The History of the Post Office Part 3

The letters, as soon as they had been sorted, were despatched into the country, the usual hour of despatch being shortly after midnight; but, of course, with a force to prepare them of only six persons, a rigid punctuality such as that which now distinguishes the operations of the Post Office could hardly be observed. An instance remains on record of the disturbance caused by any unusual pressure. The 25th of February 1696, we are told, was a foreign post night, and it happened that the letters for the country as well as abroad were more than ordinarily numerous. On this occasion the mails which should have gone out before three o'clock in the morning could not be despatched until between six and seven.

Once clear of London, the letters pa.s.sed into the hands of the postmasters, who were alone concerned in their transmission and distribution. At the present time, multifarious as the duties of a postmaster are, it is not one of them to transport the mails from town to town. But such was not the case in 1690. The post roads were then divided into sections or, as they were commonly called, stages; and these stages were presided over by a corresponding number of postmasters, whose duty it was to carry the mails each over his own stage. This had been the original object of their appointment, the object for which they had been granted the monopoly of letting post-horses, and it still remained their primary duty, to which every other was subordinate. And yet traces of this original function were already beginning to disappear. The posts settled on the six main roads of the kingdom had not been long in extending themselves to other roads; and on these branch roads one postmaster would be charged with the carrying of the mails over two or more stages, leaving another without any transport duty at all. Kendal, for instance, lay on a branch road leaving the Holyhead Road at Chester; and from Wigan the letters for Kendal were fetched by the postmaster of Preston, who pa.s.sed not only his own town but the town of Lancaster on his way.

In 1690 no provincial town had a letter-carrier of its own, as that term is now understood. Even at Bristol and at Norwich, which ranked next to the capital in size and importance, there was for all Post Office purposes one single agent, and that was the postmaster. Upon him and him alone devolved all the duties which now, at all but the smallest towns, a body of sorters and letter-carriers is maintained to perform. Whether out of London there was any settled mode of delivery is uncertain; but there seems little doubt that, soon after the establishment of the Post Office, to deliver letters in his own town had come to be a part, though a secondary part, of a postmaster's duty. At Maidstone, indeed, the delivery appears to have reached a high state of perfection. The postmaster there fetched the mails from Rochester and carried them to Ashford, dropping the letters for his own town as he pa.s.sed through.

These were at once taken out by two men of his own and delivered, so that, as he took pride in relating, a letter from London arriving by the morning post at noon could he answered by the return post, which left Maidstone at six o'clock in the evening.

But this must have been an exceptional case. Except perhaps at the largest towns, letters were yet too few to make such an arrangement necessary; and it seems probable that the hour at which the delivery was made and the area over which it extended were very much in the postmaster's discretion. One check there was, and, so far as appears, one only. This was the letter bill which accompanied the letters, and in which was inserted the postage which a postmaster had to collect and bring to account; but it frequently happened that he advanced the amount himself, and of course, where this was so, there was nothing to shew that any particular letter had been delivered, still less that it had been delivered within a particular time. Far more effective, it may well be believed, than any official check was the desire, the natural desire, to stand well with his neighbours; and the substantial marks of kindness which they seldom failed to bestow upon him whenever he was so unfortunate as to get into trouble, preclude the idea that, in the matter of delivery or otherwise, remissness or inattention can have been at all general.

In London, owing to recent malpractices there, attention had been directed to the salaries, and these had been improved. The six clerks of the roads received four of them 60 a year, one 50, and one as much as 100. The sorters received 40 a year, and the general post letter-carriers 11s. a week. The wages of the penny post letter-carriers or messengers, as for distinction's sake they were called, were 8s. In addition to their salaries the clerks of the roads enjoyed the privilege of franking newspapers or, as they were then called, gazettes. This privilege, which dated from the first establishment of the Post Office, had arrested the attention of James when Duke of York, and he had desired to take it away; but, on learning that compensation would have to be given, he decided to let it continue. By post the gazettes would have cost from 4d. to 6d. apiece. The clerks of the roads supplied them for 2d. The emoluments from this source kept steadily growing during William's reign. At first the longer and more frequent sessions of Parliament, and, later on, the war in which England was engaged, excited an appet.i.te for news to which the two previous reigns afford no parallel. A statement which the postmasters-general made to the Treasury about this time, while evincing perhaps some little credulity, evinces also how keen, in the judgment of two shrewd and intelligent men, was the hunger after early intelligence. "In England," they say, "there are many postmasters, who some of them serve without salary, others for less than they would otherwise do, in consideration of their being allowed gazets by the office ffrank."

