Transcriber’s Notes

Hyphenation has been standardised.

Footnotes were moved to the ends of the text they pertain to and
numbered in one continuous sequence.




[Illustration: GOING TO BURY FAIR.

_From Engraving, A.D. 1750_.]




EARLY CARRIAGES AND ROADS

BY SIR WALTER GILBEY, Bart.

ILLUSTRATED

London VINTON & CO., Ltd., 9, NEW BRIDGE STREET, E.C.

1903




_The use of carriages, coaches and wheeled conveyances have had an
intimate relationship with the social life of English people from an
early period in history._

_Many instructive books have appeared on the subject of carriages
generally, but these have been for the most part written by experts in
the art of coach and carriage building._

_In this publication, attention has been given to the early history
of wheeled conveyances in England and their development up to recent
times._

[Illustration]

_Elsenham Hall, Essex._ _April, 1903._




CONTENTS.

                                                       PAGE
Introduction                                              1

First Use of Wheeled Vehicles                             2

Badness of Early Roads                                    3

Saxon Vehicles and Horse Litters                          4

Continental Carriages in the 13th and 14th Centuries      8

Conveyances in Henry VI.’s Time                          11

“Chariots” First Used on Great Occasions                 12

First Use of Carriages: called Coaches                   13

Coaches in France                                        15

Coaches First Used by Queen Elizabeth                    16

Duke of Brunswick, 1588, Forbids Use of Coaches          20

The Stage Waggon                                         21

The Introduction of Springs                              23

Steel Springs Introduced                                 24

The First Hackney Coaches                                26

Excessive Number of Coaches in London                    28

Hackney Carriages and the Thames Watermen                30

Hackney Carriages a Nuisance in London                   32

Licensed Hackney Carriages                               33

Coaches with “Boots”                                     35

Carriages in Hyde Park                                   38

Coach and Cart Racing                                    40

Regulations for Hackney Carriages                        41

Pepys on Carriages                                       43

Glass Windows in Carriages                               45

Improvements in Carriages                                47

Pepys’ Private Carriage                                  50

Carriage Painting in Pepys’ Day                          52

The First Stage Coaches                                  54

Objections Raised to Stage Coaches                       56

Seventeenth Century High Roads                           62

Hackney Cabs as a Source of Revenue                      66

Manners of the Cabman                                    69

Cab-driving a Lucrative Occupation                       70

Coaches and Roads in Queen Anne’s Time                   73

Coaching in George I.’s and II.’s Reigns                 74

Dean Swift on Coaches and Drivers                        76

Roads in the 18th Century                                78

Speed of the 18th Century Stage Coach                    80

The Application of Springs                               84

Outside Passengers                                       87

Roads in George III.’s Time                              88

Improvements in Stage Coaches                            90

The Mail Coach                                           91

Regulations for Mail and Stage Coaches                   94

Mail Coach Parade on the King’s Birthday                 95

The Mail Coachman and Guard                              97

“The Road” in Winter                                    100

Passenger Fares                                         102

Difference Between Stage and Mail Coach                 102

The “Golden Age” of Coaching                            104

Fast Coaches                                            106

Heavy Taxation of Coaches                               111

Early Cabs                                              112

Private and Stage Coaches, 1750-1830                    116

Varieties of Carriage                                   120




ILLUSTRATIONS.


PAGE

“Going to Bury Fair”                     _Frontispiece_

Hammock Waggon                                        5

Horse Litter                                          7

Flight of Princess Ermengarde                         9

Queen Elizabeth’s Travelling Coach                   17

Hackney Coaches in London, 1637                      29

Coach of Queen Elizabeth’s Ladies                    35

The Machine, 1640-1700                          Face 56

Mr. Daniel Bourn’s Roller Wheel Waggon, 1763         79

Travelling Posting Carriage (1), 1750                83

Travelling Posting Carriage (2), 1750                85

Portrait of Mr. John Palmer                     Face 92

Portrait of Mr. Macadam                             104

Royal Mail Coach                                    108

London Hackney Cab (Boulnois’ Patent)               115

Travelling Post, 1825-35                       Face 118

King George IV. in His Pony Phaeton                 120


[Illustration:

JOHN BALE SONS and DANIELSSON L^{TD}.
G^T TITCHFIELD STREET LONDON.]




EARLY CARRIAGES AND ROADS.




INTRODUCTION.


Only some three hundred and fifty years have elapsed since wheeled
conveyances for passengers came into use in England; but, once
introduced, they rapidly found favour with all classes of society, more
especially in cities. The progress of road-making and that of light
horse-breeding are so intimately connected with the development of
carriages and coaches that it is difficult to dissociate the three. In
the early days of wheeled traffic the roads of our country were utterly
unworthy of the name, being, more particularly in wet weather, such
quagmires that they were often impassable.

Over such roads the heavy carriages of our ancestors could only be
drawn by teams of heavy and powerful horses, strength being far more
necessary than speed; and for many generations the carriage or coach
horse was none other than the Great or Shire Horse. Improved roads
made rapid travel possible, and the increase of stage coaches created a
demand for the lighter and more active harness horses, for production
of which England became celebrated.

If comparatively little has been said concerning horses, it is because
the writer has already dealt with that phase of the subject in previous
works.[1]

[1] _The Great Horse, or War Horse; Horses, Past and Present._ By Sir
Walter Gilbey, Bart. (Vinton and Co., Ltd.)


FIRST USE OF WHEELED VEHICLES.

Wheeled vehicles for the conveyance of passengers were first introduced
into England in the year 1555. The ancient British war chariot was
neither more nor less than a fighting engine, which was probably
never used for peaceful travelling from place to place. Carts for
the conveyance of agricultural produce were in use long before any
wheeled vehicle was adapted for passengers. The ancient laws and
institutes of Wales, codified by Howel Dda, who reigned from A.D. 942
to 948, describe the “qualities” of a three-year-old mare as “to draw
a car uphill and downhill, and carry a burden, and to breed colts.”
The earliest mention of carts in England that some considerable
research has revealed is in the _Cartulary of Ramsay Abbey_ (Rolls
Series), which tells us that on certain manors in the time of Henry I.
(1100-1135) there were, among other matters, “three carts, each for
four oxen or three horses.”


BADNESS OF EARLY ROADS.

That carriages did not come into use at an earlier period than the
sixteenth century is no doubt due to the nature of the cattle tracks
and water-courses which did duty for roads in England. These were
of such a nature that wheeled traffic was practically impossible
for passengers, and was exceedingly difficult for carts and waggons
carrying goods.

In old documents we find frequent mention of the impossibility of
conveying heavy wares by road during the winter. For example, when
Henry VIII. began to suppress the monasteries, in 1537, Richard
Bellasis, entrusted with the task of dismantling Jervaulx Abbey, in
Yorkshire, refers to the quantity of lead used for roofing purposes,
which “cannot be conveyed away till next summer, for the ways in that
countrie are so foule and deepe that no carriage (cart) can pass in
winter.”

In the Eastern counties, and no doubt elsewhere in England, our
ancestors used the water-courses and shallow stream beds as their
roads. This is clear to anyone who is at pains to notice the lie and
course of old bye-ways; and it is equally clear that a stream when low
offered a much easier route to carts, laden or empty, than could be
found elsewhere. The beds of the water courses as a general rule are
fairly smooth, hard and gravelled, and invited the carter to follow
them rather than to seek a way across the wastes. In process of use
the banks and sides were cut down by the wheels or by the spade; and
eventually the water was diverted into another channel and its old bed
was converted into a road.


SAXON VEHICLES AND HORSE LITTERS.

Strutt states that the chariot of the Anglo-Saxons was used by
distinguished persons for travel. If the illustrations from which
he describes them give a fair idea of their proportions and general
construction, they must have been singularly uncomfortable conveyances.
The drawing is taken from an illuminated manuscript of the Book of
Genesis in the Cotton Library (Claud. B. iv.), which Strutt refers to
the ninth century, but which a later authority considers a production
of the earlier part of the eleventh. The original drawing shows a
figure in the hammock waggon, which figure represents Joseph on his way
to meet Jacob on the latter’s arrival in Egypt; this figure has been
erased in order to give a clear view of the conveyance, which no doubt
correctly represents a travelling carriage of the artist’s own time,
viz., A.D. 1100-1200.

[Illustration: HAMMOCK WAGGON.

Supposed to have been in use in England about A.D. 1100-1200.]

Horse litters, carried between two horses, one in front and one
behind, were used in early times by ladies of rank, by sick persons,
and also on occasion to carry the dead. Similar vehicles of a lighter
description, carried by men, were also in use.

William of Malmesbury states that the body of William Rufus was brought
from the spot where he was killed in the New Forest in a horse-litter
(A.D. 1100). When King John fell ill at Swineshead Abbey, in 1216,
he was carried in a horse-litter to Newark, where he died. For a man
who was in good health to travel in such a conveyance was considered
unbecoming and effeminate. In recording the death, in 1254, of Earl
Ferrers, from injuries received in an accident to his conveyance,
Matthew Paris deems it necessary to explain that the Earl suffered from
gout, which compelled him to use a litter when moving from place to
place. The accident was caused by the carelessness of the driver of the
horses, who upset the conveyance while crossing a bridge.

The illustration is copied from a drawing which occurs in a manuscript
in the British Museum (Harl. 5256).

Froissart speaks of the English returning “in their charettes” from
Scotland after Edward III.’s invasion of that country, about 1360;
but there is little doubt that the vehicles referred to were merely
the baggage carts which accompanied the army used by the footsore and
fatigued soldiers.

[Illustration: HORSE LITTER USED A.D. 1400-1500.]

The same chronicler refers to use of the “chare” or horse-litter in
connection with Wat Tyler’s insurrection in the year 1380:—

“The same day that these unhappy people of Kent were coming to London,
there returned from Canterbury the King’s mother, Princess of Wales,
coming from her pilgrimage. She was in great jeopardy to have been
lost, for these people came to her chare and dealt rudely with her.”

As the chronicler states that the “good lady” came in one day from
Canterbury to London, “for she never durst tarry by the way,” it is
evident that the chare was a “horse-litter,” the distance exceeding
sixty miles.

The introduction of side-saddles by Anne of Bohemia, Richard II.’s
Queen, is said by Stow to have thrown such conveyances into disuse:
“So was the riding in those whirlicotes and chariots forsaken except
at coronations and such like spectacles:” but when the whirlicote or
horse-litter was employed for ceremonial occasions it was a thing of
great magnificence.


CONTINENTAL CARRIAGES IN THE 13TH AND 14TH CENTURIES.

Carriages were in use on the continent long before they were employed
in England. In 1294, Philip the Fair of France issued an edict whose
aim was the suppression of luxury; under this ordinance the wives of
citizens were forbidden to use carriages, and the prohibition appears
to have been rigorously enforced. They were used in Flanders during the
first half of the fourteenth century; an ancient Flemish chronicle in
the British Museum (Royal MSS. 16, F. III.) contains a picture of the
flight of Ermengarde, wife of Salvard, Lord of Rouissillon.

[Illustration: THE FLIGHT OF PRINCESS ERMENGARDE.

Carriage used about 1300-1350 in Flanders.]

The lady is seated on the floor boards of a springless four-wheeled
cart or waggon, covered in with a tile that could be raised or drawn
aside; the body of the vehicle is of carved wood and the outer edges
of the wheels are painted grey to represent iron tires. The conveyance
is drawn by two horses driven by a postillion who bestrides that on
the near-side. The traces are apparently of rope, and the outer trace
of the postillion’s horse is represented as passing under the saddle
girth, a length of leather (?) being let in for the purpose; the traces
are attached to swingle-bars carried on the end of a cross piece
secured to the base of the pole where it meets the body.

Carriages of some kind appear also to have been used by men of rank
when travelling on the continent. _The Expeditions to Prussia and
the Holy Land of Henry, Earl of Derby, in 1390 and 1392-3_ (Camden
Society’s Publications, 1894), indicate that the Earl, afterwards King
Henry IV. of England, travelled on wheels at least part of the way
through Austria.

The accounts kept by his Treasurer during the journey contain several
entries relative to carriages; thus on November 14, 1392, payment is
made for the expenses of two equerries named Hethcote and Mansel, who
were left for one night at St. Michael, between Leoban and Kniltelfeld,
with thirteen carriage horses. On the following day the route lay over
such rugged and mountainous country that the carriage wheels were
broken despite the liberal use of grease; and at last the narrowness of
the way obliged the Earl to exchange his own carriage for two smaller
ones better suited to the paths of the district.

The Treasurer also records the sale of an old carriage at Friola
for three florins. The exchange of the Earl’s “own carriage” is the
significant entry: it seems very unlikely that a noble of his rank
would have travelled so lightly that a single cart would contain his
own luggage and that of his personal retinue; and it is also unlikely
that he used one baggage cart of his own. The record points directly to
the conclusion that the carriages were passenger vehicles used by the
Earl himself.


CONVEYANCES IN HENRY VI.’s TIME.

It was probably possession of roads unworthy of the name that deterred
the English from following the example of their continental neighbours,
for forty years later the horse-litter was still the only conveyance
used by ladies. On July 13, 1432, King Henry VI. writes to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of Winchester and Durham, and the
High Treasurer, in connection with the journeyings of Joan of Navarre,
widow of Henry IV.:—

“And because we suppose that she will soon remove from the place where
she is now, that ye order for her also horses for two chares and let
her remove thence into whatever place within our kingdom that she
pleases.”


“CHARIOTS” FIRST USED ON GREAT OCCASIONS.

There is still some little doubt concerning the date when the carriage
or coach was first seen in England; but it seems certain that wheeled
vehicles of some kind were used on great ceremonial occasions before
the coach suitable for ordinary travel came into vogue.

When Catherine of Aragon was crowned with Henry VIII., on June 24,
1509, she was, says Holinshed, conveyed in a litter followed by
“chariots covered, with ladies therein.” Similarly when Anne Boleyn
passed in state through London she was borne in a litter followed
by ladies in a chariot. From these records it is clear that the
horse-litter was considered the more dignified conveyance.

The litter used by princesses and ladies of high degree on state
occasions was very richly furnished. The poles on which it was
supported were covered with crimson velvet, the pillows and cushions
with white satin, and the awning overhead was of cloth of gold. The
trappings of the horses and dress of the grooms who led them were
equally splendid. Ancient records contain minute particulars of the
materials purchased for litters on special occasions, and these show
with what luxury the horse-litter of a royal lady was equipped.

In this connection we must note that Markland, in his _Remarks on the
Early Use of Carriages in England_, discriminates between the “chare”
and the horse-litter: the chare gave accommodation to two persons or
more and was used for ordinary purposes of travel, and he believes
that it ran on wheels; whereas the horse-litter accommodated only one
person, and that usually a lady of high rank, on ceremonial occasions.

The chariot was clearly rising in esteem at this period, for when Queen
Mary went in state to be crowned in the year 1553, she herself occupied
a chariot. It is described as “a chariot with cloth of tissue, drawn
with six horses”; and it was followed by another “with cloth of silver
and six horses,” in which were seated Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves.


