How the World Travels

								

coach, with its passengers and piled baggage, clatters along a
broad high road or draws up at the open door of some old-fashioned
English inn. Those are the eighteenth-century days that we call
to mind, the days when coaching was at its height, but we must go
further back than that if we want to find the origin of this form
of conveyance, and to see how it developed out of the clumsy wagons
and quaint whirlicotes and charettes of medi�val times.
We first hear of coaches in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and they
are said to have been introduced into England in 1594 by a coachman
who was a native of Holland.
There is an old picture of the great queen riding in one of her new
equipages on some state occasion. It was open at the sides, had a
high roof decorated with waving plumes, and was drawn by two richly
caparisoned horses.


At first, it appears, coaches were reserved for the use of royalty,
but Stowe tells us that "after a while divers great ladies made
them coaches and rid in them up and down the country, to the great
admiration of all beholders." He goes on to say that within twenty
years coach-making became an important trade in England.


These coaches were very different from those of later times, for
they were open at the sides and the wheels were very small and low.
In shape they were not unlike the state coach that is still used
at coronations and other great occasions.


During the seventeenth century many alterations and improvements
took place in coach-building both in England and France, and in
1620 we find Louis XIV. driving in a carriage with glass sides.
In the reign of this monarch, too, a curious light two-wheeled
conveyance was introduced. It was called a flignette and very
much resembled a modern dog-cart.


In the eighteenth century greater progress was made as roads
improved. Sedan chairs came into use, and ladies rode pillion
fashion, sitting on a cushion behind the saddle of the horseman.


Hired carriages, too, began to be seen in the streets of Paris, and
in 1625 they appeared in London. Very few of them were allowed at
first, but in 1634 an old sea-captain named Baily established a
stand for hackney coaches near the Maypole in the Strand, and by
the end of the century there were no fewer than eight hundred of
these vehicles in the City and suburbs.


Stage coaches to carry both passengers and mails were the next
innovation, and they were soon running regularly during summer on
three of the principal high roads of England.
Nowadays, when we can travel from one end of the country to the
other in a few hours, we should think the old conveyances very slow
coaches indeed, but at the end of the seventeenth and during the
eighteenth centuries they were thought marvels of swiftness. It