166 KAltLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE. 



excited much wonder. It is related of " that valyant 

 knyght Sir Harry Sidney," that on a certain day in the 

 year 1583 he entered Shrewsbury in his waggon, "with 

 his Trompeter blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and 

 see." l 



From this time the use of coaches gradually spread, 

 more particularly amongst the nobility, superseding 

 the horse-litters which had till then been used for 1he 

 conveyance of ladies and others unable to bear the 

 fatigue of riding on horseback. The first carriages 

 were heavy and lumbering, and upon the execraUe 

 roads of the time they went pitching over the stones 

 and into the ruts, with the pole dipping arid rising like 

 a ship in a rolling sea. That they had no springs, is 

 clear enough from the statement of Taylor, the water- 

 poet, that in the paved streets of London men and women 

 were so " tost, tumbled, rumbled, and jumbled about in 

 them." Although the road from London to Dover, 

 along the old Roman Watling-street, was then one of the 

 best in England, the journey of the French household of 

 Queen Henrietta, when they were sent forth from the 

 palace of Charles I., occupied four tedious days before 

 they reached Dover. 



But it was only a few of the main roads leading from 

 the metropolis that were practicable for coaches ; and on 

 the occasion of a royal progress, or the visit of a lord- 

 lieutenant, there was a general turn out of labourers and 

 masons to mend the ways and render the bridges at least 

 temporarily secure. When the judges, usually old men 

 and bad riders, took to going the circuit in their coaches, 

 juries were often kept waiting until their lordships 

 could be dug out of a bog or hauled out of a slough by 

 the aid of plough-horses. In the seventeenth century 

 scarcely a Quarter Sessions passed without presentments 

 from the grand jury against certain districts on account 

 of the bad state of the roads, and nianv were the fines 



