If, then, we please to pronounce for that event as the true beginning, and allow 1848, the year when one of the last coaches, the Bedford “Times,” was withdrawn from the London and Bedford road in consequence of the opening of the Bletchley and Bedford branch railway, to be the end, we have the beginning, the growth and perfection of the old coaching era, and its final extinction, all comprised within a period of a hundred and ninety-one years. Wheeled conveyances are generally said by the usual books of reference to take their origin in this country with the introduction of Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage in 1553; but, so far from that being correct, mention of carriages is often found in authorities of a period earlier by almost two centuries. Thus, in her will of September 25th, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, bequeathed her “great carriage, with the covertures, carpets, and cushions,” to her eldest daughter; and carriage-builders at the close of Edward III.’s reign charged £100 and £1000 for their wares. Carts were not unknown to the peasantry; Froissart tells us that the English returned from Scotland in 1360 in “charettes,” a kind of carriage whose make he does not specify; and ladies are discovered in 1380 travelling with the baggage in “whirlicotes,” which were cots or beds on wheels, or a species of wheeled litter. We have, by favour of one of the old chroniclers, a fugitive picture of Richard II., at the age of seventeen, travelling in one of these whirlicotes, accompanying his mother, who was ill. But such instances do not prove more than occasional use, and it certainly appears that when Queen Mary rode from the Tower of London to Westminster on her Coronation Day, September 20th, 1553, in her State coach, she thereby revived the use of carriages, which, for some reason or another, had fallen into disuse since those early days. Her coachmaker, by a grant made on May 29th in the first year of her reign, was one Anthony Silver. We may seek the cause of wheeled conveyances going out of use in the two centuries before this date in the steady and continuous decay of the roads consequent upon the troubled state of the kingdom in that intervening space. Rebellions, pestilences, foreign wars, and domestic strife had marked that epoch. The Wars of the Roses themselves lasted thirty years, and in all that while the social condition of the people had not merely stood still, but degenerated. Towns and districts were half depopulated, and the ancient highways fell into disuse. It is significant that the first General Highway Act, a measure passed in 1555, was practically coincident with the reintroduction of carriages.