are many interesting reports and minutes relating to the pack train transport, largely arising out of difficulties of payment. In the early days, carriers were paid by the sack or pack, and in many cases are accused, and often rightly, of using small sacks and shallow baskets, so that the cost of carriage was often out of all proportion to the weight of goods handled. The remedy for this was the provision of standard measures at the smelt mills, into which coal and charcoal was delivered, a payment note being made out by the “checkweighman”. In all accounts the carriage rates vary with the season, with further offsets for particularly bad weather. This is mainly due to the condition of the unmetalled tracks, which in winter were either stream courses or deep sloughs of mud, and sometimes even impassable for ponies. To reduce winter carriage as much as was desirable to balance these conditions, it would have been necessary to maintain large stocks of ore, coals, charcoal, and timber, with considerably enlarged storage space…… [pp. 82/83] [AR goes on to say that it was these considerations that forced the Company to invest in Turnpike Trusts and became joint promoters in some of the earliest canals. SCG.]

With the consolidation of properties in the North, following the 1790 sales of Derbyshire and Welsh leases, the Company embarked on a period of active road building, to link up their estates in Alston Moor, Weardale, Teesdale, Swaledale and Westmorland. Reference has already been made to the isolation and the difficult nature of this country, and it was essential, if the agents were to visit all the centres regularly, that roads which would be fairly usable in winter should be made. The cost of carriage of ore from the mines to the smelt mills, and lead from the mills to the shipping wharf on the Tyne at Stella, was almost prohibitive in bad weather, and impossible for a great part of the winter, so long as the pack horses had to make their way across the moors by ill-defined and unsurfaced tracks. Between 1790 and 1810, the Company on several occasions defined its policy of building a network of serviceable roads and under the stimulus of Robert Stagg, appointed mining agent for the North in 1778, and his son Joseph Stagg who succeeded him in 1808, this policy was translated into fact.[p. 88]

Note made in 1813; In the carriage department an immense saving has been effected by Mr. Stagg, principally by inducing a new set of carriers to enter the service ; and classing the whole into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd rate men, according to their conduct and exertions. Prior to the new arrangement the carriers were in the constant habit of standing out for higher rates or “sticking”, (the local term for rebellion). This was annihilated, and for instance, he found on entering office, the carriage of lead from Stanhope Mill, costing 1/10d. per piece (i.e. 1 ½ cwt.) and the ore carriage from Middlehope at 4/6d. per bing (8 cwt.), and the carriers sticking for higher rates. These were speedily lowered to 11d. per piece, and the ore to 2/6d. per bing and a similar reduction was accomplished in these and all other carriages at the several Mills, etc. These changes could not be effected without incurring great personal abuse, and no little odium, among the carriers.[pp. 90/91]

[SCG note: There is no mention in any of these abstracts of wheeled transport. I am tempted to assume that it was not until the advent of the turnpike trusts that the Company made use of carts or wagons. The other thing that strikes me is that the operators of the packhorse trains seem to be private contractors, hence the disputes over rates for carriage. The Company’s operations were conducted in some of the most inhospitable terrain in Britain and the general conclusion is that in the conditions prevailing, packhorses were the only possible transport solution. It was only when improved roads were made and canals were built that this situation changed.]

LEAD MINING IN THE MID PENNINES. THE MINES OF NIDDERDALE, WHARFEDALE, AIREDALE, RIBBLESDALE AND BOWLAND. Arthur Raistrick. D Barton Bradford, Truro. 1973.

After the Roman workings on Greenhow Hill, there is no more record or evidence of any kind of work, however limited, for ten centuries. It is possible that there was some work during the Dark Ages, as there was in Derbyshire, but we simply do not know. The first evidence of even the possibility of mining comes with. the monastic period when Roger de Mowbray, between 1143 and 1166, gave to the Abbot and Convent of Byland Abbey, a grant of iron ore throughout all his forest of Nidderdale, and included in the grant ‘a tenth of my lead house'. It is a matter of speculation if this was the steward's house where a royalty of one-tenth on lead being produced was collected, or whether there is some other meaning; at least it suggests that lead was being mined at that date. About 118o a grant had been made to Fountains Abbey which gave them lead mines on the east side of Greenhow Hill. Byland's lands had now been defined as Stonebeck Up and Down, on the west of the river Nidd, and Fountains had the rest. The two areas met in a common boundary along the Ashfold Gill. Roger's grant gave to Fountains "all copper, iron, lead and every kind of metal and stone in his forest of Nidderdale in whatsoever place found, below ground or above ... for ever, in grooves, mines and minerals". Byland had secured similar privileges in their area. The two monasteries were not slow to take advantage of the grants and began work near the common boundary where the very strong Providence vein crossed from the north side to the south side of Ashfold Gill, passing out of Heathfield Moor into Coldstones ground. By 1225 the two groups of miners had come into dispute about their workings, alleging trespass against one another, and an arbitration award gives us the first view of mining as such, in the areas. From this award it is clear that five mines, or grooves, were involved; there were two grooves in 'Kaldestaines' (Coldstones on the south side of the boundary), which were to be worked jointly with all expenses shared and the lead ore, 'except the king's share' to be divided, and this for a period of seven years from February 2nd, 1226 after which Fountains were to have it to themselves. There was another groove at Coldstones worked in common and to be so worked until it was exhausted. Either or both of these could be almost anywhere on Greenhow, and there is no evidence on which to make a decision. Two grooves in ‘Hirefeldberg' were to be the sole property of Byland. The village name of Heathfield was in the middle ages written Hirefield, and Hirefeldberg is presumably Heathfield Hill and the mine would be the part of Providence vein north of the beck in Ashfold Gill.

From this date to the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century there are only fragmentary mentions of mining on Greenhow and among them little of technical interest. We can, however, gather scraps relating to the mines, to smelting and to the ever present problem of transport. The record of further disputes in the area, like the one already quoted, hinge on the poor definition of boundaries and the consequent accusations of trespass and working in another miner's ground. One of the transport accounts shows that the mines on Coldstones were working on a moderate scale. In 1363 the Exchequer Accounts include items "for the hire of two waggons, each with 10 oxen". These were employed in "carrying 24 fothers of lead from Coldstones in Nidderdale by high and rocky mountains and by miry roads to Boroughbridge, more or less 20 leagues, namely for 24 days each waggon with the men for it taking 3/- a day, £7-4-o.". From Boroughbridge the lead was carried by land and water at 2/4 the fother, then by water to York, and from York to London. From York a total of 40 fothers was sent at a cost of £26-13-8. The lead was used in building at Windsor Castle. At the same time 168 pigs of lead from Nidderdale, weighing 2o fothers, were sent to Hull for shipment to Windsor. These 'pigs' would be pieces of about one hundredweight for pack-horse carriage or one and a half hundredweight for carts. So the fother would be much smaller than its later value of 21 cwts.

In 1455 lead was carried by John Qwarfe from Abbot Wath in Warsill to Ripon, and for his labour he was paid 1/8d. It was then carried forward to John Wederall at Scarborough, on a payment of 6/-d. Lodge of Swanley was paid for the carriage of lead from Stainley to Thorpe Underwood for the Dean of York. In 1502 the Merchant Adventurers of York sent a letter to Marmaduke Huby, Abbot of Fountains, complaining of his activity "that you occupy beying and sellyng lede and other marchandise as a fre marchaunt, contrary to Godds lawis and mans". They asked him to stop selling lead and other goods, as he was thus infringing their monopoly. Following the dissolution of the Abbey, the receiver for the estates of Sir Richard Gresham, the purchaser, noted many items referring to the mines, among them one for Robert Elles, "carriage of 22 pieces from his baill hill to Boroughbridge, at 5/- a fother, 55/-“. This indicates a load of eleven fothers, quite a large amount. There are other mentions of lead delivered at York.

These accounts and other brief notices of lead for use in the cathedral at York, and for sale at Hull, are at least evidence that the mines on Greenhow were working at many dates during the monastic period and we might assume the working to have been fairly continuous. The fourteenth century reference to Coldstones indicates that as being the main area of interest, but an early sixteenth century dispute with Bolton Priory shows work had begun on the edge of Craven Moor as well.[pp.19/20]

[SCG note: Interesting that despite the early period, all the references to transport in this piece appear to indicate wheeled transport, the amounts are called ‘loads’. Note the reference to”… the hire of two waggons, each with 10 oxen" and the time it took to travel 20 leagues [60 miles]. They seemed to be averaging about three miles a day if we allow four days for them to return empty, a good indication of how bad the roads were. I have some references to oxen as haulage animals, see below…]

Page 29. There is a reference to a court case of 1604/1613 whereby a man called Proctor won the right to mine in the Manor of Bewerley [near Brimham]. This allowed him to build houses, comprising most of the present hamlet of Greenhow Hill thus allowing his miners to live close to their work. Also, he was assured of wood for the mines and pasture for horses used for transport. It’s not clear whether these were packhorses or draught horses.

OLD YORKSHIRE DALES. Arthur Raistrick. David and Charles. 1967. ISBN 0 330 02739 5.

A few customary markets in the dales have their origin in special circumstances. In the west part of the dales and over much of the Pennine watershed there was forest, which at the Conquest was granted to the Norman barons. At the heads of Swaledale and Wensleydale there were the forests of Swaledale, Mallerstang and Wensley, held by the Earl of Richmond. At the head of Wharfedale the forest of Litton and Langstrath was held by Percy, Earl of Northumberland. There were no villages within these forests, but foresters and forest servants inhabited many lodges and made up a moderate population not in a position to grow their own food. To meet their requirements markets were soon established in the nearest villages to the forest boundary - Reeth in Swaledale, Askrigg in Wensleydale, and Kettlewell in Wharfedale. Sooner or later these customary markets were regularized by charters, though in the case of Askrigg this was not until 1587.

Of these, Kettlewell was on a direct route between Settle and Kirkby Malzeard markets. A green road climbs out of Settle on to Langcliffe but is now lost in the modernized road as far as the crossing of the ancient road from Helwith Bridge across Malham Moor which the monks of Fountains refer to as early as 1206 as the 'road from Lonsdale'. Across this road a bridleway continues the road from Settle with unchanged direction, across the spur of Fountains Fell called Knowe Fell, and so to the modernized road down into Arncliffe in Littondale. Over Old Cote Moor into Wharfedale it has two branches. One goes to Kettlewell, then by a bridleway across Conistone Moor where it is called Sandgate, by Middlesmoor in Nidderdale and so to Kirkby Malzeard and Masham. The other branch goes down to cross the Wharfe at Starbotton, and then over between Great and Little Whernside into the head of Nidderdale and on to Kirkby Malzeard, with a branch above Kettlewell down Coverdale to Middleham and Richmond. When a bridge was destroyed by flood in Kettlewell it was said in Quarter Sessions' reports that 'packmen from Lancashire are detained'. These were some of the market traders from Lancaster, via Settle. Very little of this road could be used by carts, so, as wheeled traffic developed, new lines along lower country and through different villages were made and the ,market road' became only an upland bridleway.

The directness of the market roads was only possible because they were used by pack ponies, in ones and twos, or possibly in trains or 'gangs' of up to twenty. An advertisement in the Leeds Mercury in June 1728 says that: A Gang of Good Packhorses, containing eighteen in number, with their accoutrements and Business belonging to the same, being one of the ancient gangs which has gone with Goods from York, Leeds, and Wakefield to London, being the Horses of Thomas Varley ... etc. are for sale. Such gangs could travel over the hills, not worried by steep or rough ground and free on the moorland tops to make diversions around patches of very bad ground. Packhorse tracks thus tend to spread wide in a way which a walled road cannot do. In many soft parts causeways of large flags or stones were laid down and these are a frequent sight on our hills. The tracks go up hill and down dale in a way entirely foreign to tracks off the 'highland zone'.

The market road between Settle and Kirkby Malzeard for instance, starts at Settle, about 5oo ft OD, and goes through Arncliffe at 740 ft and Kettlewell at 750 ft, but between these villages the way rises to 1,650 ft and 1,600 ft respectively. Leaving Kettlewell, the traveller climbs to more than 1,750 ft OD and, after a moorland crossing of 8 miles, he reaches a stream at 750 ft, climbs to Middlesmoor at 95o ft, then down to the River Nidd at 550 ft. The climbs over the fells to Masham or Kirkby Malzeard reach 1,400 ft and 1,226 ft respectively. This switchback route is in no way unique; most of the cross-dale market routes of which we are speaking rise to great heights on the uplands but generally manage to cross between 1,500 ft and 1,750 ft. Deep peat with uncrossable erosion gullies called haggs and a prolonged snow cover make almost any higher line than this impracticable.

With the improved performance of today's motor-cars in mind, a few of these ancient market ways have been made into motor roads; for instance, the old green track from Ramsgill in the head of Nidderdale across the moors to Masham is now a motor road, saving a great many miles and bringing Masham market within easy access of Nidderdale. At weekends the town-dweller enjoys the testing zigzag climbs to the tops and the stimulating run across the high moors, but we must hope and strive to keep most of these green ways for the generations who sooner or later are going to relearn the pleasure and benefit of walking on the quiet tops.

In the days of the packhorses the journeys between some of the principal markets would take two or three days, and along these roads there are ancient inns or their ruins, often called the Packhorse Inn or the Packman, where abundant outbuildings allowed the unloading of the packs and many small closes could accommodate the ponies. The packman and his boy would sleep among the packs, but stories of theft are remarkably few and the whole trade seems to have been based upon honesty and trust.

Within the broad pattern of market roads there is a complex of shorter tracks which link up most of the villages and which also breast the hills to reach outlying hamlets and farms. The market roads in many cases carry the name Jagger Lane or some variant of this, the ‘jagger' being derived from the ‘jaeger', hunter, as the sturdy German hunting ponies were used extensively for this work. There are, however, some green tracks named Badger Gate, Badger Stile and so on, and these remind us of a humbler traveller connected with the markets. The 'badger' was a small trader licensed to carry corn from the market to sell in small quantities to individual customers or in other markets. No doubt he would carry other goods as well as corn, spices and smaller dry-salter's articles. He served those for whom a market journey was more than their needs would warrant.

