The Life of Thomas Telford | Page 8

in habit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The country is a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from two long ranges of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."
It was almost as difficult for old persons to get to church in Sussex during winter as it was in the Lincoln Fens, where they were rowed thither in boats. Fuller saw an old lady being drawn to church in her own coach by the aid of six oxen. The Sussex roads were indeed so bad as to pass into a by-word. A contemporary writer says, that in travelling a slough of extraordinary miryness, it used to be called "the Sussex bit of the road;" and he satirically alleged that the reason why the Sussex girls were so long-limbed was because of the tenacity of the mud in that county; the practice of pulling the foot out of it "by the strength of the ancle" tending to stretch the muscle and lengthen the bone!*[4] But the roads in the immediate neighbourhood of London long continued almost as bad as those in Sussex. Thus, when the poet Cowley retired to Chertsey, in 1665, he wrote to his friend Sprat to visit him, and, by way of encouragement, told him that he might sleep the first night at Hampton town; thus occupying; two days in the performance of a journey of twenty-two miles in the immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis. As late as 1736 we find Lord Hervey, writing from Kensington, complaining that "the road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud."
Nor was the mud any respecter of persons; for we are informed that the carriage of Queen Caroline could not, in bad weather, be dragged from St. James's Palace to Kensington in less than two hours, and occasionally the royal coach stuck fast in a rut, or was even capsized in the mud. About the same time, the streets of London themselves were little better, the kennel being still permitted to flow in the middle of the road, which was paved with round stones,--flag-stones for the convenience of pedestrians being as yet unknown. In short, the streets in the towns and the roads in the country were alike rude and wretched,--indicating a degree of social stagnation and discomfort which it is now difficult to estimate, and almost impossible to describe.
Footnotes for chapter I
*[1] Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, describes a journey made by him from London to Oxford about the end of the thirteenth century, resting by the way at Shirburn Castle. He says, "Our journey from London to Oxford was, with some difficulty and danger, made in two days; for the roads are bad, and we had to climb hills of hazardous ascent, and which to descend are equally perilous. We passed through many woods, considered here as dangerous places, as they are infested with robbers, which indeed is the case with most of the roads in England. This is a circumstance connived at by the neighbouring barons, on consideration of sharing in the booty, and of these robbers serving as their protectors on all occasions, personally, and with the whole strength of their band. However, as our company was numerous, we had less to fear. Accordingly, we arrived the first night at Shirburn Castle, in the neighbourhood of Watlington, under the chain of hills over which we passed at Stokenchurch." This passage is given in Mr. Edward's work on 'Libraries' (p. 328), as supplied to him by Lady Macclesfield.
*[2] See Ogilby's 'Britannia Depicta,' the traveller's ordinary guidebook between 1675 and 1717, as Bradshaw's Railway Time-book is now. The Grand Duke Cosmo, in his 'Travels in England in 1669,' speaks of the country between Northampton and Oxford as for the most part unenclosed and uncultivated, abounding in weeds. From Ogilby's fourth edition, published in 1749, it appears that the roads in the midland and northern districts of England were still, for the most part, entirely unenclosed.
*[3] This ballad is so descriptive of the old roads of the south-west of England that we are tempted to quote it at length. It was written by the Rev. John Marriott, sometime vicar of Broadclist, Devon; and Mr. Rowe, vicar of Crediton, says, in his 'Perambulation of Dartmoor,' that he can readily imagine the identical