In London, owing to recent malpractices there, attention had been directed to the salaries, and these had been improved. The six clerks of the roads received four of them £60 a year, one £50, and one as much as £100. The sorters received £40 a year, and the general post letter-carriers 11s. a week. The wages of the penny post letter-carriers or messengers, as for distinction's sake they were called, were 8s. In addition to their salaries the clerks of the roads enjoyed the privilege of franking newspapers or, as they were then called, gazettes. This privilege, which dated from the first establishment of the Post Office, had arrested the attention of James when Duke of York, and he had desired to take it away; but, on learning that compensation would have to be given, he decided to let it continue. By post the gazettes would have cost from 4d. to 6d. apiece. The clerks of the roads supplied them for 2d. The emoluments from this source kept steadily growing during William's reign. At first the longer and more frequent sessions of Parliament, and, later on, the war in which England was engaged, excited an appetite for news to which the two previous reigns afford no parallel. A statement which the postmasters-general made to the Treasury about this time, while evincing perhaps some little credulity, evinces also how keen, in the judgment of two shrewd and intelligent men, was the hunger after early intelligence. "In England," they say, "there are many postmasters, who some of them serve without salary, others for less than they would otherwise do, in consideration of their being allowed gazets by the office ffrank." Another curious custom prevailed in 1690, and continued indeed for nearly a century afterwards. This was the distribution among the Post Office servants in London of a certain sum annually as "drink and feast money." The sum so distributed in 1685 had been no less than £60; and this was in addition to two "feasts" which were given them at the expense of the Crown, one at midsummer and the other at Christmas. In the country, where there was no one to watch over the postmasters' interests, the salaries were merely nominal. The postmaster of Sudbury in Suffolk received a salary of £26 a year; and for this he had, three times a week, to carry the letters to Braintree and back, a distance of thirty-two miles, over a road that was barely passable. At Maidstone, in order to keep the delivery up to his own standard of excellence, the postmaster expended 2s. a day in what he called "horse-meate and man's-meate," yet his salary was only £5. Many postmasters received no salary at all. Even at Bristol, which stood next to London in population and wealth, the salary was only £60, having been recently raised to that amount from £50.