92 History of Inland Transport 



and realised a sufficient fortune to be able to have a carriage 

 of his own when not half a dozen were kept in the town by 

 persons connected with business. 



" He sent the manufactures of the place into Nottingham- 

 shire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and the intervening 

 counties, and principally took in exchange feathers from 

 Lincolnshire and malt from Cambridgeshire and Nottingham- 

 shire. All his commodities were conveyed on pack-horses, 

 and he was from home the greater part of every year, perform- 

 ing his journeys entirely on horseback. His balances were 

 received in guineas, and were carried with him in his saddle- 

 bags. He was exposed to the vicissitudes of the weather, to 

 great labour and fatigue, and to constant danger. . . . 

 Business carried on in this manner required a combination 

 of personal attention, courage, and physical strength not to 

 be hoped for in a deputy. . . . The improvements in the way 

 of carrying on commerce, and its increase, may be attributed 

 in a great degree to the increased facility of communication, 

 and the difference between the times I have alluded to and 

 the present is nearly as great as between a pack-horse and a 

 steam-carriage." 



Walker also mentions that in the early days of the trader 

 here referred to Manchester was provided with wine by a 

 wine merchant who lived at Preston and carried his supplies 

 to Manchester on horseback. The quantity then consumed, 

 however, was but small, as " men in business confined them- 

 selves generally to punch and ale, using wine only as a medicine 

 or on very extraordinary occasions." 



A no less interesting phase of the improvements being 

 brought about, and one to which I shall revert in the chapter 

 on " The Canal Era," was found in the influence of better 

 communications on the social conditions of the people. 



That these conditions had been greatly prejudiced by the 

 bad roads is beyond all question. Villages which could be 

 reached only with difficulty in summer, and were isolated from 

 the rest of the world for four or five months in the autumn, 

 winter and early spring, were steeped in ignorance and super- 

 stition. True it is that in such communities as these the games, 

 sports, customs and traditions which represented the poetry of 

 old English life survived the longest, and have not even yet dis- 

 appeared before the march of Modern Progress. But no less 



