The Sunday Trading Act has never been wholly repealed, and it is still possible for sour and malignant persons to intervene, under the ready cloak of religious and Sabbatarian feeling, and to lay information against shopkeepers who open on Sundays, and so cause the tobacconists, the hairdressers and newsagents, who commonly continue their business on that day, to be summoned and fined for every such offence. The Act only generally comprehended hackney-coaches, but that term included the stages, which were thus penalised until 1710, when, by the 9th of Anne, c. 23, hackney-coachmen and chairmen might ply. It is a curious and noteworthy point about this obsolescent Act that when an information is laid the police have no optional course. They must issue a summons, while the magistrates are bound to fine offenders on their being convicted. It depends, however, upon the character and the prejudices of the bench whether the penalty may be a merely nominal one, carrying an implied disapproval of the informer’s action, or the full statutory fine of 5s. and costs. We here observe the ill which it is still possible for the common informer to work, but the great days of these gentry are gone. Parliament, never tired of legislating for roads and vehicles, produced in course of time a strange and bewildering medley of laws, often contradictory of one another. Among these Acts, those for the regulation of waggons were the most numerous. An early curiosity of the statute book in this connection is the Act of Charles II. forbidding carters and waggoners to drive six or more horses tandem. Already, it appears, the old prohibition of four-wheeled carts or wains, in 1622 and 1629, was obsolete. Then followed an Act of William III. expressly forbidding waggon-horses being yoked in pairs; but another of the same reign withdrew this prohibition, and, in allowing pairs, limited the team to eight animals. In the succeeding reign of Anne this limit was reduced to six in pairs, except uphill, when additional horses might be yoked on. The prohibition of horses going abreast points to the extreme narrowness of the roads in many parts of the country at that time, just as its supersession by the Act permitting pairs would appear to be a result of road-widening.