Her Majesty's Mails

Whilst communication between different large towns was comparatively easy--passengers travelling from London to York in less than a week before the close of the century--there were towns situated in the same county, in the year 1700, more widely separated for all practical purposes than London and Inverness are at the present day. If a stranger penetrated into some remote districts about this period, his appearance would call forth, as one writer remarks, as much excitement as would the arrival of a white man in some unknown African village. So it was with Camden in his famous seventeenth-century tour. Camden acknowledges that he approached Lancashire from Yorkshire, "that part of the country lying beyond the mountains towards the western ocean," with a "kind of dread," but trusted to Divine Providence, which, he said, "had gone with him hitherto," to help him in the attempt. Country people still knew little except of their narrow district, all but a small circle of territory being like a closed book to them. They still received but few letters. Now and then, a necessity would be laid upon them to write, and thereupon they would hurry off to secure the services of the country parson, or some one attached to the great house of the neighbourhood, who generally took the request kindly.[30] Almost the only intelligence of general affairs was communicated by pedlars and packmen, who were accustomed to retail news with their wares.