A great sheaf of informations was laid by him at Brighton in July 1827. William Blunden, proprietor of a stage-van, was summoned--not for carrying more passengers than he should, but for not having painted on his conveyance the number of passengers his licence entitled him to carry. A £5 fine was the result, of which Byers was awarded 50s. and costs. In another of his cases on this occasion the informer did not come off victorious. It was not his master-mind that had prepared the cases, but that of one of his hirelings, Aaron Rolland, and there was a fatal flaw in this particular one. It was a summons against Snow, the Brighton proprietor, for carrying passengers in excess; but, unfortunately for the prosecution, the coach was not plying for hire on that occasion, and Byers suffered defeat. In this same year Byers was arrested and imprisoned for debt, but he was soon out again and prosecuting with redoubled energy. In November William Cripps, of the firm of Cripps & Wilkins, coach-proprietors, appeared at his instance before the Brighton magistrates, charged with permitting a name other than that of the licensees to be painted on his coach. The name was that of the afterwards celebrated Henry Stevenson, of the “Age.” It was placed there with an idea of securing patronage for the coach, and it was contended in court, that forty names might so be painted on the panel of the coach, if the proprietors liked. But the bench held otherwise, and imposed two mitigated penalties of 50s. each with costs, it being the first offence. In August 1830, Byers procured three fines of £10 each and costs in an overloading case against Francis Vickers. In this affair the methods of himself and his spies were disclosed, for it appeared that the spy was watching the coaches from the upstairs window of a public-house. But already, for some time past, one of Byers’ men had set up for himself as a coachman’s lawyer, and, coming from the opposition camp, of course brought with him a great deal of special knowledge. From this time Byers’ business waned. The early steam-carriages of 1826 had foreshadowed the end of the coaching age, and when railways came the informers’ business was ruined. True, they might still make a trifle out of the surviving waggons, and it was possible, now and again, to catch a pikeman not giving a ticket when toll was paid, or not having his own name painted on his toll-board as collector when he had succeeded some other pikeman; but the penalties for these offences were, like the offences themselves, trivial. In short, informing ceased to pay its travelling expenses.