58 History of Inland Transport 



innovation as one that foreshadowed for them a competition 

 which did, indeed, become formidable, and even fatal, to their 

 own occupation. 



In those days and for long afterwards the Thames was the. 

 highway by means of which people of all classes went, when- 

 ever practicable, from one part of London to another, the 

 main incentive to this general use of the river being the 

 deplorable condition of the streets and roads. In his book on 

 " England in the Fifteenth Century " the Rev. W. Denton 

 tells how the King's serjeants-at-law, who dwelt in Fleet 

 Street, and who pleaded at Westminster Hall, gave up an 

 attempt to ride along the Strand because the Bishop of Norwich 

 and others would not repair the road which ran at the back of 

 their town houses. It was safer and more pleasant for lawyers 

 to take a boat from the Temple stairs and reach Westminster 

 by water. The Lord Mayor, on his election, not only went 

 by water from the City to Westminster, to be received by the 

 judges, but down to 1711, when a " Lord Mayor's Coach " 

 was provided for him, rode on horseback from the Guildhall 

 to London Bridge, where he embarked on the City barge, 

 accompanied by representatives of the Livery Companies in 

 their barges. 



Transport on the Thames constituted a vested interest of 

 great concern to the watermen, who had hitherto regarded as 

 their special prerogative the conveyance of Londoners along 

 what was then London's central thoroughfare ; and the story 

 of the way in which they met the competition of vehicular 

 traffic in the streets is worth the telling because it illustrates 

 the fact that each successive improvement in locomotion and 

 transport has had to face opposition from the representatives 

 of established but threatened conditions. 



The great champion of the watermen was John Taylor 

 (1580-1654), the " Water Poet," as he called himself. When 

 the private carriages began to increase in number he ex- 

 pressed his opinion of them thus : 



" The first coach was a strange monster, it amazed both 

 horse and man. Some said it was a great crab-shell brought 

 out of China ; some thought it was one of the pagan temples, 

 in which cannibals adored the devil. . . . 



" Since Phaeton broke his neck, never land hath endured 

 more trouble than ours, by the continued rumbling of these 



