In thus giving 1820 as the date of the horseman’s final disappearance, it need not be supposed that Cobbett and his _Rural Rides_ are forgotten. He covered England on horseback some years later, but his journeys are not on all fours with those of the horsemen whose only desire was quickly to get from start to finish of their journeys. He halted by the way, and from the vantage-point of the saddle cast a keenly scrutinising eye upon the agricultural methods of the various districts, as seen across the tops of hedgerows, or delayed his travels to harangue the farmers on market-days. Nor is the existence forgotten of those country gentlemen and City merchants who, seventy years ago, rode to and from the City on horseback; but they also formed an exception. Already, by some ten years or so, the commercial travellers, as a body, had left the saddle and taken to what was, in its first inception, essentially the vehicle of the commercial representative. This was the “gig.” The gig at once became a favourite middle-class conveyance. Thurtell, the flashy betting-man, vulgar _roué_, and murderer, was thought by a witness “a respectable man: he kept a gig.” This aroused the scorn of Carlyle, who coined the word “gigmanity.” The early commercial travellers, in fact, were long known as “riders,” from their custom of riding horseback from town to town, sometimes with a led pack-horse when their samples were unusually bulky or heavy. The “London riders” sometimes found mentioned in old literature were therefore London commercials. The successive names by which these “ambassadors of commerce,” as they have sometimes been grandiloquently styled, were known are themselves highly illuminating. They were, in succession, “bagmen,” “riders,” “travellers,” and “commercial gentlemen.” They are now “representatives.” CHAPTER III DAWN OF THE COACHING AGE Meanwhile the first stage-coaches had been put upon the chief roads out of London, and had begun to ply between the capital and the principal towns. Stage-coaches are, on insufficient authority, said to have begun about 1640, but no particulars are available in support of that statement, and in considering this point we are bound to look into the social state of England at that time, and to consider the likelihood or otherwise of a public service of coaches being continued throughout those stormy years which preceded, accompanied, and followed the great Civil War that opened with the raising of the King’s standard at Nottingham in 1642, and ended with the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. That victory ended the war in favour of the Parliament men, but the political troubles and their attendant social displacements continued.