as Crooked-lane. Yet it argues your courage, much like your military pastime of throwing at cocks. But your mettle would be more magnified (since you have long allowed those two valiant exercises in the streets) to draw your archers from Finsbury, and, during high market, let them shoot at butts in Cheapside."*

It was the same in the days of Elizabeth. To this game went the sturdy apprentices, with all the train of idlers in a motley population; and when their blood was up, as it generally was in this exercise, which Stubbes calls "a bloody and murthering practice, rather than a fellowly sport or pastime," they had little heed to the passengers in the streets, whether there was passing by

The

or a gentle lady on her palfrey, wearing her "visor made of velvet." courtier, described in Hall, had an awful chance to save his "perewinke" in such an encounter; when with his "bonnet vail'd," according to the "courtesies" of his time,

"Travelling along in London way,"

he has to recover his "auburn locks" from the "ditch" that crosses the thoroughfare.

The days we are noticing were not those of pedestrians. The "red-heel’d shoes" of the time of Anne were as little suited for walking, as the "pantofles" of Elizabeth, "whereof some be of white leather, some of black, and some of red; some of black velvet, some of white, some of red, some of green, rayed, carved, cut, and stitched all over with silk, and laid on with gold, silver, and such like.' So Stubbes describes the "corked shoes" of his day; and he adds, what seems very apparent, "to go abroad in them as they are now used altogether, is rather a let or hindrance to a man than otherwise."§ These fine shoes belonged to the transition state between the horse and the coach; when men were becoming "effeminate" in the use of the new vehicles, which we have seen the Water-Poet denounced; and the highways of London were not quite suited to the walker. Shoes such as those are ridiculed by Stubbes as "uneasy to go in ;" and he adds, they exagerate a mountain of mire, and gather a heap of clay and baggage together."

66

In asking our readers to look back to the period when London was without coaches-when no sound of wheels was heard but that of the cart, labouring through the rutty ways, with its load of fire-wood, or beer, or perhaps the king's pots and pans travelling from Westminster to Greenwich—we ask them to exercise a considerable power of imagination. Yet London had no coaches till late in the reign of Elizabeth; and they can scarcely be said to have come into general use till the accession of James. Those who were called by business or pleasure to travel long distances in London, which could not be easily reached by water-conveyance, rode on horses. For several centuries the rich citizens and the courtiers were equestrians. All the records of early pageantry tell us of the magnificence of horsemen. Froissart saw the coronation of Henry IV., and he thus describes the progress of the triumphant Bolingbroke through the city :-" And

* Entertainment at Rutland House.

+ Donne.

§ Anatomy of Abuses.

Stubbes.

after dinner the duke departed from the Tower to Westminster, and rode all the way bareheaded; and about his neck the livery of France. He was accompanied with the prince his son, and six dukes, six earls, and eighteen barons, and in all, knights and squires, nine hundred horse. Then the king had on a short coat of cloth of gold, after the manner of Almayne, and he was mounted on a white courser, and the garter on his left leg. Thus the duke rode through London with a great number of lords, every lord's servant in their master's livery; all the burgesses and Lombard merchants in London, and every craft with their livery and device. Thus he was conveyed to Westminster. He was in number six thousand horse."* The old English chroniclers revel in these descriptions. They paint for us, in the most vivid colours, the entry into London of the conqueror of Agincourt; they are most circumstantial in their relations of the welcome of his unhappy son, after the boy had been crowned at Paris, with the king riding amidst flowing conduits, and artificial trees and flowers, and virgins making "heavenly melody," and bishops "in pontificalibus;" and having made his oblations at the cathedral, "he took again his steed at the west door of Paul's, and so rode forth to West

minster." By the ancient "order of crowning the kings and queens of England," it is prescribed that, "the day before the coronation, the king should come from the Tower of London to his palace at Westminster, through the midst of the city, mounted on a horse, handsomely habited, and bare-headed, in the sight of all the people." The citizens were familiar with these splendid equestrian processions, from the earliest times to the era of coaches; and they hung their wooden houses with gay tapestry, and their wives and daughters sate in their most costly dresses in the balconies, and shouts rent the air, and they forgot for a short time that there was little security for life or property against the despot of the hour. They played at these pageants, as they still play, upon a smaller scale themselves; and the Lord Mayor's horse and henchmen were seen on all solemn occasions of

+ Fabyan.

