Why a Simple Carriage Ride in the 18th Century Was an Absolute Nightmare

Ajouté : 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]You need to get from London to Edinburgh. It is the year 1763 and you have options. You could walk, which would take roughly 3 weeks if nothing goes wrong, and something will go wrong. You could ride on horseback, which is faster, but requires you to own or hire a horse, and to be comfortable spending 12 hours a day in the saddle over roads that are in places more suggestion than surface. Or you could take the stage coach. The stage coach is the modern option, the civilized option.

[00:00:35]It runs on a schedule, more or less. It carries other passengers and it costs significantly less than hiring a private carriage. The journey from London to Edinburgh will take you by stage coach in 1763, approximately 12 to 14 days. You book your seat outside because the inside seats cost more and you are making sensible financial decisions. You will regret this before the first hour is over. But you do not know that yet. You will not survive this journey uninjured.

[00:01:09]Not because anything dramatic will happen. Not because you will be robbed or the coach will overturn. Though both of those things happen frequently enough that they are genuine statistical risks rather than dramatic hypotheticals. You will not survive it uninjured because the basic mechanics of 18th century road travel were by any reasonable standard a sustained physical assault on every passenger unfortunate enough to experience them. Let us start with the road itself because without understanding the road nothing else makes sense. The roads of 18th century Britain, and this was true across most of Europe, were not engineered surfaces.

[00:01:51]They were tracks mostly. They were the paths that people had always walked, widened over time by cart traffic, occasionally filled with gravel in the bettermaintained sections, frequently reduced to parallel channels of churned mud in the sections that saw heavy use in wet weather. The turnpike acts of the early 18th century had introduced a system of toll roads with theoretically maintained surfaces and by the 1760s some of the major routes were genuinely improved. Genuinely improved meant in this context that the worst sections of deep ruts and standing water had been partially addressed. It did not mean smooth. It meant less catastrophically bad than the alternative. A stage coach weighed, fully loaded with passengers and luggage, somewhere between one and two tons. It was suspended on leather straps, not metal springs, leather straps that provided a form of shock absorption roughly comparable to not having any shock absorption at all on anything worse than mild irregularity.

[00:02:59]The wooden wheels had iron rims, which were excellent for durability and terrible for vibration transmission.

[00:03:07]Every stone, every rut, every hole in the road traveled from the wheel directly through the iron rim, directly through the wooden axle, directly through the wooden frame, directly through the wooden seat, directly into your body. You sitting on the outside have a wooden bench and a handhold that may or may not be solidly attached. The coach moves at an average speed of approximately 8 to 12 km per hour. On the better road sections on the worst sections, it moves slower. On the steepest sections, the outside passengers are sometimes asked to get off and walk because the combined weight of the coach and all its passengers exceeds what the horses can manage up the gradient, and you have paid for a seat that periodically requires you to not use it. Within the first hour, you will have been jolted hard enough repeatedly that the muscles of your lower back will have begun a protest that they will maintain for the entire journey. By the end of the first day, a stage coach in this period typically covered 40 to 60 km in a day, stopping at ins to change horses roughly every 15 to 20 km. You will be bruised in places that are difficult to explain to another person. Now let us talk about the other passengers. The inside of a stage coach in the 1760s carry four passengers on two facing benches, knees essentially touching for 12 or more hours a day for multiple consecutive days. These passengers did not choose each other. They were whoever had booked the inside seats, which meant they could be anyone. a wealthy merchant, a clergyman, a traveling salesman, a woman visiting relatives, a man who had not bathed in a period that became apparent within the first enclosed hour. Personal hygiene in the 18th century was not what it is today.

