THE AGE OF LITTERS

AS roadmakers, the Romans, if they can be said to have had successors at all, were succeeded by the monks. On the assumption that travellers were unfortunate people, as indeed they were, needing help, religious Orders were founded whose chief work was that of building bridges and repairing the roads. Other Orders likewise performed such tasks, though possibly for more selfish reasons, being as they were large owners of cattle, and immersed as much in agricultural as in theological occupations. So in many parts of Europe the Pontife Brothers, or bridge-makers, were to be found. There were also Gilds formed to repair the roads, such as the Gild of the Holy Cross in Birmingham, founded in the reign of Richard II, which “mainteigned ... and kept in good reparaciouns the greate stone bridges, and divers foule and dangerous high wayes, the charge whereof the towne of hitsellfe ys not hable to mainteigne.” In Piers the Plowman, too, the rich merchants are exhorted to repair the “wikked wayes” and see that the “brygges to-broke by the heye weyes” may be mended “in som manere wise.” The maintenance of the roads in England, says M. Jusserand,14 “greatly depended upon arbitrary chance, upon opportunity, or on the goodwill or the devotion of those to whom the adjoining land belonged. In the case of the roads, as of bridges, we find petitions of private persons who pray that a tax be levied upon those who pass along, towards the repair of the road.” So in 1289, Walter Godelak of Walingford is praying for “the establishment of a custom to be collected from every cart of merchandize traversing the road between Jowemarsh and Newenham, on account of the depth, and for the repair, of the said way.” Unfortunately for him—and doubtless he was no exception to the rule—the reply came: “The King will do nothing therein.”

Indeed the roads were in a truly abominable condition. As often as not, deep ruts marred what surface there had ever been, and here and there brooks and pools rendered easy passage an impossibility. There is a patent of Edward III (Nov. 20, 1353) which ordered “the paving of the high road, alta via, running from Temple Bar”—then the western limit of London—“to Westminster.” “This road,” says M. Jusserand, “had been paved, but the King explains that it is ‘so full of holes and bogs ... and that the pavement is so damaged and broken’ that the traffic has become very dangerous for men and carriages. In consequence, he orders each proprietor on both sides of the road to remake, at his own expense, a footway of seven feet up to the ditch, usque canellum,” and see to it that the middle of the road is well paved. In France matters were just as bad. “Outside the town of Paris,” runs one fourteenth-century ordinance, “in several parts of the suburbs ... there are many notable and ancient high-roads, bridges, lanes, and roads, which are much injured, damaged or decayed and otherwise hindered by ravines of water and great stones, by hedges, brambles, and many other trees which have grown there, and by many other hindrances which have happened there, because they have not been maintained and provided for in time past; and they are in such a bad state that they cannot be securely traversed on foot or horseback, nor by vehicles, without great perils and inconveniences; and some of them are abandoned at all parts because men cannot resort there.” Wherefore it was proposed that the inhabitants should be compelled, by force if necessary, to attend to the matter.

While, however, the wretched state into which the roads were being allowed to fall had a great deal to do with the almost total, though indeed temporary, extinction of the wheeled pleasure carriage in western Europe, there is another fact which must be taken into consideration in any endeavour to account for it. As will appear in a little, the renaissance of carriage-building in the sixteenth century was for a time retarded in various places by a widespread feeling of distrust against anything that could be thought to lead to an accusation of effeminacy. Laws were passed—as was the case, for instance, in 1294, under Philip the Fair of France—forbidding people to ride in coaches, and sharp comparisons were drawn by the satirists between the hardy horsemen of old and the modern comfort-loving individuals who lolled, or were supposed to loll—though how they could have done so in those springless monstrosities is past comprehension—in their gaudily decorated carriages. I would not insist upon the point, but it may be that in the reaction against such undue luxuries as had helped to bring ruin to the Roman Empire, carriages for that reason became unpopular. From which, of course, it would follow that the disappearance of the carriage led, in part at any rate, to the neglect of the roads, and such new roads as were made would be laid down primarily for the convenience only of the horsemen. The same thing applied also to the litters, though their popularity naturally followed merely upon the state of the roads.

