functioning of the learned correspondence, it was a challenge to make them pay.
The Carrier’s Trade: Moving Books and Papers
While letters traveled by post, packages were sent by carrier.39 Carriers traveled many of the same routes as the Royal Mail but were organized and managed privately. Although some carriers were solely devoted to the business, it could also be a side occupation. Farmers, for example, seeking profitable employment for themselves, their horses, and their wagons turned to carrying in the off-season. In some parts of England, wagons came into fashion only in the first half of the seventeenth century; before that goods were moved over land in two-wheeled carts.40 In the farther reaches of Britain—the Welsh Marches or Derbyshire, for example—carrier wagons were likely to be replaced by packhorses, which could better navigate treacherous, narrow roads.41 Rates were regulated by local authorities. In the early 1690s Parliament passed an act specifically obligating justices of the peace, also responsible for overseeing local road maintenance, to regulate carrier fees in their domain.42 In 1692 justices of the peace in the West Riding of Yorkshire set rates from London to towns no farther north than Leeds (a distance of about two hundred miles) at one pence per pound.43 Typically each town had a carrier who waited one day a week (or more, depending on how many packages a particular area generated each week) at a local public house to accept packages for delivery.44 Carriers typically had a fixed route connecting a provincial town with London or another urban center. A guide published in 1637, The carriers cosmographie, listed all the carriers in inns near and in London, what days of the week they could be found at the inns, and where they carried goods.45 In the 1690s the apothecary John Houghton regularly published a table of carrier routes, drop-off points, and charges in his weekly periodical, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. Destinations from London were primarily market towns and regional centers such as Nottingham, Colchester, Cambridge, Derby, and Warwick.46 Coaches, which carried people, were differentiated from carriers, who transported goods. One issue of Houghton’s Collection lists fifty-six different carriers and twenty-nine coaches; perhaps there was more of a need to move goods than people in the late seventeenth century.47
Carriers were plagued with the same problems that affected the mail. Detailed local knowledge was required to send and receive packages by carrier. Such information was neither reliably nor regularly made known beyond localities (as the publication dates of The carriers cosmographie and Houghton’s Collection attest). In a letter to William Musgrave requesting back issues of Philosophical Transactions, the physician Robert Peirce gave Musgrave detailed instructions for sending them by the Oxford-Bristol carrier, who passed through the village of Marshfield once or twice a week. Packages and letters would reach Peirce via “a foote man” who delivered letters that had been left at the post inn in Marshfield.48 Peirce’s instructions make it clear that one could not assume that one’s correspondent possessed basic knowledge about how to send a package between two towns less than one hundred miles apart. This was so because carrier routes, as well as correspondents’ addresses, were often vague, ill-publicized, or unstable. This was so even in Peirce’s instructions: he thought the post inn was called “the Starre,” but he was not sure.49 Local, personal knowledge of how packages were delivered in a particular community was paramount, and the system could tolerate a fair degree of fuzziness.
Naturalists were sometimes suspicious of their carriers, not trusting them to transmit precious books and boxes safely. On 18 November 1691 the botanist John Ray received a jarring letter from his friend John Aubrey. Aubrey inquired after the manuscripts of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire he had sent to Ray for his perusal in September of that year. By the time Ray read the letter, he had already read and annotated his friend’s book in the comfort of his home in the village of Black Notley in Essex and had remitted it to the local carrier—who made the round trip between Essex and London once a week—with careful instructions to return it to Aubrey. Somehow, however, the package failed to make it into Aubrey’s hands, as an alarmed Aubrey informed Ray by letter. One can imagine Aubrey’s state when the autograph manuscripts representing over thirty years’ work went missing on the road from Essex to London. Ray responded in haste:
Sir, Your Letter dated Novemb. 12 came not to my hands till this day noon. Had you sent it by Post I had received it last Friday. Upon reading of it, finding that you had <not> received your Manuscripts I was much surprised & startled. I sent them inscribed according to your Directions this day fortnight, & inclosed therein an open Letter to you. Such an Accident as this never yet befell me, & ’tis too soon now. The Carrier is now gone up to London, so that I cannot examine him about it…. If it be not casually drop’t out of the wagon, I doubt not but we shall retrieve it. The losse of it would be inestimable.50
Although Ray was correct that the manuscripts had simply been delayed rather than lost, both Ray and Aubrey were deeply alarmed. The two books Aubrey lent to Ray were unique and irreplaceable manuscript texts containing annotations, drawings, and botanical samples not included in the only other extant copy, an autograph copy that Aubrey deposited in the library of the Royal Society in 1691.51
Naturalists and antiquaries were occasionally cheated by their carriers. The most common stratagem was to claim upon delivery that the recipient needed to pay more postage even though the sender had paid the posted fee. Aubrey opened a 1679 letter to Wood with a screed against a lying carrier: “I recd your welcome ltr of Dec. 23. and this day the pacquet. but the Carrier is a knave. the carriage that you payd for was blotted-out and 4d more was inserted for me to pay. I grudge not the money, for the gladness of the ltr; but am vex’t at the abuse.”52 Aubrey, though vexed, had little choice but to pay the four pence if he wanted to receive his letter.
Another problem that sometimes cropped up was a lack of local knowledge on the part of a carrier. When a carrier did not know the addressee of a package, he would hold on to it until someone came to pick it up. Edward Lhuyd at times ran into this problem in Oxford: packages addressed solely to him sometimes failed to arrive. He wrote to John Aubrey, “for the generality of the people at Oxford doe not yet know, what the Musaeum is; for they call the whole Buylding the Labradary <or Knackatory> & distinguish no farther. That nothing miscarried soe directed to Dr Plot was because the person was known better than the place, but things directed to me or Mr Higgins commonly stay’d at the carriers till we fetch’d them.”53 In this instance, the carrier’s knowledge was more personal than institutional: he knew Plot, the old keeper, well enough but not Lhuyd or where to send a package addressed to the museum. So that a recipient would know to look out for a delivery, naturalists usually sent word by post when a package was on its way. Correspondents hoped that carriers would know enough to deliver packages, but they had strategies for keeping the system functioning when carriers lacked that knowledge.
To get around the problems that plagued shipments by carriers, naturalists sometimes sent important packages by trusted friends rather than unnamed carriers. In a letter to Aubrey, Robert Plot promised, “And as for the booke that I have {one of Aubrey’s manuscripts}, I will take care to send it not by any Carrier, but some faithfull friend, that knows how to value so great a treasure.”54 The book that Aubrey loaned Plot—in which Plot found “many things in it much to my purpose, though not <very> many in Oxfordshire”—probably contained notes that Aubrey had made as a natural historical and antiquarian surveyor for John Ogilby’s projected Britannia.55 Naturalists also bargained with carriers. In their correspondence regarding Royal Society matters in the early 1680s, Francis Aston and Robert Plot watched carrier charges carefully, and with good reason. After being charged an exorbitant eighteen pence for the delivery of the shipment of “the earth in the little box,” Aston asked Robert Plot to “bargain for the carriage, and set it down on the Bundle for a direction” before sending anything to him from Oxford by carrier.56 They could also work through existing commercial networks. William Molyneux worked out an arrangement with a Dublin bookseller to ensure regular delivery of issues of Philosophical Transactions to the Dublin virtuosi.
