Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

12 than by road. It used to take a longer time to get from London to York than to Calais. Improved roads, for instance, had reduced the travel time from London to Manchester to one day. During the 18 th century it had taken three days. The canal network, although not making much of a contribution to passenger transit, had led to a reduction of 75% in freight costs. Canals were ponderously slow. It took twelve hours by canal from Manchester to Liverpool. G.M.Trevelyan wrote of the ‘unremedied badness of the roads’, legally the responsibility of the parishes through which they passed. The parochial authorities had neither the resources nor the ambition to do much about these route ways. When the weather was inclement, especially in the winter months, wheeled traffic came to a complete standstill. Josiah Wedgwood’s renowned Etruria pottery, built in the 1770s, had pack-mules to convey his attractive wares for the first part of their carriage to customers and he reckoned that a third were broken on that leg of their journey because of the rough terrain. It was not an entirely immobilised society – but it was a pedestrianised one. Few had access to a horse for personal conveyance. That was a perquisite of the wealthy. Even then the daily radius for a journey by horse was little more than fifteen miles. It was, basically, a nation of walkers. Even in London 90% of journeys under six miles were on foot. Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbevilles in fiction and Charles Dickens and William Gladstone in fact bear testimony to that. What is often not factored in with regard to recreational history is the time-consuming nature of walking. Gladstone thought nothing of walking home to Hawarden from Chester station having travelled from London. It is an eight mile hike and it took him a couple of hours, exactly the current rail journey time from London to Chester. When William Pitt the Younger decreed in 1803 that all able-bodied men must join the militia, a version of the home guard, against the peril of Napoleonic invasion (although his sceptical critics would argue that this was part of ‘Project Fear’, deploying the French menace to distract from domestic strife and misery) he advised there should be two weekly parades. However, he added that these should not be more than six miles from anyone’s home, ‘no more’, he said ‘than the sturdy English peasantry were in the habit of going when led to a cricket match or other rural diversion.’ Twelve miles walking was not in itself an improbable exercise but, after arriving home after a hard day in the fields and having attended, as many perforce had to do, to one’s domestic plots, the notion of spending another five or six hours walking and parading was out of the question. Numerically, the scheme was a success but it is thought most of the militia parades remained quite local and in the more heavily populated townships. Being ‘led’ to a cricket match was an interesting usage by William Pitt. It does indicate the sense of a special occasion, some holiday or festive event rather than a regular occurrence. The combine of lengthy working hours and inadequate transport facilities told against more than a modicum of movement for all but a few rare Pre-Victorian Society; ‘Gentle And Simple’