“Passengers to pay One Pound five Shillings each, who are allowed to carry fourteen Pounds Weight--for all above to pay three-halfpence per Pound.”
This is the first appearance of the epithet “Flying” in the literature of coaches. Possibly it was used in this first instance in order to distinguish the new conveyance from a stage-waggon that must for many years before have gone the journey, as well as to justify the higher fare charged by the new vehicle. The waggon would have conveyed passengers at anything from a halfpenny to a penny a mile; by “Flying Machine” it came to threepence. The term “Flying,” for a coach that consumed three days in performing a journey of 109 miles, raises a smile; but it was only relative, and in contrast with the pace of the waggons of that period, which would probably have made it a six-days’ trip.
This Bath coach would seem to have set the fashion in nomenclature, for in April 1669 a “Flying Coach” began to fly between Oxford and London. It was, it will be noticed, a “coach,” and not a “machine”; the term “machine” did not come into general use until about seventy years later. But although the Oxford coach did not call itself by so high-sounding a title, it made a better pace than the Bath affair, doing the fifty-four miles in one day, between the hours of six o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening. Moreover, its fare--twelve shillings, reduced two years later to ten--was somewhat cheaper. Perhaps one was always charged higher rates on the fashionable Bath Road.
How, in this thirteen years’ interval between 1657 and 1669, had the older stages progressed? The Chester stage was going its way, promising to do the distance in five days, but taking six--a sad falling off from the original four; of the others, presumably continuing, we hear nothing further, and of new ventures there is not a whisper. Yet it is surely not to be supposed that, at a time when coaches ran to Bath, to York, to Coventry, and to Norwich, such a place (for instance) as Bristol would be without that convenience. For Bristol was then what Glasgow is now--the second city. London came first, with its half a million inhabitants; Bristol came next, with some 28,000, and Norwich third, with 27,000. It is, then, only fair to assume that other coaches existed of whose story nothing has survived. A strong reason for coming to this conclusion is found in the publication in 1673 of Cresset’s violent tirade against coaches, not, surely, called forth _apropos_ of the already old-established stages, but provoked, doubtless, by some sudden increase, of which we, at this lapse of time, know nothing. What brief John Cresset could have held for the innkeepers and horse-breeders, and for the other trades supposed to be injuriously affected by the increase of stage-coaches, we know not, nor, indeed, anything of Cresset himself, except that he lived in the Charterhouse.