England; but it was so narrow as barely to afford passage for more
than a single horseman, and so deep that the rider's head was
beneath the level of the ground on either side.

The roads of Sussex long preserved an infamous notoriety.
Chancellor Cowper, when a barrister on circuit, wrote to his wife
in 1690, that "the Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond
imagination. I vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will
in habit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The country is
a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water
that falls from two long ranges of hills on both sides of it,
and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist
and soft by the water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only
able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."

It was almost as difficult for old persons to get to church in
Sussex during winter as it was in the Lincoln Fens, where they were
rowed thither in boats. Fuller saw an old lady being drawn to
church in her own coach by the aid of six oxen. The Sussex roads
were indeed so bad as to pass into a by-word. A contemporary
writer says, that in travelling a slough of extraordinary miryness,
it used to be called "the Sussex bit of the road;" and he
satirically alleged that the reason why the Sussex girls were so
long-limbed was because of the tenacity of the mud in that county;
the practice of pulling the foot out of it "by the strength of the
ancle" tending to stretch the muscle and lengthen the bone!*[4]
But the roads in the immediate neighbourhood of London long
continued almost as bad as those in Sussex. Thus, when the poet
Cowley retired to Chertsey, in 1665, he wrote to his friend Sprat
to visit him, and, by way of encouragement, told him that he