The History of Coaches

by George Athelstane Thrupp

Laws for the improvement of old roads and the making of new, were passed in the reign of Henry VIII., and special mention is made of those between St. Clements Danes in the Strand, and Charing Cross, Holborn, and Southwark as being then noxious and very jeopardous. In the time of Queen Mary, in 1555, an Act of Parliament ordered the appointment of two surveyors for each parish, and that the roads should be repaired under their supervision.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the long broad wheeled waggons were introduced into England, and began to pass regularly between the great towns with goods and passengers. These long waggons first received the name of “Stages.” There are continual allusions in old books to their great convenience, although the rate of speed was small.

About one hundred and thirty years ago there seems to have arisen an extraordinary contest between the owners of waggons and those who repaired the highways. It was asserted that the waggon wheels destroyed the road by reason of the great weight of the vehicles and the narrowness of the tyres.

The question was carried before Parliament, and endeavours were made to widen the tyres to nine and even ten inches, so as to reduce the crushing effect of the wheels on soft roads to a minimum. On such roads it was said there were ruts more than a foot deep, cut by the narrow wheels. The Legislature endeavoured to promote the use of broad wheels by exemptions from turnpike tolls, by restrictions and fines upon narrow wheels, and actually recommended tyres 16 inches wide, under the idea that they would roll roads flat, just as gravel walks in a garden are rolled.

In the British Museum is a work by Daniel Bourne, dated 1763, having a design of a waggon with four wheels in which the front axle-tree is very short, so that the track outside the front wheels is made to correspond with the inside of the hind wheels, and they are made like four garden rollers, each 15 inches wide, so that as the waggon moved 5 feet of the road should be simultaneously rolled flat.

After a contest of many years it was generally acknowledged that, to oblige waggoners to carry burdensome wheels to roll the road for pleasure carriages, was an obvious hardship. Every inch added to the really necessary width for strength to the tyre of the wheels was felt by the carrier as a grievance, and the evasion of the government regulations was sympathised with by the common sense of mankind. It was left to the waggoner to keep the wheel sufficiently narrow to run lightly, and sufficiently wide to prevent its sinking with a heavy load into the road. It was admitted that the chief person interested in the matter was the waggoner, as, if his wheels turned heavily over the road by reason of sinking into the surface, then he would fine himself by being obliged to use more horses, or by travelling very slowly.

During the whole of the sixteenth century the improvement of English main and cross-roads continued steadily advancing by the system of turnpike tolls, on the security of which money was borrowed by the parishes in order to make them. Although for a long time there was great opposition, yet the system suited the time, and was probably, in our free country, the only way to obtain them. In France, on the other hand, the nobility made their roads by the forced labour of the peasants within their territory—one of the instances of cruel oppression that led to the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1786, as the poor peasants were obliged, from time to time, to leave the cultivation of the fields and turn out with carts and horses to labour for two or three weeks together at the repair of the roads, and this, too, without any payment.

In 1617, an author named Fynes Morryson relates, that “there were post horses in England, at stations about ten miles apart, that could be hired by travellers on horseback at the charge of 2½d. per mile to 3d.,” but, he adds, “most travellers ride their own horses. In some counties a horse can be hired at 3d. per day, finding the food. Likewise carriers let horses from city to city bargaining that the passengers put up at their inns. They will lend a horse for five or six days thus, and provide its food at these inns for about 20s. Lastly, these carriers have long covered waggons in which they carry passengers to and fro; but this kind of journeying is very tedious; so that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort. Coaches are not to be hired anywhere (this was in 1617) but in London. For a day’s journey a coach with two horses is let for about 10s. a day, or 15s. with three horses, the coachman finding the horses’ feed.”

Yet in 1610 a native of Stralsund, in Pomerania, obtained in Scotland a Royal patent giving him the exclusive privilege of running coaches and waggons between Edinburgh and Leith.

The horses that were hired for travellers were called in France “hacqueneè,” and in Wales “hacknai,” which term extended into England, and after was applied to hired coaches, thence named Hackney Coaches. Samuel Pepys, in his Diary of 1662, speaks of riding his hacqueneè to Woolwich, at a period when he did not keep any horse of his own.