The early development of the wool trade in centres like Halifax and Kendal was based upon the 'brogger' or 'wool driver' - the man with one or two packhorses who followed the pattern of the 'badger', visiting farms and hamlets all over the dales country, buying in small parcels of wool. These he took to the clothiers in Halifax or Kendal market. The so-called 'Halifax Act' of 1552, restricting the dealing in wool to members of the Staple, was soon changed, so that in 1555 exemption was given for the wool driver and brogger; in fact they were then established as an essential part of the industry. In a way they are still represented by the wool buyer's motor lorry which now makes its regulated visits to many of the remote farms which have usable roads.

We have then a picture of our network of green roads carrying a regular traffic of gangs of packhorses going between markets, feeding intermediate village markets and being known all along the road. They carried news and gossip of a wider world and were an important and welcome element in the dales community. The broggers and badgers served the isolated farms and hamlets in the same way, and in the later nineteenth century their tradition was continued by the 'Scotsman' who visited the same areas but carried his pack on his back and traded mainly in haberdashery. A few of these men still have their regular periodic rounds in the dales, but generally they work with a small car which can get them over much of the ground and can thus extend their area to an economic size. [See LTP. 78/AK series for Emma Clark’s account of her husband trading in such a way in the 1920s.]

We started this chapter with Torrington's comments on the inn at Gearstones and its congregation of Scots drovers. This was by no means an isolated picture. There are still many farms on the fells which appear to be lonely beyond the reach of any company, some, because of their isolation, having been abandoned to fall into ruin. Yet some or these have in a past age shared scenes as crowded and as lively as those at Gearstones. These were the inns along or near the great drove roads, where drovers of Scottish cattle, farmers and butchers met and the loneliness of the long 'drive' from Scotland was relieved by the rare night of drink and song.

This droving trade, with its sturdy race of' drovers, arose in the late seventeenth century with the increasing demand for meat in the English markets, particularly of the south. Young cattle were collected from the Highlands, and in the eighteenth century even from the Hebrides, and were gathered into the great fairs or 'trysts' at a few centres such as Falkirk, Crieff and Dumfries. Here the cattle were bought by English 'graziers' in herds of many hundreds. The cattle were then driven quietly to fairs in the north of England where farmers bought them for over-wintering on their hill pastures, returning them next year into the markets where they were bought by butchers or their agents to be driven again to the meat markets of the Midlands and around London .

The drovers were men skilled in handling these wild cattle, and a drover with a boy and two dogs would bring 40 or 50 beasts by quiet ways along the fells, avoiding villages and cultivated ground, crossing rivers by fords, and caring for their charges day and night. Usually a number of drovers would combine to move with a herd of 100 or 200, making 10 to 12 miles a day and carrying food and the minimum of stores on a pack pony. Most nights they slept out with the cattle, wrapped only in their woollen plaids, but occasionally they had a livelier night at some drovers' inn. Their staple food was oatmeal.

The drove roads are not as numerous as the market roads; they run from north to south, crossing the borders into England by the valleys of the Jed into the headwaters of the Coquet, by Liddesdale to the source of the North Tyne, by Eskdale and Annandale to the South Tyne and Eden, or from Dumfries by Gretna or the fords across the Solway to Carlisle. These were busy principal routes and the drove roads which cross into the Yorkshire dales stem principally from the Annandale and South Tyne way. The great road which came from Bewcastle to Gilsland crossed the Irthing on to the Pennines, going up the South Tyne valley into the headwaters of the Tees. A broad green track is still preserved in part on the west side of the river, crossing the big tributary of Maize Beck near Birkdale, for long a house of call for the drovers. Farther down the dale, near Holwick, the tracks cross southward over the Lune and Balder, tributaries of the Tees, and near Grassholme the route divides. The westerly branch came by Sleightholme in the Greta valley, through upper Arkengarthdale and then between Melbecks and Reeth Moors into Swaledale. Over the moors to Askrigg in Wensleydale a road went by the Roman road to Gearstones, the road followed by Lord Torrington and already described. An alternative way was by the Stake and crossing upper Wharfedale and Littondale to Great Close on Malham Moor.

The easterly branch of the great drove road from Grassholme crossed Stainmore by Gilmonby, then over Barningham and Gayles moors and Richmond outmoor to Richmond. From Richmond forward roads took the cattle to the great fairs at Northallerton or Masham. There were routes on the west side of the Pennines which converged on Appleby and on Brough Hill near the head of the Eden valley, and thence to Malham, Settle or Lancaster.

The Great Close, which became the site of the drovers' fairs at Malham Moor, is a large enclosed pasture near Malham Tarn and to the east of it. It was part of the estates of Fountains Abbey, but after the Dissolution of the Monasteries it had come into the hands of the Lambert family. It was said to be the largest enclosed pasture in the country, being ‘upwards of 732 acres in one Pasture, a great part of which is a fine rich soil, and remarkable for making Cattle both expeditiously and uncommonly fat'. At the opening of the seventeenth century it was used as an agistment, a pasture into which sheep, cattle and horses were taken from many farmers and grazed for a season. The stock using it were in fact 'boarded out' and looked after and fed by the owner of the agistment land.

A list survives from 1619 which gives us the 'Gyst taken into the great close of Malham more anno. dm. 1619'. This gives the name of every owner of stock and the number and kind of his animals, and over sixty people are named. The beasts are listed in groups by kind, as - 5 horses, with another 24 horses 'had out of Lancashire’. – 5 twinter [two year or two winter] Stagges’, 8 foles, 136 sheep, 58 made [full grown] bullocks; a total of 372 animals. In the 18^th c. the whole agistment was taken by a Skipton grazier [Birtwistle] who used it as a gathering ground and market for stock which he bought at the Scottish Trysts. The Great Close gatherings quickly took on the nature of a customary fair or market to which other drovers, apart from those employed by Birtwistle, brought their herds. The schoolmaster at Malham, Thomas Hurtley, wrote in 1768 a book ‘A concise account of some natural curiosities in the environs of Malham in Craven, Yorkshire [which contains an account of the Great Close and its uses] [PP. 128/134] ……..

…….. We can, however, in imagination take a wide and overall view of our Pennine uplands in the eighteenth century, and see a vast number of persons and animals traversing them by ways now almost unused except by the walker. The slow-moving herds with their attendant drovers, boys and dogs were at all times coming along the great north to south drove roads. East to west roads were mainly market roads, along which were moving the packhorse gangs: between the two, broggers and badgers, sturdy beggars, lime and peat getters and miners found their way among the hills. There must have been many meetings, long rests for news and gossip, friendly exchange and trust, or none of the trades could have survived. This picture of quietly-moving traffic over the lonely hills is a refreshing contrast to the crowded, noisy, smelly motor roads which are now penetrating more and more of the Pennine dales. For the present, however, we can walk many, many miles along these old high-level ways and think kindly upon those who made and used them in the past, resisting wherever we can the selfish requests which come from time to time for these ways to be 'modernized' so that the motorist, as well as the walker, can invade all the moorlands and fells. [p.136]

[SCG note: This account by AR is valuable and accurate, his scholarship can be relied on implicitly. I have included some of the material on drove roads because their history is integral with the packhorse trails even though they used different routes many a time. It is important to be able to distinguish between the two where they differ. One aspect of these accounts worth reflecting on is what the effect of the early 19^th c. enclosures would have had on these ‘green ways’. The recent ‘right to roam’ legislation may have restored some of the rights to free passage for packhorses damaged by enclosures.]

‘SURPRISING ROSSENDALE’ by Chris Aspin. Published by Helmshore Local History Society, 1986. ISBN 0 9068811 03 x.

[pp/53/54] Packhorse Days

‘Near the eastern gate of Haslingden churchyard is the grave of Christopher Duckworth, who must have known the moors and valleys of Rossendale better than anyone in the later seventeen hundreds. As his fading epitaph records, he 'followed a gang of packhorses for upwards of half a century' until his death in 1800 at the age of 66. Duckworth began his travels as a boy of ten, working first for Richard Lonsdale and then, from 1776, for Richard's son, Daniel. Richard was a corn chandler, but other members of the family preferred to be known as merchants. This was a remarkably grand, not to say grandiose, profession in Georgian Haslingden and one so cherished by the Lonsdales that they appear to have imposed it posthumously on one of their number. The occupation of John Lonsdale, who died in 1770, was amended on his tombstone: the original word was chipped away and 'Merchant' carved in the resulting hollow. Though proud and important people, the Lonsdales were gracious enough to allow Duckworth to lie next to them in the churchyard. To modern eyes, his gravestone is much more interesting than theirs, since it includes what is probably the only poetic tribute to a packhorse driver.

‘Fifty six years he unoffensive mov'd

Loving his horses, by his horses lov'd,

In faithful servitude the Roads along,

And seldom said and seldom did he wrong...

A grateful Master, whom he lov'd and fear'd,

With trembling eye this stone memorial rear'd.

Reader, repose in Christ the Lord thy trust,

Like honest Christopher, be true and just.’

"The numerous Pack Horse public houses in East Lancashire remind the modern traveller of a method of transport which served some parts of the region until well into the nineteenth century. In Duckworth's day, 'main' roads were few and fearsome. John Wesley, much jolted during a journey from Padiham to Haslingden on April 21, 1788, noted in his diary that the roads 'were sufficient to lame any horse and shake any carriage to pieces' On the following day, Wesley 'hobbled on to Bury through roads equally deplorable,' resolving never to return until they were mended. He did not come back. More than seventy years later, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth found many of Rossendale's upland tracks so bad that no cart could use them. They were suitable only for the teams of 'gals' - a breed of pony from Galloway - which carried lime in wooden pack-saddles from the Clitheroe kilns to farms and building sites. 'Gaunt, lean and ungroomed' teams of 'gals' are a feature of Sir James's novel Scarsdale, which is set in the 1830s.

They were led by one or two 'old stagers', accustomed to the road, and seldom attended by more than one man to adjust the packs &c. They browsed, in a long, straggling and broken string, the rough grass on
the fells, moorlands and sides of the lanes. Advancing at a pace of  about two miles in the hour, but continuing during eight or ten hours  in the day, they made a soldier's march and a forager's meal, snatching what they could on their way. Imagine a life thus spent. Conceive that it was your fate to brave the storm, the driving rain, the piercing frost, the benumbing and perplexing mists of wintry solitudes on solitary moorlands; or, at times, to swelter in a long, sultry march under the blaze of a hot summer's sun, without a pulse of air. Conceive that you met in this life-long task scarcely any but the solitary denizens of these regions ... What would become of your wits in such a life?"

One is not surprised to discover that the last of the 'gal' drivers, Mary Alice Hartley, of Shawforth, was a pronounced eccentric, who was said to look more like a man than a woman. In her younger days, she had as many as twenty 'gals', but in later life - she died in 1879 - her only companion was a donkey called Jerry, which carried sacks of coal to some of her old customers. For several years Jerry shared Mary Alice's moorland cottage, being taken indoors each night and fastened to her bedpost.’

[SCG note: I have to wonder whether the word erased from John Lonsdale’s tombstone was ‘Badger’, the general name for a dealer in corn. In later days the family might have thought it more fitting to replace the vernacular term with the more pretentious appellation of ‘merchant’.]

‘JOHN HODGSON’S TEXTILE MANUFACTURE IN KEIGHLEY’. First published in 1879, facsimile reprint by Shaun Tyas, Stamford. 1999 with an introduction and index by Gillian Cookson and George Ingle.

[page 17.] Nearly to the end of the 18^th century, the yarn from which worsted pieces were made was all spun a single thread at a time, mostly on the spinning wheel, yet notwithstanding this apparent drawback, it was the most extensive trade in the kingdom, giving employment to a vast number of the working population; this will be apparent, especially when it is borne in mind, that to work up a pack of wool into stuff pieces it required the labour of 300 persons for a week. Residing in the North Riding in 1818, we well recollect there was a spinning wheel in nearly every house. The farmers in looking after their sheep were in the habit of picking up any stray locks of wool and bringing it home, which when having accumulated to a few pounds, the, farmer's wife or daughters would card and spin it into a thick thread, something like woollen weft, which they called Garn, and then knit it into stockings from this single thread.

[SCG note: I’ve included this extract because it is a piece of direct evidence of domestic manufacture in the North Riding in the 18^th century from a man who actually saw the process. Note that he is not only talking about production for domestic consumption but by referring to the labour needed to process a pack of wool from the raw fleece to ‘stuff’ or cloth he is referring to the general wool trade. The question arises; what exactly is a pack? See my next extract for the best evidence I have on this subject.]

A DICTIONARY OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES FOR THE BRITISH ISLES. THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Ronald E Zupko. Published 1985 by the American Philosophical Society, Independence Square, Philadelphia. [this book is the life work of Doctor Zupko and is truly magnificent. Would you believe I got it off Amazon.com. Every historian should have access to a copy.]

Here is Doctor Zupko’s entry for ‘PACK’.

