If we are to credit Taylor’s description of the earliest coaches, some of them must have resembled the present Irish jaunting-car, or Bianconi’s mid-nineteenth century coaches, in the manner of carrying passengers. He tells us, in his fanciful way, that a coach, “like a perpetual cheater, wears two bootes and no spurs, sometimes having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in that miserable manner, and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways, as they are when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered.” This boot, or this pair of boots—which did not in the least resemble, in shape or position, the fore and hind boots of a later age—was a method of carrying the outsides in days before the improvement of roads rendered it possible for any one to ride on the roof without incurring the danger of being flung off. No illustration of this type of coach has ever been found, but it seems possible that the back-to-back boots, to carry four, were built on to the hinder part of the coach, and really formed the first attempt to carry outsides.

This type of coach described by Taylor must have been freakish and ephemeral. Those in general use were very different, resembling in their construction the private carriages and London hackney-coaches of the time, and varying from them only in being built to hold a number of people—usually six, but on occasion eight. In Sir Robert Howard’s comedy, The Committee, printed in 1665, the Reading coach brings six passengers to London.

The body was covered with stout leather, nailed on to the frame with broad-headed nails, whose shining heads, gilt or silvered, picked out the general lines of the structure, and were considered to give a pleasing decorative effect. Windows and doors were at first unknown. In their stead were curtains and wooden shutters, so that the interior of an early coach on a wet or chilly day, when the curtains were drawn, must have been a close and dismal place. It was this feature that gave Taylor an opportunity of comparing a coach with a hypocrite: “It is a close hypocrite, for it hath a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness.” The first vehicle with glass windows was the private carriage of the Duke of York, in 1661, and we do not begin to hear of glazed windows in stage-coaches until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when “glass coaches” were announced. It is, indeed, unlikely that glass could in any case have been introduced for the purpose of country travelling at an earlier date, for it would need to have been of extraordinary strength and thickness to survive the shocks and crashes of travel of this period.

All these vehicles were low hung, for the heavy body, slung by massive leather braces from the upright posts springing from the axletrees of front and hind wheels, was too responsive to any and every rut and irregularity of the road to be placed at the height to which the coaches of a century later attained.

In the excessive jolting then incidental to travelling, the body of a coach swayed laterally to such an extent that it would often swing, in the manner of a pendulum, quite clear of the underworks. Occupants of coaches were thus often afflicted with nausea, not unlike that of sea-sickness, and to be “coached” was at that time an expression which meant the getting used to a violent motion at first most emphatically resented by the human stomach.

Although the body of a coach enjoyed a wide range of motion sideways, it had not by any means the same freedom back and forth. A severe strain, in the continual plunging and jolting, was therefore thrown upon the supporting uprights, so that they not infrequently gave way under the ordeal, and suddenly threw passengers and coachman in one common heap of ruin. To aid him in making such roadside repairs as these and other early defects of construction often rendered necessary, the coachman carried with him a box of tools placed under his seat, and it is from this circumstance that the name of “hammercloth”—the hangings decorating the coachman’s seat on many a State carriage—was derived.

Bad as was the situation of the passengers, that of the coachman was infinitely worse. His was a seat of torture, for it was placed immediately over the front pair of wheels, and, totally unprovided with springs, transmitted to his body the full force of every shock with which those wheels descended into holes or encountered stones.

In 1667 a London and Oxford coach is found, performing the fifty-four miles in two days, halting for the intervening night at Beaconsfield; and in the same year the original Bath coach appears, in this portentous announcement:—

“FLYING MACHINE.

“All those desirous to pass from London to Bath, or any other Place on their Road, let them repair to the ‘Bell Savage’ on Ludgate Hill in London, and the ‘White Lion’ at Bath, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the Whole Journey in Three Days (if God permit), and sets forth at five o’clock in the morning.

“Passengers to pay One Pound five Shillings each, who are allowed to carry fourteen Pounds Weight—for all above to pay three-halfpence per Pound.”

This is the first appearance of the epithet “Flying” in the literature of coaches. Possibly it was used in this first instance in order to distinguish the new conveyance from a stage-waggon that must for many years before have gone the journey, as well as to justify the higher fare charged by the new vehicle. The waggon would have conveyed passengers at anything from a halfpenny to a penny a mile; by “Flying Machine” it came to threepence. The term “Flying,” for a coach that consumed three days in performing a journey of 109 miles, raises a smile; but it was only relative, and in contrast with the pace of the waggons of that period, which would probably have made it a six-days’ trip.