Rustic Manners and Customs. 83 



fitted with finger-posts at all crossways. He describes the 

 London streets " as the most dirty, nasty, stinking streets of 

 any capital city now in Europe." ^ An Act of Parliament 

 had already attempted to remedy their condition by levying 

 a tax on hackney carriages ; which, by the way, has about it 

 the idea of the Van and AVheel Tax recently proposed in the 

 House of Commons. The great baggage wagons continually 

 converging on the metropolis, described by Kalm as " fright- 

 fully large," with very high wheels, loaded " with astonishing 

 weights," and drawn by long strings of huge cart-horses, were 

 probably the cause of the disgraceful condition of the high- 

 ways in and around London. For this writer mentions the 

 deep furrows which they made, and contends that no roads 

 could withstand such wear and tear.^ Hi fact, no man at this 

 period expected them to; and wheelwrights went on adding 

 to the breadth of the felloes, till they fondly imagined that 

 their cumbrous machines became independent of ruts and 

 hollows. 



Though locomotion was dangerous, uncomfortable, and ex- 

 pensive, and though carriages frequently stuck fast in the 

 mud, or were waylaid by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath or 

 in Popham Lane, many of the wealthier gentry paid annual 

 visits to the metropolis, thus showing the same hankering 

 after a London season as their descendants of to-day. In fact, 

 the non-residency of our landed gentry had attained sufficient 

 prominence to have attracted Chamberlaine's attention, who 

 would have introduced a law to compel " the married nobility 

 to keep house in the country according to the good polity of 

 their ancestors, and by a judicious hospitality win over the 

 affections of the peasantry," thereby literally fulfilling the 

 meaning from which the word manor or manerium was sup- 

 posed to have obtained its origin {i.e. a maneudo). The strong 

 and the young of either sex commonly travelled on horseback. 

 Those who preferred hired horseflesh could do so at about 

 two shillings and sixpence per ten miles, the price which 

 Taylor ^ paid for the " anatomy of a beast " which carried him 



' Id. Ihid. * Kalm's England, p. 12. 



* A Short Relation of a Land Journey, etc., vol. iii. p. 5. 