"pack-3-6 pak; 3-7 packe; 4-5 pakke; 4-9 pack; 5 pakk; 5-6 pake [ME pak, packe, pakke, of LG origin; see OED] A m-c [measure of capacity]and m-q [measure of quantity]for many products: cloth, generally 10 PIECES; flax or flour, 240 lb (108.862 kg); teasels, generally 9000 heads for kings and 20,000 heads for middlings, except in Gloucestershire, 40 STAFFS or 1000 GLEANS or 20,000 heads for middlings and 30 staffs or 900 gleans or 9000 heads for kings, and in Yorkshire, 1350 bunches of 10 heads each or 13,500 in all; vegetables, Huddersfield, 240 lb (108.862 kg); wool, 240 lb (108.862 kg), except lamb's wool in Yorkshire and Lancashire, 44 lb (19.958 kg) ; and yarn, 4 Cwt or 480 lb (217.724 kg) .-1228 [date] Gras 1.157: 1 pak mailede. 1439 [date] Southampton 2.81: 1 pak de canevas. 1443 [date] Brokage 11.27: Flaxe the pack untrussed….. Cum iiii pakkes de pannys; ibid 119: 1 pak straytes; ibid 158: Cum ii pakkys cerseyse. c.1461 Hall 16: Also clothe is sold by numbyr, for x hole clothys make a pak. 1466 Gras 1.614.. Pro i pakke lewent. c1475 Ibid 192: Of a pakke of wulle cloth. 1507 Ibid 695: Brusshys the packe; ibid 698: Flexe the pake containing xx [X] c lbs. ; ibid 699: Hather the packe that contains as moche as a packe of wolle; ibid 704: Torche waxe the pack. 1509 Ibid 562: ii packes canvas continent iii [X] m ulnarum; i~ 566: i packe

cum ii bages ginger continent iii [X] c libras; ibid 590: Pro ii packes cum xii [X] c goodes cotonrusset. 1555 York Mer. 156: A pake of clothe, sixtene pence; a small trusse, as the parties canne agree, so that it excede not the price of the pake, to be rated after the qualitie thereof. 1562 Ibid 168-69: A packe of clothe, xx d. 1607 Cowell sv sarpler: Further that a packe of wolle is a horse loade, which consisteth of 17. stone. two pounds. 1665 Sheppard 66: And further, That a Pack of Wooll is a horse load, consisting of 17 stone and two pounds. 1717 Dict. Rus. sv: Pack of Wooll, is 17 Stone and 2 Pounds, or 240 Pound weight. 1756 Rolt sv: PACK of wool, in commerce, is a horse's load; containing 17 stone and 2 pounds, or 240 pounds weight. 1820 Second Rep. 25: Pack of yarn, 4 hundred weight, each of 120 lb ... of teazles, 9000 heads of kings; 20000 of middlings ... Huntingdonshire: of wool, 240 lb... Kent: of flax, 240 lb...Yorkshire, N.R. of teazles, 1350 bunches of 10 each = 13500. 1834 Pasley 113: 1 Pack of Lamb 's Wool in Yorkshire and Lancashire... 44 [lb]; ibid 114: 1 Pack of Wool in Huntingdonshire ... of Lamb's Wool in North Wales ... of Flax in Kent ... 240 [lb]. 1850 Alexander 78: Pack; of wool ... 240.-pounds. 1880 Courtney 154: A pack of wool is 17 stone 2 lbs. = 240 lbs. 1880 Britten 173: Pack, of teazles, 9000 heads of kings; 20,000 of middlings. (Glouc.), of teazles, 40 staffs = 1000 glens = 20,000 of kings, 30 staffs = 900 glens = 9000. 1883 McConnell 15: 20 lbs. = 1 score, and 240 lbs. or 12 scores = 1 pack. 1896 Wagstaff 36: A pack of vegetables in Huddersfield = 240 lbs. 1956 Economist 50: Pack: Flour = 240 lb; ibid 58: 1 pack [of wool] = 240 lb.

[SCG note: Complicated isn’t it. This entry demonstrates the big problem with medieval measures, they were not standardised but customary and depended on the area. The message is to beware of jumping to conclusions when dealing with a measure as amorphous as a ‘pack’. From a purely practical point of view, the early measures such as the one for lamb’s wool in Yorkshire and Lancashire weighing 44lb could very likely be a man’s load, it would be about right for that. The pack of 240lbs is quite obviously a horse load. However, this is the most comprehensive definition I have ever found and I commend it to you.]

‘TRANSPORT SAGA. 1646 - 1947’. This book has no author or publishing date as it is a company history of the Hay’s Wharf Cartage Company which had as a subsidiary company Pickford’s Limited, the famous haulage firm. It is the Pickford material that is of interest to us as they started as packhorse carriers.

[Reaney and Wilson in the Oxford Dictionary of English surnames give this origin: PICKFORD: Alcock de Pykeford 1288 [Anglo Saxon charters]; Thomas Pikeford, 1332, [Subsidy Rolls; Sussex]: Thomas Pickford alias Pickfatt, 1649, [41^st report, Deputy Keeper of Public Records, 1880] From Pickforde in Ticehurst, Sussex.]

Page 5.

There is a strong tradition that one Thomas Pickford, living in 1646 at Adlington in the parish of Prestbury, Cheshire, was a forerunner of the Pickfords who are amongst the subjects of this book. Prestbury is but fifty miles from Pitchford, while it was at Poynton, a village neighbouring Adlington, that the first-known Pickford carriers started business. And those Pickfords were an Adlington family.

In 1646 the Civil War was approaching its tragic climax. The King had been captured and the Long Parliament, settling down to the uneasy task of facing its financial troubles, was seizing the property of its Cavalier opponents, much of which booty could be found (with a little diligence) in Lancashire and Cheshire, those Royalist strongholds. The only accusation recorded against Thomas Pickford, yeoman, is that he did 'send a man to Adlington House when it was garrisoned by the King'; yet for this Cromwell's russet-coated captains swooped on him, accused him of royalist sympathies and saw to it that his estates were sequestrated, his property forfeited and his name perpetuated in the public records. So much for the indictment: but it is said to this day that Pickford had supplied horses to the Cavaliers, which, if he were indeed engaged in the carrying trade, is likely to be true, although whether his baggage-animals would be imbued with warlike ardour is not related. [SCG note: Remembering the vernacular name for packhorses, ‘jagger’ from the German word ‘Jaeger’ {hunter} that was applied to a breed of small horse used by German Cavalry, perhaps the packhorses were more useful to the Royalists than the author of this piece realised.]

We next hear of this Pickford family about thirty years later, when the bitter religious and political feuds had abated and the King was enjoying his own again in his charming, if profligate, court at Whitehall. Pickford, also enjoying his own again apparently, is said to have owned a stone-quarry on the Cheshire-Derbyshire borders and to have obtained a government contract for supplying stones to mend roads in the district around Macclesfield. This so-called road mending consisted of tipping the chipped stones into the dust or mud and leaving them for passing traffic to drive in. The stone-carrying was done by teams of packhorses, which had been the normal means of moving goods for centuries.

Pickford's packhorses travelled in gangs of forty or fifty in single file on a two-foot track beside the muddy waste which purported to be the highway. They travelled musically, for the leading horse had suspended from his bridle a pair of bells whose tinkling warned travellers of their approach, as well as guiding the rear horses in the dark. Packhorse teams were apparently a common sight in this district, for a rather disgruntled traveller of the time wrote that lie found in the naked hills and desert dales of Derbyshire nothing worth notice except the 'vast number' of packhorses, of which he counted sixty between Nottingham, Derby and Manchester.

It occurred to Pickford that his packhorses wasted time returning unladen to the quarry after depositing their loads of stones. A 'return empty' run was uneconomic and so he decided that on his homeward journeys he would carry and distribute goods for the people in neighbouring villages.

In electing to become a carrier Pickford made himself an important figure in the community. Not only would he carry goods but would act as postman and general newsman. The carrier was well-known to all on the road, staying habitually at the same inns and travelling in all weathers. He had to be tough. His blunderbuss was as essential to him as his whip and he was generally treated with respect. A contemporary says of him vividly but unflatteringly: 'A carrier is like the vault in Gloucester church that conveys whispers at a distance for he takes the sound out of your mouth at York and makes it be heard as far as London. He is a great afflicter of the highways and beats them out of measure, which injury is sometimes revenged by the purse-taker and then the voyage miscarries. No man domineers more in his inn, nor calls his host irreverently with more presumption, and his arrogance proceeds out of the strength of his horses. He forgets not his load where he takes his case, for he is drunk commonly before he goes to bed'.

Gradually, it appears, Pickford's carrying superseded his stone carting-or, who knows? with change of Government the contract was possibly not renewed: at all events, the carrying business flourished in the district and in time extended to Manchester.

At this point another link, though a slender one, is forged between this rather apocryphal figure and the first recorded members of Pickfords. Thomas seems to have joined forces with the other Manchester carriers who undertook the long journey to London. John Taylor, the water poet, who compiled a Carrier's Cosmographie, 'whereby all sorts of people may find direction how to receive or send goods or letters unto such places as their occasions may require', tells us that in London 'the Carriers of Manchester doe lodge at the Beare in Bassingshaw; they doe come on Thursdaies and Fridaies ... and doe also lodge at the Two neck'd Swan in Lad lane (between great Wood-street and Milk-street end) they come every second Thursday: also there do lodge carriers that doe passe through divers parts of Lancashire'.

Now, a hundred years later Pickfords were advertising themselves as using both these inns, amongst others, for their London headquarters, so it seems possible if not even probable that James Pickford's waggons were the 18th-century modernisation of Thomas Pickford's packhorses, just as in the 2oth century mechanised transport drove out the horse-drawn vehicle.

‘TRAFFIC AND TRANSPORT’. An economic history of Pickfords. Gerard L Turnbull, George Allen and Unwin, 1979. ISBN 0 04 300080 0.

Chapter one is a brilliant overview of our subject:

'The carriage of goods in England,' said Defoe, 'is chiefly managed by horses and waggons; the number of which is not to be guessed at, and is equal, in my opinion, to the whole trade of some nations ... Our river navigation is not to be named for carriage, with the vast bulk by packhorse, and by waggons."(1) Defoe's view of the position of land carriage in the transport system of the early eighteenth century contrasts sharply with that which has been taken by many historians. Until recently the inland trade has been generally regarded as being of only minor importance. Consequently the likely volume of traffic was presumed to have been small, and also any traffic which proceeded more than a few miles invariably to have travelled by water. River and coastal shipping were taken to have formed the heart of the country's transport system. Because of its great expense, road transport was assumed to have been very constrained, confined to a limited range of valuable goods which could absorb the high cost of carriage. To prefer Defoe's opinion and to argue that by his time of writing, the 1720s, there already existed an extensive and well-organised road haulage industry which covered the whole country and catered for a very varied and considerable volume of traffic is directly to challenge entrenched beliefs.(2)

The nature of the conflict is clear. If the received wisdom were correct a road carrying business like that operated by James Pickford in the mid-eighteenth century could not have existed. The fact that it did and that there were plenty of other similar enterprises throughout the country fundamentally weakens the traditional view. The mistake was made not because the existence of such people was deliberately ignored, but rather because historians allowed themselves to be misled by the constant flow of complaints by contemporaries about the state of the country's roads. Travellers like Arthur Young castigated certain stretches of road in highly quotable prose, and what he damned in particular was interpreted as the reality in general by the clinching argument that the record of turnpike trusts returning to Parliament for extensions of their powers was an unbroken catalogue of admitted failure to carry out their appointed task. Roads were considered to have been in such an appalling state that anything but the most limited and primitive provision of road transport was inconceivable. Some writers took a different line and indeed demonstrated the pitfalls of the literary evidence, but little notice was taken of them.(3)

Recent research has vindicated this minority view.(4) The Webbs' belief, which so many writers slavishly followed, that turnpikes were ‘scattered' and 'unconnected', and of little importance until towards the end of the eighteenth century, has been entirely discredited. In fact there was a discernible, logical pattern to their development from the start, one which closely followed the transport needs of the contemporary economy. Turnpikes were set up because a growing volume of traffic was causing such destruction to the roads that the normal means of repair could no longer cope. [See Raistrick; ‘Two Centuries of Industrial; Welfare’ (ibid) page 88/89 for accounts of the contributions made by the Quaker Lead Company not only to the turnpike trusts but also to parishes for bridge repairs and in support of relief committees in 1816 providing labour for the unemployed on road maintenance. They recognised that even though they had the right to use the King’s highway, they had a moral duty, as heavy traffic, to subsidise maintenance. In one of his reports to the directors, Stagg, the mining agent said that though the company would never see a direct return on this investment they would derive an ample return in other ways….] Historians have been right to emphasise the poor condition of England's roads in the eighteenth century and before; the error was to miss the cause and therefore draw the wrong inference. Improvement was undoubtedly slow. Complaints continued, as expenditure on road renewal inevitably lagged behind the pressure of traffic. But the central assumption from which the neglect of road transport has stemmed was clearly wrong.

[I can remember sitting in a class at school and being lectured on the abysmal state of the roads before the 18^th century. I asked how the roads had got into such a bad state and was told it was because no repairs had been done since the Romans left…. I didn’t know enough to question this answer at the time but the more I studied the growth of trade and industry the clearer it became that it was the traffic that had destroyed the roads. It’s so nice to see Dr Turnbull demolishing the old theory so comprehensively.]

Having cleared that obstacle it is possible to concentrate on the road transport industry itself. The typical supplier of road transport services was the common carrier. He, too, has been neglected, partly because of preconceived ideas, perhaps more because the available records from which his trade might be studied are very sparse indeed. He appears as an incidental figure in many places, but there is little of substance. However, as the road carrying trade forms the background to this study it is necessary to try and pull the threads together.

GROWTH AND ORGANISATION OF THE ROAD CARRYING TRADE

It is worth recalling that cartage services were part of the manorial obligations. The impression frequently given that there was little or no demand for road transport from the mediaeval economy and society is certainly misleading. The manorial surplus had to be gathered in. The Crown, the courts, barons, bishops and scholars all had occasion to travel and transport their households with them. Baggage trains accompanied civil as well as war-time manoeuvres.(5) More important, the growth of towns, trade and industry depended on adequate transport. Imported produce and industrial raw materials had to be distributed inland, the output of the wool and woollen cloth industries conveyed to London and other ports, towns and cities supplied with their various needs. Most traffic went by water. Of that which passed by road, the majority was local, conveyed by whatever horses and carts were available. But where road traffic was sufficiently extensive and drawn from sufficiently long distances, more than casual provision was required. It was here that the full-time professionals, the common carriers, appeared.

There were several strands to the development of the road carrying trade, and reference to Thomas Censor of Cat Street, Oxford, so far the first man to have been identified as a common carrier, illustrates one of them. In the 1390s Censor provided regular carriage between Oxford and London, Winchester and Newcastle.(6) No doubt it was his good fortune to be mentioned in records which have happened to survive, but the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, drawing scholars, pupils and supplies from all over the country, were in any case likely to require regular provision of transport services.