FIRST USE OF CARRIAGES; CALLED COACHES.

We are now come to the period when the coach proper was introduced into
England. Stow, in his _Summary of the English Chronicles_, says that
carriages were not used in England till 1555, when Walter Rippon built
one for the Earl of Rutland, “this being the first ever made.” Taylor,
the “Water Poet,” in his life of Thomas Parr, states that Parr was 81
years old “before there was any coach in England.” Parr was born in
1483, so the year in which he reached 81 would be 1564; in that year
William Boonen, a Dutchman, brought from the Netherlands a coach which
was presented to Queen Elizabeth; and Taylor, on Parr’s authority,
mentions this as the “first one ever seen here.”

The obvious inference is that Parr had not heard of or (what is more
probable considering his advanced age) had forgotten the coach built
eleven years earlier for a much less conspicuous person than the
sovereign. There is also mention in the Burghley Papers (III., No. 53)
quoted by Markland, of Sir T. Hoby offering the use of his coach to
Lady Cecil in 1556. It is quite likely that the coach brought by Boonen
from the Netherlands served as a model for builders in search for
improvements, as we read in Stow’s _Summary_: “In 1564, Walter Rippon
made the first _hollow, turning coach_, with pillars and arches, for
her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.” What a “hollow, turning” coach may have
been it is difficult to conjecture. Drawings of a hundred years later
than this period show no mechanism resembling a “turning head” or
fifth wheel. Captain Malet[2] says that the Queen suffered so much in
this vehicle, when she went in it to open Parliament, that she never
used it again. The difference between the coach for ordinary travel
and the chariot for ceremony is suggested by the next passage in the
_Summary_: “In 1584 he (Rippon) made a _chariot throne_ with four
pillars behind to bear a crown imperial on the top, and before, two
lower pillars whereon stood a lion and a dragon, the supporters of the
arms of England.”

[2] _Annals of the Road_, London, 1876.

Queen Elizabeth, according to Holinshed, used a “chariot” when she went
to be crowned at Westminster in 1558.


COACHES IN FRANCE.

By way of showing how the old authorities differ, mention may be made
of the coach which Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, brought from France
and presented to the Queen, it is said, in 1580. This vehicle is cited
as the first coach ever seen in public but inasmuch as we have ample
evidence to prove the last statement incorrect, apart from the fact
that the Earl died in 1579, nothing more need be said about it.

France does not seem to have been very far ahead of Britain in the
adoption of coaches. In 1550 there were only three in Paris; one
belonged to the Queen of Francis I., another to Diana of Poitiers, and
the third to René de Laval, who was so corpulent that he could not
ride. Mr. George Thrupp, in his _History of the Art of Coach Building_
(1876), observes that “there must have been many other vehicles in
France, but it seems only three covered and suspended coaches.”


COACHES FIRST USED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH.

Queen Elizabeth travelled in a coach, either the one built by Walter
Rippon or that brought by Boonen (who, by the way, was appointed her
coachman), on some of her royal progresses through the kingdom. When
she visited Warwick in 1572, at the request of the High Bailiff she
“caused every part and side of the coach to be opened that all her
subjects present might behold her, which most gladly they desired.”

The vehicle which could thus be opened on “every part and side” is
depicted incidentally in a work executed by Hoefnagel in 1582, which
Markland believed to be probably the first engraved representation of
an English coach. As will be seen from the reproduction here given, the
body carried a roof or canopy on pillars, and the intervening spaces
could be closed by means of curtains.

[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH’S TRAVELLING COACH.

About the year 1582.]

Queen Elizabeth seems to have preferred riding on a pillion when she
could; she rode thus on one occasion from London to Exeter, and again
we read of her going in state to St. Paul’s on a pillion behind her
Master of the Horse. Sir Thomas Browne, writing to his son on October
15, 1680, says: “When Queen Elizabeth came to Norwich, 1578, she came
on horseback from Ipswich by the high road to Norwich, but she had a
coach or two in her train.”

Country gentlemen continued to travel on horseback, though ladies
sometimes made their journeys by coach. The _Household Book_ of the
Kytson family of Hengrave in Suffolk contains the following entry under
date December 1, 1574: “For the hire of certain horses to draw my
mistress’ coach from Whitsworth to London 26 shillings and 8 pence.”

Other entries show that “my mistress” occupied the coach: whence it
would appear that not all our country roads in Queen Elizabeth’s time
were impassable during the winter, as we might reasonably infer from
many contemporary records. The horse-litter, as we may well suppose,
was an easier conveyance than the early springless coach: for example,
in Hunter’s _Hallamshire_ we find mention of Sir Francis Willoughby’s
request in 1589 to the Countess of Shrewsbury to lend her horse-litter
and furniture for his wife, who was ill and unable to travel either on
horseback or in a coach.

It may be observed here that the latest reference we have found to the
use of the horse-litter occurs in the _Last Speech of Thomas Pride_
(Harleian Miscellany): in 1680 an accident happened to General Shippon,
who “came in a horse-litter wounded to London; when he paused by the
brewhouse in St. John Street a mastiff attacked the horse, and he was
tossed like a dog in a blanket.”

Owing no doubt to their patronage by royalty, coaches grew rapidly
popular. William Lilly, in a play called “Alexander and Campaspes,”
which was first printed in 1584, makes one of his characters
complain of those who had been accustomed to “go to a battlefield on
hard-trotting horses now riding in easy coaches up and down to court
ladies.” Stow, referring to the coach brought to England by Boonen,
says:—

“After a while divers great ladies, with as great jealousy of the
Queen’s displeasure, made them coaches and rid in them up and down the
countries, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then by
little and little they grew usual among the nobilitie and others of
sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach making.”

This confirms the statement of Lilly above quoted: it is quite clear
therefore that, about 1580, coaches had come into general use among the
wealthy classes. Their popularity became a source of anxiety to those
who saw in the use of a coach the coming degeneracy of men and neglect
of horsemanship.


DUKE OF BRUNSWICK, 1588, FORBIDS USE OF COACHES.

In 1588, Julius Duke of Brunswick issued a proclamation forbidding
the vassals and servants of his electorate to journey in coaches,
but on horseback, “when we order them to assemble, either altogether
or in part, in times of turbulence, or to receive their fiefs, or
when on other occasions they visit our court.” The Duke expressed
himself strongly in this proclamation, being evidently resolved that
the vassals, servants and kinsmen who “without distinction young and
old have _dared_ to give themselves up to indolence and to riding in
coaches,” should resume more active habits.

The same tendency on the one side and the same feeling on the other
in this country led to the introduction of a Bill in Parliament in
November, 1601, “to restrain the excessive use of coaches,” but it was
rejected. Whereupon:—

“Motion was made by the Lord Keeper, that forasmuch as the said
Bill did in some sort concern the maintenance of horses within this
realm, consideration might be had of the statutes heretofore made and
ordained touching the breed and maintenance of horses. And that Mr.
Attorney-general should peruse and consider of the said statutes, and
of some fit Bill to be drawn and prefered to the house touching the
same, and concerning the use of coaches: which motion was approved of
the House.”

It does not appear, however, that any steps were taken by the
Parliament of the time to check the liberty of those who could afford
it to indulge in coaches.

They were probably little used except in London and large towns where
the streets afforded better going than country roads: though, as
we have seen, Queen Elizabeth took coaches with her when making a
progress. The coach seems to have been unknown in Scotland till near
the end of the century, for we read that when, in 1598, the English
Ambassador to Scotland brought one with him “it was counted a great
marvel.”


THE STAGE WAGGON.

About 1564 the early parent of the stage coach made its appearance.
Stow says: “And about that time began long waggons to come in use, such
as now come to London from Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, Gloucester,
&c., with passengers and commodities.” These were called “stages”: they
were roomy vehicles with very broad wheels which prevented them sinking
too deeply into the mud: they travelled very slowly, but writers of the
period make frequent allusions to the convenience they provided. Until
the “long waggon” came into use the saddle and pack horse were the only
means of travelling and carrying goods: this conveyance was largely
used by people of small means until late in the eighteenth century,
when stage coaches began to offer seats at fares within the reach of
the comparatively poor.

Some confusion is likely to arise when searching old records from the
fact that words now in current use have lost their original meaning.
Thus in an Act passed in the year 1555 for “The amending of High
Ways,” the preamble states that certain highways are “now both very
noisome and tedious to travel in and dangerous to all passengers and
‘cariages.’” We might read this to mean vehicles for the conveyance
of passengers; but the text (which empowers local authorities to make
parishioners give four days’ work annually on the roads where needed)
shows us that the “cariage” or “caryage” is identical with the “wayne”
or “cart” used in husbandry. “Carriage” is used in the same sense in a
similar Act of Elizabeth dated 1571, which requires the local authority
to repair certain streets near Aldgate which “become so miry and foul
in the winter time” that it is hard for foot-passengers and “caryages”
to pass along them.


THE INTRODUCTION OF SPRINGS.

It is impossible to discover when builders of passenger vehicles first
endeavoured to counteract the jolting inseparable from the passage of
a primitive conveyance over rough roads by means of springs. Homer
tells us that Juno’s car was slung upon cords to lessen the jolting:
and the ancient Roman carriages were so built that the body rested on
the centre of a pole which connected the front and rear axles, thus
reducing the jolt by whatever degree of spring or elasticity the pole
possessed.

To come down to later times, Mr. Bridges Adams in _English Pleasure
Carriages_ (1837) refers to a coach presented by the King of Hungary to
King Charles VII. of France (1422-1461), the body of which “trembled.”
Mr. George Thrupp considers that this probably indicates a coach-body
hung on leather straps or braces, and was a specimen of the vehicle
then in use in Hungary. At Coburg several ancient carriages are
preserved: one of those built in 1584 for the marriage ceremony of Duke
John Casimir, the Elector of Saxony, is hung on leather braces from
carved standard posts which, says Mr. Thrupp, “are evidently developed
from the standards of the common waggon. The body of this coach is six
feet four inches long and three feet wide: the wheels have wooden rims,
but over the joints of the felloes are small plates of iron about ten
inches long.”

In regard to these iron plates it will be remembered that the wheels
of the coach represented in the “Flemish Chronicle” of the first half
of the fourteenth century referred to on pp. 8-9, is furnished with
complete iron tires. Neither this vehicle, nor that of Queen Elizabeth,
a sketch of which is given on p. 17 are furnished with braces of any
kind. It would not be judicious to accept these drawings as exactly
representing the construction of the carriages, but if the artist has
given a generally accurate picture it is difficult to see how or where
leather braces could have been applied to take the dead weight of the
coach body off the under-carriage.


STEEL SPRINGS INTRODUCED.

Mr. Thrupp states that steel springs were first applied to wheel
carriages about 1670,[3] when a vehicle resembling a Sedan chair on
wheels, drawn and pushed by two men, was introduced into Paris. This
conveyance was improved by one Dupin, who applied two “elbow springs”
by long shackles to the front axle-tree which worked up and down in
a groove under the seat. The application of steel springs to coaches
drawn by horses was not generally practised until long afterwards: in
1770 Mons. Roubo, a Frenchman, wrote a treatise on carriage building,
from which we learn that springs were by no means universally employed.

[3] See page 84.

When used, says Mr. Thrupp,

“They were applied to the four corners of a perch carriage and placed
upright, and at first only clipped in the middle to the posts of the
earlier carriages, while the leather braces went from the tops of the
springs to the bottoms of the bodies without any long iron loops such
as we now use; and as the braces were very long we find that complaints
were made of the excessive swinging and tilting and jerking of the
body. The Queen’s coach is thus suspended. Four elbow springs, as we
should call them, were fastened to the bottom of the body, but again
the ends did not project beyond the bottom, and the braces were still
far too long; and Mons. Roubo doubts whether springs were much use.”

The doubt concerning the value of springs was shared in this country;
for Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in his _Essay on the Construction
of Roads and Carriages_ (1817), tells us that in 1768 he discovered
that springs were as advantageous to horses as to passengers, and
constructed a carriage for which the Society of English Arts and
Manufactures presented him with a gold medal. In this carriage the
axletrees were divided and the motion of each wheel was relieved by a
spring.

Travel in a springless coach over uneven streets and the roughest of
roads could not have been a sufficiently luxurious mode of progress
to lay the traveller open to charge of effeminacy. Taylor, the Water
Poet, was no doubt biased in favour of the watermen, but he probably
exaggerated little when he wrote, in 1605, of men and women “so tost,
tumbled, jumbled and rumbled” in the coach of the time.


THE FIRST HACKNEY COACHES.

It was in the year 1605 that hackney coaches came into use; for several
years these vehicles did not stand or “crawl” about the streets to
be hired, but remained in the owners’ yards until sent for. In 1634
the first “stand” was established in London, as appears from a letter
written by Lord Stafford to Mr. Garrard in that year:—

“I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up amongst us
though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a
sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries
experiments. He hath created, according to his ability, some four
hackney coaches, put his men into livery and appointed them to stand
at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to
carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had.
Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and
performed their journeys at the same rate so that sometimes there is
twenty of them together which dispose up and down, that they and others
are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside.”

Lord Stafford adds that everybody is much pleased with the innovation.
It may here be said, on the authority of Fynes Morryson, who wrote
in 1617, that coaches were not to be hired anywhere but in London at
that time. All travel (save in the slow long waggons) was performed on
horseback, the “hackney men”[4] providing horses at from 2½d. to 3d.
per mile for those who did not keep their own.

[4] See _Horses Past and Present_, by Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart. Vinton &
Co., 1900.

The number of coaches increased rapidly during the earlier part of the
seventeenth century.


EXCESSIVE NUMBER OF COACHES IN LONDON.

The preamble of a patent granted Sir Saunders Duncombe in 1634 to
let Sedan chairs refers to the fact that the streets of London and
Westminster “are of late time so much encumbered and pestered with the
unnecessary multitude of coaches therein used”; and in 1635 Charles
I. issued a proclamation on the subject. This document states that
the “general and promiscuous use” of hackney coaches in great numbers
causes “disturbance” to the King and Queen personally, to the nobility
and others of place and degree; “pesters” the streets, breaks up the
pavements and cause increase in the prices of forage. For which reasons
the use of hackney coaches in London and Westminster and the suburbs
is forbidden altogether, unless the passenger is making a journey of
at least three miles. Within the city limits only private coaches were
allowed to ply, and the owner of a coach was required to keep four good
horses or geldings for the king’s service.

[Illustration: HACKNEY COACHES IN LONDON, 1637.]

This proclamation evidently produced the desired effect, for in 1637
there were only sixty hackney carriages in London: the majority of
these were probably owned by James Duke of Hamilton, Charles’ Master
of the Horse, to whom was granted in July of that year power to license
fifty hackney coachmen in London, Westminster and the suburbs, and “in
other convenient places”; and this notwithstanding the fact that in
1636 the vehicles “in London, the suburbs and within four-mile compass
without are reckoned to the number of six thousand and odd.”[5]

[5] _Coach and Sedan Pleasantly Disputing for Place and Precedence, the
Brewer’s Cart being Moderator._ Published at London by Robert Raworth
for John Crooch in 1636.