Another curious custom prevailed in 1690, and continued indeed for nearly a century afterwards. This was the distribution among the Post Office servants in London of a certain sum annually as "drink and feast money." The sum so distributed in 1685 had been no less than 60; and this was in addition to two "feasts" which were given them at the expense of the Crown, one at midsummer and the other at Christmas.

In the country, where there was no one to watch over the postmasters'

interests, the salaries were merely nominal. The postmaster of Sudbury in Suffolk received a salary of 26 a year; and for this he had, three times a week, to carry the letters to Braintree and back, a distance of thirty-two miles, over a road that was barely pa.s.sable. At Maidstone, in order to keep the delivery up to his own standard of excellence, the postmaster expended 2s. a day in what he called "horse-meate and man's-meate," yet his salary was only 5. Many postmasters received no salary at all. Even at Bristol, which stood next to London in population and wealth, the salary was only 60, having been recently raised to that amount from 50.

Nor was it only in the matter of salary that the postmasters were objects of compa.s.sion. The disturbed state of the country during the last few years had brought back old abuses. Officers of the army and others who had not the officers' excuse of urgency would override the post-horses, and when, as frequently happened, these were lamed or killed, no compensation appears to have been given. Another cla.s.s of persons infested the roads, persons who, taking advantage of the general confusion, would hire post-horses and not return them. During the last twelve or thirteen years of the seventeenth century many postmasters were languishing in prison through inability to pay what they owed for postage; and among these there were few who did not trace their misfortunes to the fact that immediately before and after William's accession to the throne their horses had been killed or spoiled through reckless riding or else run away with.

But neither the loss of their horses nor the inadequacy of their remuneration was so galling to the postmasters as the liability to which they now became subject, of having soldiers quartered upon them. A standing army had been recently authorised, and there was little or no barrack accommodation. Hence a liability, which in our own time might be little more than nominal, was, in 1690, tantamount to a heavy tax. Under Charles and James[12] the postmasters had been exempt from this annoyance; but the exemption had been granted by virtue of the royal prerogative, and William could not be induced to continue it. In vain it was urged that, if a burden were cast upon them as novel as it was oppressive, justice demanded that their salaries should be increased.

The King resolutely refused to make a distinction which the law did not recognise, and, except in a few isolated cases, the salaries remained unchanged.

[12] In the reigns of Charles II. and James II. the practice of billeting, illegal as it then was, was necessarily resorted to in order to provide quarters for the troops they maintained in time of peace; and even billeting in private houses was not unknown. An Act of 1689, the second Mutiny Act, as it is called, while forbidding billeting in private houses, authorised it at "inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and all houses selling brandy, strong waters, cyder or metheglin, by retaile, to be dranke in their houses."

Despite these drawbacks, there is no reason to think that the appointment of postmaster was not eagerly sought for, or that when obtained there was any general disposition to throw it up. The explanation is obvious. In the first place the appointment carried with it the exclusive right of letting post-horses. This monopoly, at all events on the more frequented roads, must have been remunerative; and it must have been especially remunerative where, as appears to have been generally the case, the postmaster was also innkeeper. Travellers were drawn to his house, for it was only there that they could procure horses to pursue their journey. He was, in a word, a.s.sured of custom. Other sources of emolument were--1st, gratuities, varying according to distance, from 1d. to 3d., on every letter he collected or delivered; and 2nd, what were technically called "Bye-letters." This term, whatever may have been the case a century before, had now a distinctive meaning.

It meant letters which stopped short of London,[13] letters upon which at that time there was no check. In 1690 the postage on these letters was probably not large; but, large or small, the whole or all but the whole of it found its way into the pockets of the postmasters, and it was one of the first cares of the new postmasters-general to consider how the diversion might be stopped.

