Trade and Transport in the Turnpike Era 93 



true is it that such communities were the longest to foster 

 that once popular belief in witchcraft which meant, not merely 

 the looking askance at any decrepit old creature who was 

 believed to have turned the milk sour in the pails, or to have 

 stopped the cows and ewes from breeding, but the putting 

 to death of many thousands of supposed " witches " in 

 England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries. The total number of victims in the first eighty years 

 of the seventeenth century alone is estimated by Dr Charles 

 Mackay, in " Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions," 

 at forty thousand ! This particular mania was certainly shared 

 by Kings, Parliaments and ecclesiastics no less than by 

 ignorant villagers ; but it decreased in proportion as general 

 intelligence increased, and the increase in general intelligence 

 was materially influenced by those improvements in locomo- 

 tion and communication which led to wider knowledge and a 

 greater intermingling of the classes. 



The same isolation fostered the belief in ghosts, goblins, 

 wraiths, kelpies and other inhabitants of the world of spirits, 

 whose visitations or doings probably formed a leading topic 

 of conversation as the isolated family sat round the fire in the 

 long winter months, wives and daughters busy, no doubt, 

 with their distaffs, their spinning-wheel or their needlework, 

 but none the less able to tell or to listen to the favourite 

 stories. 



The whole conditions of existence were of the most cir- 

 cumscribed kind. Many a village got no news at all of what 

 was happening in the world except such as the pedlar might 

 bring, or, alternatively, might circulate through his London- 

 printed " broadsides," telling of some great victory, giving 

 the last dying speech of a noted highwayman, or recording 

 the death of one ruler and the succession of another, of which 

 events the villagers might not hear for two or even three 

 months after they had occurred. "Whole generations," in 

 the words of Samuel Smiles (" Early Roads and Modes of 

 Travelling "), " lived a monotonous, ignorant, prejudiced 

 and humdrum life. They had no enterprise, no energy, little 

 industry, and were content to die where they were born." 



In the Elizabethan era, and even later, inhabitants of the 

 northern counties were regarded by dwellers in the south as 

 people among whom it would be dangerous for them to go. 



