It may be that the boot in process of time was metamorphosed into the large, deep, four-sided basket which was strapped to the back of public coaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, indeed, this basket seems to have been called the boot in eighteenth-century stage coaches. It was probably in such a basket-boot as this that Mr. Pepys put his great barrel of oysters, “as big as sixteen others,” which was given him in 1664.
An interesting point in this connection is that those who travelled on the seatless and presumably most uncomfortable roof of a coach plying for hire, paid more for the privilege than did those who rode in the boot.
However greatly the chroniclers may differ as to the date of the actual introduction, and others besides Taylor disagree with Stowe, there seems no doubt that by 1585 many of the nobility and some wealthy commoners owned private coaches, and, indeed, certain enterprising tradesmen, as will appear, let other coaches on hire at so much per day.
“After a while,” says Stowe, “divers great ladies, with a great jealousy of the Queen’s displeasure, made them coaches and rid them up and down the countries, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then little by little they grew usual amongst the nobilitie and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach-making.”
Indeed, every one of any wealth was eager to possess them. A private coach settled any doubts as to your quality. It was a new fashion, a new excitement. “So a woman,” says Quicksilver, the rake, in _Eastward Hoe_, “marry to ride in a coach, she cares not if she rides to her ruin. ’Tis the great end of many of their marriages.” And again, in Ben Jonson’s _Alchemist_ it is said of the Countess that she
“... has her pages, ushers Her six mares— Nay, eight! To hurry her through London, to the Exchange, Bethlem, the china-houses— Yes, and have The citizens gape at her, and praise her tires.”
Even the plain country-folk seem to have been smitten with the new toy, for toy it was to them. “Has he ne’er a little odd cart,” asks Waspe in _Bartholomew Fair_, “for you to make a coach on, in the country, with four pied hobby-horses?” Any shift for a coach, thought he, and no doubt voiced public opinion.