The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (34 page)

John Taylor, a waterman on the Thames and a poet in his spare time, echoes this complaint; but his main concern is the loss of business. ‘This is the rattling, rowling, rumbling age, and the world runs on wheels,’ he writes. ‘The hackneymen who were wont to have furnished travellers in all places with fitting and serviceable horses for any journey (by the multitude of coaches) are undone by the dozen …’ Elsewhere he puts his complaint into verse:

Caroches, coaches, jades and Flanders mares

Do rob us of our shares, our wares and fares;

Against the ground we stand and knock our heels

While all our profit runs away on wheels.
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For such reasons a Bill is presented to Parliament in 1601 proposing the limitation of the use of coaches. It is read twice and then rejected.
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THE STATE OF THE ROADS

The driver who refuses to drive his cart along a certain road is not just being precious. Roman and medieval roads were intended for people and animals on foot, not for coaches with iron-tired wheels. According to William Harrison, ‘in the clay or cledgy soil [the roads] are very deep and troublesome in the winter half …’ In towns too the vast majority of roads are not paved. Gravel is put down at the
worst-affected junctions to soak up the mud, but otherwise carts must pass over deep ruts of dry mud or soft wet soil. Any extant stones of Roman paved roads near the surface are likely to be more of a hindrance than a help for a coachman. Landowners and tenants of land bordering on the highways are meant to maintain the ditches that drain the roads, but they do not always do so. Once soaked by a blocked drain, the road quickly turns into a quagmire.

Driving a coach or cart through a town is just as hazardous. Many people have nowhere to stack firewood other than in the street, sometimes under the eaves of their houses, but sometimes partly blocking the way. Many towns have bye-laws forbidding this; nevertheless it is a perennial problem. Crates, branches and trunks of trees, broken wagons awaiting repairs, split timber, barrels and troughs are all likely to be found in the streets. People dig in the roads for sand or clay to daub their wattle buildings and leave great holes. Sawpits, often more than six feet deep, are no less dangerous, especially where dug directly beside the road so that large trunks can be easily offloaded. People are fined for digging wells in or just beside the highway; in 1573 a servant girl of Rettendon falls into a roadside well and drowns.
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Some modern historians claim that nothing is done to improve the state of communications in Elizabeth’s reign.
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But that is not true. Several Acts of Parliament to remedy the poor state of the roads are passed, the most important of which just pre-dates Elizabeth’s accession. The Act of 1555 establishes the process whereby the churchwardens in every parish appoint two surveyors of the highways at Easter. These surveyors announce four days in the year on which all parishioners will repair the roads. Every farmer must send a cart with two of his men and every cottager has to give his own labour, or else be fined heavily. This legislation is greatly extended in scope by a second Act in 1563, which purposefully envisages a reform of communications in England. It restricts the size of gravel and sand pits, enforces the digging and scouring of ditches and drains beside the main roads, allows surveyors to take small stones freely from quarries to mend the roads, increases the number of days to be devoted to road works to six in each year, and raises the fines that have to be paid by defaulters. In 1576 a third Act amplifies and extends the existing legislation. In addition, Acts are passed for the repair of particular stretches of road, such as the highways in Sussex, Surrey and Kent, in 1585 and 1597.
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If you travel in the summer you can see the law
being obeyed – at least in part. In 1581 in Great Easton, Essex, two dozen farmers and cottagers send their carts or offer their labour to help with highway maintenance; twenty-seven others pay fines of 10s for not providing a cart or 12d a day for not working, and these fines are spent on further work on the highways.
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William Harrison confirms that, in general, the wealthy prefer to pay the fines, so that on average only two of the six days are worked by everyone.
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The fundamental problem with the whole approach is that the people who are expected to do all the work do not significantly benefit from it. Most of them travel on foot or on horseback: they have little need or inclination to rebuild the roads for the benefit of wealthy coach passengers – rich women and ‘effeminate’ men – or royal messengers. The majority of country folk simply walk round the quagmires in winter and step over the hardened ruts in summer; they can live with these obstacles. Not until the burden is placed on the road user does it become economically feasible to maintain the highways properly – and that will not happen for another century.

