Carriages & Coaches: Their History & Their EvolutionStraus, Ralph
History
Carriages & Coaches: Their History & Their Evolution
Straus, Ralph
Carriages and carts
The provender bill for six horses is given, also an item “for setting
up the coach horses at dyvers times at Walsingham Howse, iiij_s._;
at Hatton Howse, xij_d._; at Baynardes Castle, ij_s._; dressing and
oyling the coach, ij_s._”; while the most necessary whip costs Mr.
Screven twelve pence. Other payments are six shillings for two new
bearing braces for the “double hanging” of the coach—here at any
rate is definite mention of suspension, a fact which might suggest
that, after all, either Rippon’s or Lord Arundel’s coach had been
of the suspended type—four shillings for a long spring brace, two
shillings and sixpence for a new “wynge,” and sixteen pence for two
“bearing raynes.” The new coach, however, is not ready in time for
his Lordship, who thereupon hires one with three horses to take him
“to the Court at Nonesuch, 23, 24, and 25 of September, at xvj_s.
per diem_.” Meanwhile payments for his own coach continue. For four
“skynnes of orange colour leather goate” he pays various sums; for the
timber work, for more painting, for a covering in “black lether,” and
for making the “curtaynes, and setting on the firinge, and making the
blew cloth cover” a sum of twenty-six pounds, nineteen shillings, is
expended. Nor is this all. My Lord was evidently determined to make his
coach as gorgeous as possible. Nine yards of “marygold coulour velvet
for the seat and bed in the coach” were required, and each yard cost
twenty-three shillings. The quilting for the bed cost forty shillings.
In addition, there was a lace of “crymosin silk” and no less than “v
elles of crymosin taffaty for curtaynes,” costing three pounds fifteen
shillings; also “9 yardes of blew clothe for a cover.” Then, of great
interest, comes the final entry:—
“Item, paid to Ryly, embroderer, in full for embrodering
iij sumpter clothes of crymosin with his L[ordship’s] armes
thereon at large, and vij otheres embrodered onely with great
peacocks, with carsey for the garding and tasselles and
frynge, 14 July, lxiiij_li._”
Mr. Ryly was well paid for his work[21].
From such details it is possible to imagine what this and other coaches
of the time were like. You figure a huge, gaudy, curtained apparatus
with projecting sides and incomplete panels, large enough to contain
a fair-sized bed, hung roughly from four posts, and capable of being
dragged at little better than a snail’s pace—“four-wheeled Tortoyses”
Taylor calls them—along roads hardly worthy of the name. Twenty miles
a day was considered good going. Says Portia, in the _Merchant of
Venice_:—
“... I’ll tell thee all my whole device
When I am in my coach, which stays for us
At the park gate; and therefore haste away,
For we must measure twenty miles to-day.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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