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  ROADS

  For most Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the condition of the roads which dictated the pace of communications and the degree of mobility. Almost everywhere the ‘roads’ were tracks, with no foundations or drainage and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts. They were muddy quagmires when it rained and dust bowls when the sun shone: ‘more like a retreat of wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man’ in the view of an English observer writing about the early eighteenth century. Even the main highways would count for forest tracks today. The roads of Europe were essentially those of the Roman Empire–after fourteen hundred years of neglect. Whether in Galway or Galicia, the average speed for the great majority of travellers rarely exceeded walking pace. Indeed, for most people the average speed could only be walking pace, for the good reason that this was the only way they could afford to move from place to place: ‘on Shanks’ pony’, ‘en el coche de San Fernando’, ‘auf Schusters Rappen’, etc. In the weary words of the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson in 1774,

  And auld shanks-naig wad tire, I dread,

  To pace to Berwick.

  Travelling by horse-drawn coach was more exclusive, a little faster, but much more expensive and arguably more gruelling, as a contribution to The London Magazine entitled ‘The Miseries of a Stage-Coach’ in 1743 made clear. After recounting the various discomforts of a journey from London to York, which included beginning at three o’clock in the morning, bumping and jolting along uneven roads, and having to put up with fellow passengers who variously smelt of garlic, broke wind, snored, talked incessantly, blasphemed and complained, the author concluded,

  If, of stages the boasted convenients be sung–

  May I travel a foot, though it be on a crutch.

  Journeys were seldom hastened by the routing of roads along the shortest distance from point to point. The sinuous, time-and effort-consuming nature of English roads was legendary. Although this meandering caused travellers inconvenience, one foreign observer, Pierre Jean Grosley, when travelling from Dover to London in 1771, saw it as a symptom of political virtue:

  The high roads are very far from being exactly rectilineal; not but that there are engineers in England skilful enough to draw a right line across a field; but, besides that the dearness of land requires some caution, property in England is a thing sacred, which the laws protect from all encroachment, not only from engineers, inspectors, and other people of that stamp, but even from the king himself; add to this, that, as we shall find in the Article of gardens, the right line is not to the taste of the English.

  Conditions on the continent were no better, rather the contrary. Arthur Young found the post-chaise which bore him from Calais to Paris in 1787 to be much worse and even more expensive than its English equivalent. Nowhere did suspensions cushioned by springs become common before 1800. Dutch coaches were notoriously uncomfortable: an English visitor took one look at the vehicle which was to carry him from Hoorn to Enkhuizen and declined to get aboard. He allowed his luggage to be put in but preferred to walk the 13 miles (21 km). If he had walked on into the Holy Roman Empire, he would have found no respite. In the view of James Boswell, the typical German coach was a ‘barbarity’, as it was ‘just a large cart, mounted on very high wheels, which jolts prodigiously. It has no covering and three or four deal boards laid across it serve as seats.’ His verdict was confirmed by the Russian Nikolai Karamzin, who recorded in 1789: ‘The Prussian “stagecoach”, so-called, bears no resemblance whatever to a coach. It is nothing but a long covered wagon with two benches, and with neither straps nor springs.’ Its slowness and unreliability were also notorious; one contemporary complained that the best way of learning the need to be patient, apart from marriage, was travelling around Germany. It was no better south of the Alps, where Arthur Young described the carriages as ‘wretched, open, crazy, jolting, dirty dung-carts’, adding, ‘to step at once from an agreeable society into an Italian voiture is a kind of malady which does not agree with my nerves’. Travelling on the King’s business was no guarantee of comfort or speed, as Louis XIV’s special envoy, Nicolas Mesnager, found when he went to Madrid in 1708. From Bayonne he reported to Versailles that his journey had already taken nine days, due to the poor state of the roads and the disorder of the staging system. In terms of distance, he was already more than halfway to his destination, but he estimated that he would be another fortnight on the road, so difficult was it to obtain mules.

  Four or six draught-animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 km), depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile (1.6 km) of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles (300 km) from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which travelled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles (100 km) as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled labourer more than a month’s wages just for the fare. On the very eve of the coming of the railway, after significant improvements to roads and carriages had brought the cost down appreciably, a stagecoach journey from Paris to Bordeaux was still costing the equivalent of a clerk’s monthly wages. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, the German social historian Karl Biedermann estimated that travelling had been fourteen times more expensive two generations earlier. Only the introduction of a steam locomotive able to pull a train carrying hundreds of people could create economies of scale and thus democratize travel.