Before attempting to deal with these litters, it will be well to see what is known—it is not very much—of such wheeled carriages as there were at this time, and at the outset it is necessary to bear in mind that the old chroniclers used the word carriage in anything but its modern significance. To them a carriage was no more than an agricultural or baggage cart. Time and again you have accounts of this or that great man making his way, peaceably or otherwise, through some country, accompanied by numbers of carriages. These were simply his luggage carts, and although, as in earlier times, the cart, gaily ornamented, could very easily be converted into a pleasure carriage, it is important to remember the real meaning of the word. Such carts, in point of fact, were extremely common. In England they were generally square boxes made of planks borne on two wheels. Others, of a lighter pattern, were built of “slatts latticed with a willow trellis.” Their chief peculiarity was to be found in their wheels, which were furnished with extraordinarily large nails with prominent heads. Contemporary manuscripts give rough pictures of such carts. One of these is shown drawn by three dogs. One man squats inside, a second helps to push it from behind. A most interesting illustration in the Louterell Psalter—a fourteenth-century manuscript—shows a reaper’s cart going uphill. Here the two huge, six-spoked wheels with their projecting nails are clearly shown. The platform of the cart is strengthened by upright stakes with a cross-rail connecting them at the sides. The driver, standing over the wheels on the poles, is holding a long whip which is flicking the leader of three horses. Three other men are helping at the rear, and the stacks of wheat are held in position by ropes.

The earliest Anglo-Saxon carriage of which there is record belongs to the twelfth century. Strutt refers to a drawing in one of the Cottonian manuscripts, which represents a peculiar four-wheeled contrivance with two upright poles rising from the axle-trees, from which poles is slung a hammock. Such a chariot or chaer was apparently used by the more distinguished Anglo-Saxons when setting out upon long journeys. The drawing shows the figure of Joseph on his way to meet Jacob in Egypt, but is no doubt a correct representation of a travelling carriage in the artist’s lifetime. This hammock is interesting as being a primitive form of suspension, which may or may not have led to the later experiments in that direction.

A most luxurious English carriage of the fourteenth century is shown in the Louterell Psalter. This was obviously evolved from a four-wheeled waggon. Five horses, harnessed at length, drew it, a postilion with a short whip riding on the second, and another with a long whip on the wheeler. The tunnel-like body was highly ornamented, and its front decorated with carved birds and men’s heads. The frame of the body was continued in front as two poles, and underneath, hanging by a ring and looking rather ludicrous, is shown a small trunk. Women only appear in this carriage, the men riding behind it.

“Nothing,” remarks M. Jusserand, “gives a better idea of the encumbering, awkward luxury which formed the splendour of civil life during this century than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels; three or four horses drew them, harnessed in a row, the postilion being mounted on one, armed with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel; as a whole, ungraceful enough. But the details,” he goes on to say, speaking of the carriage shown in the Louterell Psalter, “were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilt, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were disposed in the corners as if to invite sleep, square windows pierced the sides and were hung with curtains. Thus travelled,” he continues with a touch of picturesqueness, “the noble lady, slim in form, tightly clad in a dress which outlined every curve of the body, her long, slender hands caressing the favourite dog or bird. The knight, equally tightened in his cote-hardie, regarded her with a complacent eye, and, if he knew good manners, opened his heart to his dreamy companion in long phrases like those in the romances. The broad forehead of the lady, who has perhaps coquettishly plucked off her eyebrows and stray hairs, a process about which satirists were indignant, brightens up at moments, and her smile is like a ray of sunshine. Meanwhile the axles groan, the horse-shoes—also heavily nailed—crunch the ground, the machine advances by fits and starts, descends into the hollows, bounds altogether at the ditches, and falls violently back with a dull noise.”

Other gaily decorated carriages, surprisingly like our modern vans, though on two wheels, are shown in Le Roman du Roy Meliadus, another fourteenth-century manuscript preserved in the British Museum, but only the richest and most powerful of the nobles could afford to keep them.

“They were bequeathed,” says M. Jusserand, “by will from one another, and the gift was valuable. On September 25, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, wrote her last will and endowed her eldest daughter with ‘her great carriage with the coverture, carpets, and cushions.’ In the twentieth year of Richard II, Roger Rouland received £400 sterling for a carriage destined for Queen Isabella; and John le Charer, in the sixth [year] of Edward III, received £1000 for the carriage of Lady Eleanor—the King’s sister.”

These were fabulous sums, when it is remembered that an ox cost about thirteen shillings and a sheep but one shilling and five pence.

Now it may be that such a “great carriage” as is shown in the Louterell Psalter was identical with the whirlicote in which, according to Stowe, Richard II and his mother took refuge on the occasion of Wat Tyler’s rebellion.

