After the Restoration they appeared with whip and spurs, and towards the end of the century mounted a coachman's box. This box, covered with a hammer-cloth, was in reality a box, and within it, or in a leather pouch attached to it, were tools for mending broken wheels or shivered panels, in the event of accidents occurring, which were by no means uncommon; in consequence, first, of the defective construction of the vehicles, which, according to Davenant, were "uneasily hung, and so narrow that he took them for sedans on wheels;" in the second place, from the clumsy driving of carmen in the crowded thoroughfares; and, lastly and principally, from the nature of the streets themselves, full of all the worst perils a coachman could have to encounter. The state of the street ways, where the ruts lay half a yard deep, did not admit of rapid driving, and we read, even in the days of Charles II., of the Royal coach being upset twice in getting from the City to Westminster.
At this date, and for some generations after, the custom was, when ladies traversed the city in carriages, for the gentlemen gallants to accompany them on horseback, riding in advance, or on each side. These formed a body-guard, not at all unnecessary or superfluous, looking to the swarms of "scourers," "knights of the road," and "goshawks" who made free warren of London streets and scrupled at no act of violence. The picture Gay has left us of the street ways in the beginning of the eighteenth century will form some estimate of what they were at an earlier period:—
"Where a dim gleam the paly lantern throws,
O'er the mid pavement heapy rubbish grows,
Or arched vaults their gaping jaws extend,
Or the dark caves to common shores descend;
Oft by the winds, extinct the signal dies,
Or smothered in the glimmering socket lies.
Ere night has half rolled round her ebon throne
In the wide gulf, the shatter'd coach o'erthrown