carriage

 

wheeled vehicle, in modern usage restricted to passenger vehicles that are drawn or pushed, especially by animals. Carriages date from the Bronze Age; early forms included the two-wheeled cart and four-wheeled wagon for transporting goods. An early passenger carriage was the chariot, but Roman road-building activity encouraged the development of other forms. The coach, a closed four-wheeled carriage with two inside seats and an elevated outside seat for the driver, is believed to have been developed in Hungary and to have spread among the royalty and nobility of Europe in the 16th cent. The hackney coach, which was any carriage for hire, was introduced in London c.1605. During the 17th cent. coaches became lighter and less ornate and in England the public stagecoach became common. In the 18th cent., as roads improved, carriage-building became a major industry. The hansom cab, patented by J. A. Hansom in 1834, was a closed carriage with an elevated driver's seat in back. Lord Brougham based the carriage known by his name on the hansom. In the United States the most distinctive type of carriage was a light four-wheeled buggy with open sides and a folding top. The term carriage was also used to refer to railroad passenger cars, which in England began as strings of separate compartments. With the introduction of the automobile, the carriage trade collapsed, except where carriage builders such as the Fisher Company adapted to auto body building.

The word 'carriage' may also refer to a shopping cart, a part of a typewriter, or a lace-making machine.

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. Compare the public conveyances stagecoach, charabanc, and omnibus.

A vehicle that is not sprung is a wagon. An American buckboard or Conestoga wagon or "prairie schooner" was never taken for a carriage, but a waggonette was a pleasure vehicle, with lengthwise seats.

The word car meaning "wheeled vehicle", came from Norman French at the beginning of the 14th century ^{[citation needed]}; it was extended to cover automobile in 1896.

In the British Isles and many Commonwealth countries, a railway carriage (also called a coach) is a railroad car designed and equipped for transporting passengers.

In the United States, a baby carriage is a wheeled conveyance for reclining infants (in English outside North America: perambulator or pram), usually with a hood that can be adjusted to protect the baby from the sun.

In some parts of New England, a carriage (or shopping carriage) is sometimes a shopping cart.

History of carriages

Some horsecarts found in Celtic graves show hints that their platform was suspended in a frame, elastically ^[1]. The Romans in the first centuries BC used sprung waggons for overland journeys ^[2]. 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 classes 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.

In British and French coaches, the coachman drove from a raised coachbox at the front. In Spain the driver continued to ride one of the horses, as also in the 1939 state visit procession in Canada (illustration, left).

From the 1860s, few rich Europeans continued to use their posting coaches for long-distance travel: a first-class railway carriage was the faster modern alternative. Then, in the 1890s, just as automobiles came into use, "coaching" became an upper-class sport in Britain and America, where gentlemen would take the reins of the kinds of large vehicles of types generally driven by a professional coachman.

Types of horse-drawn carriages

An almost bewildering variety of horse-drawn carriages existed. Arthur Ingram's Horse Drawn Vehicles since 1760 in Colour lists 325 types with a short description of each. By the early 19th century one's choice of carriage was only in part based on practicality and performance; it was also a status statement and subject to changing fashions. The types of carriage included the following:

Barouche Berlin Brake Britzka Brougham Buggy Cabriolet Calash Cape cart Cariole Carryall Chaise Chariot Clarence Coach

Coupé Croydon Curricle Dogcart Dos-à-dos Drag (carriage) Dray Droshky (Drozhki) Fiacre Fly Four-in-hand Gharry Gig Gladstone Hackney

Hansom Herdic Jaunting car Landau Limousine Mail coach One-horse carriage Park Drag Phaeton Post chaise Randem Ratha Road Coach Rockaway Spider phaeton

Stagecoach Stanhope Sulky Surrey Tarantass (Tarantas) Telega Tilbury Trap Victoria Village cart Vis-à-vis Voiturette Whim Whiskey

The names of many have now been relegated to obscurity but some have been adopted to describe automotive car body styles: coupé, victoria, Brougham, landau and landaulet, cabriolet, (giving us our cab), phaeton, and limousine— all once denoted particular models of carriages.

Competitive driving

In most European and English-speaking countries, show driving is a competitive equestrian sport. Many shows host driving competitions for a particular breed of horse or type of carriage.

Other competitors compete in the all-around test of driving: Combined driving also known as Horse Driving Trials is an equestrian discipline regulated by the FEI (Federation Equestre Internationale) and with National Federations representing each member country.

World Championships take place on alternate years, including Single Horse Championships, Horse Pairs Championships and Four-in-Hand Championships as well as the Four-in-Hand competition at the World Equestrian Games, held every four years.

For pony drivers, the World Combined Pony Championships are held every two years and include singles, pairs and four-in-hand.

See also

• Harness
• Driving (horse)

Carriage collections

• Austin Carriage Museum
• National Coach Museum (Museu dos Coches) in Lisbon (Portugal)
• Nymphenburg Palace in Munich (Germany)
• Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Austria)
  • Illustrated descriptions of some of the carriages
• Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, Long Island, New York
  • The Long Island Museum
• Coson Collection, Beechdale, Pennsylvania
• Versailles, the Grand Stables
  • The Versailles Stables
• Carriage Museum of America, Lexington, Kentucky
  • Offers an extensive research library on the subject of animal-drawn vehicles.
  • www.carriagemuseumlibrary.org
• Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
• Mossman Collection, Luton
• Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan

External links

• Driving for Pleasure by Francis Underhill, 1896 A comprehensive overview, with photographs of horse drawn carriages in use at the turn of the nineteenth century. Full text free to read, with free full text search.

References

1. ^ Raimund Karl: Überlegungen zum Verkehr in der eisenzeitlichen Keltiké = Deliberations on Traffic in the Ironage Celtic Culture (Dissertation in German, PDF)
2. ^ Rekonstructions of a Roman travelling waggon and of a waggon from the Hallstadt bronze culture (in German)

• Sallie Walrond, Looking at Carriages
• Arthur Ingram, Horse Drawn Vehicles since 1760 in Colour, Blanford Press 1977.

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