[13] In the agreement with Ralph Allen, dated thirty years later, bye-letters are defined to be "letters not going or coming from, to, or through London."

Such, in England, was the condition of the Post Office when Cotton and Frankland a.s.sumed the direction of it in the month of March 1690. In Scotland the posts were under separate direction, the direction of the Secretary of State for that part of the kingdom, and subject to the control of the Scotch Parliament. For purposes of convenience, however, an arrangement had been made between the two Post Offices. On letters between London and Edinburgh in both directions the English Post Office took not only its own share of the postage but the whole; and, in return, it paid the salaries of all the postmasters and defrayed the cost of all expresses between the Border town of Berwick-on-Tweed and Edinburgh. The correspondence at this time pa.s.sing between the two capitals was of the slightest. It is true that for the three years ending March 1693 the amount due to the London office for postage on letters to Edinburgh was 1500, or at the rate of 500 a year; but the correspondence of the Secretary of State for Scotland, or "Black-box" as it was called, from the colour of the box in which it was carried, would probably account for nearly the whole. In 1707, which no doubt was a busy year in consequence of the Act of Union, the cost of carrying this box to and fro averaged 66 a month.

In Ireland the Post Office was managed by a deputy-postmaster, who was directly responsible to the postmasters-general in London. The method of business was the same as in England. Instead, however, of six "roads,"

there were only three--the Munster Road, the Ulster Road, and the Connaught Road. The Dublin establishment, clerks and letter-carriers included, consisted of twelve persons, of whom five received 20 a year, and no one, the deputy-postmaster excepted, more than 80. The deputy-postmaster himself received 400. Such at least was the normal establishment; but all was now confusion. The battle of the Boyne had not yet been fought, and Tyrconnel was still Lord Deputy. By his direction the Post Office servants in Dublin, down to the youngest letter-carrier, had been turned out of their appointments; and the mails from England, instead of being opened at the Post Office, were being carried to the castle and opened there.

The new postmasters-general had not long taken up their quarters in Lombard Street before they began to feel serious alarm for the revenue committed to their charge. It was in the matter of bye-letters that their apprehensions were first aroused. London, as the metropolis, sent and received more letters than any other town, more probably than all the other towns of the kingdom put together. Through London, too, as the centre of the Post Office system, many letters pa.s.sed in those days which would not so pa.s.s now, because there were no cross-posts. Still there was a residue, a residue considerable in the aggregate, consisting of letters which did not touch London in any part of their course; and of these comparatively few were accounted for. Some thirty years later, after a check had been established, the revenue derived from bye-letters was only a little over 3000 a year. At the end of the seventeenth century it probably did not amount to as many hundreds.

It was, however, not the letters that fell into the post, but those that were kept out of it, the illicit traffic in fact, that caused the greatest concern. This traffic was a.s.suming larger proportions every day. Under Charles and James searchers had been appointed, men who searched for letters as baggage is searched at the Custom House. No suspected person, no suspected vehicle, was safe from inspection. But there was no legal sanction for the practice, and it had ceased on William's accession. Early in the present reign it had been mooted whether a prosecution should not be undertaken, at all events against the princ.i.p.al offenders; but the King refused to consent to a step which he regarded as impolitic and calculated to excite discontent. License waxed bolder with impunity. Along the road from Bristol to Worcester and from Worcester to Shrewsbury men might be seen openly collecting and delivering letters in defiance of the law. Openly or clandestinely the same thing was being done in other parts. "Wherever," wrote the postmasters-general, "there are any townes which have commerce one with another so as to occasion a constant intercourse by carryer or tradesman, there we do find it a general practice to convey at the same time a considerable number of letters."

But the illicit traffic between one part of the country and another, large as were the dimensions it had a.s.sumed, was insignificant as compared with that which was taking place between the country and London. This was the natural result of the establishment of the penny post. At the first introduction of postage care had been taken so to fix the rates that for single letters the post should be cheaper than the common carrier. But the common carrier, in compet.i.tion with the State, had one enormous advantage. He could reduce his terms at will. So long, therefore, as there was a profit to be made, the relative cheapness of the post had proved only an imperfect check.

