William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a radical farmer, journalist and campaigner who travelled extensively in England in the 1820s and 1830s, inspecting the state of farming and farm workers. His reports, collected as Rural Rides, also give us a picture of life on the roads in those decades before the railways radically changed patterns of travel. Cobbett went mainly on horseback, but also sometimes by post chaise, which was a light, four-wheel vehicle which usually only had seats for two.

Even a relatively sophisticated vehicle like this was still liable to accidents:

‘This hill is called Burlip Hill, it is as much as a mile down it, and the descent so steep as to require the wheels of the chaise to be locked; and, even with that precaution, I did not think it over and above safe to sit in the chaise … so, I got out and walked down’.

Like many other travellers Cobbett frequently complained about the price of refreshments at the inns:

‘Four shillings for teas,’ and ‘eighteen pence for cold meat,’ ‘two shillings of moulds and fire,’ in this common coach-room, and ‘five shillings for beds!’

In preference to lunching at inns he recommends a diet of apples and nuts, which seems strikingly modern.

We often forget that there were many travellers on foot in early modern England, including, Cobbett reminds us, the ‘perambulating labourers’ who moved around the country with the various harvests, especially hay and wheat:

We saw, all the way down, squads of labourers, of different departments, migrating from tract to tract; leaving the cleared fields behind them … and then, as to the classes of labourers, the mowers, with their scythes on their shoulders, were in front, going on to the standing crops, while the hay-makers were coming on behind towards the grass already cut or cutting. The mowers are all English, the hay-makers all Irish’.