EARLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE. PART TIL 



CHAPTER II. 



EARLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE. 



SUCH being the early state of the roads, the only 

 practicable modes of travelling were on foot and on 

 horseback. The poor walked and the rich rode. Kings 

 rode and Queens rode. Gentlemen rode and robbers 

 rode. Judges rode circuit in jack-boots, and the Bar 

 sometimes walked and sometimes rode. Chaucer's ride 

 to Canterbury will be remembered as long as the Eng- 

 lish language lasts. Hooker rode to London on a hard- 

 paced nag, that he might be in time to preach his first 

 sermon at St. Paul's. Ladies rode on pillions, holding 

 on by the gentleman or the serving-man mounted before. 

 Shakespeare incidentally describes the same style of tra- 

 velling among the humbler classes in his ' Henry IT.' l 

 The party, afterwards set upon by Falstaff and his 

 companions, bound from Rochester to London, were 

 up by two in the morning, expecting to perform the 

 journey of thirty miles by close of day, and to get to 

 town " in time to go to bed with a candle." Two are 

 carriers, one of whom has "a gammon of bacon and 

 two razes of ginger, to be delivered as far as Charing 

 Cross ;" the other has his panniers full of turkeys. 

 There is also a franklin of Kent, and another, " a kind 

 of auditor," probably a tax-collector, with several more, 

 forming in all a company of eight or ten, who travel 

 together for mutual protection. Their robbery on Gad's 

 Hill, as painted by Shakespeare, is but a picture, by no 

 means exaggerated, of the adventures and dangers of 

 the road at the time of which he wrote. 



1 King Henry the Fourth (Part I.), Act II. Scene 1. 



