ABSTRACT
The Turnpike Trusts were, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, about five times as numerous as the Municipal Corporations, and nearly twenty times as numerous as the Courts of Quarter Sessions that governed the Counties. During the seventeenth, and still more during the eighteenth century, we see constantly increasing what was practically a new use of the roads, namely the through traffic of wheeled vehicles of every kind. In 1656, the Vestry of the little parish of Radwell, in Hertfordshire, petitioned Quarter Sessions for help with its roads. The Turnpike Trusts were distinguished from the Municipal Corporations on the one hand, and from the Incorporated Guardians and Improvement Commissioners on the other, by the uniformity and rigidity of the constitutional structure which Parliament imposed upon them. The most defective side of turnpike administration was that of finance.
