The precursor of all public vehicles was the carrier’s waggon, a conveyance of hoary antiquity, intended in the first instance for the carriage of heavy goods, but finding room for those wayfarers who were too poor to own or hire a horse, or possibly too infirm to sit one even if their means sufficed. At least a hundred and fifty years before the earliest stage-coach was put on the road, the waggon, the poor man’s coach, was creaking and groaning on its tedious way at a pace of little more than two miles an hour. The stage-waggon, in fact, came into use about 1500, and the first glimpse and earliest notice of the carrier’s and stage-waggon business introduces us to a very celebrated waggoner indeed, by far the most notable of all his kind--none other, in fact, than Thomas Hobson, the carrier between Cambridge and London, the grand original of the Chaplin & Hornes, the Pickfords, the Carter Patersons, and Suttons of succeeding generations. Hobson’s London place of call was the “Bull,” Bishopsgate Street Within. When the business was founded is not on record, but it was old-established and prosperous when he succeeded to it on the death of his father in 1568. Under the terms of his father’s will he inherited, among other things, the vehicle with which the carrying trade was conducted, the “cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things thereunto belonging, with the nag.” It is quite evident from this that one cart or waggon sufficed for all the commerce between London and Cambridge at that time. If he did not choose to take these things, he was to have £30 instead, the equivalent of their value, which--taking into consideration the fact that the purchasing power of money at that time would be about six times that of our own--was therefore £180. The “nag” specified in the will was, of course, the horse ridden by the waggoner by the side of the eight-horse waggon team. In old prints of stage-waggons we see that the waggoner did not usually drive his team from the waggon holding the reins, but rode a pony, and, wielding a whip of formidable length, urged on the much-suffering beasts through mud and ruts.