The Horse Book by Kathleen Walker-Meikle

Author:Kathleen Walker-Meikle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784422264
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

In 1623, John Taylor wrote a fearsome tirade against the newly introduced coach; he believed that ‘no land has endured more trouble and molestation than this has, by the continual rumbling of these upstart four wheeled tortoises’. The coaches are ‘cumbersome by their rumbling and rutting, as they are by their standing still, and damming up the streets and lanes, as the Blackfriars, and other diverse places can witness... the streets are so pestered and clogged with them, that neither man, horse, or cart can pass for them.’

Riding in them wasn’t much better, according to Taylor:

It is a most uneasy kind of passage in coaches on the paved streets in London wherein men and women are so tossed, tumbled, jumbled, rumbled, and crossing of kennels, dunghills, and uneven-ways, which is enough to put all the guts in their bellies out of joint, to make them have the palsey or megrum, or to cast their gorges with continual rocking and wallowing.

John Taylor, The world runnes on wheeles: or oddes betwixt carts and coaches (London 1623)

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