The condition of the streets in the towns being often no improvement on that of the roads in the country, the development of vehicular traffic, even there, was but slow. It was the example of Queen Elizabeth in riding in a "coach" through the streets of London that led to private carriages becoming fashionable, since, following thereon, "divers great ladies" had coaches made, and went about in them--much to the admiration of the populace, but much, also, to the concern of the Thames watermen, who regarded the {58}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, whenever 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 expressed 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 {59}upstart four-wheeled tortoises.... A coach or carouch is a mere engine of pride, which no one can deny to be one of the seven deadly sins."