Charles I. can hardly have shared the dislike exhibited by some of his
subjects to wheel passenger traffic, for in 1641 we find him granting
licenses for the importation of horses and enjoining licensees to
import _coach_ horses, mares, and geldings not under 14 hands high and
between the ages of three and seven years.


HACKNEY CARRIAGES AND THE THAMES WATERMEN.

The number of cabs, then called hackney coaches, soon produced an
effect upon the earnings of the Thames watermen, who, until these
vehicles were introduced, enjoyed the monopoly of passenger traffic.
Thomas Dekker[6] refers to the resentment felt by the watermen in 1607,
two years after the hackney couch made its appearance:—

“The sculler told him he was now out of cash, it was a hard time; he
doubts there is some secret bridge made over to hell, and that they
steal thither in coaches, for every justice’s wife and the wife of
every citizen must be jolted now.”

[6] _A Knight’s Conjuring Done in Earnest._ By Thomas Dekker. London:
1607.

There seems to have been good reason for the preference given the
hackney coach over the waterman’s wherry. The preamble of an Act passed
in 1603 “Concerning Wherrymen and Watermen” shows that the risks
attending a trip on the Thames were not inconsiderable, and that love
of novelty was not the only motive which caused the citizens of London
to take the hackney coach instead of the wherry. This Act forbade the
employment of apprentices under 18 years of age, premising that:—

“It hath often happened that divers and sundry people passing by water
upon the River of Thames between Windsor and Gravesend have been put
to great hazard and danger of the loss of their lives and goods, and
many times have perished and been drowned in the said River through the
unskilfulness and want of knowledge or experience in the wherrymen and
watermen.”

In 1636, when, as we have seen, there were over 6,000 coaches, private
and hackney, in London, Sedan chairs also were to be hired in the
streets; and the jealousy with which the hackney coachman regarded the
chairman was only equalled by the jealousy with which the waterman
regarded them both. We quote from “Coach and Sedan,” the curious little
publication before referred to:—

“Coaches and Sedans (quoth the waterman) they deserve both to be thrown
into the Thames, and but for stopping the Channel I would they were,
for I am sure where I was wont to have eight or ten fares in a morning,
I now scarce get two in a whole day. Our wives and children at home
are ready to pine, and some of us are fain for means to take other
professions upon us.”


HACKNEY CARRIAGES A NUISANCE IN LONDON.

By the year 1660, the number of hackney coaches in London had again
grown so large that they were described in a Royal Proclamation as
“a common nuisance,” while their “rude and disorderly handling”
constituted a public danger. For these reasons the vehicles were
forbidden to stand in the streets for hire, and the drivers were
directed to stay in the yards until they might be wanted. We can well
understand that the narrowness of the streets made large numbers of
coaches standing, or “crawling,” to use the modern term, obstacles
to traffic; and it is interesting to notice that the earliest patent
granted in connection with passenger vehicles (No. 31 in 1625) was to
Edward Knapp for a device (among others) to make the wheels of coaches
and other carriages approach to or recede from each other “where the
narrowness of the way may require.”


LICENSED HACKNEY CARRIAGES.

In 1662, there were about 2,490 hackney coaches in London, if we may
accept the figures given by John Cressel in a pamphlet, which we shall
consider on a future page. It was in this year that Charles II. passed
a law appointing Commissioners with power to make certain improvements
in the London streets. One of the duties entrusted to them was that of
reducing the number of hackney coaches by granting licenses; and only
400 licenses were to be granted.

These Commissioners grossly abused the authority placed in their hands,
wringing bribes from the unfortunate persons who applied for licenses,
and carrying out their task with so little propriety that in 1663 they
were indicted and compelled to restore moneys they had wrongfully
obtained. In regard to this it is to be observed that one of the 400
hackney coach licenses sanctioned by the Act was a very valuable
possession. We learn from a petition submitted by the hackney coachmen
to Parliament that holders of these licenses, which cost £5 each, sold
them for £100. The petition referred to is undated, but appears to have
been sent in when William III.’s Act to license 700 hackney coaches
(passed in 1694) was before Parliament.

The bitterness of the watermen against Sedan chairs seems to have died
out by Pepys’ time, but it was still hot against the hackney coaches,
as a passage in the _Diary_ sufficiently proves. Proceeding by boat to
Whitehall on February 2, 1659, Samuel Pepys talked with his waterman
and learned how certain cunning fellows who wished to be appointed
State Watermen had cozened others of their craft to support an address
to the authorities in their favour. According to Pepys’ informant, nine
or ten thousand hands were set to this address (the men were obviously
unable to read or write) “when it was only told them that it was a
petition against hackney coaches.”


COACHES WITH “BOOTS.”

From _Coach and Sedan_ (see page 30), we obtain a quaint but fairly
graphic description of the coach of this period:—

“The coach was a thick, burly, square-set fellow in a doublet of black
leather, brasse button’d down the breast, back, sleeves and wings, with
monstrous wide boots, fringed at the top with a net fringe, and a round
breech (after the old fashion) gilded, and on his back an atchievement
of sundry coats [of arms], in their proper colours.”

[Illustration: COACH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH’S LADIES. Showing near-side
“Boot.”]

The “boots” were projections at the sides of the body between the front
and back wheels, as shown in the drawing of the coach occupied by Queen
Elizabeth’s ladies; and there is much evidence to support the opinion
that these boots were not covered. Taylor in _The World Runnes on
Wheeles_ describes the boot with picturesque vigour:—

“The coach is a close hypocrite, for it hath a cover for any knavery
and curtains to veil or shadow any wickedness; besides, like a
perpetual cheater, it wears two boots and no spurs, sometimes having
two pairs of legs in one boot, and often-times (against nature) most
preposterously it makes fair ladies wear the boot; and if you note,
they are carried back to back like people surprised by pirates, to be
tied in that miserable manner and thrown overboard into the sea.”

These two fanciful descriptions explain very clearly what the “boot”
was and how occupied. The “monstrous width” referred to in _Coach and
Sedan_ confirms the statement by Taylor that sometimes “two pairs of
legs” occupied it, the proprietors of the legs sitting back to back.
“No trace of glass windows or perfect doors seems to have existed up
to 1650” (Thrupp), so we can well understand that the passengers who
were obliged to occupy the boot of a stage coach (for these as well as
hackney coaches were so built) on a prolonged journey would have an
exceedingly uncomfortable seat in cold or wet weather.

It was no doubt an open boot which was occupied by the writer of the
curious letter quoted by Markland. Mr. Edward Parker is addressing his
father, who resided at Browsholme, near Preston, in Lancashire; the
letter is dated November 3, 1663:—

“I got to London on Saturday last; my journey was noe ways pleasant,
being forced to ride in the boote all the waye. Ye company yt came
up with mee were persons of greate quality as knights and ladyes. My
journey’s expense was 30s. This traval hath soe indisposed mee yt I am
resolved never to ride up againe in ye coatch. I am extreamely hott and
feverish; what this may tend to I know not, I have not as yet advised
with any doctor.”

Sir W. Petty’s assertion that the splendour of coaches increased
greatly during the Stuart period recalls a passage in Kennett’s
_History of England_. George Villiers, the great favourite of James I.
who created him Duke of Buckingham, had six horses to draw his coach
(“which was wondered at then as a novelty and imputed to him as a
mast’ring pride”). The “stout old Earl of Northumberland,” not to be
outdone by the upstart favourite, “thought if Buckingham had six, he
might very well have eight in his coach, with which he rode through the
city of London to the Bath, to the vulgar talk and admiration.” The
first coaches were drawn by two horses only; love of display led to the
use of more for town use, but the deplorable condition of the country
roads justified the use of as many as quagmires might compel.

How much a coach weighed in these early days we do not know: Mr. R. L.
Edgeworth, writing in 1817, says, “now travelling carriages frequently
weigh above a ton;” and as carriages had undergone vast improvements by
that date, we are justified in concluding that those of a hundred or a
hundred and fifty years earlier weighed a great deal more.


CARRIAGES IN HYDE PARK.

During the Commonwealth (1649-1659), it was the fashion to drive in
“the Ring” in Hyde Park. The Ring is described by a French writer,[7]
as two or three hundred paces in diameter with a sorry kind of
balustrade consisting of poles placed on stakes three feet from the
ground; round this the people used to drive, in Cromwell’s time,
at great speed, as appears from a letter dated May 2, 1654, from a
gentleman in London to a country friend, quoted by Mr. Jacob Larwood in
his _Story of the London Parks_, (1872):—

[7] M. Misson. _Memoirs and Observations of a Journey in England_,
1697.

“When my Lord Protector’s coach came into the Park with Colonel Ingleby
and my Lord’s three daughters, the coaches and horses flocked about
them like some miracle. But they galloped (after the mode court-pace
now, and which they all use wherever they go) round and round the Park,
and all that great multitude hunted them and caught them still at the
turn like a hare, and then made a lane with all reverent haste for them
and so after them again,[8] and I never saw the like in my life.”

[8] The following sentence from Misson explains this reference. He says
of the way people drive in the Ring: “When they have turned for some
time round one way they face about and turn the other.”

There is an interesting letter from the Dutch Ambassadors to the States
General, dated October 16, 1654, which is worth quoting here. The
Ambassadors give particulars of the accident to explain why no business
has been done lately:—

“His Highness [Oliver Cromwell], only accompanied with Secretary
Thurloe and some few of his gentlemen and servants, went to take the
air in Hyde Park, where he caused some dishes of meat to be brought,
where he had his dinner; and afterwards had a mind to drive the coach
himself. Having put only the Secretary into it, being those six grey
horses which the Count of Oldenburgh[9] had presented unto His Highness
who drove pretty handsomely for some time. But at last, provoking these
horses too much with the whip, they grew unruly and ran so fast that
the postilion could not hold them in, whereby His Highness was flung
out of the coach box upon the pole.... The Secretary’s ankle was hurt
leaping out and he keeps his chamber.”

[9] This suggests that the North German province of Oldenbourg was
famed then, as now, for its breed of coach horses.

From this it is evident that when six horses were used a postillion
rode one of the leaders and controlled them; while the driver managed
the wheelers and middle pair. When four horses were driven it was the
custom to have two outriders, one to ride at the leaders’ heads and
one at the wheelers’; in town this would be merely display, but on a
journey the outrider’s horses might replace those of the team in case
of accident, or more frequently, be added to the team to help drag the
coach over a stretch of bad road.


COACH AND CART RACING.

John Evelyn in his Diary refers to a coach race which took place in
the Park on May 20, 1658, but gives no particulars. Mr. Jacob Larwood
observes that at this period and for a century later coach-racing was
a national sport; some considerable research through the literature of
these times, however, has thrown no light upon this sport, and while
we need not doubt that coaches when they chanced to meet on suitable
ground did make trials of speed, it is open to question whether the
practice was ever developed into a sport. It may be that Mr. Larwood
had in mind the curious cart-team races described by Marshall in his
_Rural Economy of Norfolk_, published in 1795.

This writer tells us that before Queen Anne’s reign the farmers of
Norfolk used an active breed of horses which could not only trot but
gallop. He describes as an eyewitness the races which survived to his
day; the teams consisted of five horses, which were harnessed to an
empty waggon:—

“A team following another broke into a gallop, and unmindful of the
ruts, hollow cavities and rugged ways, contended strenuously for the
lead, while the foremost team strove as eagerly to keep it. Both were
going at full gallop, as fast indeed as horses in harness could go
for a considerable distance, the drivers standing upright in their
respective waggons.”


REGULATIONS FOR HACKNEY CARRIAGES.

The Act of 1662 has already been referred to in connection with the
number of hackney coaches in London; we may glance at it again, as
it gives a few interesting particulars. No license was to be granted
to any person following another trade or occupation, and nobody
might take out more than two licenses. Preference was to be given to
“ancient coachmen” (by which expression we shall doubtless be right
in understanding, not aged men but men who had followed the calling in
previous years), and to such men as had suffered for their service to
Charles I. or Charles II.

Horses used in hackney coaches were to be not less than fourteen hands
high. The fares were duly prescribed by time and distance; for a day
of twelve hours the coachman was to be paid not over 10s.; or 1s. 6d.
for the first and 1s. for every subsequent hour. “No gentleman or other
person” was to pay over 1s. for hire of a hackney coach “from any of
the Inns of Court or thereabouts to any part of St. James’ or the city
of Westminster (except beyond Tuttle Street)”; and going eastwards
the shilling fare would carry the hirer from the Inns of Court to the
Royal Exchange; eighteenpence was the fare to the Tower, to Bishopsgate
Street or Aldgate. This Act forbade any hackney coach to ply for hire
on Sunday; thus the hackney carriage was placed in the same category as
the Thames wherries and barges. The restrictions concerning the persons
to whom licenses might be granted obviously afforded the Commissioners
opportunity for the malpractices we have already mentioned.


PEPYS ON CARRIAGES.

For further information concerning this period we naturally turn to Mr.
Pepys, who patronised the hackney coach so frequently that when he was
considering the propriety of setting up his own private carriage, he
justified his decision to do so by the fact that “expense in hackney
coaches is now so great.” Economy was not the only motive; on the
contrary, this entry in his Diary appears to have been merely the
salve to a conscience that reproached his vanity. In 1667 he confides
more than once to the Diary that he is “almost ashamed to be seen in a
hackney,” so much had his importance increased: and on July 10, 1668,
he went “with my people in a glass hackney coach to the park, but was
ashamed to be seen.” The private carriage he set up in December of that
year will be referred to presently.

The public conveyance available for hire in Pepys’ time was evidently
a cumbrous but roomy conveyance; as when a great barrel of oysters “as
big as sixteen others” was given him on March 16, 1664, he took it in
the coach with him to Mr. Turner’s: a circumstance that suggests the
vehicle was built with boots.

No doubt many of these hackney carriages had formerly been the private
property of gentlemen, which when old and shabby were sold cheaply to
ply for hire in the streets.

Coaches with boots were being replaced by the improved “glass coach” a
few years later, and of course the relative merits of the old and new
styles of vehicle were weighed by all who were in the habit of using
hackney coaches. It was one of the old kind to which Pepys refers in
the following passage:—

August 23, 1667. “Then abroad to Whitehall in a hackney coach with
Sir W. Pen, and in our way in the narrow street near Paul’s going the
back way by Tower Street, and the coach being forced to put back, he
was turning himself into a cellar [parts of London were still in ruins
after the Great Fire], which made people cry out to us, and so we were
forced to leap out—he out of one and I out of the other boote. _Query_,
whether a glass coach would have permitted us to have made the escape?”

Other objections to glass coaches appear in the following entry:—

September 23, 1667. “Another pretty thing was my Lady Ashley speaking
of the bad qualities of glass coaches, among others the flying open
of the doors upon any great shake; but another was that my Lady
Peterborough being in her glass coach with the glass up, and seeing a
lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear
that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the
glass and cut all her forehead.”

