OUR FIRST VEHICLES

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 4 May 1931, Page 7

OUR FIRST VEHICLES

In the reign of Richard 11. there was mention of a vehicle termed a “whirlicotc"—a’cot, or bed, upen wheels. The king and his mother rode in a whirlicote in 1380, when she was sick, and history tells us that whirlicotes were much used for the conveyance of ladies. Froissart, in his “Chronicles,” speaks of the return of the English from Scotland in the time of Edward TIL in their “charettes,” about 1360. In 1533, when Anne Boleyn went- to her coronation, chariots were used. Twenty years later in 1555, Queen Mary Tudor rode through the City from the Tower to Westminster to her coronation in a chariot of cloth of tissue, drawn by six horses wrapped with the like cloth. Vehicles of some sort existed in this country from the earliest, days:* They were probably adaptations of warchariots of tho Romans. In “The Squyr. of Low Degre,” a poem which is considered anterior to Chaucer (died 1400), occur the following lines:— ' ; • :

“To-morrow ye shall on hunting fare, . And ride my daughter in a chare; It shall be covered with velvet red, And clothes of fine gold all about your 1 head.”