and superfluous use of coaches within this realm. The act, however, was rejected on the second reading.
Coaches soon came into very general use. They are frequently mentioned in contemporary plays. They were not for the use of noblemen alone. In Eastward Ho one belongs to the wife of a knight. A "lady" owns one in The London Prodigal. "Coaches are as common nowadays as some that ride in 'em." (Middleton, A Mad World, etc.) "As the nobleman's coach is drawn by four horses, the knight's by two, and the cuckold's by three." (Dekker, The Devil's Inn.) The latter is a facetious allusion to the carting of lewd women, and neither two nor four horses were necessarily appropriate to knights or noblemen. We often read of six and eight horses attached to a coach.
These were crudely-built conveyances with heavy wheels and without springs. In 1568 the Queen complained to the French ambassador of "the aching pains she was suffering in consequence of having been knocked about in a coach which had been driven a little too fast a few days before." "A coach!" contemptuously exclaims a character in Dekker's Westward Ho!, "I cannot abide to be jolted." For all that, they were gorgeously decorated. "They strangle and choke
