For a long time the roads continued barely practicable for wheeled
vehicles of the rudest sort, though Fynes Morison (writing in the
time of James I.) gives an account of "carryers, who have long
covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from place to
place; but this kind of journeying," he says, "is so tedious, by
reason they must take waggon very early and come very late to their
innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel
in this sort."

[Image] The Old Stage Waggon.

The waggons of which Morison wrote, made only from ten to fifteen
miles in a long summer's day; that is, supposing them not to have
broken down by pitching over the boulders laid along the road, or
stuck fast in a quagmire, when they had to wait for the arrival of
the next team of horses to help to drag them out. The waggon,
however, continued to be adopted as a popular mode of travelling
until late in the eighteenth century; and Hogarth's picture
illustrating the practice will be remembered, of the cassocked
parson on his lean horse, attending his daughter newly alighted
from the York waggon.

A curious description of the state of the Great North Road, in the
time of Charles II., is to be found in a tract published in 1675 by
Thomas Mace, one of the clerks of Trinity College, Cambridge. The
writer there addressed himself to the King, partly in prose and
partly in verse; complaining greatly of the "wayes, which are so
grossly foul and bad;" and suggesting various remedies. He pointed
out that much ground "is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide
roads, where coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for