94 History of Inland Transport 



English navigators were entering on voyages of discovery and 

 conquest in distant seas, where they would fearlessly en- 

 counter the enemies of England or the Indians of the New 

 World, at a time when their fellow-countrymen at home would 

 have shrunk from the perils of a journey across the wilds of 

 Northumberland or of an encounter with the supposed savages 

 of Lancashire. 



Even when it was a matter of visiting friends, journeys to 

 distant parts of the country were but rarely undertaken. 

 In the " Gentleman's Magazine " for December, 1752, it was 

 remarked that English people were readily going to France, 

 where they spent in 1751 nearly ^100,000 ; but though a 

 rich citizen in London who had relatives or friends in the 

 west of England might hear of their welfare half a dozen times 

 in his life, by post, " he thinks no more of visiting them than 

 of traversing the deserts of Nubia." 



On the other hand, one result of this limitation in the 

 facilities for home travel was to give to many a county town a 

 far greater degree of social distinction that it can claim to-day. 



Just as in mediaeval times England had consisted of so 

 many separate self-governing and self-dependent communities, 

 each with the house of the lord of the manor as the " hub " 

 of its own little universe, so in the days when communications 

 had certainly, though still only relatively, improved did the 

 county town become the recognised centre of social life and 

 movement for each and every cou'nty where there was any 

 pretence to social life at all. The country gentry, with their 

 wives and daughters, came to regard a visit to the county town, 

 and indulgence there in a round of balls, feasts, visits and 

 functions, in the same light as a season in London is regarded 

 at the present date. 



London in the seventeenth century, if not even down to the 

 middle of the eighteenth, was, for all practical purposes, as 

 far away from the western counties of England as London to- 

 day is from Vienna or St. Petersburg. Visits to the Metropolis 

 were then, indeed, of extremely rare occurrence. In 

 Macaulay's sketch of "The State of England in 1685," forming 

 chapter iii. of his " History of England," there is a diverting 

 account of what must have happened to the lord of a Lincoln- 

 shire or Shropshire manor when he appeared in Fleet Street, 

 to be " as easily distinguished from the resident population 



