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318
The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance
·
James Wilson Hyde
32
CHAPTER
III.
STAGE
AND
MAIL
COACHES.
Prior
to
the
middle
of
the
seventeenth
century,
about
which
period
stage-coaches
came
into
use
in
England,
the
only
vehicles
available
to
ordinary
travellers
would
seem
to
have
been
the
carrier's
stage-waggon,
which,
owing
to
its
lumbering
build
and
the
deplorable
state
of
the
roads,
made
only
from
ten
to
fifteen
miles
in
a
long
summer's
day.
The
interior
of
such
waggons
exhibited
none
of
the
refinements
of
modern
means
of
travel,
the
only
furnishing
of
the
machine
being
a
quantity
of
straw
littered
on
the
floor,
on
which
the
passengers
could
sit
or
lie
during
the
weary
hours
of
their
journey.
Though
the
stage-coaches
came
into
vogue
about
the
middle
of
the
seventeenth
century,
as
already
stated,
the
heavy
waggons
seem
also
to
have
held
a
place
till
much
later--for
in
one
of
these
Roderick
Random
performed
part
of
his
journey
to
London
in
1739;
and
it
was
doubtless
only
the
meaner
class
of
people
who
travelled
in
that
way,
as
the
description
given
by
Smollett
of
his
companions
does
not
mirror,
certainly,
people
of
fashion.
M.
Sobriere,
a
Frenchman,
on
his
way
from
Dover
to
London
in
the
reign
of
Charles
II.,
thus
writes
of
his
experience
of
the
waggon:
"That
I
might
not
take
post,
or
be
obliged
to
use
the
stage-coach,
I
went
from
Dover
to
London
in
a
waggon.
It
was
drawn
by
six
horses,
one
before
another,
and
driven
by
a
waggoner,
who
walked
by
the
side
of
it.
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