The usage of the time appears to have been for the driver of a hackney
carriage to fill up his vehicle as he drove along the streets somewhat
after the manner of a modern ‘bus conductor, if we correctly understand
the following entry in the Diary:—

February 6, 1663. “So home: and being called by a coachman who had a
fare in him he carried me beyond the Old Exchange, and there set down
his fare, who would not pay him what was his due because he carried a
stranger [Pepys] with him, and so after wrangling he was fain to be
content with sixpence, and being vexed the coachman would not carry me
home a great while, but set me down there for the other sixpence, but
with fair words he was willing to it.”

Whence it also appears that some members of the public objected to this
practice. The cabman of that time was evidently an insolent character,
for Pepys refers contemptuously to a “precept” which was drawn up in
March, 1663, by the Lord Mayor, Sir John Robinson, against coachmen who
“affronted the gentry.”


GLASS WINDOWS IN CARRIAGES.

Glass was used in carriages at this time, as the entries quoted from
Pepys’ Diary on pages 43 and 44 tell us. Mr. Thrupp states that “no
trace of glass windows or perfect doors seem to have existed up to
1650.” Glass was in common use for house windows before that date,
and Mr. Thrupp refers to the statement that the wife of the Emperor
Ferdinand III. rode in a glass carriage so small that it contained only
two persons as early as 1631. The manufacture of glass was established
in England in 1557[10] (Stow), but plate glass, and none other could
have withstood the rough usage which coaches suffered from the wretched
roads, was not made in England until 1670; previous to that date it was
imported from France. A patent (No. 244) was granted in 1685 to John
Bellingham “for making square window glasses for chaises and coaches.”

[10] James I., by Proclamation, in 1615, forbade the manufacture of
glass if wood were used as fuel, on the ground that the country was
thereby denuded of timber. In 1635 Sir Robert Maunsell perfected a
method of manufacturing “all sorts of glass with sea coale or pitt
coale,” and Charles I. forbade the importation of foreign glass in
order to encourage and assist this new industry.

Pepys writes in his Diary, December 30, 1668: “A little vexed to be
forced to pay 40s. for a glass of my coach, which was broke the other
day, nobody knows how, within the door while it was down: but I do
doubt that I did break it myself with my knees.” Forty shillings for a
single pane seems to indicate that it was plate glass. This passage
also shows us that the lower part of the coach door must have received
the glass between the outer woodwork and a covering of upholstery of
some kind. Had there been wooden casing inside Pepys would not have
broken it with his knees, and had it been uncovered the accident could
not have escaped discovery at the moment.


IMPROVEMENTS IN CARRIAGES.

With reference to the introduction of springs: the patent granted to
Edward Knapp in 1625 protected an invention for “hanging the bodies
of carriages on springs of steel”: the method is not described.
Unfortunately, the Letters Patent of those days scrupulously refrain
from giving any information that would show us _how_ the inventor
proposed to achieve his object. Knapp’s springs could not have been
efficacious, for forty years later ingenious men were working at this
problem. On May 1, 1665, Pepys went to dine with Colonel Blunt at
Micklesmarsh, near Greenwich, and after dinner was present at the

“... trial of some experiments about making of coaches easy. And
several we tried: but one did prove mighty easy (not here for me to
describe, but the whole body of the coach lies upon one long spring),
and we all, one after another, rid in it; and it is very fine and
likely to take.”

These experiments were made before a committee appointed by the Royal
Society, from whose records it appears that on a previous date Colonel
Blunt had “produced another model of a chariot with four springs,
esteemed by him very easy both to the rider and horse, and at the same
time cheap.”

This arrangement of springs evidently did not give such satisfactory
results as the one mentioned above by Pepys. On May 3, 1665, we learn
from Birch’s _History of the Royal Society_:—

“Mr. Hook produced the model of a chariot with two wheels and short
double springs, to be drawn with one horse; the chair [seat] of it
being so fixed upon two springs that the person sitting just over or
rather a little behind the axle-tree was, when the experiment was made
at Colonel Blount’s house, carried with as much ease as one could be in
the French chariot without at all burthening the horse.”

Mr. Hook showed:—

“Two drafts of this model having this circumstantial difference, one
of these was contrived so that the boy sitting on a seat made for him
behind the chair and guiding the reins over the top of it, drives the
horse. The other by placing the chair clear behind the wheels, the
place of entry being also behind and the saddle on the horse’s back
being to be borne up by the shafts, that the boy riding on it and
driving the horse should be little or no burden to the horse.”

It seems to have been this latter variety of Colonel Blount’s
invention, or a modification of it, which Pepys saw on January 22,
1666, and describes as “a pretty odd thing.”

On September 5, 1665, Pepys writes:—

“After dinner comes Colonel Blunt in his new chariot made with springs.
And he hath rode, he says now, this journey many miles in it with one
horse and outdrives any coach and outgoes any horses, and so easy, he
says. So for curiosity I went into it to try it and up the hill to the
heath and over the cart ruts, and found it pretty well, but not so easy
as he pretends.”

Colonel Blunt, or Blount, seems to have devoted much time and ingenuity
to the improvement of the coach, for on January 22, 1666, the committee
again assembled at his house

“—to consider again of the business of chariots and try their new
invention which I saw my Lord Brouncker ride in; where the coachman
sits astride upon a pole over the horse but do not touch the horse,
which is a pretty odd thing: but it seems it is most easy for the
horse, and as they say for the man also.”

On February 16, 1667, a chariot invented by Dr. Croune was produced
for inspection by the members of the Royal Society and “generally
approved.” No particulars of the vehicle are given: we are only told
that “some fence was proposed to be made for the coachman against the
kicking of the horse.”


PEPYS’ PRIVATE CARRIAGE.

On October, 20, 1668, Pepys went to look for the carriage he had so
long promised himself “and saw many; and did light on one [in Cow Lane]
for which I bid £50, which do please me mightily, and I believe I shall
have it.” Four days later the coach-maker calls upon him and they agree
on £53 as the price. But on the 30th of the same month Mr. Povy comes
“to even accounts with me:” and after some gossip about the court,

“—— he and I do talk of my coach and I got him to go and see it, where
he finds most infinite fault with it, both as to being out of fashion
and heavy, with so good reason that I am mightily glad of his having
corrected me in it: and so I do resolve to have one of his build, and
with his advice, both in coach and horses, he being the fittest man in
the world for it.”

Mr. Povy had been Treasurer and Receiver-General of Rents and Revenues
to James, Duke of York: Evelyn describes him as “a nice contriver of
all elegancies.” The opinion of such a personage on a point of fashion
would have been final with a man of Pepys’ temperament, and we hear no
more about the coach with which Mr. Povy “found” most infinite fault.

On 2 November, 1668, Pepys goes “by Mr. Povy’s direction to a
coach-maker near him for a coach just like his, but it was sold this
very morning.” Mr. Povy lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Lord
Braybrooke remarks, “Pepys no doubt went to Long Acre, then, as now,
celebrated for its coach-makers.” On November 5,

“With Mr. Povy spent all the afternoon going up and down among the
coach-makers in Cow Lane and did see several, and at last did pitch
upon a little chariot whose body was framed but not covered at the
widow’s that made Mr. Lowther’s fine coach; and we are mightily pleased
with it, it being light, and will be very genteel and sober: to be
covered with leather and yet will hold four.”

The carriage gave great satisfaction when it came home, but the horses
were not good enough for it: and on December 12 Pepys records that
“this day was brought home my pair of black coach-horses, the first I
ever was master of. They cost me £50 and are a fine pair.”


CARRIAGE PAINTING IN PEPYS’ DAY.

Pepys’ position as an official at the Navy Office was not considered by
his detractors to give him the social status that entitled him to keep
his own coach, and soon after he became the owner of it a scurrilous
pamphlet appeared which, incidentally, gives us a description of the
arms or device with which it was decorated. After denouncing Pepys for
his presumption in owning a carriage at all the writer proceeds:—

“First you had upon the fore part of your chariot tempestuous waves
and wrecks of ships; on your left hand forts and great guns and ships
a-fighting; on your right hand was a fair harbour and galleys riding
with their flags and pennants spread, kindly saluting each other.
Behind it were high curled waves and ships a-sinking, and here and
there an appearance of some bits of land.”

If this is a true description, it would seem as though Pepys’ idea of
the “very genteel and sober” cannot be measured by modern standards of
sober gentility: however that may be, the Diarist takes no notice of
the pamphlet and continues to enjoy possession “with mighty pride” in a
vehicle which he remarks (March 18, 1669), after a drive in Hyde Park,
he “thought as pretty as any there, and observed so to be by others.”

In the following April, however, we find him resolving to have “the
standards of my coach gilt with this new sort of varnish, which will
come to but forty shillings; and contrary to my expectation, the doing
of the biggest coach all over comes not to above £6, which is not very
much.” One morning, a few days later: “I to my coach, which is silvered
over, but no varnish yet laid on, so I put it in a way of doing.”
Again, in the afternoon:—

“I to my coach-maker’s and there vexed to see nothing yet done to my
coach at three in the afternoon, but I set it in doing and stood by it
till eight at night and saw the painter varnish it, which is pretty to
see how every doing it over do make it more and more yellow, and it
dries as fast in the sun as it can be laid on almost, and most coaches
are nowadays done so, and it is very pretty when laid on well and not
too pale as some are, even to show the silver. Here I did make the
workmen drink, and saw my coach cleaned and oiled.”

There is a passage in the Diary (April 30, 1669), which suggests that
it was not unusual for people of station and leisure to superintend the
painting of their carriages; as Pepys found at the coach-maker’s “a
great many ladies sitting in the body of a coach that must be ended
[finished] by to-morrow; they were my Lady Marquess of Winchester,
Lady Bellassis and other great ladies, eating of bread and butter and
drinking ale.”

On the day after that he spent at the coach-maker’s, Pepys, on his
return from office, takes his wife for a drive: “We went alone through
the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses’ manes and
tails tied with red ribbons and the standards there gilt with varnish,
and all clean, and green reins, that people did mightily look upon us;
and the truth is, I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay,
than ours, all the day.”

Samuel Pepys’ child-like pride in his carriage was no doubt a source of
amusement to his contemporaries, but it has had the result of giving us
more minute details concerning the carriages of Charles II.’s time than
we can obtain from the pages of any other writer.


THE FIRST STAGE COACHES.

We must now turn to the stage coach which had come into vogue about the
year 1640.[11] Chamberlayne,[12] writing in 1649, says:—

[11] _History of the Art of Coach Building._ By George A. Thrupp, 1876.

[12] _The Present State of Great Britain._ By Chamberlayne, 1649.

“There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and
women, to travel from London to the principal towns of the country
that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stage
coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place sheltered from
foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging one’s health and one’s
body by hard jogging or over violent motion on horseback, and this not
only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but
with such velocity and speed in one hour as the foreign post can make
but in one day.”

There were two classes of coach in the seventeenth century. Mons.
Misson[13] says, “There are coaches that go to all the great towns
by moderate journeys; and others which they call flying coaches that
will travel twenty leagues a day and more. But these do not go to
all places.” He also refers to the waggons which “lumber along but
heavily,” and which he says are used only by a few poor old women. Four
or four miles and a half in the hour was the speed of the ordinary
coach.

[13] _Memoirs and Observations of a Journey in England_, 1697.

The coaches that travelled between London and distant towns were
similar in construction to the hackney coach, which plied for hire
in the streets, but were built on a larger scale. They carried eight
passengers inside, and behind, over the axle, was a great basket for
baggage and outside passengers, who made themselves as comfortable as
they might in the straw supplied. The “insides” were protected from
rain and cold by leather curtains; neither passengers nor baggage were
carried on the roof; and the coachman sat on a bar fixed between the
two standard posts from which the body was hung in front, his feet
being supported by a footboard on the perch.

Mr. Thrupp states that in 1662 there were only six stage coaches in
existence; which assertion does not agree with that of Chamberlayne,
quoted on a previous page; the seventeenth century writer tells us that
in his time—1649—stage coaches ran “from London to the principle towns
in the country.” It seems, however, certain that the year 1662 saw a
great increase in the number of “short stages”—that is to say, coaches
running between London and towns twenty, thirty, forty miles distant.


OBJECTIONS RAISED TO STAGE COACHES.

This is proved by the somewhat violent pamphlet written by John
Cressel, to which reference was made on page 33. This publication,
which was entitled _The Grand Concern of England Explained_, appeared
in 1673. It informs us that the stage coaches, to which John Cressel
strongly objects:—

“Are kept by innkeepers ... or else ... by such persons as before the
late Act for reducing the number of hackney coaches in London [_see_
page 33] to 400, were owners of coaches and drove hackney. But when
the number of 400 was full and they not licensed, then to avoid the
penalties of the Act they removed out of the city dispersing themselves
into every little town within twenty miles of London where they set up
for stagers and drive every day to London and in the night-time drive
about the city.”

[Illustration: “THE MACHINE.” A.D. 1640-1750.]

These intruders,[14] whose number John Cressel says is “at least
2,000,” paid no £5, and took bread from the mouths of the four hundred
licensed hackney coachmen.

[14] Owing to the profitable nature of the business these unlicensed
hackney coaches increased until on November 30, 1687, a Royal
Proclamation was issued appointing new Commissioners with authority to
make an end of them.

John Cressel’s purpose in writing his pamphlet was to call the
attention of Parliament to the necessity which, in his opinion, existed
for the suppressing all or most of the stage coaches and caravans
which were then plying on the roads; and incidentally he gives some
interesting particulars concerning the stage coach service of his time.
Taking the York, Chester and Exeter coaches as examples, he says that
each of these with forty horses apiece carry eighteen passengers per
week from London.[15] In the summer the fare to either of these places
was forty shillings and in winter forty-five shillings; the coachman
was changed four times on the way, and the usual practice was for each
passenger to give each coachman one shilling.

[15] The stage coach carried six passengers, and a coach left London
for each of the towns named three times a week.

The journey—200 miles—occupied four days. These early “flying
coaches” travelled faster than their successors of a later date. The
seventeenth century London-Exeter coach did the journey, one hundred
and seventy-five miles, in ten days, whereas in 1755, according to
“Nimrod,” proprietors promised “a safe and expeditious journey in a
fortnight.”

The “short stages,” _i.e._, those which ran between London and places
only twenty or thirty miles distant, were the hackney coaches which had
not been fortunate enough to obtain licenses under Charles II.’s Act.
These were drawn by four horses and carried six passengers, making the
journey to or from London in one day. There were, John Cressel states,
stage coaches running to almost every town situated within twenty or
twenty-five miles of the capital; and it is worth observing that at
this date letters were sent by coach. Coaches ran on both sides of the
Thames from Windsor and Maidenhead, and “carry all the letters, little
bundles and passengers which were carried by watermen.”

This writer’s arguments against coaches are worthless as such, but
they throw side lights on the discomforts of travel at the time. He
considered it detrimental to health to rise in the small hours of the
morning to take coach and to retire late to bed. With more reason he
enquired,

“Is it for a man’s health to be laid fast in foul ways and forced to
wade up to the knees in mire; and afterwards sit in the cold till fresh
teams of horses can be procured to drag the coach out of the foul ways?
Is it for his health to travel in rotten coaches and have their tackle,
or perch, or axle-tree broken, and then to wait half the day before
making good their stage?”