Other carriers served industry and trade. Brief case studies of the trade of Bristol and Southampton in the fifteenth century illustrate their role.(7) Both places were major centres of overseas trade, drawing exportable goods from their hinterland and distributing imports through it. Both were also in touch, by road, with places far distant. In the 1440s Southampton exchanged traffic with London, chiefly by water, but goods were also regularly dispatched by road. Traffic also went by road to Bristol, Gloucester and Coventry, and even as far north as Kendal. Indeed later on in the century a well-organised trade in cloth existed between Kendal and Southampton, despite the enormous distance, as packhorse men travelled south with the famous 'Kendal greens' for export. In like fashion Bristol supported a steady flow of road traffic with London and also drew in supplies from Buckingham, Coventry and Shrewsbury. By the end of the fifteenth century, the economy was sufficiently diverse and industry sufficiently dispersed for the exchange of products across long distances to be a normal occurrence. Perhaps Bristol and Southampton, among the leading ports after London, might be regarded as having been in the way of special cases, but the frequent testamentary bequests during that period for the upkeep of highways and bridges is clear evidence of the importance attached to good roads by the merchant community.'

The strongest flows of road traffic from Bristol and Southampton were to London. This was likely to have been the case generally. As capital city and principal port, London dominated the rest of the country. It was the largest centre of population, income and consumption and to it were sucked in great quantities of foodstuffs and manufactures from all parts. As its influence strengthened and widened from the mid sixteenth century, the movement of goods to London became the most prominent flow of traffic in the country.(9) Again much went by water, but a lot arrived by land, borne by carriers' wagons and horses. The London carrier became an increasingly familiar sight travelling the country's roads. His services had become sufficiently important by the early seventeenth century for John Taylor, the so-called water poet, to draw up a guide to them. His ‘Carriers Cosmographie’, published in 1637, contains the first systematic survey of road carrying and provides the starting point for any close examination of the trade.

It is a deceptively simple source. Taylor lists the places served by the carriers, the inns they used, the frequency of service and sometimes the carrier's name. The entry for Gloucester, for example, reads as follows:

‘The Carriers of Glocester doe come to the Saracens head without Newgate, on fridaies. The Carriers of Gloster doe lodge at the Saracens head in carter lane, they come on fridaies. Clothiers doe come every weeke out of divers parts of Glocestershire to the Saracens head in friday street. The Waines or Waggons doe come every weeke from sundry places in Glocestershire, and are to bee had at the Swan neere holborne Bridge. There are Carriers of some places in Glocestershire that doe lodge at the mer-maide in Carterlane.’

How is such evidence to be employed? In particular can it be pressed, though doubtless Taylor would have been horrified at the prospect, to yield some sort of statistic which might be used to measure the dimensions of the trade? Various approaches have been tried. Some have counted the number of places or number of carriers mentioned, but the most successful is that which attempts to estimate the level of services implicit in the data.(10) By plotting the carrier routes and their operators, it is possible to eliminate duplicate entries and so isolate place-specific services. The quoted example for Gloucester, a count of one if place names were recorded, yields a total of four carrier services per week to the city and the county, five if the clothiers are included. Should any of these appear to be also recorded for some intermediate place they could not, of course, be included again. Treating all the entries in this way it is possible to build up a cumulative measure for the whole London-based trade and ultimately, by analysing successive similar lists, an index of the growth of the trade over time.

In 1637 there were about 270 road carrier services per week from London. The majority, about 55 per cent, were concentrated within the counties ringing London, but others penetrated far from the capital. Only seven counties, Cornwall, Cumberland, Durham, Middlesex, Northumberland, Rutland and Westmorland, were deficient in recorded carrier services, but of these both Middlesex and Rutland were crossed by carriers to other counties. Middlesex was in any case well enough provided for by water. The subsequent trend of services is reasonably clear, at least in outline. The output of services in the London trade had more than doubled by the beginning of the eighteenth century and more than doubled again by the early years of the nineteenth.(11) It broadly kept in step with the expansion of the economy, but tended to run ahead when the outbreak of war threatened coastal shipping and drove traffic inland for security. The construction of canals weakened this influence, but the vigorous expansion of the economy from the last couple of decades of the eighteenth century combined with the great duration of the wars against France enabled the trade to hold its place. By then, of course, the arms of the London carrying trade reached out to all parts of the country.

The London carriers took the limelight, but beneath them was a supporting cast of local and provincial carriers. Taylor had indicated that the services he described rested on similar operators for local deliveries but did not spell out any of the details. It becomes possible to do this only from about the mid-eighteenth century with the publication of local newspapers and directories. Carriers frequently advertised their services in the columns of the provincial press and compilers of directories usually included as comprehensive a list as they could obtain of the local carrier services. These sources reveal a fuller picture of the carrying trade. The London carriers still emerge as the most important single group but their share of total services in any one place was quite small, rarely more than 10 per cent. Most services were local, terminating within a radius of 25 to 30 miles, while a smaller group catered for more distant traffic, to major provincial centres. The whole trade, therefore, fell into a broadly threefold structure of London, or national, provincial and local layers of carrier services.(12)

Did these three groups remain distinct or did they link up to form a recognisably integrated transport system? If so, how? And how did a potential customer with a parcel to send actually proceed ? Carriers were generally identified with particular routes and particular inns. As in the coaching trade, road goods transport was organised in close association with inns and innkeepers. Inns provided feed and stabling for the horses, a place to park the wagon while loading and unloading, even a warehouse in the inn courtyard in which to store goods; the innkeeper provided information about the carrier's movements, kept an eye on parcels left for the carrier to collect and an account of payments made, and performed various other duties. A visit to the carrying inns would, therefore, elicit the required information as to the appropriate carrier to employ and his day of departure. In the provinces several inns might have had to be visited before the right one was found but in London the carrying inns were already highly specialised by the early eighteenth century. Carriers from a particular region tended to patronise the same group of inns, usually located closely together, say in the Strand or Holborn or Cheapside, so that in the absence of a carrier guide, information about particular services could be quickly obtained by a visit to the appropriate part of the City.(13)

Inns were also the points of contact between carriers, the places at which traffic was exchanged. This was where the different groups of carrier services came together. London carriers stopped off at various inns on their journey and there picked up traffic brought in from outlying districts, or from provincial routes. Northampton was a frequent point of interchange for traffic directed to scholars at Oxford and brought south by the Kendal carriers to London. Provincial and local services tended to be more detached, but there was always a handful of carriers whose services tied the pieces together. In the 1750s the Wigan-based carrier Ralph Jolly travelled between Liverpool and Leeds, and at the latter place handed goods on to the York carriers. James Lea, on the other hand, travelled only between Liverpool and Warrington, but at Warrington he exchanged traffic with a number of carriers from other parts of Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the midlands.(14) The same pattern was repeated in all major provincial centres. As a result traffic could be passed on, stage by stage, from village to London carrier or through the provincial system. A parcel from a Devonshire village, say, for Newcastle-upon-Tyne might be taken to Exeter and either sent on in several stages by way of Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds, or, probably more likely, be conveyed in two stages by London carriers. If any obstacle interposed, it would be one of price rather than distance.

There is no doubt that there was by the mid-eighteenth century a well-organised and effective network of carrier services. Of course traffic went astray sometimes, as it still does. And bad weather interfered with advertised service schedules, especially in winter, again as it still does. But, remembering what happens when a touch of frost jams a few railway points or the occasional bizarre adventures of airline baggage, neither of these should be exaggerated. Business correspondence of the mid- and later eighteenth century make it quite clear that the belief that road transport at the time was at best precarious and gave up entirely in winter is misconceived(15), journeys took longer in winter and prices were increased, but the carrier's wagons kept moving. His service was not cheap, nor was it swift, even by the so-called 'flying' wagons, but it could be relied on. The carrying system rested on two great strengths, its regularity and the fact that it could reach into most parts of the country.

Any town or village could, therefore, 'plug into' the nationwide carrier network, although not all local connections were necessarily made exclusively by carriers. Plenty of other traders had reason to own horses and carts and in addition to supplying their own needs did not pass up the chance of earning some extra income by engaging in a bit of private carriage on the side. Nor was such activity confined to purely local traffic. In the early eighteenth century some Liverpool cheese merchants took their produce to London by wagon expecting to be able to offset part of the cost by bringing back articles for sale at Chester Fair,(16) and it was common for farmers at slack seasons to invade the London routes even over quite long distances from the capital. These all had a part to play in the supply of road transport services, but they did not diminish the carrier's position. They lacked the professional's skilled expertise, a fact recognised by Lord Fitzwilliam, writing from London to his agent in Norfolk. ‘If I had goods ready to send downe,’ he wrote, ‘I should chuse rather to send them by the Carrier, than any Country Waggon, for they know how to packe up Goods safe to deliver them carefully, than any country man can.(17)

Apart from the skills and experience of the professional, what distinguished the carrier from those who engaged casually in the supply of road transport services ? In many cases the answer would probably be, not very much. The majority of carriers travelled no more than 2o to 30 miles, roughly a day's journey. With no more than a single wagon and team of horses and a minimum of organisation, the carrier was in business. He set off from his inn one day, stayed overnight at another inn at his destination, and returned the following day. He needed some capital, for wagons and horses were not cheap, but no fixed premises and no assistance beyond the usual services of an innkeeper. This applied as much to the majority of London carriers as to local carriers in the provinces. Although the character of the London trade was far more significant, many London carriers travelled no greater distances. Their scale and basis of operations were, therefore, much the same. Abraham Voll, a Colchester-to-London carrier in the early eighteenth century, drove his own wagon and travelled a round trip to and from London every two days. His personal wealth at his death, other than his wagon and horses, was only £120. Although not many such men have been identified, he was probably reasonably typical of this category of London carrier, ranked, in social status,alongside the artisan or husbandman.(28)

The major provincial carriers to London were in a separate class altogether. In carrying, scale of organisation and capital needs were determined by two factors, distance and frequency of service. The greater the distance, the more wagons were required to maintain a given level of service. Over distances of 100 miles or more, several wagons were required to provide, say, a weekly service. To set up such a service was, therefore, a lot more costly than for short-haul routes, and, of course, potentially raised much greater difficulties of control and organisation. One solution, which preserved the small-scale operations typical of most carriers, was for several individuals, each of whom worked his own wagon, to co-ordinate their activities so that together they provided a more regular and more frequent service than each could have done alone. It follows that when an individual carrier, or a couple in partnership, ran an equivalent provincial service, owning and operating several wagons and employing men to work them, these were considerably larger business concerns. The men behind such enterprises, therefore, and there were quite a lot of them, rank as the foremost members of the carrying trade, to be compared in the social hierarchy with middle-order urban tradesmen or landlords of the larger provincial inns.(19)

Such men were also marked out by the physical size of the stock they employed. Their horses were bigger and stronger than ordinary farm carthorses, able to haul much heavier loads than those occasional interlopers. Their wagons, too, were heftier and more capacious, even before the broad-wheel wagon was adopted by the carriers as their standard vehicle. Contemporary portrayals of carriers' wagons leave an impression of vast, lumbering objects, creaking under the strain of immense loads. The stratagem of Abraham Walker of Leeds may serve as an illustration. He was offered a haystack containing eight common cart-loads at a knock-down price of £2 provided that he removed it immediately and employed no more than three horses in doing so. If he could not meet these terms, the price would be £2o. Walker confounded his challenger, and won the bargain, by calling in the assistance of the London carrier Jackson, three of whose horses harnessed to a broad-wheel wagon easily dealt with the load, ‘tho it seemed like a moving Mountain’. Walker thus outwitted 'the Knowing Ones, who had Bet Two to One against him’.(20)

Presumably the resources needed by the leading provincial carriers were somewhat larger than those of their lesser colleagues, but by how much is not clear. William Bass, later of brewing fame, is said to have got his start as a carrier between Derby and London on the strength of a £500 lottery prize. Another carrier, 'poor Mr. Tooley', managed to lose his fortune of £800, being driven into bankruptcy by a more wealthy carrier. These were substantial sums of money; were they of the scale necessary in order to enter the carrying trade? The evidence is so slender it is difficult to be sure. John Lowden left £6o in his will, dated November 1618, to assist the six poorest carriers between Kendal and Wakefield, and London, provided none were ‘Lancashire men’, but how the gesture is to be interpreted is far from clear.(21) The high entry and death rate of carrying firms implies that capital was not a prohibitive obstacle, but clearly the majority who tried to break into the trade shared Tooley's fate. It seems, though, that the successful provincial carriers could be quite wealthy men.

CONTROL AND REGULATION

The title 'common carrier' denoted a particular status in law.(22) Carriers were included among the so-called common trades, in which the condition of accepting the custom of all-comers was obligatory. The classification was important. Casual or private carriers were left free to set their own terms. The common carriers were bound by strict requirements. All goods offered for towns to which they professed to carry had to be conveyed, and at 'reasonable' rates. They were fully liable in respect of damage or loss, including theft. The only admissible exceptions were acts either of God or of the king's enemies. They were, moreover, denied the normal protection of the law: in any dispute, the carrier was guilty until he proved his innocence. Carriers tried to limit their burden by demanding special rates for valuable items, but customers preferred to hide their valuables in barrels of soap or trunks of clothing in the sure knowledge that should they disappear the carrier had to pay up even though he had known nothing about them. Why such severe obligations were imposed is not really clear. The usual explanation, that otherwise customers would lack the confidence to entrust their goods to the carriers and that ultimately the country's commerce would be threatened, is not very convincing. [K J Bonser {The Drovers. Macmillan and Co, 1970} pp.78/79 describes how the droving trade was used by the government and private landowners to transfer large sums of money such as Ship Money or rents from Wales to London. On page 80 he states; ‘Even if a drover was insolvent, he was not allowed, by an Act of 1706 [6 Anne. Chap. 22, sec. 8, 1706] to be declared bankrupt. This had been passed because dishonest drovers had been in the habit of pretending they had been robbed on the way home, declaring themselves bankrupt, thus seeking to defraud the owners of the beasts they had sold. Could it be similar considerations that had resulted in the imposition of such severe rules on the carriers?]