A far more efficient check, in the case of the metropolis at least, had been the difficulty of dispersion. It was one thing to bring letters to London and another to deliver them. In a maze of streets consisting of houses which bore no numbers, a comparative stranger to the town attempting anything in the shape of a general delivery would have been simply bewildered. But all this was now altered. The penny post supplied the very machinery, the want of which had hitherto kept the illicit traffic within bounds. Once within the orbit of that post, a letter consigned to any one of Dockwra's four or five hundred receiving offices would be delivered in any part of what was then known as London for 1d., and in the suburbs for 2d. And these charges would carry up to one pound in weight; whereas a quarter of one pound by the general post, even from places no further distant from London than Croydon or Kingston, would be charged 2s. 8d.

Of course, under such conditions, to carry letters across the border-line, the line which separated the general post from the penny post, had soon become a regular traffic; and this traffic, in consequence of the impunity it enjoyed, was now being carried on with little concealment. No stage-coach entered London without the driver's pockets being stuffed with letters and packets, and he was moderate indeed if he had not a bagful besides. The waggoner outstripped his waggon and the carrier his pack-horse; and each brought his contribution. The higgler's wares were the merest pretext. It was to the letters and packets he carried that he looked for profit. So notorious had the abuse become that two private persons, unconnected with the Post Office, offered their services with a view to its correction. These persons were gentlemen by birth, and yet it is difficult to conceive an office more odious than the one which they were prepared to a.s.sume.

They proposed to erect stands or barriers in Westminster, Southwark, and other places in the outskirts of London, and there to demand of suspected persons as they pa.s.sed any letters they might have about them which did not concern their private business. They further proposed to deliver these letters by messengers of their own, and to collect the postage, and to proceed against the bearers of them for the recovery of the penalties. It is significant of the extent to which the traffic had grown, that in return for their services they asked no more than two-thirds of the postage they should collect, and even pleaded the heavy expenses to which they would be put as an apology for asking so much. The remaining third they would undertake to make over to the postmasters-general. They did not explain, however, how it was proposed to distinguish letters which concerned the private business of the bearers from those which did not, or how, while checking others, they were to be checked themselves. Nor indeed was any such explanation needed, for the postmasters-general very clearly discerned that the proposed remedy would be worse, far worse, than the disease.

Cotton and Frankland were sorely perplexed. They knew perfectly well that the true policy was to supplant and not to suppress; and experience had taught them that to facilitate correspondence was to increase it.

These views they never ceased to inculcate; but their power of giving effect to them was extremely limited. They could not lower the rates of postage, for these were fixed by Act of Parliament. They could not set up a new post nor alter an old one without the King's permission.

Neither was this permission so easy to obtain as it had been. The Post Office revenue was settled upon William just as it had been settled upon James; but while James kept the control in his own hands William left it to his ministers.[14] Const.i.tutionally sound as the change of practice was, it had its drawback. James might care little for the convenience of trade and commerce; but self-interest would prompt him not to withhold facilities where these might be given at small cost and with the prospect of comparatively large returns. Ministers, on the contrary, even the most enlightened, concerned themselves mainly with the balance-sheet of the year, and no promise of future and remote profit would easily reconcile them to a diminution of present receipts. That the Post Office must sow before it can reap is a truism which those who hold the purse-strings have, at all times, found it hard to accept.

[14] Occasionally, even after William's accession, the postmasters-general addressed the King direct. The remonstrance against quartering soldiers upon postmasters was so addressed. This doc.u.ment is dated the 1st of February 1692/3.

