The classic definition of a carriage is a four – wheeled horse drawn private passenger vehicle with leaf springs (elliptical springs in the 19th century) or leather strapping for suspension, whether light, smart and fast or large and comfortable. Some horsecarts found in Celtic graves show hints that their platform was suspended in a frame, elastically. The Romans in the first centuries b.C. used spring waggons for overland journeys. With the decline of the antique civilizations these techniques almost disappeared. In the Middle Ages all travellers who were not walking, rode (save the elderly and the infirm). A trip in an unsprung cart over unpaved roads was not lightly undertaken. Closed carriages began to be more widely used by the upper class in the 16th Century. In 1601 a short lived law was passed in England banning the use of carriages by men, it being considered effeminate. Better sprung vehicles were developed in the 17th century. New lighter and more fashionably varied conveyances, with fanciful new names, began to compete with one another from the mid-18th century. Coachbuilders cooperated with carvers, gilders, painters, lacquerworkers, glazers and upholsterers to produce not just the family’s state coach for weddings and funerals but light, smart fast comfortable vehicles for pleasure riding and display. At the end of the 19th century they were little by little abandoned just as automobiles came into use, and “coaching” became an upper-class sport in Britain and America.