The carrier had, indeed, good cause to cast a wary eye at the civil authorities, several of whom sought him out for attention or snared him when looking for poachers elsewhere. All the central aspects of his business, the price he charged, the amount he carried, the vehicle and number of horses he employed, came in for some degree of regulation over and above that imposed by the law of common trades.

Control of the carrier started at the local level. Whoever possessed the crucial transport link with London enjoyed a position of considerable potential power and to protect itself from exploitation the merchant community of several towns treated the office as a regulated monopoly. The carriership of Southampton was awarded in 16o8 to John Broadwaye on payment of an entry fine of £10, to be renewed each year, and a promise that any adjustment to his price had to be discussed with and confirmed by the burgesses .(23) They were expressing in practice, in other words, the obligation to carry at 'reasonable rates', thus attaching social constraints to the London carrier's market power. When at the end of the seventeenth century the Justices of the Peace were instructed (24) to settle each year appropriate rates of carriage to London and the major towns in their areas they were only carrying out at a higher level of authority a degree of price control which had long been practised locally. They were not asked, however, to exercise any control over the London carrier's movements which the local authorities had done from time to time, especially to prevent the introduction of plague from the capital.

However, the most pervasive and injurious form of regulation arose out of the flow of legislation from the late seventeenth century which sought to preserve the nation's highways by controlling the traffic which passed over them. The carriers' complaint was not so much against the imposition of maximum weights which they could load on their wagons but about the confused manner in which this objective was approached. To some extent the carriers brought trouble on their own heads since they were adept at devising means of frustrating the intentions of the legislature. In consequence, although at times actual weight limits were imposed, the carriers' tactics resulted in more indirect means of control being adopted. And added to this was a further layer of confusion arising from contrary views of how the basic objective of road preservation should be tackled. As a result just about every conceivable device was tried - the number of horses allowed and their position in the draught, the width of wheels, the alignment of front and rear wheels, flat or rounded rims, the thickness of tyres and the shape of nails by which they were to be fixed to the wheel; followed later by the chopping and changing as to whether broad-wheel wagons should pay toll or not. The upshot was a situation of sheer confusion for those expected to implement Parliament's latest shift of tactics.

But one group gained from the ill wind, the self-appointed posse of informers on which the policing of the legislation rested .(25) They declared open season on carriers confident that, as one of the more notorious of the profession claimed, it was virtually impossible for a wagoner to travel the road without breaking some law. Some read the small print of the Statutes carefully. One Act, 5 Geo. 1, C.12, required tyres to be no less than 2 ½ inches 'when worn'. [width] Did this refer to a new tyre, as the carriers argued, or a worn-out tyre? Informers, supported by the courts. decided the latter interpretation was the correct one, and promptly reached for their callipers. The carrier Thomas Filkin complained bitterly of having to pay £20 to redeem three horses seized by an informer because just one wheel, the rear nearside wheel which took the heaviest pounding, had been found deficient, though it 'wanted scarce the breadth of a barley-corn of its full breadth'. Others ignored the law entirely and openly engaged in a straightforward protection racket. The two leading gangsters, Richard Fielder and John Littlehale, behaved in true mobster fashion, one taking the western and the other the northern road into London and, under the guise of deputy surveyors of the highways, invited 'contribution money' from the passing carriers to purchase freedom from harassment. Littlehale was twice ordered to be arrested by investigating committees of the House of Commons, but apparently on both occasions he disappeared before the Serjeant-at-Arms caught up with him.

On other occasions carriers were innocent victims, or so they claimed, of regulations aimed at other targets. Attempts by aulnagers [Official - examined quality of woollen goods & stamped them with the town seal of approval.] to insist on their rights of search and fine often resulted in raids on carriers' wagons in the belief that merchants with whom they were in conflict were trying to sneak out unstamped cloth in this way. (26) And then there were the commissioners to prevent the export of wool. To stop the illegal export of wool, and hence to protect the native woollen cloth industry, the movement of wool was prohibited during the hours of darkness, and officials were appointed to police the ban. Carriers delayed by a breakdown and getting home after dark were liable to have any wool they were carrying seized, or again simply invited to buy protection from such seizures.(27) Confused by Parliament, harassed by informers and robbed by footpads, it is not surprising that carriers showed a marked tendency to combination between themselves, a reaction as much of self-defence as the pursuit of narrow self-interest of which they were frequently accused.

THE CARRIERS' ROLE

Finally, where did the carrier fit into the contemporary transport scene ? Who bought his services and what sort of traffic did he typically convey ? Only a brief sketch can be given here, sufficient to place the carrier in his proper setting, the wider context of road transport being discussed more fully below (Chapter 4). For the immediate purpose, carrier services may be categorised as being of two main kinds, as a support to passenger travel or as the chosen means of conveyance for a wide range of traffic - agricultural, industrial and personal.

The carrier's wagon was the first step up in convenience from walking, although Smollett's account of Roderick Random's journey from Newcastle to London by this means makes it plain that the degree of comfort provided was pretty limited.(28) Passengers had to find what vantage point they could among the bales and boxes and otherwise generally fend for themselves. Travellers more frequently employed the carrier's wagon to carry their heavy baggage while they themselves travelled by coach or horseback. Lord Irwin and family, for example, journeyed from Leeds to London in November 1740 in their private carriage, while the luggage and some of the servants were dispatched on a wagon specially hired from one of the local carriers.(29) Some carriers would also perform a few favours, take a riding horse down for someone returning from London or keep an avuncular eye on a young gent going off to a fashionable school or university.

After London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were probably the most frequented centres of travel, requiring special provision and a special quality of service. University carriers in fact formed a distinct branch of the trade. In Oxford they were official appointees (tabellarii), and received a monopoly to and from the districts for which they were licensed. The first recorded appointment, in 1553, was that of Robert Towe, as carrier to London. By the 1640s quite a number of the counties of England were similarly provided, especially those to the west and south-west, but also the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Nottingham and Leicester, and the distant counties of Cumberland and Westmorland.(30) The sons of Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, near Kendal, were for many years shepherded to Queens College, Oxford, by successive members of a family of university carriers by the name of Burnyeats. They carried the boys' trunks and boxes of books, and on their regular subsequent visits brought money from their father and a constant flow of letters in each direction. This particular relationship became very close. They were sometimes referred to as 'the carrier', or 'Burnyeats', but more frequently as Peter, Richard or Tom and at times by such fancy titles as 'the trusty Trojan', 'our Cumberland and Westmorland Envoy', or 'His Excellency the Northern Ambassador'.(31) These suggest a degree of familiarity well beyond that of just carrier and customer.

Other carriers provided a continuing, personalised service to a certain clientele, usually customers who could afford to indulge fairly expensive tastes in London and have their purchases brought to them. A second category of goods which the carrier's passengers clambered over included, for example, the game pies, sweetmeats, spices, clothing and a hundred other items transported by several carriers between London and Bolton for the Shuttleworth family from the 158os to the 1620s. Here, again, the carrier became a family assistant, not just an agent of conveyance. The Purefoy family of Shalstone, near Buckingham, employed several London carriers, and had a special contract with one of them, William Eagles. He especially, but the others as well, were expected to do the family shopping in London, pay bills, arrange for the repair of clocks and rings, and get razors sharpened as well as convey goods to and fro.(32)

In the long run, however, the carrier's third role was by far his most important: the conveyance of produce and manufactures between the provinces and London, as well as to and from provincial and local markets. Again the variety of his traffic was infinite, matching that carried by coaster and recorded in the Port Books, but one commodity stands out above all - cloth. All the major textile areas sent cloth to Blackwell Hall in London, to be sold and redistributed internally and exported overseas, and although it is impossible to be exact about the proportions it is quite clear that a good deal was brought in by road, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly by carriers, partly by clothiers themselves or other agents. Other goods included silks, lace, linens, stockings, light leather products and small metalware, the output, that is, of that group of light consumer goods industries which formed such a basic part of England's early industrialisation. In that phase of economic development, the carrier's wagon was of considerable importance.

The Pickfords were common carriers between Manchester and London. The foregoing sketch of the carrying trade to about the middle of the eighteenth century provides a context for their activities even before any personal details are known. The business is immediately placed in the most important segment of the carrying trade, the long-distance trade between London and a major provincial centre. Whether it ranked among the leaders would depend on whether or not it was conducted in partnership with others. It could be expected to trade from inns' transport passengers and goods, work in harmony with fellow carriers, and soon disappear into obscurity. How the business actually fared and how the inland carrying trade developed subsequently form the substance of the chapters which follow.

REFERENCES: CHAPTER I

1 D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1726-7; 4th edn, London: Rivington, 1738), Vol. 1, PP. 339-41.

2 For the most recent interpretation see T. C. Barker and C. I. Savage. An Economic History of Transport in Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1974); J. A. Chartres, Internal Trade in England 1500-1700 (London: Macmillan, 1977); T. S. Willan, The Inland Trade. Studies in English Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976).

3 E. F. Gay, 'Arthur Young on English roads', Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. XLI (1927), PP. 545-SI; H, L. Beales, 'Travel and communications' in A. S. Turbeville (ed.), Johnson's England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), Vol. 1, PP. 125-59.

4 W. Albeit, The Turnpike Road System in England 1663-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); E. Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Academic Press, 1977).

5 G. H. Martin, 'Road travel in the Middle Ages', Journal of Transport History, new series, vol. 111 (1976), pp. 159-78; S. F. Willard, 'The use of carts in the fourteenth century', History, new series, vol. XVII (1932), PP 246-50.

6 J. E. T. Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), Vol. I, PP. 95, 66o.

7 E. M. Carus Wilson, 'The overseas trade of Bristol', in E. Power and M. M. Postan (eds), Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1933), PP. 183-91; O. Coleman (ed.), The Brokage Book of Southampton, 1443-1444, (Southampton, Southampton Records Series, 196o), Vol. 1, p. xxii; B. C. jones, 'Westmorland packhorse men in Southampton', Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series, Vol. LIX (1959), pp. 65-84.

8 B. McClenaghan, The Springs of Lavenham and the Suffolk Cloth Trade in the XV and XVI Centuries (Ipswich: W. E. Harrison, 119241), PP. 46 ff.

9 F. J. Fisher, 'The development of the London food market, 1540-1640', Economic History Review, vol. V (1934-5), PP. 46-64. E. A. Wrigley, 'A simple model of London's importance in changing English society and economy 1650-1750', Past and Present, vol. 37 (1967), PP. 44-70.

10 For an analysis of the use of Taylor and similar later sources see J. A. Chartres, 'Road carrying in England in the seventeenth century: myth and reality', Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. XXX (1977), PP. 73-94

11 Combining Chartres's findings with a similar count from Critchett and Woods, Post Office Annual Directory for 1815 (London: Maiden, 1815).

12 G. L. Turnbull, 'Provincial road carrying in England in the eighteenth century', Journal of Transport History, new series, vol. IV (1977), PP. 17-39. Current research by Dr Chartres and myself will provide a more extensive analysis of the growth and structure of the road carrying trade than it is possible to give here. What follows draws on that work.

J. A. Chartres, 'The capital's provincial eyes: London's inns at the beginning of the eighteenth century', London Journal, vol. 111 (1977), PP. 24-39.

14 The Liverpool Memorandum Book or Gentleman's Merchant's and Tradesman's Daily Pocket Journal for 1753 (?Liverpool: Williamson, 1753).

15 J. de L. Mann (ed.), Documents Illustrating the Wiltshire Textile Trades in the Eighteenth Century (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Records Branch, vol. XIX, 1963); G. Unwin (ed.), Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924); T. S. Willan, An Eighteenth Century Shop-keeper: Abraham Dent of Kirkby Stephen (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1970); out letter books, 1754 onwards, John Wilson & Sons, linen merchants, Leeds City Archives.

16 Cholmondeley Correspondence, c. 1709, Cheshire Record Office.

17 Fitzwilliam Correspondence, Fitzwilliam to Guybon, 1703, Northants. Record Office.

18 K. H. Burley, 'The economic development of Essex in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries' (unpublished PhD thesis, London, 1957), pp. 189, 215-16.

19 J. A. Chartres, 'The place of inns in the commercial life of London and western England, 166o-176o' (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1973).

20 Leeds Intelligencer, 12 August 1760.

21 H. S. Twells, 'Mr Drewry and the Derby wagons', Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Journal, vol. 63 (1942), P. 75; G. Eland (ed.), The Purefoy Letters (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 193 1), P. 290; HMC 13: 10th R IV: Corporation of Kendal, P. 317.

22 A. M. Milne and A. Laing, The Obligation to Carry (London: Institute of Transport, 1956).

23 J. W. Horrocks (ed.), The Assembly Books of Southampton (Southampton Record Society, 1907-24), vol. 1, PP. 70, 94, 101; Vol. Ill, PP. 35, 49, 6o.

24 3 William & Mary, c. 12.

25 The following is based on House of Commons Journal, January-March 1695(6), Vol. XI, PP. 397, 434, 511; March-May 1699, vol. XII, pp. 604, 682-3; February 1707(8), vol. XV, PP. 531, 55 1, 562-3; December 1719-December 1721, Vol. XIX, PP. 210-11, 233, 68o, 685, 689.

26 For one of many examples see H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), p. 198.

27 House of Commons Journal, May 1701-March 1702, esp. pp. 501-570, 703, 783-4.

28 T. Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748; 1824 edn, London: Rivington).

29 Templenewsam Collection, TN/EA 12/15, Leeds City Archives.

3o A. Clark (ed.), Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford Historical Society, vol. X, 1887), PP. 315-20.

31 J. R. Magrath (ed.), The Flemings in Oxford (Oxford Historical Society, vols XLIV, LXII, LXXIX, 1903-24). I owe this reference to Professor T. S. Willan.

