At this time, when most roads were mere bridle tracks, and few conveniences for travel existed, when even in towns the streets were so ill-paved that in bad weather the goodwife hesitated before going to the market, the dwellers in villages and hamlets were often fain to buy from pedlars who brought goods to their door and to sell butter and eggs to anyone who would undertake the trouble of collection. Their need was recognised by the authorities, who granted a certain number of licences to Badgers, Pedlars and Regraters, and probably many others succeeded in trading unlicensed. This class of Dealers was naturally regarded with suspicion by shopkeepers. A pamphlet demanding their suppression, points out that “the poor decaying Shopkeeper has a large Rent to pay, and Family to Support; he maintains not his own Children only, but all the poor Orphans and Widows in his Parish; nay, sometimes the Widows and Orphans of the very Pedlar or Hawker, who has thus fatally laboured to starve him.” As for the Hawkers, “we know they pretend they are shut out of the great Trading Cities, Towns and Corporations by the respective Charters and all other settled Privileges of those Places, but we answer that tho’ for want of legal Introduction they may not be able to set up in Cities, Corporations, etc., yet there are very many Places of very great Trade, where no Corporation Privileges would obstruct them ... if any of them should be reduc’d and ... be brought to the Parish to keep; that is to say, their Wives and Children, the Manufacturers, the Shopkeepers who confessedly make up the principal Numbers of those corporations, and are the chief Supporters of the Parishes, will be much more willing to maintain them, than to be ruin’d by them.”[444] Footnote 444: _Brief State of the Inland and Home Trade._, pp. 59 and 63, 1730.