WHEELS
When I was looking at the history of keeping warm last week I touched on local laws made by the Manorial Court about the use of wheeled vehicles. This reminded me of some of the interesting facts I dug up when I was researching transport in Barlick. It would be impossible to imagine life today without wheels on everything from shopping trolleys to large commercial vehicles and I don't know about you but when they were teaching me history seventy years ago we were given the impression that once the principle had been invented wheeled transport became universal. In truth, this was far from the case.
Consider this quotation; 'When a load of coals was brought in a cart from East Kilbride to Cambuslang (near Glasgow) in 1723 'crowds of people went out to see the wonderful machine; they looked with surprise and returned with astonishment'.' The thing that amazed them was the fact that it was a wheeled vehicle. I shan't bore you with all the evidence but a clear picture emerged the further I dug into the subject, the further you got from the big cities and the further North you went the more uncommon wheeled road transport was. Until the mid-eighteenth century most reports were that once you got off the main roads and into the countryside roads were terrible and wheeled transport almost unknown. However, there is always the exception, take note of this snippet from the Court Rolls for the Honour of Clitheroe; In 1442/1443 there is a record of ‘two loads of timber from Barnoldswick Wood carried to the water mill at Colne to make ‘two balkes’ at 8d. per load’. These were not ordinary loads, they were big timbers and it is almost certain that they would be carried on a specialised timber carrier and hauled by a big team of oxen who could deal with the bad conditions. So perhaps we should distinguish between occasional large haulage jobs like this and normal, day to day road transport.
In the Barnoldswick Manorial Court we find the following entry: ‘17th April 1733. Every person using the way from Salterforth Town Stoops to Barnoldswick Coates with cart or carriage or any other loads (not having the right to be there) in the mercy of the Lords [fined] 4/-‘. This must be the old road from the boundary at Salterforth to Coates. This was not a public road as part of it at Rainhall was later designated a private road. So it seems that wheeled vehicles were being used in Barlick before this date for local transport, we were evidently more advanced than the Scots!
Another thing we were told at school was that until the mid 18th century the roads were almost impassible because nobody had repaired them since the days of the Romans. I can remember thinking at the time that this seemed unlikely and my research has convinced me that it is simply untrue. The thing that made the roads so bad was the amount of traffic on them and in the mid-18th century we see the growth of the turnpike trusts who took over lengths of main road, improved them and charged tolls for their use. Local roads were maintained by the landholders through who's land they passed and this was supervised by the Manorial Court. Try this one: '26th April 1737. Ann Brogden widow presented for not repairing a way tending from Barnoldswick to Cowpasture over two closes called Calf Hall. Fined 3/4d per rood not repaired before 1st September 1737'. Difficult to identify this one but I suspect it refers to what we now know as the lane up to Calf Hall and I suspect that rather than being important because it was a way to the town it was one of the routes to the Corn Mill. What is certain is that the Court officials were inspecting the by-ways of the town and making sure they were maintained.
For the next 200 years, horse-drawn wheeled traffic was common in the town, only being ousted after WW1 by the growth of motorised traffic. Almost every shopkeeper in the town had a small two wheeled cart for delivering goods and with the advent of the canal and coal transport hundreds of two wheeled carts carried coal to the mills and four wheeled wagons delivered household coal. We've looked at this in the past and an enormous number of horses had to be stabled and fed in the town and their muck carried away. All this has gone now and in their place we have modern motorised traffic. The humble cart wheel has given place to the pneumatic tyre but it is still the same principle as the very first use of the wheel by our prehistoric ancestors.
Now here's a thought for you. In large towns during WW2 horses came back into their own due to fuel rationing. In Stockport when I was a lad horses were still used by the Co-op, the railway companies and the breweries, our milk was delivered each morning by horse power and the rag and bone men still used horses and light two wheeled carts. We all know about the rise in present day transport costs and I sometimes wonder how long it will be until some bright spark realises that there are still local carting jobs that could be done more cheaply with a horse. I have little doubt that the economic case would stand up now but perhaps it's the fact that you can't turn a horse off when the job is done. Wouldn't it be nice if we saw a resurgence of the horse and once again mothers could tell the kids to go out and collect that horse muck off the road and put it on the roses. My mother never let a good pile of droppings go to waste and I was often sent out with the coal shovel!
There are still plenty of people alive in Barlick today who can remember a slower pace of life when horses were common on the streets and Garibaldi Pickles, the local carrier, made his daily trips to Colne and Skipton to bring back small parcels or groceries from the wholesalers. Emma Clarke once told me that they got a weekly delivery of groceries from Duckworth's the wholesaler in Colne until the 1930s. Puts a different slant on the weekly trip to the out of town supermarket doesn't it!
A rag and bone man in Salford in 1976.