The ministers charged with the control of the Post Office were the Lords of the Treasury. How little the postmasters-general were left to act on their own responsibility will best be shewn by examples. Warwick, according to the computation of those days, was sixty-seven miles from London; but letters for that town pa.s.sed through Coventry, thus traversing a distance of eighty miles. And not only was the route a circuitous one but it involved an additional charge for postage, the rates for a single letter being, for eighty miles, 3d., and for less than eighty, 2d. The postmasters-general desired to send the letters direct; but even so simple a matter as this they were not competent to decide for themselves. A change of route involved a reduction of charge; and a reduction of charge might affect the King's receipts. Before, therefore, the route could be altered, the King's a.s.sent had to be signified through his appointed ministers. In 1696 a post was established between Exeter and Bristol. This was the first cross-post set up by authority in the British Isles. It ran twice a week, leaving Exeter on Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days at four in the afternoon, and arriving at Bristol at the same hour on the following days. From Bristol the return post, which went on Mondays and Fridays, started at ten in the morning. But in this case as in the other, the postmasters-general had not the power to act of their own motion. Hitherto letters between the two towns had pa.s.sed through London, and so had been liable to a double rate of postage, to one rate of 3d. from Exeter to London, and to another rate of equal amount from London to Bristol, or 6d. altogether.

For the future, the towns being less than eighty miles apart, the charge would be 2d. Large as this reduction was, the postmasters-general strongly advocated it. The existing post, they said, was both tedious and costly, and had been little used in consequence. A direct post, it was true, would require a small outlay to start it; but, this outlay notwithstanding, the post was certain to prove remunerative. Increase facilities for correspondence, and correspondence would a.s.suredly follow. Besides, it would promote trade and be an inestimable boon to the public generally. To these representations the Treasury yielded; and before three years were over, the postmasters-general had the satisfaction of reporting that the new post was producing a clear profit of more than 250 a year. But complaisant as the Treasury had been on this occasion, their co-operation was fitful and uncertain. The Post Office could not advance a step without incurring some trifling expense; and the Treasury only too often acted as if to save expense, however trifling, were the highest proof of statesmanship.

The postmasters-general were indeed heavily handicapped. Even with a free hand their position would have been one of great embarra.s.sment. But bound hand and foot as they were, what could they do? They did what was perhaps the very best thing that could have been done in the circ.u.mstances. They grouped large numbers of post offices together and let them out to farm. These groups, or branches as they were called, spread over a wide area. The Buckingham branch, for instance, not only included the county of Bucks but extended as far as Warwick. The Hungerford branch comprised sixteen post offices in the counties of Berks, Wilts, and Somerset. The Chichester branch covered a large part of Surrey as well as Suss.e.x; and the six remaining branches, for eventually there were nine altogether, were equally extensive.

This, though by no means a perfect remedy for the existing evils, went far to mitigate them. The farmer, of course, could not alter the rates of postage; but with this single exception he was free from the restraints which hampered the postmasters-general. Within the area over which his farm extended he had only to consult his own interests; and, happily, his own interests and the interests of the public were identical. He improved and extended the posts, because to improve and extend the posts added to the number of letters and made his farm more profitable. He stopped the practice of levying gratuities on the delivery of letters, because this practice, by adding to the cost of the post, and so deterring persons from using it, diminished his own receipts. For the same reason he took good care that no agent of his own should omit to account for bye-letters, and, if other than his own agents continued to send letters by irregular means, that it should not be for want of facilities which he could himself supply.

To this community of interest as between himself and the public may be ascribed the exceptional feelings with which, at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, the Post Office farmer was regarded. The very name of farmer in connection with other branches of the revenue had become a by-word for all that was rapacious and extortionate. Only recently the farmer of the customs and the farmer of the hearth money had been stamped out as moral pests. The Post Office farmer, on the contrary, was welcomed wherever he came as a public benefactor. In his case outrages and exactions such as had disgraced the others were impossible. Before he could collect a single penny he had a service to perform; and according as this service was performed well or ill, he repelled or attracted custom.

The real secret of his welcome, however, was that he supplied an urgent demand; and how urgent this demand was may best be judged by the conditions on which he was glad to accept his farm. These conditions were a lease of no more than three years, and a rent equivalent to the highest amount which the post offices included in his farm had in any one year produced. For his profits he had nothing to look to but the increase of revenue resulting from his own management; and even of this he received the whole only in the first year, when he would, presumably, be establishing his plant. In subsequent years he received two-thirds, the remaining third going to the Post Office. If under such conditions as these it were possible to toil and grow rich, great indeed must have been the field of operation.

