John Evelyn in his Diary gives interesting glimpses of such carriages and other vehicles as he saw during his several European tours. In Brussels (1641) he was allowed the use of Sir Henry de Vic’s coach and six, and travelled luxuriously in it as far as Ghent. “On the way,” he notes, “I met with divers little waggons, prettily contrived, and full of peddling merchandize, drawn by mastiff dogs, harnessed completely like so many coach-horses; in some four, in others six, as in Brussels itself I had observed. In Antwerp I saw, as I remember, four dogs draw five lusty children in a chariot.” When dogs were first used for the purpose of traction does not appear, but they are still to be seen in the Netherlands in a like capacity. A few days later, to continue with Evelyn’s observations, he was going from Ostend to Dunkirk “by waggon ... the journey being made all on the sea sands.” On his return to England, however, it is to be noticed that he rode post to Canterbury. In 1643 he was again in Paris, mentioning “the multitude of coaches passing every moment over the bridge,” this being, he says, to a new spectator, “an agreeable diversion.” In the following year, while standing in the garden of the Tuileries, he saw “so many coaches as one would hardly think could be maintained in the whole city, going late as it was, towards the course”—the fashionable rendezvous of the day—“the circle being capable of containing a hundred coaches to turn commodiously, and the larger of the plantations for five or six coaches abreast.” The road from Paris to Orleans he describes as “excellent.” Coming to Italy, he found Milan, in spite of the narrowness of its streets, abounding in rich coaches. In Paris again, two or three years afterwards, the design of a new coach so took his fancy that he determined, like his friend Mr. Pepys, to possess one for himself. And so on May 29th, 1652, “I went,” he writes, “to give orders about a coach to be made against my wife’s coming, being my first coach, the pattern whereof I brought out of Paris.” This was probably “booted,” but differed from the earlier coaches in having a curved roof.
The commonest French coach of this time seems to have been the _corbillard_, a flat-bottomed, half-open, half-close coach, furnished with curtains of cloth or leather in the front part. These were merely tied on to the supports, and would roll up when required. Doors there were none, but there was a “movable rail, over which a leather screen was hung” at the back portion of the carriage, which was about six feet long, and here were the seats. There were also projecting movable step-seats. Possibly Evelyn saw a newer model with a curved bottom and door half-way up, panelled in the lower part, but curtained above. Such a carriage was hung low, and would have swung from side to side, giving such passengers as were “bad sailors” a fit of nausea.