[00:05:13]The public bath culture of the Romans had not been replaced by anything equivalent, and in much of Britain in the 1760s, a full body wash was an occasional event rather than a daily one. in an enclosed coach in summer with four strangers in physical proximity that modern commuters would find confronting. The sensory experience was notable. Contemporary accounts of coach travel mention this with a frequency and specificity that makes it clear it was not a minor inconvenience. There was also the matter of motion sickness. The specific motion of an 18th century stage coach. The combination of vertical jolting and lateral swaying produced by the leather suspension and the uneven road was for a significant proportion of the population nauseating, not unpleasant. nauseating in the clinical sense. An enclosed carriage with four passengers, one of whom was actively sick with no ventilation to speak of, traveling at 8 km hour through the English countryside, was a contained situation with no easy resolution. You outside had the advantage of fresh air.

[00:06:25]You had the disadvantage of the weather.

[00:06:27]18th century road travel had no protection from precipitation. If it rained, and England being England, the statistical probability of rain during a 12 to 14 day journey was essentially 100%.

[00:06:42]You were rained on. Your coat, however heavy, was not waterproof in any modern sense. Oil skin technology existed, but was expensive and imperfect. You sat on your outside bench in the rain, holding your handhold, being jolted, getting wet for hours. At night, you stopped at a coaching in. The coaching in system of 18th century Britain was a genuine infrastructure, a network of establishments spaced along the major routes capable of changing horses, feeding passengers, and providing beds.

[00:07:18]The beds were, by modern standards, an adventure of a different kind. Room at a coaching in rarely meant a private room.

[00:07:27]It meant a bed which you might share with another traveler if the inn was busy, and the better ins on the busier routes were frequently busy. The beds themselves were straw mattresses, occasionally supplemented by feather on wooden frames in rooms that were either too hot from the kitchen fire below or too cold from the single window above and that contained with a consistency that every traveler of the period commented on. Bed bugs. Bed bugs were not a minor nuisance in the 18th century. They were an accepted feature of inn accommodation, a known cost of travel, an expected degradation. A traveler who arrived at an inn and did not encounter bed bugs was a traveler who had been unusually fortunate. Most did not write about the experience as outrageous. Most wrote about it as they wrote about the mud and the rain as one of the things the travel was. You also faced on the road itself the risk of robbery. Highway men are one of the most romanticized figures in British popular culture. And the romantic version, the dashing horsemen, the theatrical courtesy, the inexplicable chivalry, has almost no relationship to the documented reality. Highway robbery was violent, common on certain routes and certain stretches, and occasionally fatal. The famous routes out of London, the Bath Road, the Dover Road, the Great North Road, all had documented stretches where robbery rates were high enough that passengers traveled in coached groups specifically to discourage attack and where firearms were carried as a matter of course rather than an exceptional precaution. The guard who traveled on the back of the stage coach, standard on the better organized services, was not decorative. He was armed and he was there because the probability of encountering someone who wanted what the passengers were carrying was real enough to justify the cost of an armed man riding the entire route. And through all of this, the jolting, the rain, the bed bugs, the stale air of the in common room, the roads that were sometimes impassible and required the coach to wait for weather improvement before continuing. Through all of this, you were still 12 days from Edinburgh.

[00:09:49]Modern rail takes 4 and 1/2 hours.

[00:09:52]Modern motorway driving takes between 7 and 8. The Edinburgh Express flying takes 1 hour and 20 minutes. 12 days over roads that were trying to return to mud in a vehicle with no suspension next to strangers whose proximity you had not chosen and could not escape in the weather of the British autumn which had no particular interest in your plans.

[00:10:18]The people who traveled this way did not consider themselves to be suffering unusually. They were simply traveling.

[00:10:25]This was what travel was. And if you needed to be somewhere, this was how you got there. And the alternative was not going. By the time you arrived, stiff, bruised, sleepdeprived, wearing clothes that had been damp for most of the journey, you were not the same person who climbed onto that outside bench in London. You were a person who had learned in the most immediate physical way possible what distance actually meant before it became something you could measure in hours rather than days.

[00:10:56]The word journey after all comes from the French journey meaning a day's travel. It was a unit of time before it was a unit of space because in the 18th century the two were the same thing.