BRIDGES

Chapter 1
began with the observation that ‘different societies see landscapes differently’. It won’t take you long to realise that different societies
think
of the landscape differently too. Whereas most modern people think of England in terms of a road network, most Elizabethans think in terms of a network of rivers. John Leland, writing in the late 1530s, describes the rivers in every county he visits. The River Alre in Hampshire, for example, rises a good mile above Alresford and flows into Alresford Pond, ‘then it commeth into a narrow bottom and runneth through a stone bridge at the end of Alresford Town, leaving it on the left hand or ripe [bank]’. He continues to describe the flow of the river downstream to Itchen Stoke village, ‘where there is a little bridge for horses and footmen’, and then beyond that to Eston, ‘where there is a wooden bridge for carts’. It flows on through Worthy to the East Bridge at Winchester, ‘having two arches of stone’; further downstream he notes another wooden bridge, called Black Bridge. Similarly he lists the bridges on the River Teign in Devon, starting at Chagford ‘four or five miles from the head’ of the river, and progressing
down to the next one, four miles downstream, at Clifford Bridge; then another at Bridford four miles further on, and another at Chudleigh, five miles beyond that. Leland is mapping the country by its rivers and bridges. This, in fact, remains a common way of thinking about the country well into the next century.
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There are many different types of bridge. London Bridge has already been described, as has Hugh Clopton’s fourteen-arch bridge at Stratford-upon-Avon. You will see other impressive medieval bridges elsewhere: the eleven-arch stone bridge over the Medway at Rochester, the eighteen-arch stone bridge over the Exe at Exeter and the bridge over the Thames at Wallingford, which has twenty-two arches. Most are more modest, however, and often made of timber. Leland records several wooden bridges over the River Kennet near the important town of Reading. There are even still timber bridges over the Thames, at Caversham and Sonning. Note that just because a bridge is built of stone does not mean that it is better than a wooden one. Some old stone bridges are very narrow – four to five feet is not unusual in rural areas. Like the bridges over the Alre, many have been designed to carry nothing wider than a man and a packhorse or a small cart; they cannot accommodate wide coaches, especially if the coachman tethers his horses in pairs rather than in the old way, all in a line. Improving the highways seems pointless if vehicles cannot traverse the rivers.

Not all bridges are in good repair. You will take one look at some of them and fear that you are taking your life in your hands. In winter the heavy water flow disturbs the piers, even if they are made of stone, and this in turn weakens the superstructure; wooden bridges often tumble into the fury of a river in full spate. The Bridges Act of 1530 empowers magistrates to determine those responsible for the upkeep of a bridge and to levy a charge if they fail in their duty. But this does not always solve the problem. Bridges cross rivers which normally mark the ancient boundaries between two landholdings; and where there are two landowners, frequently neither one wants to take responsibility for a dilapidated bridge. Do the people want to pay for the bridge instead? No. So you have a case like that at Ingatestone in 1567: the bridge is ruinous and the magistrates determine that it is the responsibility of the landowners to repair it. Lord of the land on one side is Sir William Petre. Can the magistrates force Sir William to pay? They try – and try again the next year, and again the next. They are
still trying to get the bridge repaired five years after it was first reported to be in a bad state.
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Nor is the queen any better at repairing rotten bridges. Although she is happy to endorse parliamentary Bills for bridges and roads to be mended at other people’s cost, she does little to repair the broken bridges on her own manors.
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Here too there seems to be a mismatch of liability and benefit. Only where an important bridge clearly benefits the local community are you likely to find it well cared for at municipal expense. When the floods of 1588 break both ends of the bridge at Stratford-upon-Avon, for example, the town authorities quickly see to its repair.
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HORSES

