Carriages & Coaches: Their History & Their EvolutionStraus, Ralph
History
Carriages & Coaches: Their History & Their Evolution
Straus, Ralph
Carriages and carts
Most of the morning is wasted by such desultory talk, and the street
becomes blocked. There comes on the scene a waterman, who, of course,
is equally antagonistic to both, and would throw coach and sedan
into the Thames if he were not afraid of blocking the stream, and so
bringing harm to himself. There follows him a country farmer, who
thinks the sedan the honester and humbler of the two, but really knows
very little about it. “I heare no great ill of you,” he is good enough
to say, but is bound to add, “I have had no acquaintance with your
cowcumber-cullor’d men.” Yet in the country he has in his way tried a
sedan-chair, which is a “plaine wheele-barrow,” just as his cart is his
coach “wherein now and then for my pleasure I ride, my maides going
along with me.” But if they both come to Lincolnshire, the sedan, he
thinks, will receive a warmer welcome than the coach.
After him comes a country vicar who has no hesitation in accusing the
coach of all sorts of robberies. Soon, he cries, you will be “turned
off.” You never cared for church, and indeed, during service, you
disturb everybody rumbling your loudest outside. Also you are so set up
that you will never give place “either to cart or carre.” A surveyor is
less personal than the vicar, but has little good to say of the coach,
although he agrees with most of the others that for a nobleman of high
rank, it is something of a necessity.
Finally the brewer appears and speedily puts an end to the wrangle.
“With that, comes up unto us a lustie tall fellow, sitting
betweene two mōstrous great wheeles, drawne by a great
old jade blinde of an eie, in a leather pilch, two emptie
beere-barrels upon a brewer’s slings besides him, and old
blew-cap all bedaub’d, and stincking with yest.... My name is
_Beere-cart_, quoth hee, I came into England in _Henry_ the
Seventh’s time.”
And the decision of the cart is, of course, that both coach and sedan
shall give way to _him_. They are both to exercise great care, and the
sedan is to have the wall. And he adds, turning to the smaller vehicle,
a sentence which it is difficult to understand.
“You shall never,” he says, “carrie Coachman againe, for the
first you ever carried was a Coachman, for which you had like
to have sufferd, had not your Master beene more mercifull.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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