32 J. Harland (ed.), The Shuttleworth House and Farm Accounts (Chetham Society, vols XXXV, XLI, XLIII, XLVI, 1856-8); Eland, Purefoy Letters.

PACKHORSE WAGGON AND POST. LAND CARRIAGE AND COMMUNICATION UNDER THE TUDORS AND STUARTS. J Crofts. 1967. Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 7100 4566 2.

Packhorse and Waggon

When a load of coals was brought in a cart from East Kilbride to Cambuslang (near Glasgow) in 1723 'crowds of people went out to see the wonderful machine; they looked with surprise and returned with astonishment'.'

Such a scene of excitement could hardly have occurred in southern England at any date since the Norman Conquest. Under the manorial system 'Carrying services' by cart or wain were common, and by the time of the Tudors, the Court, when on progress, was able to rely upon '400 carewares' requisitioned 'out of the countries adjoining'; whereby, says Harrison, 'the ancient use of somers and sumpter horses is in a manner utterly relinquished, which causeth the trains of our Princes in their progresses to shew far less than those of the Kings of other nations'.(2)

But although a 'strong axle treed cart that is clouted and shod' had become standard farm equipment in Tusser's East Anglia, it was not such a common possession elsewhere. In 1607 the parish of Weybridge, for instance, begs to be excused from supplying transport for the Queen's journey to Oatlands on the ground that they have 'but one cart in the parish', (3) and in many parts of Tudor and Stuart England wheeled vehicles were hardly used at all. A traveller of 1637 found Cornwall entirely destitute of 'ought that is moved upon wheels. All carriage is layde upon horses backs, either in trusses or on crookes, or in panniers or peds, which they call pots'. (1)

1 H. Graham. The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 1906, p. 167.

2 A Description of England, 1577, Bk. III, 8.

3 Petition quoted in Archaeologia, Vol. VIII, p. 239.

 

Most of Devonshire was in the same condition. Although Plymouth was an important naval base, Raleigh reported in 1593 that ordnance could not be conveyed thither by land: 'the passages will not give leave'.(2) The roads could be described as ‘mere gullies, worn by torrents in the rocks, which appeared in steps as stair cases with fragments lying loose in the indentures'. Celia Fiennes describes a special kind of narrow waggon which was used in 'the opener wayes' on the eastern border of the county, and this type of vehicle may have been the 'hock cart' of Herrick's poem; but almost all farm work was done by packhorse. Even a century later, when many of the roads had been made fit for wheels, the old methods persisted. 'I have seen building stone', says the agriculturist W. Marshall in 1796, ‘carried on horseback along the finest road in the Kingdom, close by the side of which they were raised, and conveyed to a neighbouring town through which the road passed'.(3)

Similar conditions prevailed in Northumberland- ('not a cart in the country', says a traveller of 1749) (4)-and, as one might expect, in the Lake District. Celia Fiennes found Kendal full of pack-horses, and the only carts that she saw in use about Windermere were small tumbrils with wheels fixed to a revolving axle. 'The reason is plaine', she says, 'from the narrowness of the Lanes: where is good lands they will lose as little as they can, and where it's hilly and stony no other Carriages can pass'.(5)

When Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal tries to arrange for a carrier between Kendal and Whitehaven in 1685, there is no talk of waggons. 'The Kendal carriers bring their packs into Kendal about noon every Wednesday', he writes, 'and set forward for London the Monday following'. He thinks it will be impossible to find a man who will do the journey to Whitehaven and back between Wednesday and Monday; but if between Wednesday and the following Monday week would be good enough he would recommend 'Charles Udal of this town, who hath a good set of horses (with bells &c)'.(1) This was of course exceptionally hilly and difficult country, but packhorse traffic was the rule also in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Until 1760 there was no road for wheeled traffic from Liverpool to Manchester, and the best that the local carrier could offer for the conveyance of invalids or expectant mothers was an easy pad nag.(2) In 1689 a runaway prentice boy, desperately ill, was brought back on a horse from Dewsbury to Huddersfield through bitter March hail storms, arriving collapsed and dead in the saddle, and with the side of his face beaten to pulp on the saddle bow. Although he had received some kindness and attention from compassionate villagers on the road, nobody seems to have thought of putting him in a cart. If carts existed in that bleak country side, they had presumably been laid up for the winter, and were not to be turned out for runaway prentice boys.(3)

1 A Journey into the West of England, 1637, Harleian MS. 6494.

2 Worth. A History of Plymouth, 1890, p. 335.

3 W. Marshall. Rural Economy of the West of England, 1796.I, 294.

4 Quoted by Jackman, p. 142.

5 Through England on a side saddle (The diary of Celia Fiennes, ed. Griffiths, 1888), p. 160.

 

In 1718 the Derbyshire justices consider the dangerous condition of Alport ford, on the road between Derby and Stockport. 'Carriers with loaden horses and passengers cannot pass the said ford without great danger of being cast away'. They decide that a horse bridge is urgently needed for the 'great gangs of London Carriers' horses, as well as great drifts of Malt Horses and other daily carriers and passengers'.(4) There is no word of a bridge for wheeled traffic, evidently because the need of it was not felt. Until at least the middle of the eighteenth century all goods sent from Derby or Nottingham to Manchester or to London, all the Yorkshire clothing products, and all the Manchester and Coventry wares were transported on horseback, ‘not to London only', says Defoe, 'but to all parts of England, . . . the Manchester men being, saving their wealth, a kind of Pedlars, who carry their goods themselves to the country shop keepers everywhere, as do now the Yorkshire and Coventry manufacturers also'.(5)

1 M. L. Armitt. Rydal, 1916, p. 453.

2 Quoted by Jackman, p. 147.

3 Depositions from York Castle (Surtees Soc., 1861), item cclxii.

4 J. Cox. Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals.

5 The Complete English Tradesman, 1725, Ch. XXVI.

This does not mean that in these northern districts wheeled traffic might not sometimes be used in an emergency. From time to time Lord Howard of Naworth had heavy goods conveyed from London to Newcastle by sea, thence to Newburn by wherry, and from there to Naworth by waggon along 'that hideous road along the Tyne' which in 1680 was still ‘for the so many and sharp Turnings and perpetual precipices, for a Coach (not sustained by main Force) impassable'.(1)

Similar haulage, via Barnard Castle and Stainmore, was undertaken by the German miners who worked the Keswick copper mines from 1569 onwards; and on one occasion when their director, Daniel Hochstetter, brought his wife and five children over from Germany in 1571, the party actually travelled the whole way to Keswick in a vehicle, especially equipped with cushions and with 'chains to stretch under it' by the carrier, at a cost of £ 10.

But these were really minor feats of engineering, too expensive for ordinary use. When Hochstetter and his wife rode on horseback from London to Keswick the carrier's charges were only £2 6s. 8d., and the same contrast is to be seen in the freight charges for goods. Dutch chairs, warming pans, groceries, thin oven sheeting-anything that could be carried on a horse's back -came all the way from London to Keswick at a penny a pound. But when heavy machinery or casks of wine had to be carted from Newcastle over Stainmore (less than half the distance) the cost worked out at about fourpence a pound, exclusive of tolls and other incidental expenses.(2) Theoretically waggon traffic should have been cheaper, because a horse can draw a much heavier load than it can carry. But only over a good road: not over Stainmore in Elizabeth's time. Until the roads could be made fit for wheels packhorse traffic was actually less costly. In 1584 Sir Ralph Sadler points out that various household things required for the Queen of Scots at Tutbury 'maye be brought downe on horsback by the caryers of Derby and of this town for less than id a lib. And so may the plate be also brought in a tronk, well malid in canvas, much better chepe than by cart'. (3) As soon as the Turnpike Acts had begun to make some of the roads

1 The Household Books etc of Lord William Howard of Naworth (Surtees Soc., 1874); Roger North, The Life of Francis North Baron of Guildford, 1742, p. 139.

2 Accounts of the Augsburg company printed in W. Collinwood's Elizabethan Keswick, 1912. (Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian Soc., Tract S.)

3 Sadler III, 2()-1.

fit for wheels the rate for carriage by pack was fixed by the justices at so much a hundredweight higher than the rate for carriage by waggon; but even then the packhorse was found cheaper for some purposes because it moved very much faster. There were, indeed, some exceptions to this. The heavy malt horses from Essex which plodded solemnly into London in the early morning, with the malt men sprawling asleep on the sacks, could be taken by Dekker as an emblem of sloth. But the northern pack trains evidently went at a lively pace. Nashe, speaking of the secret bribes accepted by unjust judges, says that 'by night corrupt gifts and rewards rush in at their gates in whole Armies, like northern carriers coming to their inn'.' Especially rapid pack trains seem to have been used, as one might expect, in the fish trade. Defoe says that the Workington men 'carry salmon, fresh as they take them, up to London upon Horses which, changing often, go night and day without intermission, and, as they say, outgo the Post, for that the fish come very sweet and good to London, where the extraordinary price they yield, from 2s. 6d. to 4s. per lb., pays very well for the carriage. They do the same from Carlisle'. This was in the early eighteenth century; but similar fish trains were running from Rye in 1608, from Lyme Regis at about the same date, from Newcastle in 1592, and probably much earlier from other places. (2) Their effect is to be seen in the rapidly falling market for fresh water fish. It is true that in the seventeenth century London fishmongers were still prepared to make a bid for the carp in a gentleman's ponds. (3) But a handsome carp of eighteen inches, which had been worth 4s. in the reign of Henry VIII, could command a price of only is. 4d. in 1581. For the carp, which is a bony and bothersome table fish, (4) had owed its great prestige in earlier days largely to the fact that it could be kept alive for days and even weeks in a hamper of wet straw, and could thus be delivered fresh at a great distance by the simplest and slowest form of

transport. Now the trotting pack-horses were making sea fish more readily available, and in many an ancient fish pond the venerable carp were left to slumber in their medieval mud. Similar fish trains were used by the fish-rippers of Calais and Dieppe, who maintained a rapid service to Paris, and it was made a ground of complaint against the Postmaster for Foreign Parts in 1613 that he had allowed official dispatches to be carried by this means, so that 'it is grow'en a by word in France that the fishe Rippers of France, who often bring packetts to Diepe, are the King of Englands Messengers'.'

1 Thomas Dekker. The Seven Deadly Sins of London, 1608; Thomas Nashe. Works, ed. McKerrow, I, 285.

2 Defoe. A Tour of Great Britain, 1724; H.M. Com. Report, III, p. 309. S. Webb. The King's Highway, p. 77; Dekker. Lanthorne and Candlelight, 1608, Ch. VIII.

3 Covenants concluded and Made by the Officers of the Greencloth with Robert Parker and George Hill, Yeomen Purveyors of Fresh water Fish, 1543; The Losely Manuscripts, ed. Kemp, 1836, p. 276 (Letter from Henry Sledd). And see Note 01.

4 See Note 02.

 There was therefore a good deal to be said for the packhorse even where waggons could have been used, and once accepted as a convenient means of transport it was likely to become permanent for a curious reason. It had been found that in a difficult country of steep hills and boggy valleys the ploughing and heavy hauling was best done by oxen. 'In stiff pulls of every kind, most especially in going up steep hills', writes the agriculturist Marshall in 1796, 'a pair of oxen are considered a sheet anchor. Horses, it is argued, are fearful and soon lost their feet in a slippery road; while oxen, where they are unable to proceed, will always stand their ground. Indeed oxen seem to be considered as essentially necessary in an awkward hilly country. (2) A very similar opinion was expressed by the Australian 'bullocky' quoted by C. E. Bean:

'In a hole gimme the bullocks. A 'orse is good to go when he's at it, but he hasn't got the heart. If 'orses get fixed for twenty minutes they're punctured. They won't pull any more, however long you stay there. But bullocks-they'll go back nex' day and pull the same as ever. (3)

As a result of this contrast in animal psychology the ploughing and heavy hauling in the difficult district of the north and west had, from time immemorial, been done chiefly by oxen, and this had had its effect upon the roads. An ox's hoof splays slightly as it is thrust into the mud, and contracts as it is withdrawn, thus enabling the animal to keep going over soft ground in which a horse would soon be bogged. Hence it had been a common

1 Petition of Henry Huntley, S.P. 14, LIV. 51.

2 W. Marshall. Rural Economy of Yorkshire, 1788, 1, 263.

3 C. E. Bean. On the Wool Track, 1916, Ch. XX.

practice in these districts to leave the haulage way soft, and make a narrow causeway alongside it for the pack-horses. And once this had been done it was not easy to alter. A causeway was much cheaper and easier to keep in repair than a full width road, and the parish concerned could always plead that it was responsible only for a 'pack and prime way', as it was called: not for a waggon road.' Thus a vicious circle was established. They made a causeway because they had left the road soft, and they continued to leave the road soft because they had made a causeway. In this way packhorse traffic tended to perpetuate itself, and these narrow causeways spread everywhere, near York, Skipton, Preston, Wigan, over Blackstone Edge, near Halifax, in Shropshire and Cheshire, as well as in the southwest about Exeter and Ashburton. A company of travellers in 1739 is described as riding the whole way from Glasgow to Grantham on these narrow pack and prime ways. (2)

In the southern and south-eastern counties (except perhaps in Sussex) the traffic presented a different appearance. It is true that here too the packhorse was frequently used, and it is probable that at the beginning of the sixteenth century it was still the chief means of transport. The men who carried for the Pastons in Suffolk, for the Lestranges in Norfolk and for the Stonors in Oxfordshire were all apparently packmen or 'pedders', and so, it may be noted, was the typical carrier as he appears in Elizabethan fiction: 'Derick, Goodman Hobling's man of Kent', who figures in The famous Victories of Henry V, and the Rochester carriers in Shakespeare's Henry IV. But there can be no doubt that by the middle of the century waggon traffic was well established in these districts, and that it was rapidly increasing.