Among those who were commissioned to supply the accommodation which the postmasters-general were precluded from supplying themselves was one who deserves to be specially mentioned. This was Stephen Bigg of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire. Bigg farmed the Buckingham branch. He appears to have possessed and to have deserved the confidence of the postmasters-general.

Of ample means, and endowed with no ordinary powers of organisation, he had probably embarked on his undertaking less with a view to profit than from a desire to improve the posts. Be that as itmay, the same means which conduced to the one end conduced also to the other; and when the time arrived for him to render an account of his proceedings, he not only made over to the Post Office a handsome sum as one-third share of the profits, but had earned for himself the grat.i.tude of the large district over which his farm extended.

His success in his own county encouraged him to enlarge the sphere of his operations. Pa.s.sing through Lancashire in the last year of the century, he was struck with the wretched accommodation which the posts afforded. As compared with those under his own control, they were slow, irregular, and, owing to the system of gratuities, costly. On his return to London he offered to take in farm the post offices of the whole county. The offer was accepted, and a lease was signed fixing the rent, as ascertained in the usual manner, at 2826. The history of this farm is curious. Bigg had not long been engaged in his new undertaking before the cross-post which had some few years before been set up between Exeter and Bristol was extended to Chester. It is not very clear how this interfered with Bigg's proceedings; but, as a matter of fact, it appears to have tapped an important source of supply. On this being pointed out to the postmasters-general, they at once, with that high sense of justice which distinguished all their proceedings, released him from his engagement and cancelled the lease.

The next county to which Bigg turned his attention was Lincolnshire. If Lancashire had bad posts, Lincolnshire had next to none. Five post towns were all of which Lincolnshire could boast--Stamford and Witham and Grantham, Lincoln and Boston; and of these only two were off the great north road which ran through the extreme west of the county. It is true that other towns received letters; but they received them only by virtue of a private arrangement, and heavily had they to pay for the luxury.

From Lincoln, for instance, the postmaster went twice a week to Gainsborough and to Brigg, to Horncastle, Louth, and Grimsby, charging as his own perquisite on each letter he collected or delivered the sum of 3d. over and above the postage; but, so far as depended on any official post, these and all the intervening towns were absolutely cut off from the rest of the world.[15] Bigg procured a farm of the district in favour of his son, and the lease was signed on the 4th of August 1705. On the 1st of October in the same year posts began to run, and gratuities on the delivery of letters had become a thing of the past.

One penny on each letter collected was the only charge that remained over and above the postage.

[15] In the case of Grimsby it is the more surprising that this should have been so, because out of the only five towns in the kingdom which the Act of 1660 mentions by name Grimsby is one. According to this Act the post was to go there once a week.

It would be less than justice not to recognise the important part which about this period the farmer played in the history of the Post Office; nor is it possible not to admire the sagacity of those who, when they found the posts to be slipping through their fingers, summoned this extraneous agency to their aid. It was no mere venture which by a happy accident happened to turn out well. The postmasters-general had foreseen and foretold exactly what would be the result--that under a system of farming the public would be better served, letters would become more numerous, and the revenue, when it should revert to the Crown at the termination of the lease, would be higher than when the lease began.

Next to Lincolnshire in poverty of the means of correspondence stood Cornwall. Until 1704 the post to Falmouth, after leaving Exeter, ran through Ashburton to Plymouth and thence along the south coast. Of the towns in Mid Cornwall Launceston alone possessed a post office. At others, indeed, letters were delivered, but only by virtue of a private arrangement and on payment of a gratuity of 2d. apiece. No farmer, unfortunately, offered his services here. But, what was perhaps the next best thing, the gentry of the county, headed by Lord Granville, took the matter up. Thus supported, the postmasters-general proceeded to concert their arrangements. They desired the postmasters of Exeter, Plymouth, and Launceston to meet together and prepare some scheme for facilitating the correspondence of the midland towns. Such a scheme was soon submitted, and, although it involved a cost of 260 a year, authority for its adoption was not withheld. Henceforth the post for the extreme west of England was to go, not by way of Plymouth, but direct from Exeter to St. Columb, and thence through Truro to Falmouth. A single post through a wide extent of country might ill accord with our present views of what the public convenience requires; and yet at the beginning of the eighteenth century Mid Cornwall, by the mere alteration of the route for the Falmouth mails, obtained facilities for correspondence not inferior to those enjoyed by other parts of the country.

