Turnpike Trusts at this time encouraged Sabbatarian feeling by charging double on Sundays; but “knowing” travellers sometimes travelled on that day, and submitted to that imposition as the cheaper of two evils. The one they thus escaped was the imminent risk of being molested by highwaymen and stripped of all their valuables; for those gay “Collectors,” as they delighted to style themselves, did not attend to business on the Sabbath. We are not, from this, to suppose that the highwaymen were at church, or at home, reading improving literature. Not at all: they did not expect wayfarers, and so took the day off. The Sunday Trading Act for many years forbidding Lord’s Day employment, prevented coaches running then, and so helped to give the hard-worked nocturnal gentlemen of the road their needed weekly rest, and ensured them from missing very much. Yet anxious travellers did sometimes go on Sundays, and risk an information. When at last the mail-coaches were started, to go seven times a week, and the Post Office itself set the example of Sunday travel, away went the highwayman’s week-ends and the travellers’ respite from wayside “Stand and deliver!” The stages then plied on Sundays also. As for the mails, they were immune from attack. The Post Office early issued a warning against sending gold by them; but it did so, not from fear of the highwaymen, but “from the prejudice it does the coin by the friction.” Highwaymen were, in fact, little feared either by the Department or by the mail-passengers, for not only did the guard’s embattled condition secure them from attack, but the Post Office introduced enactments dealing very severely with highway robbery applied to the mail-coaches. The standing reward offered the liege-subjects of the king for arresting an ordinary highwayman was raised to £200 in the case of an attack on the mail, further augmented by another £100 if within five miles of London. Mail-coaches, by consequence, were left severely alone by the Turpins, Abershaws, and others of their kind; and it has been said that a mail-coach, unlike the old postboys carrying the mail-bags, was never attacked.