John Cressel was prone to exaggeration, but there is plenty of reliable
contemporary evidence to show that his picture of the coach roads was
not overdrawn. Yet when this advocate for the suppression of coaches
seeks to rouse public sentiment, he reproaches those men who use them
for effeminacy and indulgence in luxury! One of his quaintest arguments
in favour of the saddle horse is that the rider’s clothes “are wont to
be spoyled in two or three journies”; which is, he urges, an excellent
thing for trade as represented by the tailors.

John Cressel, it will be gathered from this, viewed the innovation from
a lofty stand-point. He describes the introduction of stage coaches as
one of the greatest mischiefs that have happened of late years to the
King. They wrought harm, he said:

(1) By destroying the breed of good horses, the strength of the nation,
and making men careless of attaining to good horsemanship, a thing so
useful and commendable in a gentleman.

(2) By hindering the breed of watermen who are the nursery for seamen,
and they the bulwarks of the kingdom.

(3) By lessening His Majesty’s revenues; for there is not the fourth
part of saddle horses either bred or kept now in England that there was
before these coaches set up, and would be again if suppressed.

Travelling on horseback was cheaper than by coach. The “chapman” or
trader could hire a horse from the hackneyman at from 6s. to 12s. per
week. John Cressel estimates that a man could come from “York, Exeter
or Chester to London, and stay twelve days for business (which is the
most that country chapmen usually do stay), for £1 16s., horse hire and
horse meat 1s. 2d. per day.” From Northampton it cost 16s. to come to
London on horseback, from Bristol 25s., Bath 20s., Salisbury 20s. or
25s., and from Reading 7s.

If men would not ride, John Cressel urged them to travel in the long
waggons which moved “easily without jolting men’s bodies or hurrying
them along as the running coaches do.” The long waggon was drawn by
four or five horses and carried from twenty to twenty-five passengers.
He proposed that there should be one stage per week from London to
each shire town in England; that these should use the same team of
horses for the whole journey, that their speed should not exceed thirty
miles a day in summer and 25 in winter, and that they should halt at
different inns on each journey to support the innkeeping business. If
these proposals were carried out, the writer thought stage coaches
would “do little or no harm.”

John Cressel’s pamphlet was answered by another from the pen of a
barrister, who showed up the futility of his arguments and deductions,
but did not find great fault with his facts and figures.


SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HIGH ROADS.

It is commonly believed that the introduction of stage coaches produced
the first legislative endeavour to improve the country roads; this is
not the case: nor had the sufferings of travellers by “long waggon” any
influence upon legislators if comparison of dates be a reliable test;
for it was not until 1622 that any attempt was made to save the roads.
In that year James I. issued a Proclamation in which it was stated that
inasmuch as the highways were ploughed up by “unreasonable carriages,”
and the bridges shaken, the use of four-wheeled carts for carrying
goods and agricultural produce was forbidden, carts with two wheels
only being allowed.

In 1629 Charles I. issued a Proclamation confirming that of his father,
and furthermore forbidding common carriers and others to convey more
than twenty hundredweight in the two-wheeled vehicles which were
lawful, and also forbidding the use of more than five horses at once;
the avowed object being to prevent destruction of the road.

We may fairly reason from the terms of this Proclamation that it was
recognised that on occasion five horses might be required to draw one
ton along the roads; and from this we can form our own idea of the
condition to which traffic and rains might reduce the highways.

In 1661 the restrictions on cart traffic were modified by Charles
II.’s Proclamation, which permitted carts and waggons with four
wheels, and drawn by ten or more horses, to carry sixty or seventy
hundredweight, and forbade more than five horses to be harnessed to
any four-wheeled cart unless the team went in pairs. The orders issued
thus by Proclamation were made law by two Acts of Charles II. in 1670;
the second of which forbade the use of more than eight horses or oxen
unless harnessed two abreast.

In 1663 the first turnpike gate was erected; this novelty was put on
the Great North Road to collect tolls for repair of the highway in
Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdon, where in places it had
become “ruinous and almost impassable.” The turnpike was so unpopular
that for nearly a century no gate was erected between Glasgow and
Grantham.

Nothing more clearly proves the badness of the roads in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than the number of patents
granted to inventors for devices calculated to prevent carriages from
over-turning. The first invention towards this end was patented in
1684, and between that date and 1792 nine more patents were granted for
devices to prevent upsetting, or to cause the body of the vehicle to
remain erect though the wheels turned over.

Few thought it worth trying to discover a method of improving the roads
which caused accidents. In 1619, one John Shotbolt took out a patent
for “strong engines for making and repairing of roads”; another was
issued in 1699 to Nathaniel Bard, who also protected “an engine for
levelling and preserving roads and highways”; and in the same year
Edward Heming was granted a patent for a method of repairing highways
“so as to throw all the rising ridges into the ruts.” History omits
to tell us what measure of success rewarded these inventions: if the
Patent Specification files form any guide to an opinion, inventors gave
up in despair trying to devise means of keeping the roads in order,
for not until 1763 does another ingenious person appear with a remedy
thought worthy of letters patent.

Repairs to the highways were effected by forced labour when their
condition made improvement absolutely necessary. Thus, in 1695,
surveyors were appointed by Act of Parliament to require persons to
work on the road between London and Harwich, which in places had become
almost impassable. Labourers were to be paid at local rates of hire,
were not to be called upon to travel more than four miles from home,
nor to work more than two days in the week: nor were they liable to be
summoned for road-mending during seed, hay and harvest-time. This Act
also revised the system of tolls on vehicles: any stage, hackney, or
other coach and any calash or chariot was to pay 6d. toll; a cart 8d.
and a waggon 1s.

The Company of Coach and Coach Harness Makers was founded in 1677
by Charles II. The foundation of the company shows that the trade
of coach-building was by this time large and important, while the
interest taken by the King must have given an impetus to the business.
We have evidence that coaches of English build were appreciated on
the Continent in an old “List of the Names of all the Commodities
of English Product and Manufacture that was Exported to France from
England during what may be called the Interval of Peace from Christmas,
1698, to Christmas, 1702.” The list includes both coaches and harness
for coaches.

In this connection it is to be observed that by the terms of its
charter the Coachmakers’ Company was empowered to seek out and destroy
bad work wherever they might find such. Under these conditions it is
not surprising that English workmanship became famous.

Hyde Park, as Pepys and other writers show us, was the best place
in London to see the coaches of the gentry. In an undated petition,
submitted by “a great number of licensed hackney coachmen,” there is
reference to the “four hundred licensed coachmen in Hyde Park,” from
which it might be inferred that these formed a body of license-holders
distinct from the four hundred licensed by Charles II. in 1663.


HACKNEY CABS AS A SOURCE OF REVENUE.

In 1694, when the Parliament was hard pressed for money to carry on
the French war, the London cabs or hackney coaches were more heavily
taxed under a new system of licenses; the number licensed to ply for
hire was raised from 400 to 700, and for each license, which held good
for twenty-one years, the sum of £50 was to be paid down, while £4 per
annum was to be paid as “rent.” All stage coaches in England and Wales
were to pay a tax of £8 a year. This Act confirmed the old tariff of
fares for hackney coaches in London (_see_ p. 42), and the prohibition
against plying on Sundays, which had been in force since 1662, was
partially withdrawn. The new Act allowed 175 cabs to ply for hire on
Sundays; the Commissioners were enjoined to arrange matters so that the
700 licensed cabmen should be employed in turn on Sunday.

This Act caused great discontent among the original 400 licensed
coachmen, as it made them equally liable with the additional 300
licensees to the £50 impost; their grievances found vent in a petition,
wherein they prayed that they, the Original Four Hundred, might be
“incorporated” (presumably as a guild or company), and that all stage
coaches running between London and places thirty miles therefrom might
be suppressed.

The Act of 1693 compelled the hackney coachman to carry a fare ten
miles out of London if required, and doubtless the uncertainty of
finding a “fare” to bring back was partly owing to the short stages,
which ran on every road.

The five Commissioners who were appointed to carry out the provisions
of this law discharged their duties with no greater integrity than
their predecessors. Yet another Petition from the 700 hackney coachmen
refers incidentally to the circumstance that in 1694 three of the five
were dismissed for accepting bribes from tradesmen who wanted licenses;
the petition also prays for better regulations to control the “many
hundred coaches and horses let for hire without license, likewise
shaises, hackney chairs and short stages.”

The “shaise” or chaise was evidently a vehicle of a different type
from the hackney coach. The post-chaise for hire was introduced into
England about this time from France by John, a son of Mr. Jethro
Tull, the famous agriculturist who in 1733 published a work, entitled
“Horse Hoeing Husbandry,” which attracted great attention and laid the
foundation of the use of implements in farming and improvements in
methods of cultivation. In 1740 John Tull was granted a patent for a
sedan chair fixed on a wheel carriage for horse draught.


MANNERS OF THE CABMAN.

The licensed coachmen had good grounds for complaint, as we learn
from an edict issued in 1692 by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen that the
law was systematically evaded; in that year only 160 hackney coachmen
applied for licenses and the number plying in the streets was about one
thousand. The men were a turbulent set; several, we read, were indicted
for “standing of their coaches [in the streets] as a common nuisance,
for assaulting constables and tradesmen who attempt to remove them from
before their shops.” There were no side walks for foot-passengers in
those days, and thus the standing coach might be so placed as to block
the entrance to a shop.

Mons. Misson has the following passage concerning the hackney coachman;
it is interesting as an illustration of contemporary manners:—

“If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has
hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel,
the coachman consents with all his heart. The gentleman pulls off his
sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes
in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed,
which happens almost always, that goes for payment, but if he is the
_beator_ the _beatee_ must pay the money about which they quarrelled.
I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street,
the widest part of the Strand, with such a fellow whom he lamm’d most
horribly.”

The same author says that the London squares are enclosed with railings
to keep the coaches from crossing them.


CAB DRIVING A LUCRATIVE OCCUPATION.

It has been remarked on a previous page that the hackney coachman
drove a thriving business; how profitable it was we may learn from
two petitions which were evoked by Queen Anne’s Act of 1710, which
increased the number of licenses to 800 on payment of 5s. a week, such
licenses to hold good for thirty-two years. Seven hundred coaches were
more than profitable employment could be found for, if we might believe
the inevitable petition put in against this Act; but nevertheless the
new 800 licensees joined in petitioning that their licenses “may again
be made assets” as under the Act of 1694. “In consideration of which,
notwithstanding the rent of 5s. per week, we most humbly offer to raise
£16,000 as a fine of £20 on each license for the use of His Majesty
King George.”

That there was money to be made in the business is shown even more
clearly by a petition submitted by James, Lord Mordington and others
about this time. The petitioners offer to “farm the 800 hackney
coaches which are now thought necessary” at £6 per license for 21
years; they were also prepared to pay £2,000 a year during that period,
on which the King might raise a sum of £20,000; to pay £500 a year
to the orphans of the City of London; and also to raise and equip a
regiment of foot at a cost of £3,000!

The Act of 1710, it should be observed, altogether removed the
prohibition against plying on Sunday. It licensed 200 hackney chairs
and fixed the chair tariff at two-thirds of that in force for the
coach (1s. for one and a half miles, and 1s. 6d. for two miles). An
injunction to the Commissioners to fix at the Royal Exchange a table of
distances must have been appreciated by the users of hackney coaches
in London. It also repeated the injunction to use horses of fourteen
hands at least; which repetition seems to have been very necessary, as
Misson remarks that the regulation at the time of his visit was “but
ill obeyed.”

It was about this time that a curious system of wig stealing was
adopted by the London thieves. We read in the _Weekly Journal_ of March
30, 1713, that:—

“The thieves have got such a villainous way now of robbing gentlemen,
that they cut holes through the backs of hackney carriages, and take
away their wigs or the fine headdresses of gentlewomen.”

The writer counsels persons travelling alone in a hackney coach to sit
on the front seat to baffle the thieves.

In vol. 3 of the _Carriage Builders’ and Harness Makers’ Art Journal_
(1863) was published an advertisement from an old newspaper; this
was thought by the contributor who discovered it to be the first
advertisement of the practical application of springs to coaches; it
refers to a patent granted for fourteen years to Mr. John Green in
1691:—

“All the nobility and gentry may have the carriages of their coaches
made new or the old ones altered, after this new invention, at
reasonable rates; and hackney and stage coachmen may have licenses from
the Patentees, _Mr. John Green_ and _Mr. William Dockwra_, his partner,
at the rate of 12_d._ per week, to drive the roads and streets, some of
which having this week began, and may be known from the common coaches
by the words Patent Coach being over both doors in carved letters.
These coaches are so hung as to render them easier for the passenger
and less labour to the horses, the gentleman’s coaches turning in
narrow streets and lanes in as little or less room than any French
carriage with crane neck, and not one third part of the charge. The
manner of the coachman’s sitting is more convenient, and the motion
like that of a sedan, being free from the tossing and jolting to which
other coaches are liable over rough and broken roads, pavements or
kennels. These great Conveniences (besides others) are invitation
sufficient for all persons that love their own ease and would save
their horses draught, to use these sort of carriages and no other,
since these carriages need no alteration.”

This advertisement is the more noteworthy as it clearly refers to some
kind of turning head; however valuable the improvements thus offered,
the springs at least do not appear to have been appreciated, for their
use did not become general till the latter half of the eighteenth
century.


COACHES AND ROADS IN QUEEN ANNE’S TIME.

From the advertisements in old newspapers we obtain some particulars
of the speed made by stage coaches in the early part of the eighteenth
century. In 1703, when the roads were good, the coach from London to
Portsmouth did the journey, about ninety miles, in fourteen hours.
In 1706, the York coach left London on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,
performing the 200 mile journey in four days; each passenger was
allowed 14 lbs. of luggage and overweight was charged for at 3d. per
lb. In winter the cross-roads were execrable, as appears from the
_Annals of Queen Anne_ (London, 1704). In December, 1703, the King
of Spain slept at Petworth in Sussex, on his way from Portsmouth
to Windsor, and Prince George of Denmark went to meet him there:
concerning the journey one of the Prince’s attendants writes:—

“We set out at six o’clock in the morning to go to Petworth, and did
not get out of the coaches (save only when we were overturned or stuck
fast in the mire) til we arrived at our journey’s end. “’Twas hard
service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day
without eating anything and passing through the worst ways that I ever
saw in my life; we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our
coach, which was the leading, and his highnesse’s body-coach would have
suffered very often if the nimble boors of Sussex had not frequently
poised it or supported it with their shoulders from Godalmin almost to
Petworth; and the nearer we approached to the Duke’s house the more
unaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost us
six hours time to conquer them, and indeed we had never done it if our
good master had not several times lent us a pair of horses out of his
own coach, whereby we were enabled to trace out the way for him.”


