ear and notable with his four-penny besom and basket.
That he did good honest work with his birch there is credible testimony
in the parochial balance sheets of the period, wherein appear frequent
entries, at first of 4d. and then of 5d. each, for new besoms, as the
value of that commodity advanced with the greater enlightenment and
more sweeping reforms of the times!

To the same period, the latter part of it, we owe the beginning of that
general system of the "petrified kidney" style of pavement which still
lingers in places. Twopence-half-penny a bushel the material cost our
forefathers! but what, in trials of patience and of temper, have they
not cost the unlucky Roystonians who were destined to walk upon {114}
them for so long and with so little hope of change? It was a cheap way
of serving posterity, but assuredly not a kind one, for the evil of it
is that they never wear out! Farmers and others paid their highway
rates in kind, that is by carting materials, &c., and of this
"composition" according to scale, there were seven farmers in Royston
availing themselves. The first piece of stone paving in our streets
was commenced near the Cross in 1836.

During the earlier years of the century there were no street lamps in
our town of any kind, but people were commonly met in the streets on
their way to Church, Chapel, or to the shops, carrying a lantern and,
in dirty weather, "clicketting along in pattens."

The shop windows were lighted with candles, if at all, and candles were
placed upon the counters, with, of course, the necessity of a pause in
the casting up of an account or serving a customer, to snuff the
candle! Later, when gas came--in July of the year 1836--there was
here, as elsewhere, some prejudice against its adoption, and some
observations on the practical advantages of the employment of coal gas,
were addressed to the inhabitants of Royston by Mr. W. H. Nash,
secretary to the committee of the Royston Gas Company, and printed and
circulated. The price charged for gas was at first 12s. 6d. per 1,000
feet, and consequently it was an uphill work to supersede the tallow
candle and snuffers of our grandfathers!

Water was hawked round the streets at so much a pailful, though a few
wells were open to use on payment, such as that at the White Lion, and
especially the Hoops. The subject of allotments for the labourer is no
new thing, for across the space of sixty years come the stentorian
tones of the