Not only Pennant complained of the early mail-guards. The country in general went in terror of them and their lethal weapons, the bell-mouthed blunderbusses which they carried to protect the mails and were wont to discharge at random as they went along. It was, with some pardonable exaggeration, said that the Post Office had conferred a licence for indiscriminate slaughter upon them; for not only were they armed against attack, but during the wars with France (and we were always fighting the French in those days) the Postmaster-General issued a kind of commission to mail-guards to shoot any prisoner of war breaking parole. To promote zeal in this direction, a reward of £5 was offered for every prisoner so winged or killed. Prisoners of war were plentiful then, and in Edinburgh Castle, on Dartmoor, and at “Yaxley Barracks,” near Norman Cross, on the Great North Road, were to be counted in thousands. At Yaxley, as also perhaps at other places, they were often allowed out on parole, with the understanding that they were not to leave the high road and were not to remain out after sunset. It is not on record that any prisoner was thus shot, but many inoffensive rustics were wounded by guards sportively inclined, or--with what St. Paul calls a “zeal not according to discretion”--eager to earn the reward offered. The mail-guards were, indeed, very dangerous fellows to the law-abiding subjects of the King, however innocuous they may have been to the law-breakers. We may dismiss the cutlass with which they were armed. Not much damage could be accidentally wrought by that; but the blunderbuss was a terror to nervous passengers by the mail, for when the guard sportively loosed it off at the wayside sparrows, or at the ploughman busy against the sky-line, it exploded with the roar of a cannon, and some of its slugs generally whistled unpleasantly past the ears of the outsides or pierced their tall beaver hats. The guard, in fact, was a person to be shunned when he took his blunderbuss in hand, either for practice or examination; for it was not only dangerous as a gun, but was furnished with a bayonet which, folding back on a hinge against the barrel, was released by touching a powerful spring. How many persons were accidentally slain or mutilated by the guards’ awkward handling of this infernal contrivance we shall never know. It was not, however, until 1811 that anything was done to stop this indiscriminate shooting on the part of the guards; but in that year an Act of Parliament came into existence which forbade the firing of their blunderbusses except for defence, and instituting a penalty of £5 for breaking this new law. Meanwhile the position of mail-guard had become a dignified and desirable one, often obtained through Parliamentary and other influence brought to bear upon the Postmasters-General. Here, for example, is a copy of a letter of recommendation, unfortunately undated, but showing the methods in vogue:--