112 STAG ECO AC FT AND MAIL IN DA VS OF YORE 



to turnpike, roads, but still largely ojieu and uu en- 

 closed. Travellers then dare not go alone, if only 

 for a very well-founded fear of losing their way, 

 just as Pepys, years before, often did when travel- 

 ling in his carriage to Bath, to Oxford, Salisbury 

 and elsewhere. He is found paying a guide 22s. M. 

 to show him and his coachman the way between 

 Newport Pagnell and Oxford ; 3s. Q)d. for another 

 to guide him from Hungerford to Market Laving- 

 ton, and, indeed, after he had experienced the 

 awful seventeenth-century mischance of losing his 

 wav two or three times throus^h havinsr economised 

 and neglected to provide this necessary aid, guides 

 everywhere. Travellers then achieved what we 

 moderns are apt to think wonderful things in thus 

 losing themselves. Pepys actually missed his way 

 on the Bath Road between Newbury and Reading, 

 and Thoresby lost himself riding on the Great 

 North Road between Doncaster and York in 1680 ; 

 in his diary fervently thanking God that he found 

 it again. 



Although, by an early i^ct of William III.'s 

 reign, the justices were ordered to erect guide- 

 posts at the cross-roads, and road surveyors were 

 to be fined 10s. if the provisions of the Act were 

 not complied with, such posts (excej^t j^erhaps on 

 the road to Harwich, so often travelled by the 

 Third William on his journeys to and from the 

 Continent) were conspicuously lacking for many 

 generations yet to come, and no one ever seems to 

 have heard of country surveyors being fined for 

 not performing the duty thus laid upon them. An 