“Of old time,” says this honest tailor, who himself witnessed the introduction of coaches into England, “coaches were not known in this island, but chariots or whirlicotes, then so called, and they only used of princes or great estates, such as had their footmen about them; and for example to note, I read that Richard II, being threatened by the rebels of Kent, rode from the Tower of London to the Mile’s End, and with him his mother, because she was sick and weak, in a whirlicote, the Earl of Buckingham ... knights and Esquires attending on horseback. But in the next year [1381] the said King Richard took to wife Anne, daughter to the King of Bohemia, that first brought hither the riding upon side saddles; and so was the riding in whirlicotes and chariots forsaken, except at coronations and such like spectacles.”

From this it would appear that the whirlicote (which may, as Bridges Adams suggests, have been derived from “whirling” or moving “cot” or house) was identical with the chariot or chaer. Unfortunately the translators of Froissart, who mentions the incident of Richard’s ride from the Tower, cannot agree upon the correct word to render the original charette. Charette, chariette, chare, chaer (Wicliffe), and char (Chaucer) all occur in the early chronicles, and there seems no means, if, indeed, there is any need, of differentiating between them. All were probably waggons modified for the conveyance of such passengers as could afford to pay highly for the privilege. One fact, however, suggests that there were at any rate two different kinds of carriages in England at this time, for we read that the body of Richard II was borne to its last resting-place “upon a chariette or sort of litter on wheels, such as is used by citizens’ wives who are not able or not allowed to keep ordinary litters.” With this in mind, it is difficult to agree with Sir Walter Gilbey when he says15 that the chare was a horse litter, though it is fair to add that he acknowledges an opposite view.

The charette is obviously the French form of caretta, which was the carriage in which Beatrice, the wife of Charles of Anjou, entered Naples in 1267.16 This vehicle is described as being covered both inside and without with sky-blue velvet powdered with golden lilies. Pope Gregory X entered Milan in 1273 in a similar carriage. The caretta was probably an open car “shaded simply by a canopy.” In the next century, the Anciennes Chroniques de Flandres, a manuscript belonging to 1347, shows an illustration of Ermengarde, the wife of Salvard, Lord of Rousillon, travelling in a four-wheeled conveyance remarkably like the ordinary country waggon of to-day.

“The lady,” says Sir Walter Gilbey, “is seated on the floor-boards of a springless four-wheeled cart or waggon, covered in with a tilt that could be raised or drawn aside; the body of the vehicle is of carved wood and the outer edges of the wheels are painted grey to represent iron tyres. The conveyance is drawn by two horses driven by a postilion who bestrides that on the near [left] side. The traces are apparently of rope, and the outer trace of the postilion’s horse is represented as passing under the saddle-girth, a length of leather (?) being let in for the purpose; the traces are attached to swingle-bars carried on the end of a cross-piece secured to the base of the pole where it meets the body.

“Carriages of some kind,” he continues, “appear also to have been used by men of rank when travelling on the Continent. The Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land of Henry, Earl of Derby, in 1390 and 1392-3 (Camden Society’s Publications, 1894) indicate that the Earl, afterwards King Henry IV of England, travelled on wheels at least part of the way through Austria.

“The accounts kept by his Treasurer during the journey contain several entries relative to carriages; thus on November 14, 1392, payment is made for the expenses of two equerries named Hethcote and Mansel, who were left for one night at St. Michael, between Leoban and Kniltefeld, with thirteen carriage horses. On the following day the route lay over such rugged and mountainous country that the carriage wheels were broken despite the liberal use of grease; and at last the narrowness of the way obliged the Earl to exchange his own carriage for two smaller ones better suited to the paths of the district.

“The Treasurer also records the sale of an old carriage at Friola for three florins. The exchange of the Earl’s ‘own carriage’ is the significant entry: it seems very unlikely that a noble of his rank would have travelled so lightly that a single cart would contain his own luggage and that of his personal retinue; and it is also unlikely that he used one luggage cart of his own. The record points directly to the conclusion that the carriages were passenger vehicles used by the Earl himself.”

It is to be noted that the carriage of the Lady Ermengarde was a Flemish vehicle. Flanders, indeed, seems to have shared with Hungary the honour of playing pioneer in carriage-building throughout the ages, and long after the general adoption of coaches in Europe, Flemish models, and also Flemish mares, were freely imported into the various countries.