The speed at which the post travelled at the end of the seventeenth century only slightly exceeded four miles an hour. This slow rate of progress, added to the fact that, except to the Downs, the post left London only on alternate days, gave occasion for the not infrequent use of expresses. These were mounted messengers sent specially for the occasion. Whether for expresses there was any prescribed rate of speed is not known; but it seems probable that their instructions were to go as fast as they could. The charge for an express was 3d. a mile and 6d.

a stage, a stage being on the average about twelve miles. The total sum which the Post Office received on this account during the half-year which ended the 29th of September 1685 was 337.

Occasionally several expresses would be required at one time. In 1696, on the discovery of Barclay's plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate the King, orders were given to close the ports; and these orders the postmasters-general sent, as they were instructed to do, by express. Some twenty years afterwards similar orders were given, and an account is still extant shewing how on the later, and probably the earlier, occasion they were carried into effect. The English ports were sixty-two in number; and to only ten of these were expresses sent direct from Lombard Street, the others being either taken by the way or reached by branch expresses furnished by the towns through which the expresses from London pa.s.sed. Altogether the distance traversed was 2526 miles, the number of stages 202, and the sum which the Post Office received for the service from the Commissioners of Customs 36:12:6.

From expresses it seems almost natural to pa.s.s to flying packets, although between the two there is, so far as we are aware, no necessary connection. What was a flying packet? The term "flying," at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, was, no doubt, used in the sense of running. For this season, writes Lord Compton's private tutor to Lady Northampton, under date September 1734, "the coach has done flying." In like manner "flying post," a term as old as the Post Office itself,[16] meant nothing more than what in Scotland was called a runner. Possibly because the idea of expedition was conveyed by the term "flying," flying packet came to be regarded as synonymous with express. "I despatch this by a flying pacquett," writes Lord Townshend to the Duke of Argyll in 1715; and again, "My lord, after writing what is above, a flying packet brings letters from Edinburgh of the 12th." "By the flying pacquett which arrived last night," writes Secretary Stanhope about the same date, "I received the honour of your Grace's of the 21st inst." Here, by flying packet is obviously meant express. And yet, curiously enough, this is a sense in which the postmasters-general never employed the term. By them it was always designed to signify the thing transmitted, and not the means of transmission. What they called a flying packet might be sent by ordinary post no less than by express; and when sending one by express they never failed to state that it was being so sent. "You are therefore," they write in 1706, "on the receipt of the bag so delivered to your care [_i.e._ a small bag containing letters for the Court], to dispatch the same imediately by a flying packet from Harwich to this office, and to send a labil therewith expressing the precise time of the arrival and your having dispatched the same per express." On receipt of the Holland mail, they write again in the following year, "You are to take out the Court letters, and to forward the same express by a flying packet directed to Mr. Frankland at the Post Office at Newmarket." "The inclosed box being recommended to our care by His Grace the Duke of Queensberry, one of Her Majesty's princ.i.p.all Secretarys of State, we do send the same by a flying pacquet.... You are to send us advice by the first post of the safe comeing of this pacquet to your hands." In short, flying packet, in its original sense, appears to have meant simply a packet of which the enclosures were designed for some other person than the one whose address the packet bore. Within the Post Office it is occasionally necessary to employ technical terms which would not be intelligible to persons without; but this, so far as we are aware, is the only instance of the same term being used within and without in two totally different senses.

[16] 1661. Feb. 3rd. Robert Reade to Charles Spellman. "Att the right honourable my Lord Townshend's in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster." The writer says that he has as yet received no command from Mr. Spellman or from Lord Townshend, "nor do I wonder at it, because the flying post lay drunke last Friday at Fakenham (being the day that he should have binn at Thetford to take those letters then there which he should bring hether on Saterday), and had not changed his quarter yesterday as I am informed by one of Scott's men who saw him pittyfully drunke. The c.u.n.try complaines of him."--Historical Ma.n.u.scripts Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part iv. p. 25.