Stow gives 1564 as the year when 'began long waggons to come in use, such as now com to London from Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, Gloucester &c with passengers and commodities' (3), and his rough indication of the area served by these heavy wheeled vehicles can be corroborated from other sources. When the proclamation against the use of four wheeled waggons was issued in 1618, it was the carriers of Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire who

S. Webb. The King's Highway, p. 65.

2 H. Graham. The Social Life of Scotland, p. 44.

3 Stow. Annales.

joined in signing a petition against it, and those who were charged at Quarter Sessions with infringing the new regulation all belonged to the same or contiguous counties.(1) In Taylor's ‘Carrier's Cosmography 1637’ and ‘A Direction for the English Traveller 1643’ waggons or coaches are noted as coming to London from towns in Essex, Suffolk, Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

It would appear therefore that a line drawn across the map from the Wash to Gloucester, and thence curving southward to Weymouth, would include within its arc all the districts where a heavy wheeled traffic was well established in the early seventeenth century; and it may be worth noting that this area corresponds almost exactly with that in which, as N. Gras has shown,(2) corn was cheapest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One may perhaps guess that it was the problem of marketing a large surplus that had induced the south eastern farmer to set up what, on tolerable roads at least, is the more economical means of transport. In the north and west where crops were comparatively light, and easily disposed of in the local markets, there had perhaps never been the same inducement to set up a wheeled traffic, even where roads would have permitted it, while the greater mobility and adaptability of the packhorse made it far more suitable for dealing with the small consignments and scattered operations of the northern wool and cloth trade.(3)

1 H.M. Com. (Var. Col., Vol. IV).

2 N. Gras. The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 1915.

3 H. Heaton. The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 1920, p. 200.

[SCG note. This is the overall description of the carrying trade in the first chapter. The subsequent chapters are equally informative and well-referenced. This is probably the best overall book on the subject.]

THE RISE AND RISE OF ROAD TRANSPORT. 1700-1990. By Theo Barker and Dorian Gerhold. CUP. 1993. ISBN 0 521 55773 9.

This is one of the New Studies in Economic and Social History and is heavy on facts and tables. The introduction is a concise description of the historian’s neglect of road transport and the reasons why this view has changed.

Historians' neglect of road transport

Until recently the growth of Britain's road transport has been relatively neglected by historians. Even the attention it did receive was largely concentrated on turnpikes, road building and the improvement of road surfaces rather than upon what really mattered: the growing volume of traffic of various sorts which travelled along the roads. Part of the problem has been the relative scarcity of historical evidence, especially in comparison with canals and railways. Turnpike trusts have left plenty of records, but they rarely provide much information about traffic, and are often uninformative even about how the trusts improved their roads. Moreover, whereas a new canal or railway was an obvious physical development which often gave rise to identifiable changes in patterns of transport and economic activity, this was rarely the case with road improvements. Again, canals and railways, even when no longer in use, have left more visible evidence than roads and road services; and the peace of the canal towpath and the excitement of steam have attracted enthusiasts and given rise to societies and periodicals which have fostered research and a flood of publications. Road transport, by contrast, attracts few devotees and is associated all too often nowadays with frustrating traffic jams, dangerous pollution and deadly accidents.

The problem of sources has also affected the study of internal trade in general. Chartres showed in an earlier contribution to this series, Internal Trade in England, 1500-1700 (1977), that overseas trade had received more than its fair share of attention from historians because it was recorded by customs officials, even though the poorly documented (and therefore less studied) inland trade in fact involved much greater volumes of goods. We shall argue that road transport in particular has been underestimated for much of its history. Underestimation applies to periods both before and after our starting date of 1700, for even as early as the fifteenth century there is evidence of considerable traffic by wheeled vehicle. Olive Coleman used the brokage books of Southampton to show that carts were heading in most directions from that port in 1443-4, with no fewer than 535 journeys being made to London alone in that year, and Harrison has demonstrated the large number and high quality of the bridges existing as early as 1530, the great majority of them being wide enough for carts (D. F. Harrison).

There has been general agreement that road transport improved in the half century or so before the coming of railways; but even in that period it is the increasingly fast and frequent stage coaches with their relays of horses which have caught the attention of historians, rather than the less spectacular and ungainly stage waggons and the great variety and quantity of goods they carried. Before that period it has often been assumed that the roads were in so bad a state that road transport was necessarily unreliable and expensive. The most influential view was for a long time that of the Webbs. They argued not only that the parish roads were ill maintained because of their dependence on ineffective statute labour, but also that turnpike roads, created piecemeal from the late seventeenth century onwards, formed an unsatisfactory system which was of limited value to through traffic, since stretches of turnpike were separated by miles of unimproved track: 'It took, in fact, practically a whole century of disconnected effort before even such national arteries of communication as the Great North Road from London to Edinburgh, the Irish road from London to Holyhead, or the Great Western Road from London to Exeter came, for the whole of their lengths, under the administration of Turnpike Trusts' (S. & B. Webb, 125).

Other scholars, it is true, were less emphatic. Jackman, who made the most extensive study of both the printed and manuscript sources for his massive work published in 1916, realised that not all contemporary comment on England's roads was unfavourable, even before 1750. On the question of whether the roads were good or bad, he concluded that 'amidst the mass of conflicting testimony, it is extremely difficult to obtain a satisfactory answer to this question' (Jackman, 85). He also provided much evidence on road transport services and the ways they improved, such as the increased speed of coaches between 1750 and 1830. The several works on inland transport which appeared between 1959 and 1974 also stressed the improvement in road transport after about 1750 (Barker & Savage; Dyos & Aldcroft; Bagwell).

There was no denying, however, the much higher cost of road transport compared with water transport, and from this it was a short step to assigning to road transport an inferior role. As Dyos and Aldcroft put it in 1969, 'the chief highway of the English during the turnpike era was not the road at all but navigable water' . Mathias, in The First Industrial Nation (1983 edn), concurred: 'However good the road system, given the economics of freight transport by horse and wagon, the canals were the only medium which could sustain the impact of industrialization and urbanization before the railways', although he added that 'speed and regularity perhaps counted for more in the calculations of customers and these advantages are more difficult to quantify'. It is precisely by emphasising the importance customers attached to speed and regularity that subsequent writers have come to challenge these earlier views.

Even when the steam railway appeared, it would be wrong to assume that horse-drawn transport for either passengers or goods was driven off the roads. 'The iron road took time to reach many parts of the country and during that time it generated much new traffic, not least in the growing towns. 'There were many more horses - perhaps three times as many - harnessed to vehicles on Britain's roads in the heyday of railways in 1900 than there had been when the first inter-city line opened in 1830 (Thompson). After 1900, when road transport itself came to be mechanised and the faithful but costly horse at last departed from most of Britain's roads, historians have tended to study the new motor transport from the point of view of its effects upon the old railway (Dyos & Aldcroft; Bagwell). There has been little consideration of mechanised road transport's spectacular growth since 1950. Nobody in the last decade of the twentieth century can doubt its great significance. Our intention is to show that it has been of greater importance than is usually realised ever since 1700, if not considerably earlier.

NEW RESEARCH ON ROADS AND ROAD TRAFFIC BEFORE THE RAILWAYS

Revision of the earlier, disparaging view of road transport started with Albert's research on turnpike trusts, published in 1972, quickly followed by that of Pawson in 1977. Albert showed that, contrary to the Webbs' conclusions, turnpikes formed a connected system of improved roads over long distances, particularly on routes to and from London, much earlier than had been supposed. By 1750 the turnpiking of the seven main roads out of London, which opened out into thirteen major trunk routes, had been largely completed to places as far away as Berwick, Manchester, Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Bristol, Portsmouth and Harwich (Albert, 31-43).

Pawson (1977) sought to trace not only the direct effects of turnpikes on road transport, but also their indirect effects upon the economy. Other historians have demonstrated the sheer quantity of freight services and the rate at which their number increased. The two complementary approaches here have been. on the one hand, the counting of public, scheduled services, notably the work of Chartres. Turnbull. and Gerhold on urban, and particularly London, directories (Chartres, 1977; Aldcroft & Freeman, Ch. 3.3 Gerhold, 1988), and, on the other hand, the gathering together of all available evidence, mostly non-quantitative, for the traffic of a particular region, exemplified by Hey's work on Derbyshire and south Yorkshire. The role and importance of road transport have also been studied through the records of businesses which used it (Freeman, 1980; Turnbull, 1982), and in two cases the records of road haulage companies (Turnbull, 1979; Gerhold, 1993a).

In general, this recent research, with the notable exception of Hey's work, has concentrated upon public services following fixed routes on specified days and at regular times by common carrier or stage coach. Specially agreed or occasional consignments of goods and passenger travel by private vehicle or horse are much more difficult to investigate, and await further study. We concentrate here upon goods transport. The importance of coach traffic, though inadequately researched so far, has never been in doubt and does not, therefore, require so much discussion.

The picture that emerges is complicated, as we shall see. Freight charges by road were certainly higher than those by water, although water transport involved additional costs such as wharf dues, and sometimes insurance, which narrowed the gap. For example, Jackman found that 'the cost of canal carriage normally did not exceed one-half, and in most cases was from one-fourth to one third, of the cost of land carriage' (Jackman, 449). However, reasonably direct water transport was often not available, especially for short journeys. Even more important, goods transport by road was usually faster and was considerably more reliable, with regular timetables along main trunk routes, and this often tipped the scales in its favour. The unreliability of coastal shipping is obvious, and canals were often closed for long periods due to frost in winter, water shortage in summer or for repair (Aldcroft & Freeman, 16).

Road transport was more suitable for some types of goods than for others. For higher-value goods, including many manufactured items, the cost of carriage by road over 100 or 200 miles amounted to only a few per cent of total cost. Such goods might therefore be sent long distances by road. They included textiles, the most important of Britain's industrial goods, throughout the pre-railway period. On the other hand, for bulky, low-value freights, of which coal and grain are the best examples, transport costs could be a high proportion of total cost. For example, the cost of carrying coal overland for ten miles at least doubled the pithead price in the early eighteenth century. Freights like these had to go by water - at that time by coastal ship and/or river - if they were to be sent longer distances. Even so, the beginning and end of their journeys were often overland to and from navigable water, and road transport was thus an integral part even of these journeys. Heavy goods, like all other freight, were also usually carried overland for the very numerous short journeys. The two modes of transport were largely complementary. The earlier period of Britain's industrialisation was able to proceed without any greater facilities for long-distance bulk transport than were provided by river and coastal waters.

So far as improvement in road transport between 1700 and the 1830s is concerned, we shall see that, while better roads were highly important, the real key to the changes was the horse, a large and expensive animal to feed and to keep, with a fairly short working life when it formed part of a team pulling a heavy waggon or a fast coach. Table 1, which shows the operating costs of carriage and coach proprietors at various dates, highlights the dominance of horse costs. As we explain below, improved roads and easier gradients reduced the number of horses per ton hauled; and improved horse breeding was capable of providing sturdier horses which ate less and worked harder - the equivalent in present-day terms of better engines and more miles per gallon.

[SCG note: This introduction draws together the available research and makes a strong conclusion for the contention it sets out to prove; that historians in the past have tended to underrate the importance of pack and wagon transport. There is a very good chapter on the evidence available for goods carriage up to the 1830s and the authors carry their thesis right through to the motorways.]

SCG/20 September 2005

SCG TIMELINE. REFERENCES TO TRAVEL.

The Celtic Churches. John T McNeill. 1974. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-56095-3.

AD314. At the Council of Arles, three of the signatories were English bishops. [SCG note: The significance of this is that even as early as this, travel abroad was not only possible but practical. Consider also the fact that the townsfolk of Barnoldswick appealed direct to the Pope in 1147 and got a reply within a matter of months.]

AD43. Roman Invasion of Britain. Julius Caesar mounted two expeditionary campaigns in 55 and 54BC. He came because he knew the islands had resources he needed, grain and metals. He also regarded the Celts of ‘Britannica’ as a threat to the submission of Gaul. He came, he saw but he did not conquer and was killed in 44BC. The invasion proper came in 43AD under Claudius. It is important to realize that by this time some of the tribes in Britannica had strong trading and political links with Rome. There was trouble and unrest in the land and some of the tribal chiefs appealed to Claudius, the Emperor for help. Claudius didn’t see Britannica as a threat but he wanted a triumph so he sent in the legions. This was not an expedition like Caesar’s incursion of 55/54BC, this was an invasion, the Claudian Conquest of 43AD. The Isles. Norman Davies. 1999. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-513442-7. Page 84.

[SCG. The significance of this reference is that apart from the fact that it was possible for armies to move about Europe, commercial traffic and passenger transport between The Isles and Rome was quite normal.]

THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE OF PYTHEAS THE GREEK. By Barry Cunliffe. 2002. Walker and Company, New York.

This account is of sea travel but in it Cunliffe shows that prior to 330BC there was a well-established sea transport system carrying trade between The Isles and the Mediterranean. The probability is that the Phoenicians were trading with Cornwall for tin much earlier than this.

WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD. I Wilkens, 1990.

Wilkens states that a statue found in the grave of the Pharaoh Pepi, 2300BC, contained Cornish Tin.

[I’m not too sure about this reference and have been unable to find the evidence supporting it. My interest in it is if it is true it pushes the time of Phoenician trading with Cornwall back to the third millennium BC which, from other evidence, seems feasible. My point here is that if trade was organised like this there must have been a relatively sophisticated transport system in place on land to support it.

STONEHENGE.

About 2,000 BC, the first stone circle (which is now the inner circle), comprised of small bluestones, was set up, but abandoned before completion. The stones used in that first circle are believed to be from the Prescelly Mountains, located roughly 240 miles away, at the south western tip of Wales. The bluestones weigh up to 4 tons each and about 80 stones were used, in all. Given the distance they had to travel, this presented quite a transportation problem. [SCG: Archaeologists are still arguing as to exactly how the stones were moved but the fact remains that they were transported, they are not glacial erratics as they have no glaciation marks. This is good evidence of a measure of competence in transportation that was previously not suspected.]

EXTRACTS FROM THE BARNOLDSWICK MANORIAL COURT ROLLS. 1723-1769.

