In 1754, a correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine argued a case for good roads when he wrote, ‘Whatever quickens and cheapens the transportation of goods, and makes their migration more easy from place to place, must of course render a state more wealthy.’ For the most part the correspondent was referring to good turnpike roads where ‘smoothness, spaciousness and the advantage of celerity in passage’ achieved these objectives. Popular opposition to turnpikes in certain localities throughout the first half of the eighteenth century suggests that others had a less optimistic view of such highways and the trusts that administered them.

Turnpike trusts were set up by Act of Parliament. Groups of local people (trustees) were thereby granted temporary powers to maintain and upgrade defined stretches of road, the cost of which was borne by charging tolls at gates along the route. As Langford notes, ‘By 1770 they covered 15,000 miles of road, administered by more than five hundred separate trusts’. Opposition sprang from the fact that, as Langford and others have pointed out, the tolls charged were ‘in the nature of a tax, supplementing one form of highway rate with another’, for the trusts operated on roads which ‘were usually ancient thoroughfares, previously maintained by statute labour and travelled free by all who used them’. It is important to emphasize that ‘before the eighteenth century the highway was not so much an actual body of land reserved and maintained for the convenience of traffic as a “right of passage” for every subject of the Crown over another's land’.