Another carriage of this time is described in a pre-Chaucerian poem called The Squyr of Low Degree, in which the father of a Hungarian princess is made to say:—

The pomelles no doubt were “the handles to the rods affixed to the roof, and were for the purpose of holding on by, when deep ruts or obstacles in the road caused an unusual jerk in the vehicle.” One notices that lilies were apparently a common form of decoration on these early carriages, but it is to be regretted that the accounts in general are so scanty.

We come to the litters.

Of these the commonest, both in England and on the Continent, seem to have been modifications of the Roman basterna. Generally they were covered with a sort of vault with various openings. Two horses, one at either end, carried them. The great majority held only one person. Thrupp describes them in some detail.

“They were,” he says, “long and narrow—long enough for a person to recline in—and no wider than could be carried between the poles which were placed on either side of the horses. They were about four to five feet long, and two feet six inches wide, with low sides and higher ends. The entrance was in the middle, on both sides, the doors being formed sometimes by a sliding panel and sometimes simply by a cross-bar. The steps were of leather or iron loops, the latter being hinged to turn up when the litter was placed on the ground. The upper part was formed by a few broad wooden hoops, united along the top by four or five slats, and over the whole a canopy was placed, which opened in the middle, at the sides, and ends, for air and light.”

Isolated references to these horse-litters are scattered throughout the old chronicles, but afford meagre information. William of Malmesbury states that the body of William Rufus was placed on a reda caballaria, a horse-litter, the name of which suggests its origin. According to Matthew of Westminster, King John, during his illness in 1216, was removed from Swinstead Abbey to Newark in a similar vehicle, the lectica equestre. Generally, however, the horse-litter was reserved exclusively for women, men being unwilling to risk an accusation of effeminacy. So, in recording the death of Earl Ferrers in 1254, from injuries received in an accident to his conveyance, the historian is careful to explain that his Lordship suffered from the gout, which was why he happened to be in a litter at all.

As time passed, the litter rather than the wheeled carriage became the state vehicle. Froissart, writing of the second wife of Richard II, describes “la june Royne d’Angleterre” as travelling “en une litere moult riche qui etoit ordondÉe pour elle.” Margaret, the daughter of Henry VII, journeyed to Scotland, it is true, on the back of a “faire palfrey,” but she was followed by “one vary riche litere, borne by two faire coursers vary nobly drest; in wich litere the sayd queene was borne in the intryng of the good townes, or otherwise to her good playsher.” But on the Continent new improvements were being made in wheeled carriages, and when in 1432 Henry VI wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and other high dignitaries of the Church, with regard to the widow of Henry of Navarre, he ordered them to place two chares at her disposal, rather than the litter to which one might have thought she would be entitled. Sir Walter Gilbey translates the word to mean a horse-litter, but Markland, in his paper on the Early Use of Carriages in England (ArchÆologia, Vol. XX), differentiates between the two, ascribing a more ceremonial use to the litter, and this seems to me to be nearer the truth. Both vehicles, for instance, are mentioned by Holinshed in his description of the coronation ceremony of Catherine of Aragon in 1509. The Queen herself rode in a litter of “white clothe of golde, not covered nor bailed, which was led by two palfreys clad in white damask doone to the ground, head and all, led by her footman. Over her was borne a canopie of cloth of gold, with four gilt staves, and four silver bells. For the bearing of which canopie were appointed sixteen knights, foure to beare it one space on foot, and other foure another space.” But the Queen’s ladies followed her in chariots decorated in red, and the same thing is true of Anne Boleyn, who in 1533 rode to her coronation in a litter, but was followed by four chariots, three decorated with red, and one with white. Such chariots probably resembled those to be described in the next chapter; the point to notice here is that they were being used now, and although the litters still continued until the time of Charles II—Mary de Medicis, the Queen-Mother of France, entered London in 1638 in a litter, though she had travelled from Harwich in a coach, and as late as 1680 “an accident happened to General Shippon, who came in a horse-litter wounded to London; when he paused by the brewhouse in St. John Street a mastiff attacked the horses, and he was tossed like a dog in a blanket”—the wheeled carriage once again became the vehicle of honour, and at the coronation of Mary in 1553 a chariot17 and not a litter was used by the Queen. This had six horses, and was covered with a “cloth of tissue.” Whatever its discomforts may have been, it cannot have been less dignified than the litter which it had, now for all time, supplanted.