ABSTRACT
Travel by road was expensive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only the rich could afford to journey regularly by stage coach or to take advantage of the new mail delivery service. Stage and mail coach proprietors were obliged to pay considerable sums in taxation and were thus compelled to demand high fares of their passengers in order to run a profitable business. The principal tax to which stage coach proprietors were subjected in the early nineteenth century was a ‘mileage duty’. The competition of coach proprietors with each other and with the steam packets gave rise to quite spectacular fare reductions on many routes in England and Wales during the early nineteenth century. Although road traffic in Cumbria as a whole declined considerably owing to railway competition, there was undoubtedly an increase in the volume of short distance traffic in the neighbourhood of the growing towns.