  Yet although the coming of the railways in the second quarter of the nineteenth century certainly did represent a revolution in transportation, it should not be allowed to overshadow the very real progress that had been made in the previous century or so. France led the way with an early initiative promoted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister for domestic affairs. One of his first measures, after securing the disgrace of his rival Fouquet in 1661, was to centralize responsibility for the maintenance of roads. In 1669 special ‘commissioners for bridges and highways’ were appointed to serve alongside the intendants, the most powerful provincial officials. As a first step towards their upgrading, all roads were classified either as ‘royal roads’ (chemins royaux) with a width of between 23 and 33 feet (7–10 m), or secondary roads (chemins vicinaux) or side-roads (chemins de traverse). Following Colbert’s death in 1683, the project faltered and then became bogged down in a general relaxation of central control. By the end of the century it was reported from Flanders that the supposedly paved ‘royal road’ from Lille to Dunkirk was now impassable at several points, obliging merchants to send their goods from the coast by water to Ypres and then to employ double the usual number of horses to drag their carts along the muddy track that led to Lille. In general, Pierre Léon has concluded, the situation in 1700 was no better than it had been in 1660.

  Significant improvement did not come until the 1740s, when the service was reorganized and a special academy established to train engineers in the art of road-building. The growing interest of the French state can be charted in the amount of money it was prepared to make available. Pierre Léon’s figures demonstrate that the budget specified by Colbert in 1668 envisaged only 0.8 per cent of national expenditure, although pressure of war in the 1670s did not allow even that target to be reached. From an average annual expenditure of 771,200 livres between 1683 and 1700 there was a sharp increase in the following reign to 3,000,000 livres for 1715–36, to more than 4,000,000 in 1770, 6,900,000 in 1780 and 9,445,000 in 1786, representing a 213-per-cent increase in the course of the century. The cumulative effect of greater expertise and investment was to create arterial roads capable
of carrying passenger transport much more quickly and reliably than in the past. This is one improvement that can be quantified: in 1650 two weeks were needed to travel from Paris to Toulouse, by 1782 that had been cut by more than half; in 1664 it took ten or eleven days to travel from Paris to Lyon, a century later just six days; in the seventeenth century it had taken at least three days to cover the 60-odd miles (100 km) from Paris to Rouen, on the eve of the Revolution it could be managed in thirty-six hours. Perhaps the most spectacular reduction was in the time needed for the route to Bordeaux, which shrank from fifteen days in 1660 to five-and-a-half in 1789. According to Daniel Roche, there was not a city in France in 1789 that could not be reached in a fortnight. In 1786 the duc de Croÿ left Calais at 5.30 in the morning and reached Paris in time for a late supper at 8 p.m., having travelled 170 miles (280 km) at an average speed of almost 12 mph (20 k.p.h.).

  Such a dramatic acceleration in the pace of travel was perhaps the Ancien Régime’s most impressive domestic achievement. It was given its most durable visual tribute by Joseph Vernet, in his magnificent painting of 1774 entitled The construction of a highway (now in the Louvre). In the foreground a group of workmen are creating a broad paved road, supervised by a foreman who is pictured reporting to a group of engineers on horseback, dressed in smart blue uniforms with gold facings; the road winds its way along an embankment cut out of the side of a hill, towards a three-span bridge, itself under construction with the assistance of two large cranes; the ultimate destination is a hill-top town, overlooked by a large windmill. The entire painting speaks of hostile nature tamed by human ingenuity and labour.

  There is also literary evidence in abundance. The sharp eye and mordant pen of Arthur Young found much in France to criticize, but the roads excited his enthusiasm: the road from Calais to Boulogne, was ‘excellent’; the road from Limoges to La Ville-au-Brun was ‘truly noble’; the road to Montauban ‘finely made and mended with gravel’; the roads in Roussillon ‘made with all the solidity and magnificence that distinguishes the highways of France…stupendous works…These ways are superb even to a folly…There is a bridge of a single arch, and a causeway to it, truly magnificent; we have not an idea of what such a road is in England’; and so on.

  Yet the glamour generated by rapid passenger traffic from Paris to the provinces concealed several tenacious problems. Freight continued to move at its earlier lethargic pace of 2–21/2 mph (3–4 k.p.h.). The cloth of Laval in Mayenne still took two good weeks to reach the ports of Brittany and Normandy and three to four weeks to reach Lille. Even along the new arterial routes from the capital, the improvement registered by passenger traffic was not replicated by freight, which needed three weeks in 1715 to travel from Paris to Lyon and only five or six days fewer in 1787. Along the lateral roads linking one provincial town with another there was no perceptible change: a journey from Amiens to Lyon lasted between twenty-five and thirty days in 1787, just as it had done in 1701. Adam Smith identified the problem in The Wealth of Nations (1776):

  In France the great post-roads, the roads which make the communication between the principal towns of the kingdom, are in general kept in good order; and in some provinces are even a good deal superior to the greater part of the turnpike roads of England. But what we call cross-roads, that is, the far greater part of the roads in the country, are entirely neglected, and are in many places absolutely impassable for any heavy carriage. In some places, it is even dangerous to travel on horseback, and mules are the only conveyance which can safely be trusted.

