ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT PAGE Vignette (_Title-page_) Preface vii List of Illustrations xi Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore 1 Arms of the Worshipful Company of Coach and Harness Makers 12 Epigram Scratched with a Diamond-ring on a Window-pane by Dean Swift 46 Old Coaching Bill, Preserved at the “Black Swan,” York 75 Old Birmingham Coaching Bill 81 Coaching Advertisement from the _Edinburgh Courant_, 1754 89 One of Three Mail-coach Halfpennies struck at Bath, 1797 173 Moses James Nobbs, the Last of the Mail-guards 265 [Illustration: STAGE-COACH AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE] CHAPTER I THE INTRODUCTION OF CARRIAGES “Ah! sure it was a coat of steel, Or good tough oak, he wore, Who first unto the ticklish wheel ’Gan harness horses four.” The lines quoted above are not remarkably good as poetry. Nay, it is possible to go farther, and to say that they are exceptionally bad--the product of one of those corn-box poets who were accustomed to speak of steam as a “demon foul”; but if his lines are bad verse, the central idea is good. That man who first essayed to drive four-in-hand must indeed have been more than usually courageous. To form anything at all like an adequate idea of the Coaching Age, it is first necessary to discover how people travelled before that age dawned. As a picture is made by contrasted light and shade, so is the story of the coaching period only to be properly set forth by first narrating how journeys were made from place to place before the continuous history of wheeled traffic begins. That history, measured by mere count of years, is not a long one. It cannot, in its remotest origin, go back beyond the first appearance of the stage-waggon, about 1590, when the peasantry of this kingdom began to obtain an occasional lift on the roads, and sat among the goods which it was the first business of those waggons to carry. The peasant, then, was the first coach-passenger, for while he was carried thus, everyone else, in all the estates of the realm, from King and Queen down to the middle classes, rode horseback, and it was not until 1657 and the establishment of the Chester Stage that the Coaching Age opened for the public in general.