COACHING IN GEORGE I.’S AND GEORGE II.’S REIGNS.

Markland,[16] referring to the above passage, states on the authority
of a correspondent that in 1748 persons travelling from Petworth to
Guildford were obliged to make for the nearest point of the great road
from Portsmouth to London; plainly indicating that the main arteries of
traffic were much superior to the cross-roads.

[16] _Remarks on the Early Use of Carriages in England._

Dean Swift, writing to Pope on August 22, 1726, refers to the
“closeness and confinement of the uneasy coach.” At this period there
was still considerable prejudice against the use of carriages by men
who were physically able to ride, as appears from a letter written by
Swift to his friend Mr. Gay, on September 10, 1731:—

“If your ramble was on horseback I am glad of it on account of your
health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage
coaches and your friends’ coaches; for you are as arrant a cockney as
any hosier in Cheapside ... you love twelve-penny coaches too well,
considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but
half-a-crown a day ... a coach and six horses is all the exercise you
can bear.”

The reference to Mr. Gay’s income indicates that the saddle was a much
cheaper means of travelling than the coach. Six horses seem to have
been the number used in private coaches during the first half of the
eighteenth century, if we may judge by the frequency with which Swift
refers to “to coach and six.”

An agreement made in 1718 between a Mr. Vanden Bampde and Charles
Hodges, a job-master, is worth noticing. Under this contract Hodges
undertook to maintain for Mr. Bampde “a coach, chariot, and harness
neat and clean, and in all manner of repair at his own charge, not
including the wheels.” If the coachman should break the glass when
the carriage was empty, Hodges was to make good the damage. He was
to supply at a charge of 5s. 6d. a day, a pair of “good, strong,
serviceable, handsome well-matched horses of value between £50 and
£60”; also a “good, sober, honest, creditable coachman,” who, with the
horses, should attend as Mr. Bampde or his lady might require in London
or Westminster. If Mr. Bampde went into the country Hodges was to find
him one or more pairs of horses at half-a-crown per pair per day extra.


DEAN SWIFT ON COACHES AND DRIVERS.

The hackney coachmen appear to have been quite as independent and
offensive a class in Swift’s time as they were in Pepys’. Writing from
Dublin on July 8, 1733, he compares the advantages of residence in that
city with residence in London, and gives prominence to the following
items:—

“I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts and
carriages round this town; who dare not insult me like your rascally
waggoners or coachmen, but give me the way.”

It may be observed here that there was still plenty of work for the
wherrymen on the Thames in the middle of the eighteenth century. Swift
writes on April 16, 1760, praying Mr. Warburton to leave London and pay
him a visit at Twickenham, and by way of inducement he adds: “If the
press be to take up any part of your time, the sheets may be brought
you hourly thither by my waterman.”

The Dean’s _Humorous Advice to Servants_ contains some sarcastic
observations addressed to the coachman, which shed light upon what we
must suppose was the usual character of that servant. He is advised
that “you are strictly bound to nothing but to step into the box and
carry your lord and lady;” and he is enjoined to take every opportunity
of drinking. The following passage shows how wheels of carriages
suffered from the battering on the roads:—

“Take care that your wheels be good; and get a new set bought as often
as you can whether you are allowed the old as your perquisite or not;
in one case it will turn to your honest profit and on the other it will
be a just punishment on your master’s covetousness, and probably the
coach-maker will consider you too.”


ROADS IN THE 18TH CENTURY.

Every author of the time has something to say about the roads. Daniel
Bourn[17] says:—

“So late as thirty or forty years ago [_i.e._, 1723-33] the roads of
England were in a most deplorable condition. Those that were narrow
were narrow indeed, often to that degree that the stocks of the wheels
bore hard against the bank on each side, and in many places they were
worn below the level of the neighbouring surface, many feet, nay, yards
perpendicular; and a wide-spreading, brushy hedge intermixed with
old half-decayed trees and stubbs hanging over the traveller’s head
intercepting the benign influence of the heavens from his path, and
the beauties of the circumjacent country from his view, made it look
more like the retreat of wild beasts and reptiles than the footsteps
of man. In other parts where the road was wide, it might be, and often
was too much so, and exhibited a scene of a different aspect. Here the
wheel-carriage had worn a diversity of tracks which wore either deep,
or rough and stony, or high or low as Mother Nature had placed the
materials upon the face of the ground; the space between these were
frequently furzy hillocks of thorny brakes, through or among which the
equestrian traveller picked out his entangled and uncouth steps.

“To these horrible, stony, deep, miry, uncomfortable, dreary roads the
narrow-wheel waggon seems to be best adapted, and these were frequently
drawn by seven, eight, or even ten horses, that with great difficulty
and hazard dragged after them twenty-five or thirty hundredweight,
seldom more.”

[17] _Treatise of Wheeled Carriages_, London, 1763.

Bourn’s reference to the “narrow-wheel waggon” touches a matter which
formed the subject of hot debate for generations. It was urged that
the narrow wheels of waggons were largely the means of cutting up the
roads, and no doubt these did contribute to the general condition
of rut and ridge that characterised them. This view was adopted by
Parliament, and to encourage the use of wide wheels a system of
turnpike tolls was adopted which treated the wide tire far more
leniently than the narrow; anything under 9 inches in width being
considered narrow.

[Illustration: MR. DANIEL BOURN’S ROLLER WHEEL WAGGON, A.D. 1763.]

Bourn was a warm advocate for wide wheels, and the book from which
the above passage is taken describes an improved waggon invented by
himself; the drawing is from the inventor’s work. The wheels of this
vehicle resemble small garden rollers; they are 2 feet high and 16
inches wide. Each is attached independently to the body of the waggon
and the fore wheels being placed side by side in the centre, while the
hind wheels are set wide apart, the waggon is practically designed to
fulfil the functions of a road-roller.[18] It does not appear that
Bourn’s invention obtained any general acceptance, which is perhaps not
very surprising.

[18] In the _St. James’s Chronicle_ of December 30, 1772, a
correspondent “observes with particular pleasure the good effects of
the rolling machine on the turnpike road to Stony Stratford. For this
important improvement Mr. Sharp is responsible.” The writer proceeds
to describe with the exactness and appreciation due to so useful an
invention, the first patent of the familiar road-roller.


SPEED OF THE 18TH CENTURY STAGE COACH.

In 1742, the Oxford coach, leaving London at seven in the morning,
reached High Wycombe (about forty miles) at five in the evening,
remained there the night, and concluded the journey on the following
day. The Birmingham coach made its journey at about the same pace,
forty miles per day, resting half a day at Oxford. Night travel
does not seem to have been at all usual. Apart from the badness of
the roads, the audacity of highwaymen was a sufficient reason for
refraining from journeys by night.

Some improvements were made in private carriages at this period, but
there was little change for the better in the stage coaches, which
differed slightly from the “machine” of a century earlier; the driver’s
seat was safer and less uncomfortable, and that was the only noteworthy
alteration. An advertisement of 1750 announces “accommodation behind
the coach for baggage and passengers; fares 21s., and servants 10s.
6d., riding either in the basket behind or on the box beside the
driver.”

Endeavour to expedite the service between the great towns of the
kingdom is shown in an advertisement of the “Flying Coach,” which was
put on the London and Manchester road in 1754. This informs possible
patrons that “incredible as it may appear, this coach will actually
arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.” The
distance between the two cities is about 187 miles, making the rate of
speed a little over 44 miles per day.

The stage coach of 1755 is thus described by Mr. Thrupp.

“They were covered with dull black leather, studded by way of ornament
with broad-headed nails, with oval windows in the quarters, the frames
painted red. On the panels were displayed in large characters the
names of the places where the coach started and whither it went. The
roof rose in a high curve with an iron rail around it. The coachman
and guard sat in front upon a high narrow boot, often garnished with
a spreading hammer-cloth with a deep fringe. Behind was an immense
basket supported by iron bars in which passengers were carried at lower
fares. The whole coach was usually drawn by three horses, on the first
of which a postillion rode, in a cocked hat and a long green-and-gold
coat. The machine groaned and creaked as it went along with every tug
the horses gave it, and the speed was frequently but four miles an
hour.”

Three horses may have done the work in summer, but there is no reason
to suppose that the roads of 1755 were any better than they had been
sixteen years earlier, when Thomas Pennant thus described a journey in
March from Chester to London. The stage, he says:—

“was then no despicable vehicle for country gentlemen. The first day,
with much labour, we got from Chester to Whitchurch, twenty miles;
the second day to the Welsh Harp; the third to Coventry; the fourth
to Northampton; the fifth to Dunstable; and as a wondrous effort on
the last, to London, before the commencement of night. The strain
and labour of six good horses, sometimes eight, drew us through the
sloughs of Mireden and many other places.”

[Illustration: TRAVELLING POSTING CARRIAGE, 1750.]


THE APPLICATION OF SPRINGS.

In the year 1768 Dr. R. Lovell Edgeworth, who had devoted much
attention to the subject, and had made numerous experiments,[19]
succeeded in demonstrating that springs were as advantageous to the
horses of, as to the passengers in a coach; and he constructed a
carriage for which the Society of English Arts and Manufactures awarded
him three gold medals. In this conveyance the axletrees were divided
and the motion of each wheel was relieved by a spring. Just one dozen
patents for springs were granted during the eighteenth century, and it
is impossible to say which invention had most influence on methods of
building coaches. In 1772 a patent was granted to James Butler for a
new coach-wheel the spokes of which were constructed of springs; but
this curious contrivance is mentioned nowhere—so far as the writer’s
investigations have shown—but in the Patent Office files, whence we may
conclude it was a failure.

[19] _An Essay on the Construction of Roads and Carriages._ London,
1817.

[Illustration: TRAVELLING POSTING CARRIAGE, 1750.]

The adoption of springs was certainly gradual. It is probably right
to assume that wealthy men led the way by having coaches built on
springs or altering their vehicles. It is impossible to draw a hard and
fast line between the period of the coach without and the coach with
springs. The illustrations show that travelling carriages on springs
and braces were built in 1750. These drawings prove that, clumsy though
the public conveyances were, private carriages were both tolerably
light and comfortable. The “whip springs” to which the braces are
attached were in general use ten years later.

A curious error arose from the application of springs to public
conveyances, according to Dr. Lovell Edgeworth. Their introduction, it
must be premised, led to the accommodation of passengers and loading of
baggage on top of the stage coach, and coachmen, finding the vehicle
drew more easily, attributed the fact, not to the springs, but to the
increased height and reduced length of the load.[20]

[20] Abolition of the basket on the hind axle would have materially
reduced the length of the load.

In the belief that a high and short load possessed some mysterious
property which made it easier to draw than a low long one, builders
vied with each other in building lofty vehicles. “Hence in all
probability,” says the authority we are quoting, “arose the
preposterous elevation of public carriages.”


OUTSIDE PASSENGERS.

Dr. Lovell Edgeworth gives us to understand that the practice of
carrying passengers on the roof of the coach followed the application
of springs to stage coaches; and in view of the belief noticed above
this seems exceedingly probable. The practice had clearly been in vogue
for some years when the _Annual Register_ published the following
paragraph:—

“_September 7 (1770)._—It were greatly to be wished the stage coaches
were put under some regulations as to the numbers of persons and
quantity of baggage. Thirty-four persons were in and about the Hertford
coach this day when it broke down by one of the braces giving way.”

In 1775, we learn from the same publication, stage coaches generally
carried eight persons inside and often ten outside passengers. On
another page appears the statement that “there are now of these
vehicles [stage coaches], flies, machines and diligences upwards of
400, and of other wheeled carriages 17,000.”

In 1785 was passed George III.’s Act, which forbade the conveyance of
more than six persons on the roof of any coach and more than two on the
box. This Act was superseded in 1790 by another which permitted only
one person to travel on the box and only four on the roof of any coach
drawn by three or more horses. A coach drawn by less than three horses
might carry one passenger on the box and three on the roof, but such
vehicles might not ply more than twenty-five miles from the London Post
Office.

The first “long coaches” (_i.e._ long-stage vehicles) and those called
diligences were superseded by what were called the “old heavies,”
carrying six inside passengers and twelve out.[21]

[21] _The Public Carriages of Great Britain._ J. E. Bradfield, London,
1855.


ROADS IN GEORGE III’s TIME.

The turnpike road had been improved by the year 1773, when Mr. Daniel
Bourn wrote a pamphlet[22] answering some objections which had been
urged against his waggon on rollers (see p. 79). Mr. Jacob had
asserted that the roughness of the roads was an insuperable obstacle to
the enormously wide wheels invented by Mr. Bourn; and the latter, while
admitting the wretched condition of local roads, refutes this argument
as applied to the great roads:—

“A person might follow a waggon from London to York and meet with very
few great stones ... let us now view this more agreeable turnpike road,
yet even here you will find that there is less degrees of loose dirt
and mangled materials.”

[22] _Some Brief Remarks upon Mr. Jacob’s Treatise._ London, 1773.

In this connection it will be remembered that the road roller had been
brought into use in the previous year (see footnote p. 80).

The improvement was by no means universal, however. Arthur Young[23]
writes:—

“I know not in the whole range of language terms sufficiently
expressive to describe this infernal road. To look over a map, and
perceive that it is a principal one, not only to some towns, but even
whole counties, one would naturally conclude it to be at least decent;
but let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally
purpose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it as they would the
devil, for a thousand to one but they break their necks or their limbs
by overthrows or breakings down. They will here meet with ruts, which
I actually measured, four feet deep, and floating with mud, only from
a wet summer; what, therefore, must it be after the winter? The only
mending it receives, in places, is the tumbling in loose stones, which
serve no other purpose but jolting the carriage in a most intolerable
manner. These are not merely opinions, but facts, for I actually passed
three carts broken down in these eighteen miles of execrable memory.”

[23] _Tour in the North of England._ London, 1770.


IMPROVEMENTS IN STAGE COACHES.

The last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century saw great increase
of the coaching industry and many important improvements. The “long
stages” were still slow; the _Edinburgh Courant_, of 1779, contains
an advertisement of the London Coach which “will run every Tuesday,
occupying ten days, resting all Sunday at Barrowbridge; for the better
accommodation of passengers will be altered to a new genteel two-end
coach machine hung upon steel springs, exceeding light and easy.” At
this period the newspapers often contained advertisements inviting
a companion to share with the advertiser the risks and expenses of
posting to London.

It was no doubt the love of Englishmen for privacy which led a Mr.
Crispus Claggett to patent in 1780 his “Imperial Mercury.” This vehicle
had the outward appearance of one carriage, but it was divided into
four equal compartments with space in each for four persons. Each
compartment was entered by its own door and was partitioned off from
the others by doors and glasses, This curious conveyance must have
somewhat resembled an early railway coach.


THE MAIL COACH.