Of the state of the roads about this period the Highway Act 1691 affords, perhaps, not the least trustworthy evidence. To incidents which have resulted in nothing more than temporary inconvenience travellers are apt to give a touch of humorous exaggeration. An Act of Parliament, on the contrary, deals with facts as they are, and concerns itself not with imaginary ills. What, then, is to be thought of the condition of the roads when provisions such as these were necessary?--No causeway for horses was to be less than three feet in breadth, nor was the breadth of any cartway leading to a market town to be less than eight feet. In highways of less breadth than twenty feet no tree was to be permitted to grow, or stone, timber, or manure to be heaped up so as to obstruct progress; and hedges were to be kept trimmed, and boughs to be lopped off, so as to allow a free pa.s.sage to travellers, and not to intercept the action of the sun and wind. Of any breach of these and other provisions the road-surveyor was, on the Sunday next after it became known to him, to give public notice in the parish church immediately after the conclusion of the sermon.

Long after the pa.s.sing of the Act of 1691, and perhaps in consequence of it, the causeway formed an important feature of the roads. This causeway, or bridle-track, ran down the middle; while the margin on either side was little better than a ditch, and being lower than the adjoining soil, and at the same time soft and unmade, received and retained the sludge. But, in truth, the state of the roads concerned the Post Office far less at the close of the seventeenth century than it did at the close of the eighteenth. The mails were carried on horseback; and, even so, they were carried mainly over the six great roads of the kingdom. These roads, as compared with others, were good; and execrably bad as we might now think them, they were probably not altogether ill adapted to riding. The disasters which history refers to this period, as ill.u.s.trating the difficulties of travelling, occurred generally on the cross-roads, and always with wheel traffic. For both wheel traffic and horse traffic the six great roads had, probably from the earliest times, been kept in some sort of repair. On the great Kent Road, nearly a hundred years before, a young Dane, with his attendants, had on horseback accomplished the distance between Dover and London in a single day.[17] In 1642 couriers had ridden from London to York and back, a distance of about 400 miles, in thirty-four hours,[18] a feat barely possible except on the a.s.sumption that the road was in tolerable order.

Now and again, indeed, some postmaster, pleading for the remission of his debt to the Crown, would urge the losses he had sustained in horse-flesh by reason of the badness of the roads; but these roads were always cross-roads--roads along which, if he had delivered letters, he had delivered them on his own account. Of the six great roads as a means of transit for the mails there were no complaints.

[17] The Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, Appendix ii. p. 69.

[18] _Clarendon's Life_, vol. i. p. 135.

It was when the Post Office required something to be done which involved transmission from place to place otherwise than on horseback that its troubles began. Such an event occurred in 1696. Sir Isaac Newton was then busy at the mint, devoting to the coinage those powers of intellect which were soon to astonish the world. The clipping of the coin had gone to such lengths that within the s.p.a.ce of one year no less than four Acts of Parliament were pa.s.sed with a view to abate the evil. Milled money was to take the place of hammered money. The clipped pieces had already been withdrawn from circulation, and now a date was fixed after which no broad pieces were to be received in payment of taxes except by weight.

This date was the 18th of November, and collectors of the public revenue were allowed until the 18th of the following month to pay them over to the Exchequer. If not paid over by the 18th of December they were to be taken by weight and not by tale, and the collectors were to lose the difference.

Here was a clear month's grace, and the postmasters were under a strong inducement to see that the period was not exceeded. From Oxford the hammered money was sent by barge. No sooner had it started than a severe frost set in, and lasted for six weeks, the consequence being to delay the arrival in London until the 7th of January. To take the money by weight and not by tale would have been equivalent to a fine of about 23. From this, however, the postmaster was excused on the ground that the barge was the safest means of conveyance he could have employed. As a "flying coach"--a coach which travelled at the speed of about four miles an hour--had for many years been running between Oxford and London, it must be a.s.sumed either that it had stopped for the winter or else that for some cause or other, possibly on account of highwaymen, it was not considered safe. From Sandwich, in Kent, the hammered money was sent by hoy, which did not reach the Thames until the 20th of January.

Again the postmasters-general urged that the delay might be overlooked on the ground that no earlier means of conveyance would have been safe.