see.”  Even such conveyances fared hard on the execrable roads of the period.  Down to the end of the seventeenth century most of the country roads were merely broad ditches, water-worn and strewn with loose stones.  In 1640 Queen Henrietta was four weary days dragging over the road from Dover to London, the best in England.  Not till the close of the sixteenth century was the wagon used, and then rarely.  Fifty years later stage-wagons ran, with some regularity, between London and Liverpool; and before the close of the seventeenth century the stagecoach, a wonderful invention, which had been used in and about London since 1650, was placed on three principal roads of the kingdom.  It averaged two to three miles an hour.  In the reign of Charles ii. a Frenchman who landed at Dover was drawn up to London in a wagon with six horses in a line, one after the other.  Our Venetian, Busino, who went to Oxford in the coach with the ambassador in 1617, was six days in going one hundred and fifty miles, as the coach often stuck in the mud, and once broke down.  So bad were the main thoroughfares, even, that markets were sometimes inaccessible for months together, and the fruits of the earth rotted in one place, while there was scarcity not many miles distant.

But this difficulty of travel and liability to be detained long on the road were cheered by good inns, such as did not exist in the world elsewhere.  All the literature of the period reflects lovingly the homelike delights of these comfortable houses of entertainment.  Every little village boasted an excellent inn, and in the towns on the great thoroughfares were sumptuous houses that would accommodate from two to three hundred guests with their horses.  The landlords were not tyrants, as on the Continent, but servants of their guests; and it was, says Harrison, a world to see how they did contend for the entertainment of their guests—­as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate, strength of drink, variety of wines, or well-using of horses.  The gorgeous signs at their doors sometimes cost forty pounds.  The inns were cheap too, and the landlord let no one depart dissatisfied with his bill.  The worst inns were in London, and the tradition has been handed down.  But the ostlers, Harrison confesses, did sometimes cheat in the feed, and they with the tapsters and chamberlains were in league (and the landlord was not always above suspicion) with highwaymen outside, to ascertain if the traveler carried any valuables; so that when he left the hospitable inn he was quite likely to be stopped on the highway and relieved of his money.  The highwayman was a conspicuous character.  One of the most romantic of these gentry at one time was a woman named Mary Frith, born in 1585, and known as Moll Cut-Purse.  She dressed in male attire, was an adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a staunch royalist; she once took two hundred gold jacobuses