Mr. John Palmer’s[24] “diligences” were put upon the road in 1783,
and with these the proprietor laid the first crude foundation of the
mail service. The ordinary post was carried by boys on horseback and
was both slow and uncertain owing to the poor quality of the horses,
the badness of the roads and not least to the untrustworthiness of the
boys. Every letter for which expedition was necessary was now sent by
diligences where they were established, and they ran from nearly all
the towns in the kingdom to London and between many of the principal
towns. Postage by these was very expensive: a letter by the ordinary
post from Bath to London cost fourpence, whereas it cost two shillings
for “booking, carriage and porterage” if sent by diligence. The
greater speed and safety were the inducements to use the diligence for
important letters, as on the stage coaches both guard and coachman were
well armed; the former sat on the box with the driver, and, says a
writer of the time, “always sat with his carbine cocked on his knees.”

[24] The story of John Palmer’s work in connection with the postal
service, may be read in Joyce’s _History of the Post Office_ (1893),
and in many histories and other works dealing with Bath. Palmer became
Member of Parliament for Bath in 1801.

The conveyance of letters by diligence or “coach diligence” from Bath,
where Mr. Palmer resided, to London was an experiment on the success of
which that gentleman depended largely in his battle with the officials
of Parliament and Parliamentary Committees when he sought to bring
about change in the method of carrying letters. For a considerable
time those in authority refused to admit the possibility of a coach
travelling from Bath to London, 108 miles, in eighteen hours; but after
a hard struggle Mr. Palmer triumphed, and the first mail coach ran
from Bristol to London on August 2, 1784. Six miles an hour had been
promised, but the journey, 117 miles, was performed in seventeen hours,
or at a rate of nearly seven miles an hour, about double the speed of
the mounted post-boy.

[Illustration: JOHN PALMER.

(_From a portrait in the possession of Henry G. Archer, Esq._)]

These early mail coaches (the “old heavies”) were cumbrous vehicles,
and by no means remarkable for strength of construction: indeed, until
Mr. Palmer took the matter firmly in hand and compelled the contractors
to replace their worn-out coaches by new ones (which were built by
Besant), three or four breakdowns or upsets were daily reported to
the Post-master General. They were drawn by four horses; carried
six inside passengers and, until the law of 1785 already noticed,
twelve “outsides.” Their speed on the principal roads was gradually
accelerated about this time, and after the mail coaches began to work
the pace of “fly stage coaches,” or flying coaches, was increased to
eight miles an hour.

On some roads the old slow coaches remained; as late as the year 1798
the Telegraph left Gosport at one o’clock in the morning and reached
Charing Cross at eight in the evening, thus occupying nineteen hours
over a journey of 80 miles; a speed of little over four miles an hour.

In 1792 sixteen mail coaches left London daily; and seven years later
these had increased to about eighty.


REGULATIONS FOR MAIL AND STAGE COACHES.

During George III’s reign, three Acts of Parliament had been passed
defining the number of outside passengers that any stage coach might
carry, and making other regulations in the public interest; these three
Acts were repealed by a fourth placed on the statute book in 1810,
which enacted that any “coach, berlin, landau, chariot, diligence,
calash, chaise-marine or other four-wheeled vehicle,” employed as
a public carriage and drawn by four horses might carry ten outside
passengers including the guard but not the coachman; that only one
person might share the box with the coachman; and of the remaining
nine, three should sit in front and six behind. No passenger might sit
on the baggage. Stages drawn by two or three horses might carry not
more than five outside passengers; “long coaches” or “double-bodied
coaches” might carry eight.

The social distinction between “inside” and the “outside” is betrayed
by a clause of this law which forbade any outside passenger to travel
inside unless with the consent of one inside passenger; and the
“inside” who gave consent was to have the “outside” placed next him.

This Act also prescribed important limitations to the height of
coaches: neither passenger nor luggage might be carried on the roof of
any coach the top of which was over 8 feet 9 inches from the ground and
whose width was under 4 feet 6 inches measured from the centre of one
wheel track to the centre of the other. On a four-horse coach 8 feet 9
inches high the baggage might be piled to a height of two feet; on one
drawn by two or three horses, to a height of eighteen inches. As it was
considered expedient to encourage low-hung coaches with the view of
attaining greater immunity from accidents, it was legal to pile baggage
up to a height of 10 feet 9 inches from the ground. Any passenger might
require any turnpike keeper to count the “outsides” or to measure
the height of the luggage on the roof. At a later date the fast mail
coaches were prohibited by the Post-master General from carrying any
baggage at all on the roof.


MAIL COACH PARADE ON THE KING’S BIRTHDAY.

Mr. Thrupp gives the following description of the mail coaches as they
appeared at the “King’s Birthday Parade,” an interesting display which
appears to have been held for the first time in the year 1799, and
which remained an annual function until 1835. The coaches assembled
in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and drove through the streets past St. James’
Palace and back to the General Post Office, then in Lombard Street:—

“Each coach was new or turned out to look like new and was painted red
with the Royal Arms on the door panel, and on the smaller panel above
the name of the town to which the coach went; on the boot the number
of the mail, and on each upper quarter one of the stars of the four
Orders of the Knighthood of the United Kingdom, the Garter, the Bath,
the Thistle and St. Patrick. The coaches were built just big enough to
contain four inside and three or four outside, and coachman and guard.
The body was hung upon a perch carriage and eight telegraph springs,
the underworks being both solid and simple in construction.”

A writer in _Baily’s Magazine_ (June, 1900), gives a description of
this parade; only the coachmen and guards, in new uniforms, were
allowed on the coaches, for which gentlemen used to lend their best
teams; the procession generally consisted of about twenty-five coaches
and was prolonged by the presence of a horseman between every two
coaches.


THE MAIL COACHMAN AND GUARD.

The mail coaches in their daily routine assembled in Lombard Street
between 8 and 8.20 p.m. every evening to receive the mails, and drew up
in double file. Each was known by the name of the town to which it ran,
and on the call of “Manchester,” “Liverpool,” or “Chester,” the coach
bound thither broke rank and came up to the post-office door to receive
the mails; the bags were tossed into the boot and the slamming of the
lid of the boot was the signal to start.

Most of the mails for the Western counties started at 7 p.m. from the
Gloucester Coffee House in Piccadilly, the mail bags being brought
thither from the General Post Office in gigs drawn by fast-trotting
horses, The stages for the West started from Hatchett’s; for the North,
from the Peacock, Islington.

The mail guard was a considerable personage; when the modern style
of build was adopted, the hind seat over the mail boot was strictly
reserved to him, nobody being allowed to share it, as a precaution
against robbery of the mails. To obtain an appointment as guard on a
mail coach the applicant had to produce a recommendation from a Member
of Parliament showing that he bore a high character, and a medical
certificate to effect that he was of good constitution (exceedingly
necessary in view of the nature of his work); if accepted as a
probationer he had to spend a term in a coach factory and there learn
how to repair a broken pole and patch up any other fracture that might
occur on the road. His pay was only 10s. per week, but his perquisites
were considerable; he might make as much as £3 or £4 a week, by taking
charge of plate chests and valuables entrusted to his care; and it was
the custom to allow the guard and coachman to divide all fares of 3s.
or less between them.

The guard went the whole way with his coach; the coachman’s “stage” was
generally forty or fifty miles out and home again. The latter’s wages
were supplemented by tips from the passengers, who were admonished
that the time had come to open their purses by the coachman’s polite
“Gentlemen, I leave you here.”

The money thus collected by the driver of a first-class coach amounted,
it is said, to £200 or £300 a year. The coachman was subject to
numerous regulations which aimed at the security of passengers and
mails. He might not allow anyone else to drive, without the consent of
the coach proprietor or against the wishes of the other passengers; he
might not leave his box unless a man was at the leaders’ heads; and
there were many such minor instructions to be observed.

Until about 1815 the coachman’s box was not part of the body of the
vehicle, and while the passengers rode comfortably on springs the
unfortunate driver had a seat as comfortless as want of springs could
make it. When this was done away with, it was quite in accord with
British traditions that strong objections should be made, the chief
being founded on the idea that if the coachman were made so comfortable
he would go to sleep on his box. The Manchester Telegraph, celebrated
as one of the smartest coaches of the day, was the first which was thus
altered.

The guard was responsible for the punctuality of the coach, and each
evening when leaving the General Post Office he was handed a watch
officially set and officially locked in a case in such wise that it
could not be tampered with. The guard also carried what was called a
“snow book” from the fact that entries therein were most usually caused
by heavy snowstorms. In this he recorded any such incidents as the hire
of extra horses when these might be needed, of saddle horses to carry
the mail bags forward if the coach came to grief, or of any other
outlay.


“THE ROAD” IN WINTER.

Mention of the guard’s “snow book” suggests that a winter’s journey
in the coaching days was an undertaking not to be lightly faced. One
morning in March, 1812, the Bath coach arrived at Chippenham with two
outside passengers frozen to death in their seats, and a third in a
dying state. A snow shovel strapped behind his seat was a regular
item of the guard’s winter equipment, but only too often a shovel was
useless. In the winter of 1814, the Edinburgh mail had to be left in
the snow and the mail bags forwarded to Alnwick on horseback; in the
same week eight horses were needed to draw the York coach to Newcastle.
When a coach was snow-bound it was the guard’s duty to get the mails
forward; this he did when possible by taking two of the horses and
riding one while the other carried the bags. Some of the best of
Pollard’s coaching pictures represent such incidents as occurred in the
severe winters of 1812, 1814, and 1836.

The winter of 1814 was long remembered for the great and prolonged fog
which disorganised traffic; the fog was followed by a singularly severe
snow storm which continued for forty-eight hours; while it lasted
no fewer than thirty-three mails in one day failed to arrive at the
General Post Office.

The Christmas season of 1836 is historical in meteorological annals
for the unprecedented severity of the snowfall. The storm lasted for
the best part of the week, and for ten days travelling was suspended.
Christmas night was the worst, and scarcely a single coach ventured
to quit London on the 26th and 27th, St. Albans was literally full of
mails and stages that could not get forward; on December 27, no fewer
than fourteen mail coaches were abandoned snow-bound on various roads;
and the Exeter mail, on December 26, was dug out five times on the way
to Yeovil. In flat and open country all traces of the roads were lost,
and the coachman had to trust the safety of the vehicle to his horses’
instinct. In some places the snow drifts gathered to an enormous depth
and made the roads utterly impassable.

It was an article of the coaching creed to “get forward” if humanly
possible; and the feats of endurance and courage accomplished by guards
and coachmen in these old times prove them to have been a remarkably
fine class of public servant, deserving all that has been written of
them.


PASSENGER FARES.

Passenger fares by mail coach were higher than by the ordinary stage;
on the former the rates were from 4d. to 5d. per mile for “outsides,”
and 8d. to 10d. per mile for “insides”; on the stage coach the outside
passenger paid from 2½d. to 3d. per mile, and the inside from 4d.
to 5d. Posting cost about eighteenpence per mile, and was therefore
reserved to rich men.


DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STAGE AND MAIL COACH.

In the early days of the century, though the actual rate of travel was
about eight miles an hour by the ordinary stage coach, much time was
occupied over the journey. There appears to have been no such thing
as a “time bill.” The coachman would go out of his way to set down or
pick up a passenger: he would wait to oblige a friend if desired, and
“Nimrod” in his famous article on “The Road” cites, as an example of
the leisurely fashion prevalent, the civility of “Billy” Williams, who
drove the Shrewsbury-Chester coach in his school days, and took twelve
hours to cover the forty miles, Two hours were allowed for dinner at
Wrexham, but this obliging coachman would come into the parlour and
say, “The coach is ready, gentlemen, but don’t let me disturb you if
you wish for another bottle.”

Very different was the case with the Royal Mail: every second was
economised: at some places horses were changed within the space of a
minute, and so jealously punctual were the coachmen that the village
people set their clocks by the mail as it sped along the street. The
Royal Mail paid no tolls, and if a turnpike keeper had not his gate
open ready for its passage he was fined 40s. The passing of the London
coach was the event of the day in quiet villages during the coaching
age, as the guard performed the functions now discharged by the
newspaper and telegraph wire. “The grandest chapter in our experience,”
says a regular traveller during the stirring times of 1805-1815,
“was on those occasions when we went down from London with news of a
victory.”


THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF COACHING.

The adoption of Macadam’s system of road-making gave birth to the brief
“golden age” of coaching. John Macadam, an Ayrshire man, born in 1756,
had devoted many years to the subject of road improvement, and between
the years 1798 and 1814 travelled over some 30,000 miles of highway in
Great Britain, His method of spreading small broken fragments of hard
stone, none ever six ounces in weight, stamped or rolled into a compact
crust, was finally approved in 1818, and “macadamised” roads were
rapidly made all over the kingdom. The inventor was awarded a grant of
£10,000, and in 1827 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Roads. He
died in 1836, when fast coaching was at the zenith of its prosperity.

The portrait of which a reproduction is here given is believed to be
the only one in existence. It was painted by Raymond, about the year
1835, and was given by Mr. Macadam’s widow to Mr. Allen of Hoddesdon,
Essex, who for several years had made road-mending tools and appliances
to the great road-maker’s patterns. The portrait was bequeathed to Mr.
Allen’s granddaughter, by whom it was sold in 1902, to the present
owner, Major McAdam.

[Illustration: JOHN LOUDON MACADAM.

(_From a painting in the possession of his great-grandson, Major J. J.
L. McAdam, of Sherborne, Dorset._)]

To fully appreciate the enormous value of Macadam’s work it must be
considered in conjunction with that of Telford the engineer, and
with knowledge of the earlier methods of road-making. The original
high-roads in England were the tracks made by travelling chapmen or
pedlars, who carried their goods on pack horses. These naturally
selected routes over the hills when they sought to avoid the bogs and
quagmires of low-lying ground; and these routes, becoming in time the
regular coach roads, left much to be desired in point of gradient and
contour. Telford cut through the hills to obtain an easier ascent,
and when Macadam had “made” the new road thus outlined it was as
widely different from the original track it replaced as it is possible
to conceive. “Nimrod,” writing in 1826, said, “Roads may be called
the veins and arteries of a country through which channels every
improvement circulates. I really consider Mr. Macadam as being, next
to Dr. Jenner, the greatest contributor to the welfare of mankind that
this country has ever produced.”

With good, firm and level roads the speed of the mail and stage coaches
increased, and the endeavour to combine speed with safety brought
about numerous minor but important improvements in coach-building,
proprietors sparing neither pains nor money to insure the best
materials and workmanship. The greatest improvements, says Mr. Thrupp,
were those begun in 1820 by Mr. Samuel Hobson. He reduced the height
of the wheels to 3 feet 3 inches in front, and 4 feet 5 inches behind,
lengthened the coach body to better proportions and hung it lower,
so that a double step would give access to the door instead of a
three-step ladder. He wrought great improvements in the curves of the
carriage, and did much to strengthen the details of the underworks.


FAST COACHES.