[SCG note: The most common offence recorded in the Manorial Court Rolls is that of trespass by people ‘making ways’, ie. taking short cuts, over private land. This is evidence of increasing foot traffic in the town taking the shortest way between habitations of places of business. It would suggest new building and therefore the need for new direct routes.]

May 1723. All persons who do not repair their ways in the street before May 30^th fined 10/- per week until repaired. [The Saxons used the word ‘street’ for the old Roman roads, hence place-names like Chester le Street for villages on or near a Roman Road. However, in the manorial roads the word ‘street’ seems to be used to denote paved roads in the precinct or township. ie. The roads outside houses. This would explain the high level of fine because in most cases this would only be a very short stretch of road.]

17 April 1732. All persons who stop, tread down, make a way or throw any rubbish into the stream, a current running from the Whitemoor well to the new mill within the jurisdiction of this court. In the mercy of the court, 5/- apiece. [The general sense of the records suggests that the court drew a distinction between Whitemoor and Weets. Weets being the northern section of the moor and Whitemoor being the southern section, the two divided by a wall. If this is the case, the biggest spring of consequence on Whitemoor is what we now know as Lister Well. This is the headwater for what was known as the Black Brook but which we now call County Brook. 1732 is too early for the erection of a mill for textiles so we are safe in assuming that ‘New Mill’ refers to a corn mill. There are only two corn mills on County Brook; Wood End Mill and the later County Brook mill (called New Mill at one time). We know from the Barcroft memoranda that Wood End existed before 1694 as it is mentioned in a letter written by Thomas Barcroft at about that time so the description ‘new mill’ is hardly likely to have been applied to Wood End mill in 1732. Therefore we can reasonably assume that the ‘new mill’ was what is now called County Brook mill. Raymond Mitchell has told me that when his grandfather bought the mill there were corn grinding stones in the cellar. So we may have an approximate date for the first build at County Brook. I do not know when Wood End mill ceased to grind or why it did so. The only reasons I can envisage are either a legal dispute or destruction of the mill by fire or flood. Either are possible and in the Barcroft letter he seems to be saying that Wood End mill had a drying kiln which could support the fire theory. Bear in mind that this is before the Whitemoor reservoir was built in 1840 and the very nature of the contour of the water course suggests that there were quite violent events on this stream. If Wood End had been destroyed and a new mill built it would be quite reasonable for the builder of the new mill to go to the Manorial Court and ask for an injunction on adjacent landowners to respect his riparian rights.]

17^th April 1733. Every person using the way from Salterforth Town Stoops to Barnoldswick Coates with cart or carriage or any other loads (not having the right to be there) in the mercy of the Lords [fined] 4/-. [This must be the old road from the boundary at Salterforth to Coates. As we shall see in a later entry this was not a public road as part of it at Rainhall is designated a private road. From this later judgement we also know that it was not considered of sufficient standard for wheeled vehicles. This is the first direct evidence I know for the existence of wheeled vehicle traffic in the area and is proof of the pressure that was growing for adequate roads for such vehicles. The owners of this way were trying to reduce the wear on it and hence the expense to them of repairing it.]

[SCG note: It’s worth remembering here that in the Court Rolls for the Honour of Clitheroe; 1442/1443 there is a record of ‘two loads of timber from Barnoldswick Wood carried to the water mill at Colne to make ‘two balkes’ at 8d. per load’. These were substantial timbers and I can think of no other way they could be moved except by wheeled transport. This may be the earliest record we have for wheeled transport in the area and was presumably an exceptional event.]

26^th April 1737. Ann Brogden widow presented for not repairing a way tending from Barnoldswick to Cowpasture over two closes called Calf Hall. Fined 3/4 per rood not repaired before 1^st September 1737. [Difficult to identify this one but I suspect it refers to what we now know as the lane up to Calf Hall and I suspect that rather than being important because it was a way to the town it was one of the routes to the Corn Mill. This is at best a reasonable conjecture based on my belief that the most important internal bulk trade in the town was corn to the mill. The miller automatically had the power of the court behind him in any restriction of passage to the mill under his ancient rights of Multure. See entry below for 20 October 1763.]

18^th October 1743. Several owners and occupiers of land adjoining the highway from Four Lane Ends to Gisburn Lane ordered to repair fences and scour and open ditches within the highway before 11^th November 1743. 1/- fine for every rod or perch not done. [ A rod, pole or perch was a measure of length and equals five and a half yards. This is the first mention I have seen of ‘highway’ and seems to refer to ‘the King’s Highway’, ie. a description of a major route upon which their was a public right of way and by definition, a manorial duty to repair and keep in good order. This would apply to major routes out of the town to other towns, in this case, Gisburn. I presume this is the stretch of road down Banks Hill towards Bracewell.]

25^th April 1745. All persons with responsibility to scour ditches along the King’s Highway to do so or be fined 1/- per rood.

21^st April 1747. Private way from Lowcock’s Gate to Calfhall Gate. Ann Brogden to repair or be fined 1/- per rood. [SCG note. ‘Gate’ almost certainly means ‘way’ or road. Calfhall Gate will be Calfhall Lane, the question is what was meant by Lowcock’s Gate? The way which seems to fit if Lowcock’s Gate is Esp Lane would be Shitten Ginnel but I have seen this referred to in the Rolls as Pickles’ Hipping so I am not sure about this one. A note for 19^th April 1749 records that Stephen Brogden, son of Ann Brogden, was appointed Constable for his mother’s lands. As the Constable was the person responsible for enforcing the decisions of the court for the area designated to him, this could have been a smart move on Widow Brogden’s part!]

22^nd April 1756. Any person having dung, ashes or any other nuisance lying in the street between Jepp Hill and the eastern end of the town to be charged 4d. for every load removed after 39^th of May. [Notice the use of the term ‘street’ in this context. This suggests that this word was used for the paved ways inside the township itself.]

22^nd April 1756. Repairs ordered on the way leading from Barnoldswick to David Blegborough’s house at Cow Pasture. 10/- fine per rood if not done by 10^th July 1756. [The severity of the fine and the time allowed suggest that this was a subject of contention. A Henry Blakeborough is recorded as being at Cow Pasture in a 1712 electoral roll so it seems we have an alternative spelling for the name. Cowpasture Farm was owned by John Bannister in 1692 when he bequeathed it to John Smith. Smith, Yeoman, sold it in 1712 to Henry Blakeborough of Addingham for £315. In 1725 Henry B. added 2 messuages and seven closes of land to Cowpasture. This land, formerly called Cowhouse Ing, the Cow Ing, the ? closes, the Laithe Flat, Laithe Flat Ing and Laithe Bank then occupied by Christopher Baxter and Robert Raikes. (probably as tenants as there is a record of the sale of this land to David Blegborough in 1745 for £73-10-0.) In 1726 Henry Blegborough[sic] sold Cowpasture to David Blegborough for £100. In 1765 David Blegborough conveys Cow Pasture and all its lands to Henry Blegborough of Richmond, Yorks, apothecary, for consideration of £24 a week for the rest of David’s life. 1808 will of HBB of Richmond leaves estate to his children. In 1811 the legatees sell Cowpasture to William Midgely of Newfield Edge in Middop for £2,200. The farm was sold at auction in 1902 with James Wright as tenant and seems to have been bought by the Pickles manufacturing family. In 1949 it was sold to Stephen Pickles and Sons Limited, Barnsey Shed for £4,000. S Pickles and sons leased some of the Cowpasture lands to BUDC. I have included these details because they give some useful field names and a flavour of land ownership at the time.]

8^th November 1769. Any turf stone or sand taken off the Commons but not used inside the Manor to be charged at 3d. per load and the proceeds used to maintain the King’s Highway.

17^th April 1760. Charles Pindar, Clerk [in Holy Orders?] given leave to take some of the waste land on Jepp Hill and release part of a garden he has there so as to improve the road or street up Jepp Hill by making it wider. [Interesting evidence of adjustments to boundaries so as to improve the road on Jepp Hill.]

18^th April 1761. Reference to trespass on Thornber’s Lands by ‘loaded or empty horse of unloaded horse’. [Seems to be referring to packhorses and saddle horses.]

15^th October 1761. There is a reference to ‘Tuber Moor Gate’ It is to be improved under the supervision of the Constable using moneys obtained from the sale of agistment on Whitemoor. [If the Manorial court are using their income from letting grazing on Whitemoor (agistment) to finance the repairs to this road it would seem that even though referred to as a ‘gate’, this was the King’s Highway, in other words, the main road over to Barrowford. I have always assumed that ‘Tubber’ was a corruption of ‘upper’ and indeed this may be the case but the name Tuber Moor raises the possibility that there may be another root for the name or at least that the moor at this point was known as ‘Tuber Moor’.]

18^th October 1762. WE do here make a By law that all freeholders within the several Townships of Barnoldswick and Salterforth shall pay for every cart load of stone to be got out of the Townships of Barnoldswick and Salterforth taken and carried away from off the White Moor or any of the waste grounds belonging the said Townships with three horses and no more and so in proportion for any less quantity then three horses the sum of three pence And if any stranger who is or may be hereafter permitted to get take or carry away stone from off the said Moor or waste out of the Parish to pay for each cart toad of such stone the sum of sixpence with three horses and no more and so in proportion for any less quantity or number and that no more than three horses shall be used for be in any carriage for the purpose herein before mentioned That all the stone to be gotten within the Parish on the lands and grounds belonging the waste and common to be gotten on White Moor and none of such stone to be carried or taken out of the Parish but between the first day of May and the twenty ninth day of September new style Also that no person or persons whatsoever shall be permitted to get any such stone within the said Parish of Barnoldswick and the same to be carried out of the said parish but such inhabitants as are legally settled within the said several Townships of Barnoldswick and Salterforth or one of them and that such person or persons so employed in getting such stones to give notice there of to the Constable of the said Parish for the time being before the stone begin to be gotten of the quantity wanted and for whose use the same are so wanted And that the person or persons so getting the same stone to pay for the same when thereunto required by the Constable of the said Parish for the time being.

[This is a fascinating entry for me. It is limiting the size of wagons by specifying no more than three horses. This suggests that by this time heavy wagons were being employed that had more than three horses in the team. It also raises the possibility that this bye-law may have been introduced to limit damage on the roads. Note also that in support of this, transport is limited to the summer months when the roads would be dry and less likely to be carved up by the traffic.]

20^th October 1763. We the Jurors above named upon our oaths present that from the time whereof the memory of Man is not to the contrary there hath been and still is a common and ancient road lying and being within the jurisdiction of this Court all the lay subjects of our Lord the King to pass & repass on foot and on horse back and with loaded horses to and from the township of Brogden within the jurisdiction aforesaid to and from the ancient and accustomed Mill called Barnoldswick Mill within the jurisdiction aforesaid containing one thousand yards in length and three yards in breadth and that Beatrix Lister widow, Nicholas Winckley, Robert Parker Esq., Edmund Grundy, John Smith, David Blegbrough, Thomas Edmondson and Thomas Hoyle, clerk Ratione Tenurae [by reason of tenure ] ought and by custom are want to repair and amend the same when and so often as need shall be as required. And the same road being deep broken and out of repair and for want of the due reparation and amendment thereof that the lay subjects of our said Lord the King cannot on foot, horse back and with loaded horses and other cattle pass go ride and labour at their will and pleasure for the purpose and on the occasion aforesaid without great damage of their loads and the toss of their goods. To the great damage of said common nuisance of our said Lord the King his crown and dignity. [This is a good indication of the importance of the corn mill and the customary rights which it enjoyed. The persons named are evidently the landowners along the route of the road and it looks as though this includes at least part of what we now know as Calf Hall Lane.]

On the same date there is an interesting note: ‘We the Jurors also above named lay a Pain on all persons severally who keep any Mastiff Bulldog or Bulldogs within the jurisdiction of this Court unmasked in the mercy of the Lords of the Manor for each offence of two shillings and six pence.’

24^th October 1765. We the Jurors above named upon our views say that we believe it will not be prejudicial or detrimental to any person whatever to suffer and permit John Baldwin of Barnoldswick Staymaker to inclose and take in from off the waste within the Township of Barnoldswick adjoining to a house belonging to him the said John Baldwin in the Manor of Barnoldswick and within the jurisdiction of this Court which said waste to contain ten square yards or thereabouts and to pay the yearly rent of one penny for the same at the feast of Easter such yearly rent to be paid for the use and benefit of the Lords and freeholders within the said Township of Barnoldswick. And that William Bagshaw Esq. one of the said Lords to view & set out or cause to be viewed and set out the said piece of waste ground as aforesaid. And we do hereby consent and agree that the said John Baldwin do peaceably enjoy the said piece of ground so to be set out as aforesaid under payment of the said yearly rent if the Lords of the said Manor shall please to consent to and allow of the same but not otherwise Provided that of default shall at any time be made in payment of the said annual rent of one penny after the same be come due Then it shall and may be lawful for the Constable of the said Manor for the time being to throw down any erection that may be then there set up or made and that the said John Baldwin shall make and maintain sufficient road opposite to such enclosure for foot passengers cart and carriage

James Mitchell (sig) Joseph Parkinson (sig)
[Apart from the fact that this entry is a useful insight into the way the waste land in the Manor was administered, it’s good to note that as part of his responsibilities John Baldwin was required to make a road opposite the land in question fit for wheeled vehicles as well as foot traffic.]

April 6^th 1769. We the jurors for the Court of Barnoldswick Present a piece of road from Musgill Gate to Dumphill Gate leading to Coates such road is a bridle road belonging to Thomas Peel of Rainhall that the same be made a sufficient Hackney Causeway before ye first day of July next.

[This is the old Salterforth to Coates road and the interesting thing is that in the intervening years since April 1733, far from prohibiting the unauthorised use of the road by persons not having permission, Thomas Peel is now required to raise the standard of the road to a condition fit for wheeled vehicles. Evidence of the increasing need for free access to the roads within the town by wheeled vehicles.]

SCG/25 September 2005


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk