“When the Manchester trade began to extend, the chapmen used to keep gangs of pack-horses and accompany them to the principal towns with goods in packs, which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging what was unsold in small stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought back sheep’s wool, which was bought on the journey and sold to the makers of worsted yarn at Manchester, or to the clothiers of Rochdale, Saddleworth, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. On the improvement of turnpike roads, wagons were set up and the pack-horses discontinued; and the chapmen only rode out for orders, carrying with them patterns in their bags. It was during the forty years from 1730 to 1770 that trade was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these riders all over the kingdom.” Such enterprise would not have been possible at an earlier period, for the turnpike roads surrounding Manchester date only from 1750: the earliest was the Preston to Lancaster turnpike, constructed under the Act of that year. Tolls were taken, on the Preston to Garstang section, until February 1st, 1875, and on the Garstang to Lancaster portion until November 1st, 1882. The way out of Manchester, on to Bolton, was turnpiked in 1752, and tolls ceased to be taken on November 1st, 1871. [Sidenote: _NO ROADS: OLD ROADS_] From the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century the roads of Lancashire were less roads than slushy lanes, very narrow and full of ruts, mud, and water. Even the main route through to Scotland was no better, and had then but little need to be, for wheeled conveyances were almost entirely unknown. Pack-horses, as we have seen, conveyed what goods were ever sent, but for all practical purposes most communities were self-contained. Their wants were few and simple, and were easily supplied from their own resources; while persons obliged to travel made their way on horseback; only those of robust physique and in good health being able to undertake such journeys, and glad enough, amid the difficulties of the way, to find here and there a stretch of lane roughly paved with rude slabs of local millstone grit. But if the ways were incredibly foul, the inns at the end of each day’s journey went some way towards compensating the fatigued horseman for his labours. The Lancashire inns were then, according to Holinshead, writing in 1577, exceptionally good, each guest being “sure to lie in clean sheets wherein no man hath lodged.” Evidently the innkeepers looked to make their profit out of the “entertainment” they supplied for man and beast, for the horseman’s bed cost him nothing, but “if he go on foot, he hath a penny to pay.” Mere public-houses, of the complexion of drink-shops, were not tolerated in Manchester and Preston; for at Manchester it was forbidden to brew or sell ale unless the brewer or vendor could make “two honest beddis,” while Preston was even more strict: lodgings for four men and four horses being the irreducible minimum.