CHAPTER V.
ON PUBLIC CARRIAGES.
Travelling before A.D. 1600—Great Width of Waggon Wheels—Turnpike Roads—Post Saddle Horses—Hackneys—Stage Coaches—Hackney Coaches—Cheap Rate of Hire—The York Coach—The Manchester Flying Coach—The Post Chaise—The Diligence—Post-Boys—Mr T. Pennant on Travelling—Increase of Mail Coaches—M‘Adam’s Roads—Four-in-Hand Clubs—Russian Travelling—Two-Wheeled Street Cabs—Street Cabs need Improvement—Hansom Cabs—Omnibus of Pascal—Omnibus of 1820—Shillibeer’s Omnibuses—General Omnibus Company—American Coachmaking—Fast Cabs of Vienna.
IMENTIONED in an earlier lecture that the Romans, during the time of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, established a system of public vehicles for hire. These were stationed at inns or post-houses, at intervals of five or six miles, and there were twenty or more horses kept at each inn along the great main roads of Italy, and many of the dependent countries of Europe and Asia. The chief use of the post-houses was to supply the public messengers, but they were found of such accommodation that more horses and vehicles were required for the use of travellers. The essedum, or two-wheeled curricle; the cisium, or gig; and the rhedum, a four-wheeled waggon, drawn by four or six mules, were the chief carriages kept at these stations.
Cesarius, a magistrate in the time of the Emperor Theodosius, went post from Antioch to Constantinople, six hundred and sixty-five miles, in six days, with a speed, allowing for stoppages, of about six miles an hour.
Coaches, we have already seen, were introduced into England in the sixteenth century, stage coaches in the seventeenth, mail coaches in the eighteenth, and railways in the nineteenth centuries. Each of the four last centuries had added to and improved upon the systems of passenger and commercial transit. The facilities for travelling, prior to the introduction of coaches, were afforded by saddle horses, and by cars or charettes, (vehicles without springs, as I have already described), by waggons, and by strings of pack-horses following each other laden with goods, upon which a passenger occasionally sat. For the sick, and ladies who did not ride, the litter, carried by men on two poles, or strapped to mules or horses, was generally adopted.
Persons were in the habit of collecting together and travelling in company with these conveyances, or in gangs by themselves, or on horses when they had them, for their mutual protection. Old men can still recollect strings of pack horses traversing Lancashire and Yorkshire, and advertisements for companions desired by gentlemen about to ride to London.