EARLY SIDE-SADDLE.
During the Middle Ages vehicles were so few because the roads were very bad, and in many places there were only rough bridle-paths from one town to another. Riding was, therefore, the principal means of transit, and horses, mules, and donkeys were used. Very large horses, the ancestors of our present cart-horses, were ridden by the knights, for a warrior in heavy mail could only be carried by a strong animal. This was especially the case when it was necessary for the horse itself to be also clothed in metal armour.
The ladies also rode, and side-saddles were first introduced into England by Anne of Bohemia, the wife of Richard II. These saddles were very different from those of the present day, for they were like chairs placed sideways on the horses' backs.
Pack-horses were much used in mediæval times, and pictures show us long trains of these animals, each with its heavy load, wending their way along the rough, narrow pathways of old England.
CHAPTER II
COACHING DAYS
Coaching days! The words carry us back a hundred years or more, and bring to our minds gay, romantic pictures of scarlet-clad postilions, prancing horses, and a rosy-faced driver with his long whip and quaint three-tiered cape. We seem to hear the merry sound of the horns, the ring of hoofs, and the rattle of harness, as the 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 mediæval 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.