You will need a horse if you intend to travel along the roads of England. It is all very well saying that you don’t mind walking and would quite like the exercise – many people do walk the length and breadth of the country – but you will soon see the reason for having a mount. It has less to do with energy expenditure than status and keeping clean. Gentlemen and ladies do not walk along the highways: they either ride or are carried in a coach. The only other option is a litter. This is a compartment or carriage supported on two long poles. In towns it might be carried by servants: some women use them for shopping in preference to a coach, being easier to manoeuvre in the streets of a city. Travelling any distance, however, will require you to have a horse harness for the litter. Although old-fashioned in comparison to coaches, they are still in use among the aristocracy. In 1589 Sir Francis Willoughby asks the countess of Shrewsbury if his wife may borrow her horse litter.
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In some large towns you can hire them: in 1577 Lord North pays £1 16s 9d to hire one to take his sister to London from Kirtling in Cambridgeshire, and in 1599 Thomas Dier falls gravely ill in London and pays £1 2s for a horse litter to take him home to Sutton Courtenay, in Berkshire.
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Various types of horse are available. A palfrey is a good-quality riding horse, ideal for long distances. A courser is high and fast, excellent for hunting. English carthorses are famous for their strength: William Harrison claims that five or six of them will draw three thousandweight on a long journey, or four hundredweight if alone. Sumpter horses or packhorses are not for riding but for
carrying bundles of goods. Harrison adds that horses bred for riding in England tend to be gelded; this makes them calmer in temperament than a stallion and suitable for female riders. (Remember that gentlewomen are expected to ride side-saddle, and that includes the wives of self-respecting yeomen too.) He also notes that many ‘outlandish horses’ have started to be imported, including Spanish jennets and Neapolitan coursers. Thomas Blundeville lists eleven types in
The fower chiefyst offices belonging to horsemanshippe
(1566), namely Turkish, Barbary, Sardinian/Corsican, Neapolitan courser, Spanish jennet, Hungarian, High Almain (German), Irish hobby, Flemish, Friesland and Swiss. They all have their distinct qualities. A Turkish horse will stop at nothing, bravely leaping over every obstacle. Barbary horses can gallop on the flat for ages. Flanders horses are huge and can draw massive weights, like modern shire horses. Spanish jennets are swift and prized by noblemen. ‘The Irish hobby’, Blundeville writes, ‘is a pretty fine horse, having a good head and a body indifferently well proportioned, saving that many of them be slender and pin-buttocked. They be tender mouthed, nimble, light, pleasant and apt to be taught, and for the most part they be amblers and therefore very mete for the saddle.’ His favourite, however, is the Neapolitan courser:

a trim horse being both comely and strongly made, and of so much goodness, of so gentle a nature and of so high a courage as any horse is … In my opinion their gentle nature and docility, their comely shape, their strength, their courage, their sure footmanship, their well-reining, their lofty pace, their clean trotting, their strong galloping and their swift running well considered … they excel numbers of other races.

When it comes to buying your own steed, you would be well advised to go straight to the most famous breeder in the country, Sir Nicholas Arnold. Alternatively, you might head to a horse fair, such as those at Ripon, Stourbridge and Smithfield (London). Qualities valued by contemporaries tend to include colour, shape of limbs and whether they have an easy ambling pace. Colour is not as obvious as you might think: it carries with it a mass of superstitions. Blundeville states that a white forefoot on the far side is a good sign, as is a white rear foot on the near side; but the opposite of these are indicators of
an evil disposition. Any white rising high up the leg is a bad sign too. Prices vary hugely: expect to pay well in excess of £3 at a fair for a good riding horse – more for a really fine beast – but you might be able to pick up an adequate older horse for much less. Ask around in a village: someone will have a horse for sale privately, in the same way that people sell second-hand cars privately in the modern world. The average second-hand price is between £1 and £2 (the price increasing slowly over the course of the reign).
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However, you can find old horses going for 5s or less in the 1580s, and an untrained yearling colt can be picked up for 6s 8d.
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