Liber Regalis, quoted by Strutt in his Manners, vol. iii. p. 422.

marching-watches and Bartholomew fairs. The city-dignitaries seldom ride now; although each new sheriff has a horse-block presented to him at his inauguration, that he may climb into the saddle as beseems his gravity. The courtiers kept to their riding processions, down almost to the days of the great civil war; perhaps as a sort of faint shadow of the chivalry that was gone. Garrard tells us, in 1635, how the Duke of Northumberland rode to his installation as a knight of the garter at Windsor, with earls, and marquises, and almost all the young nobility, and many barons, and a competent number of the gentry, near a hundred horse in all. The era of coaches and chairs was then arrived; but the Duke of Northumberland did not hold that they belonged to knighthood. Fifty years earlier coaches were shunned as "effeminate." Aubrey, in his short memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, describes the feeling about coaches in the days of Elizabeth: "I have heard Dr. Pell say that he has been told by ancient gentlemen of those days of Sir Philip, so famous for men-at-arms, that 'twas then held as great a disgrace for a young gentleman to be seen riding in the street in a coach, as it would now for such a one to be seen in the streets in a petticoat and waistcoat; so much is the fashion of the times now altered."+ Our friend the WaterPoet looks back upon that to him golden age with a similar feeling.

Nor was the use of saddle-horses confined to men in the early days. Chaucer thus describes his Wife of Bath :'

When Katharine of Spain came over in 1501 to marry Prince Arthur, a horse was provided for her conveyance from the Tower to Saint Paul's, upon which she was to ride" with the pillion behind a lord to be named by the king;" but it was also ordered that "eleven palfreys in one suit be ordained for such ladies attending upon the said princess as shall follow next unto the said pillion." The great ladies long after this rode on horseback on ordinary occasions. Elizabeth commissioned Sir Thomas Gresham to purchase a horse at Antwerp; and the merchant-prince writes to Cecil in 1560:-" the Queen's Majesty's Turkey horse doth begin to mend in his feet and body; which doubtless is one of the readiest horses that is in all Christendom, and runs the best."§ Of poor Mary of Scotland, the Earl of Shrewsbury, after conveying her to Buxton, writes to Cecil in 1580 :"She had a hard beginning of her journey; for when she should have taken her horse, he started aside, and therewith she fell, and hurt her back, which she still complains of, notwithstanding she applies the bath once or twice a day." The "horse-litter" appears to have formed a connecting link between the saddle and the coach. When Margaret, daughter of Henry VII., set forward for Scotland, she rode on a "fair palfrey;" but after her was "conveyed by two footmen one very rich litter, borne by two fair coursers very nobly drest, in the which litter the said queen was borne on the entering of the good towns, or otherwise to her good pleasure." The litter was, as we here see, a vehicle of ceremony. Hall,

Harl. MS., quoted in Northumberland Household Book, p. 449.
Lodge's Illustrations, vol. ii. p. 239.

Burgon's Life of Gresham, vol. i. p. 300.

Leland's Collectanea, quoted in Markland's valuable paper on the early use of carriages, Archæologia, vol. xx. p. 417.

the great chronicler of sights, thus describes the conveyance of Anne Bullen to her coronation :-"Then came the queen in a litter of white cloth of gold, not covered nor bailed, which was led by two palfreys clad in white damask down to the ground, head and all, led by her footmen. . . . So she with all her company and the mayor rode forth to Temple Bar, which was newly painted and repaired, where stood also divers singing men and children, till she came to Westminster Hall, which was richly hanged with cloth of arras, and new glazed. And in the middest of the hall she was taken out of her litter." Up to the time of Charles I. the horse litter continued to be used on state occasions; but it gradually became exclusively employed by the rich and aged, at a period when coaches were still terribly rough vehicles. Evelyn, in his Diary, states that he travelled in one with his sick father, in 1640, from Bath to Wotton; and this, Markland says, is the latest mention of the conveyance which he can find. There is a later mention of it, in a bitter attack upon the old republicans, in 1680: "Can we forget that horrid accident when Major-General Skippon came in a horse-litter, wounded, to London? When he passed by the brewhouse near St. John's Street, a devilish mastiff flew, as at a bear, at one of his horses, and held him so fast that the horse grew mad as a mad dog; the soldiers so amazed that none had the wit to shoot the mastiff; but the horse-litter, borne between two horses, tossed the major-general like a dog in a blanket."* Nothing can be more exact than this description of a litter.

