A most luxurious English carriage of the fourteenth century is shown in the Louterell Psalter. This was obviously evolved from a four-wheeled waggon. Five horses, harnessed at length, drew it, a postilion with a short whip riding on the second, and another with a long whip on the wheeler. The tunnel-like body was highly ornamented, and its front decorated with carved birds and men’s heads. The frame of the body was continued in front as two poles, and underneath, hanging by a ring and looking rather ludicrous, is shown a small trunk. Women only appear in this carriage, the men riding behind it.
“Nothing,” remarks M. Jusserand, “gives a better idea of the encumbering, awkward luxury which formed the splendour of civil life during this century than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels; three or four horses drew them, harnessed in a row, the postilion being mounted on one, armed with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel; as a whole, ungraceful enough. But the details,” he goes on to say, speaking of the carriage shown in the Louterell Psalter, “were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilt, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were disposed in the corners as if to invite sleep, square windows pierced the sides and were hung with curtains. Thus travelled,” he continues with a touch of picturesqueness, “the noble lady, slim in form, tightly clad in a dress which outlined every curve of the body, her long, slender hands caressing the favourite dog or bird. The knight, equally tightened in his cote-hardie, regarded her with a complacent eye, and, if he knew good manners, opened his heart to his dreamy companion in long phrases like those in the romances. The broad forehead of the lady, who has perhaps coquettishly plucked off her eyebrows and stray hairs, a process about which satirists were indignant, brightens up at moments, and her smile is like a ray of sunshine. Meanwhile the axles groan, the horse-shoes—also heavily nailed—crunch the ground, the machine advances by fits and starts, descends into the hollows, bounds altogether at the ditches, and falls violently back with a dull noise.”
Other gaily decorated carriages, surprisingly like our modern vans, though on two wheels, are shown in Le Roman du Roy Meliadus, another fourteenth-century manuscript preserved in the British Museum, but only the richest and most powerful of the nobles could afford to keep them.
“They were bequeathed,” says M. Jusserand, “by will from one another, and the gift was valuable. On September 25, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, wrote her last will and endowed her eldest daughter with ‘her great carriage with the coverture, carpets, and cushions.’ In the twentieth year of Richard II, Roger Rouland received £400 sterling for a carriage destined for Queen Isabella; and John le Charer, in the sixth [year] of Edward III, received £1000 for the carriage of Lady Eleanor—the King’s sister.”
These were fabulous sums, when it is remembered that an ox cost about thirteen shillings and a sheep but one shilling and five pence.
Now it may be that such a “great carriage” as is shown in the Louterell Psalter was identical with the whirlicote in which, according to Stowe, Richard II and his mother took refuge on the occasion of Wat Tyler’s rebellion.
“Of old time,” says this honest tailor, who himself witnessed the introduction of coaches into England, “coaches were not known in this island, but chariots or whirlicotes, then so called, and they only used of princes or great estates, such as had their footmen about them; and for example to note, I read that Richard II, being threatened by the rebels of Kent, rode from the Tower of London to the Mile’s End, and with him his mother, because she was sick and weak, in a whirlicote, the Earl of Buckingham ... knights and Esquires attending on horseback. But in the next year [1381] the said King Richard took to wife Anne, daughter to the King of Bohemia, that first brought hither the riding upon side saddles; and so was the riding in whirlicotes and chariots forsaken, except at coronations and such like spectacles.”
From this it would appear that the whirlicote (which may, as Bridges Adams suggests, have been derived from “whirling” or moving “cot” or house) was identical with the chariot or chaer. Unfortunately the translators of Froissart, who mentions the incident of Richard’s ride from the Tower, cannot agree upon the correct word to render the original charette. Charette, chariette, chare, chaer (Wicliffe), and char (Chaucer) all occur in the early chronicles, and there seems no means, if, indeed, there is any need, of differentiating between them. All were probably waggons modified for the conveyance of such passengers as could afford to pay highly for the privilege. One fact, however, suggests that there were at any rate two different kinds of carriages in England at this time, for we read that the body of Richard II was borne to its last resting-place “upon a chariette or sort of litter on wheels, such as is used by citizens’ wives who are not able or not allowed to keep ordinary litters.” With this in mind, it is difficult to agree with Sir Walter Gilbey when he says[15] that the chare was a horse litter, though it is fair to add that he acknowledges an opposite view.
The charette is obviously the French form of caretta, which was the carriage in which Beatrice, the wife of Charles of Anjou, entered Naples in 1267.[16] This vehicle is described as being covered both inside and without with sky-blue velvet powdered with golden lilies. Pope Gregory X entered Milan in 1273 in a similar carriage. The caretta was probably an open car “shaded simply by a canopy.” In the next century, the Anciennes Chroniques de Flandres, a manuscript belonging to 1347, shows an illustration of Ermengarde, the wife of Salvard, Lord of Rousillon, travelling in a four-wheeled conveyance remarkably like the ordinary country waggon of to-day.