“I cannot omit to mention,” writes Lord Stafford, “any new thing that comes up amongst us though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney coaches, put his men in livery and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had. Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and performed their journeys at the same rate, so that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which dispose up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it, for whereas before coaches could be had but at great rate”—one recalls the prices paid by Lord Rutland a few years before—“now a man may have one much cheaper.” Most of these coaches that were put on to the streets seem to have been old and disused carriages belonging to the quality. Many of them still bore noble arms, and, indeed, it would seem that when the hackneys were no longer disused noblemen’s carriages, the proprietors found it advisable to pretend that they were. Nearly every hansom and four-wheeled cab at the end of the nineteenth century bore some sort of coronet on its panels. The drivers of these first hackneys wore large coats with several capes, one over the other, for warmth. London, however, seems to have been the only town in which they were to be seen. “Coaches,” wrote Fynes Morison in 1617, “are not to be hired anywhere but in London. For a day’s journey a coach with two horses is let for about 10s. a day, or 15s. with three horses, the coachman finding the horses’ feed.” From the same author it would appear that most travellers still doggedly kept to their horses, and indeed, in some counties a horse could be hired for threepence a day, an incredibly small sum. “Carriers,” he also records, “have long covered waggons in which they carry passengers too and fro; but this kind of journeying is very tedious; so that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” These were the stage-waggons which in due course gave rise to the stage-coaches, which in their turn were superseded by the mail-coaches.