  He added that it was typical of the French system that a minister would lavish attention on a road likely to catch the eye of a court grandee and excite his praise and favour, but would neglect less glamorous but more useful projects. Even Arthur Young’s praise for the excellence of French roads was tempered by the repeated observation that there was very little traffic on them. Travelling around Paris, he wrote of the roads: ‘it is a desert compared with those around London. In ten miles we met not one stage or diligence; only two messageries, and very few chaises; not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving London at the same hour.’ After the praise of the roads in Roussillon quoted above, he observed, ‘In 36 miles, I have met one cabriolet, half-a-dozen carts, and some old women with asses. For what all this waste of treasure?’

  Young’s comments are put in perspective, and given indirect authority, by a very different account of conditions on the roads around London recorded by a French traveller, the naturalist and geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint Fond, just three years earlier, in 1784. As he travelled around the southern perimeter of London, visiting fellow scientists, he anticipated Young’s compliment to his own country by commenting that the English road was ‘as carefully made and as smooth as the avenue of a public promenade’ but, unlike Young, he was overwhelmed by the amount of traffic:

  The road was, at this time [Sunday evening], covered with numerous cavalcades of men and women, with many servants in their train. Carriages of every kind, most of them very elegant, but all of them substantial and commodious, and many of them with superb equipages, succeeded each other without interruption, and with such rapidity, that the whole picture looked like magic: it certainly showed a degree of wealth and extent of population, of which one has no notion in France. All was life, movement and rapidity; and, by a contrast only to be seen here, all was calm, silent and orderly.

  His impression was confirmed by the Russian traveller Nikolai Karamzin, just off the boat from France: ‘everywhere great numbers of coaches, chaises, and horsemen, and crowds of well-dressed people, for those who travel to and from London or the villages and country houses drive on the highroad; everywhere inns with saddle horses and cabriolets for hire. In short the road from Dover to London is like the main street of a populous city.’

  This contrast between two contemporary experiences offers a salutary warning against seeing the construction of good roads as a sufficient route to modernity. Only a tiny proportion of the French population could travel in post-chaises up and down the ‘royal routes’. According to Pierre Goubert, most peasants–i.e. most of the population–lived out their lives within a radius of only 4 to 5 miles (6 to 8 km), that is to say the area which encompassed their family, the weekly market, the notary and the seigneurial court and which they traversed on foot. They had been doing that in 1660, and they were still doing it in 1815. France covered such a huge area (more than four times the size of England), and included such diverse regions so difficult to access before the motor car, that the King’s Highways could make little impression on the economy and society in general.

  As Faujas de Saint Fond noticed, by the late eighteenth century the situation was different in Great Britain. Distances between major centres were shorter, the terrain was more co-operative, commercial incentives were stronger, and capital was more plentiful. Together with an instinctive aversion to initiatives directed and financed by the centre, this combination pointed to a different solution to the problem of road construction and maintenance. Since 1555 every parish had been obliged to provide labour and tools for the maintenance of the roads which passed through it. As the ‘surveyor’ appointed to supervise the work was not paid for his trouble, was not allowed to decline to serve and could be fined for negligence, such work as was actually undertaken was performed slowly, grudgingly and inadequately. John Billingsley recorded in his Survey of Somerset of 1798: ‘Whenever a farmer is called forth to perform statute labour, he goes to it with reluctance and considers it a legal burden from which he derives no benefit. His servants and his horses seem to partake of the torpor of the master. The utmost exertion of the surveyor cannot rouse them, and the labour performed is scarcely half what it ought to be.’

  Another contemporary source estimated that ‘more work could be done with three hired teams than five statute teams, and more with five hired labourers than twenty others’. Recognizing the productivity gap between forced and paid labour, the General Highway Acts of 1766 and
1773 allowed parishioners to commute their duty into a cash payment. By that time, however, another method had been found. This was the ‘turnpike’, a word which originally designated just a barrier across a road to keep marauders out. As a place where a toll was to be paid, the word was first used in legislation of 1695, which began a new age of road improvement. It was underpinned by the profit motive. An entrepreneur secured an Act of Parliament authorizing him to levy a fee on traffic passing along a certain stretch of road, in return for maintaining it in good condition. For the first–but by no means the last–time we encounter here a striking feature of the British state: in terms of actual implementation of legislation, it was appreciably more effective than many of the ‘absolutisms’ of continental Europe. This was due to the substantial overlap between the national law-makers (Members of Parliament), and the local law-enforcers (Justices of the Peace). So, although there was vigorous, and often violent, opposition to the introduction of road tolls, the Turnpike Acts were made to stick. The beneficial effects were quickly felt.