Of the elder vehicles that preceded coaches, whether rejoicing in the name of chare, car, chariot, caroch, or whirlicote, we have little here to say. Their dignity was not much elevated above that of the waggon; and they were scarcely calculated to move about the streets of London, which are described in a Paving Act of 1539 as "very foul, and full of pits and sloughs, very perilous and noyous, as well for the king's subjects on horseback as on foot, and with carriages." There appears little doubt that the coach first appeared about 1564; although the question was subsequently raised "whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, or else brought a coach in a fog or mist of tobacco."+ Stow thus describes the introduction of this novelty, which was to change the face of English society:

"In the year 1564, Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen's coachman; and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England. After a while, divers great ladies, with as great jealousy of the queen's displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the countries in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders; but then by little and little they grew usual among the nobility and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach-making."

In little more than thirty years a Bill was brought into Parliament "to restrain the excessive use of coaches."

One of the most signal examples we can find of the growing importance of the middle classes is exhibited in their rapid appropriation to their own use of the new luxury which the highest in the land ventured at first to indulge in, timidly, and with "jealousy" of the queen's displeasure. It was in vain that Parliament

legislated against their "excessive use;" it was equally in vain that the citizens and citizens' wives who aspired to ride in them, were ridiculed by the wits and hooted by the mob. As in the diffusion of every other convenience or luxury introduced by the rich, the distinction of riding in a coach soon ceased to be a distinction. The proud Duke of Buckingham seeing that coaches with two horses were used by all, and that the nobility had only the exclusive honour of four horses, set up a coach with six horses; and then "the stout Earl of Northumberland" established one with eight horses.* Massinger, in "The City Madam," exhibits Anne Frugal demanding of her courtly admirer

The high-born and the wealthy soon found that those who had been long accustomed to trudge through the miry streets, or on rare occasions to bestride an ambling nag, would make a ready way with money to appropriate the new luxury to themselves. Coaches soon came to be hired. They were to be found in the suburban districts and in inns within the town. Taylor (he writes in 1623) says, "I have heard of a gentlewoman who sent her man to Smithfield from Charing Cross, to hire a coach to carry her to Whitehall; another did the like from Ludgate-hill, to be carried to see a play at the Blackfriars." He imputes this anxiety for the accommodation of a coach to the pride of the good people, and he was probably right. He gives us a ludicrous example of the extent of this passion in the case of "two leash of oyster-wives," who "hired a coach to carry them to the green-goose fair at Stratford-the-Bow; and as they were hurried betwixt Aldgate and Mile-end, they were so be-madam'd, be-mistress'd, and ladyfied by the beggars, that the foolish women began to swell with a proud supposition or imaginary greatness, and gave all their money to the mendicanting canters." The rich visitors who came to London from the country were great employers of coaches; and Taylor tells us that the "Proclamation concerning the retiring of the gentry out of the city into their countries" somewhat "cleared the streets of these way-stopping whirligigs; for a man now might walk without bidding Stand up, ho! by a fellow that can scarcely either go or stand himself.‡” It is easy to conceive that in those days of ill-paved and narrow streets the coaches must have been a great impediment to the goings-on of London business. Our Water-Poet is alive to all these inconveniences: "Butchers cannot pass with their cattle for them; market folks, which bring provision of victuals to the city, are stopped, stayed, and hindered; carts or wains, with their necessary wares, are debarred and letted; the milk-maid's ware is often spilt in the dirt;" and then he describes how the proud mistresses, sitting in their "hell-cart" (Evelyn tells us this was the Londoner's name for a coach long after), ride grinning and deriding at the people "crowded and shrouded up against stalls and shops." D'Avenant, some forty or fifty years later, notices the popular feeling: "Master Londoner, be not so hot against coaches." But the coaches flourished, in spite of the populace. The carman might drive up against them, and the coachman, "with six nobles sitting together," might be compelled to + Id.

* See Wilson's Memoirs.

World runs on Wheels, p. 239.