Coach driving became a favourite occupation among men of good birth who
had run through their patrimony and could turn their hands to nothing
more congenial. “Horsing” coaches was a business to which all sorts and
conditions of men devoted themselves, and which did much to promote the
spirit of rivalry that made for good service. Innkeepers and others
contracted to supply horses for one, two, three, or more stages of a
journey, and thus acquired a personal interest in the coach. The best
coaches now ran at ten or ten and a half miles an hour, and faster
over favourable stretches of road. The Quicksilver mail from London
to Devonport, “Nimrod” tells us, was half a mile in the hour faster
than most of the coaches in England, and did the fastest stage of the
journey, four miles near Hartford Bridge, in twelve minutes. This coach
on one occasion accomplished its journey of 216 miles in twenty-one
hours, fourteen minutes, including stoppages.

The mail coaches, it should be said, carried three outside passengers
at most, and no luggage at all on the roof. Of course these rates of
speed, so much higher than had been known theretofore, called forth
protests. “Old Traveller,” writing to the _Sporting Magazine_ in 1822,
objects to the encouragement given such hazardous work by “Nimrod.” In
his younger days, he says, when about to start on a journey, his wife’s
parting hope was that he would not be robbed; now she had changed it
to the hope that he would not get his neck broken. It was no uncommon
thing, at the beginning of the century and earlier, for a Birmingham
merchant to make his will before he set out on a journey; and with all
respect to the “Old Traveller,” the risks he encountered on the road
in the days before Macadam were as great from ruts and holes as from
highwaymen.

[Illustration: ROYAL MAIL COACH.]

Travelling on May-day was avoided by those who objected to fast work,
for it was customary for rival stages to race each other the whole
journey on that day, and old sporting papers contain occasional record
of the fact that a coach had accomplished its entire journey at a
rate of fifteen miles an hour. A law passed in 1820, to put an end to
“wanton and furious driving or racing,” by which coachmen were made
liable to criminal punishment if anyone were maimed or injured, did
not stop this practice. For on May 1, 1830, the Independent Tallyho
ran from London to Birmingham, 109 miles, in 7 hours, 39 minutes. The
writer in _Baily’s Magazine_ of June, 1900, before referred to, gives
a graphic account of a May-day race between two of the smartest West
country coaches, the Hibernia and l’Hirondelle, from which it appears
that these contests were not always free from foolhardiness, though it
must be admitted that they produced wonderful displays of coachmanship.
Captain Malet gives the following as the fastest coaches in England in
1836:—

London and Brighton, 51½ miles, time five hours, fifteen minutes;
London and Shrewsbury, 154 miles, time fifteen hours; London and
Exeter, 171 miles, time seventeen hours; London and Manchester, 187
miles, time nineteen hours; London and Liverpool, 203 miles, time
twenty hours, fifty minutes; London and Holyhead, 261 miles, time
twenty-six hours, fifty-five minutes.

Some of the smartest coaches in England ran from London to Brighton,
which, owing to George III’s patronage, had since 1784 risen from a
mere fishing village to the most fashionable of seaside resorts. In
1819, says Bradfield, upwards of 70 coaches visited and left Brighton
every day; in 1835, says Bradfield, there were 700 mail coaches and
rather under 3,300 stages running in England; he estimates the number
of horses used at over 150,000, while 30,000 men were employed as
coachmen, guards, horse-keepers, ostlers, &c. Mr. W. Chaplin, the
member for Salisbury, was the largest proprietor; he had five “yards”
in London and owned 1,300 horses. Messrs. Horne and Sherman ranked next
to Mr. Chaplin; each had about 700 horses.


HEAVY TAXATION OF COACHES.

The heavy taxes laid upon the stage coaches were a fruitful source
of complaint among proprietors. In 1835 a coach conveying eighteen
passengers paid 3½d. per mile run to the revenue. To show the decline
of coaching, it may be said that in 1835 the total revenue from the
stage coaches amounted to £498,497 and in 1854 it had fallen to
£73,903. The taxes were estimated to be one-fifth of the receipts, and
this being the case it is not remarkable that, in the earlier days of
the railroad, the people in country districts remote from railways
should have suffered more inconvenience than they had ever known. It
no longer paid to run a coach in such districts; and persons in the
humbler walks of life found themselves set down at the station, ten,
fifteen or twenty miles from home, with no means of getting there other
than their own legs. Such districts saw a revival of old postal methods
in the shape of boys mounted on ponies.

The unequal competition between coach and train was continued for
many years, ruinous taxation of the former notwithstanding. While the
coaches were paying 20 per cent. of their earnings to the revenue, the
railways paid 5 per cent., and carried passengers more rapidly and more
cheaply. The coaches held their place with great tenacity, aided no
doubt by the innate British tendency to cling to old institutions.

The _Quarterly Review_ of 1837 mentions as a curious and striking
instance of enterprise and the advantages of free competition that a
day coach then performed the journey between London and Manchester in
time which exceeded by only one hour that occupied by the combined
agency of coaches and the Liverpool and Birmingham railway. The Act for
transmitting the mails by railway was passed in 1838, eight years after
the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and then it may
be said coach proprietors recognised that their industry was doomed;
but they maintained fares at the old scales until the coach was nearly
extinguished.


EARLY CABS.

We must now retrace our steps and endeavour to trace the progress made
in vehicles other than stage and mail coaches. In 1740 the first patent
was granted for a two-wheeled carriage; it is briefly described as a
“double shaft and pole carriage with two wheels drawn by two horses
harnessed abreast.” Another “coach with two wheels” was patented in
1786. Mr. Thrupp states that 27,300 two-wheeled vehicles paid duty in
the year 1814, a fact which shows how rapidly they grew in favour. It
is therefore somewhat curious that the first two-wheeled hackney cab in
London should not have appeared in London until 1823, when Mr. David
Davis built twelve of these vehicles.

“The body was a little like a hansom cab but smaller; it had a head,
of which the hinder half was stiff and solid, and the fore part made
to fold. This arrangement was probably an imitation of the gentleman’s
cabriolet, the hood of which was rarely put down altogether, as the
groom had to hold on by it. Outside the head on one side was a seat for
the driver of the cab, and the whole was hung upon stiff shafts. These
cabs were, I think, painted yellow, and stood for hire in a yard in
Portland Street close to Oxford Circus.”

Cabs of this kind stood for hire in the streets, a few years later,
if we may accept the authority of Charles Dickens. Readers of the
_Pickwick Papers_ which was published (in monthly parts) in 1837 and
1838, will remember how Mr. Pickwick, when he set out upon his travels
took a cab from “the coach stand at St. Martins-le-Grand”; and took
notes of the driver’s account of his horse as he drove to Charing
Cross. On another page we find Mr. and Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Cluppins
“squeezed into a hackney cabriolet, the driver sitting in his own
particular little dickey at the side.” This vehicle was perhaps the
light two-wheeled cab with a fixed panel top, built to carry only two
persons inside, which was introduced about 1830. The driver sat on a
little seat over the off-side wheel.

This vehicle was succeeded by Mr. Boulnois’ patent cab, of which an
illustration is given. It opened at the back, and the driver’s seat
was on the roof; the passengers sat facing one another. This cab was
light and convenient, but appears to have fallen into disuse because
the fore part was within too easy reach of the horse’s heels to make
it quite acceptable to nervous passengers, Harvey’s “Quarto Bus” to
carry four was the next popular conveyance, but it was superseded about
1836 by the “brougham cab” for two. This cab was rather smaller than
the vehicle to which Lord Brougham’s name was given in 1839. From this
conveyance was developed the “clarence cab,” which remains with us
still as the familiar “four-wheeler.” It should be mentioned that the
first four-wheeled cabs appeared in London about 1835; these however,
carried only two passengers inside. The modern hansom belongs to a
later period. In 1802 there were 1,100 hackney carriages in London,
and in 1855 the number was 2,706.

[Illustration: LONDON HACKNEY CAB (BOULNOIS’ PATENT) ABOUT 1835.]

In 1824 was published _The Hackney Coach Directory_; this book, which
must have been hailed as a real boon to the users of cabs in London,
was compiled by James Quaife, “Surveyor to the Board of Hackney
Coaches.” It set forth the “Distances checked from actual admeasurement
from eighty-four coach stands in and about the Metropolis,” and the
title page tells us “The number of fares set forth is nearly eighteen
thousand.”


PRIVATE AND STATE COACHES, 1750-1830.

A volume might easily be filled with the particulars of private
carriages which came into use between the middle of the eighteenth
century and the end of the coaching era. Great ingenuity and a great
deal of art of a florid kind was expended on the private coaches
of the upper classes. A patent granted in 1786 gives us an idea of
the materials used for the purpose; the patent was for a method of
“ornamenting the outsides of coaches and other carriages with foil
stones, Bristol stones, paste and all sorts of pinched glass, sapped
glass and every other stone, glass and composition used in or applied
to the jewellery trade.” Mr. Larwood writes of the carriages in Hyde
Park:—

“The beautiful and somewhat vain Duchess of Devonshire had a carriage
which cost 500 guineas without upholstery. That of the Countess of
Sutherland was grey, with her cypher in one of Godsell’s newly-invented
crystals. A Mr. Edwards had a _vis-à-vis_ which cost 300 guineas, and
was thought ‘admirable’; while another nameless gentleman gladdened
the eyes of all beholders with a splendid gig lined with looking
glass; while the artistic curricle, with shells on the wheels, of Romeo
Coates, was one of the features of Hyde Park.”

Six horses were not uncommonly driven. Sir John Lade drove a phaeton
and six greys. The Prince of Wales, in 1781, drove a pair caparisoned
with blue harness stitched in red, the horses’ manes being plaited with
scarlet ribbons while they wore plumes of feathers on their heads.

The decorative art as applied to vehicles naturally found greatest
scope in State coaches. The State carriage of Queen Victoria was built
in 1761 for George III. from designs by Sir William Chambers, a famous
architect, who was born in 1726. The length of this coach is 24 feet,
the height 12 feet, the width 8 feet, and the weight is between 3 and
4 tons; the various panels and doors are adorned with allegorical
groups by Cipriani. This superb carriage, having only been used on rare
occasions, is still in a good state of preservation. It cost £7,562 to
build and adorn. The State coach of the Lord Mayor of London has been
of necessity more frequently used, and alterations and repairs have
left comparatively little of the original vehicle built in 1757. In
style it is generally similar to the Royal State coach,

While money and artistic talent were lavished freely on the adornment
of the carriages built for pleasure or display in London, it must not
be supposed that sound workmanship was neglected. The highly decorated
vehicles driven in the Park were well built, but the best and strongest
work was necessarily put into carriages which were required for more
practical purposes, and we must therefore discriminate between the
pleasure carriage and that used for travelling.

The mail and stage coaches were used by nearly all classes of society,
but these worked only the main roads throughout the kingdom; therefore
country gentlemen who resided off the coach routes had to find their
own way to the nearest stage or posting house; moreover, wealthy men
who could afford the luxury of taking their own time over a journey,
were still much addicted to the use of private travelling carriages
drawn by their own horses or, more often, horsed from stage to stage
along the route by the post masters.

For many years after Mr. McAdam’s methods had been applied to the main
highways, the narrower and less used by-roads left much to be desired;
and however good the roads it is obvious that lavishly adorned
carriages would have been out of place for travel in all weathers.
A single day’s journey through mud or dust would play havoc with
ornamentation contrived of “foil stones, Bristol stones, sapped glass”
and similar materials; what was required in the travelling carriage,
such as that so well portrayed by the late Charles Cooper Henderson,
was the combination of strength and lightness. Hence the best of
the coach-builder’s art, the finest workmanship in the practical,
as opposed to the decorative sense, was applied to the travelling
carriage, which was constructed to secure the greatest comfort to the
occupants, together with the greatest strength to withstand rapid
travel over roads of all kinds with the least weight.

[Illustration:

_After the Picture by Chas. Cooper Henderson._

TRAVELLING POST, 1825-1835.]

The picture by Cooper Henderson, from which the illustration is
reproduced, refers to the period about 1825-35, and it will be observed
that while the body of the carriage is hung lower than the posting
carriage of seventy years earlier, the general plan is not greatly
dissimilar.


VARIETIES OF CARRIAGE.

About 1790 the art of coach-building had arrived at a very high degree
of perfection,[25] and carriages in great variety of shape were built.
A feature common to all, or nearly all, was the height of the wheels.
The highest were 5 feet 8 inches in diameter; these had 14 spokes, and
the number of spokes were reduced in ratio with the size of the wheel,
till the smallest, 3 feet 2 inches in diameter, had only 8 spokes. A
good example of the coach of 1790 may be seen in the South Kensington
Museum; it belonged to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and, save for
the greater size of the body, the flatness of its sides and greater
length above than below, is not widely dissimilar from coaches of the
present day.

[25] _Treatise upon Carriages and Harness._ W. Felton, London, 1794.

The Landau, invented at Landau in Germany, in 1757, was, about 1790,
made to open in the middle of the roof or “hood,” and became very
popular as combining the advantages of a closed coach with an open
carriage; the chief objection to Landaus was the greasiness and smell
of the blacking leather of which the hoods were constructed. The name
of the phaeton first occurs in a patent granted in 1788. Phaetons
of various shapes came into fashion later: all were built to be driven
by the owner, and probably gained much in popular esteem from the fact
that George IV., when Prince of Wales, used to drive a “Perch High
Phaeton” in the Park and to race meetings. Some of these vehicles were
extravagantly high, and it was the correct thing to drive four horses
in them at the fastest trot. The “Perch High Phaeton” was shaped like a
curricle and had a hood. “The centre of the body was hung exactly over
the front axle-tree, the front wheels were 4 feet high, and the hind
wheels 5 feet 8 inches” (Thrupp).

[Illustration:

_By J. Doyle._

KING GEORGE IV. IN HIS PONY PHAETON.]

The pony phaeton owed its popularity to King George IV., who, in 1824,
desired to possess a low carriage into which he could step without
exertion; old pictures show us that the pony phaeton of the present day
is very like the original vehicle. Such a phaeton was built for our
late Queen, then Princess Victoria, in 1828. It should be said that C
springs were first used by English coach builders about the year 1804.

Among other curious carriages was the “Whisky,” a two-wheeled gig with
a movable hood, the body connected with the long horizontal springs by
scroll irons, The “suicide gig” was an absurdly high vehicle which
was popular in Ireland; in this the groom was perched on something
resembling a stool 3 feet above his master who drove.

Dr. R. Lovell Edgeworth, writing in 1817, says that a sudden
revolution in the height of private carriages had taken place a few
years previously. Such as might be seen in Bond Street were so low
that gentlemen on foot could hold conversation with ladies in their
carriages without the least difficulty; but it was soon discovered that
other people over-heard their conversation, and carriages “immediately
sprang up to their former exaltation.” It is difficult to believe that
such a reason accounted for a revolution in the method of carriage
building.

Driving as a pastime came into vogue about the beginning of the
century, when it became fashionable for ladies to display their skill
on the coach box, The “Benson Driving Club” was founded in 1807, and
survived until 1853 or 1854; the Four Horse Club came into existence in
1808, but only continued for eighteen years. The Four-in-Hand Driving
Club was founded in 1856, and the Coaching Club in 1870.




Works by SIR WALTER GILBEY, Bart.,

Published by Vinton & Co., 9 New Bridge Street, London, E.C.


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