21. =Difficulties of Communication.=--Difficulties of communication served both to encourage town life and to hinder the increase of manufactures at any considerable distance from the sea. The roads were left to each parish to repair, and the parishes usually did as little as possible. In many places a mere quagmire took the place of the road. Young and active men, and sometimes ladies, travelled on horseback, and goods of no great weight were transmitted on packhorses. The family coach, in which those who were too dignified or too weak to ride made their way from one part of the country to another, was dragged by six horses, and often sank so deeply in the mud as only to be extricated by the loan of additional plough horses from a neighbouring farm, whilst heavy goods were conveyed in lumbering waggons, still more difficult to move even at a moderate speed. For passengers who could not afford to keep a coach the carrier's waggon served as a slow conveyance; but before the end of the reign of Charles II. there had been introduced a vehicle known as The Flying Coach, which managed to perform a journey at the rate of fifty miles a day in summer and thirty in winter, in districts in which roads were exceptionably good. 22. =The Country Gentry and the Country Clergy.=--These difficulties of communication greatly affected the less wealthy of the country gentry and the country clergy. A country gentleman of large fortune, indeed, would occasionally visit London and appear as a visitor at the house of some relative or friend to whom he was specially attached. The movements, however, even of this class were much restricted, whilst men of moderate estate seldom moved at all. The refinements which at present adorn country life were not then to be found. Books were few, and the man of comparatively slender means found sufficient occupation in the management of his land and in the enjoyment of field sports. His ideas on politics were crude, and, because they were crude, were pertinaciously held. The country clergyman was relatively poorer than the country squire; and had few means of cultivating his mind or of elevating the religion of his parishioners. The ladies of the houses of even the richest of the landed gentry were scarcely educated at all, and, though there were bright exceptions, any one familiar with the correspondence of the seventeenth century knows that, if he comes across a letter particularly illegible and uninteresting, there is a strong probability that the writer was a woman.