COACHES.

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requisite, that those who received a fief, or other investiture,should make their appearance on horseback. The vassalwas obliged to ride with two attendants to the court of hislord, where, after he had dismounted his horse, he receivedhis fief.

Covered carriages were again known in the beginning ofthe sixteenth century for women of the very first rank; themen thought it disgraceful to ride in them. At that period,when the electors and other Germanic princes did notchoose to be present at the meetings of the states, theyexcused themselves, by informing the Emperor , that theirhealth would not permit them to ride on horseback; whichwas considered as an established point, that it w r as unbe-coming in them to ride like women. What, according tothe then prevailing ideas, was not permitted to princes, was’much less allowed to their servants. In anno 1544, whenCount Wolf, of I3arby, was summoned by John Frederic,Elector of Saxony, to go to Spires to attend the conventionof the states assembled there, lie requested leave, on accountof ill health, to make use of a close carriage with fourhorses. When the counts and nobility w'ere invited toattend the marriage solemnity of the elector’s half brother,John Ernest, the invitation was accompanied with a memo-randum, that such dresses of ceremony as they might bedesirous of taking with them, should be transported in asmall waggon. Which notice would have been unnecessaryhad coaches been generally used among those nobles. Theuse of covered carriages was, for a long time, forbiddeneven to women, the consorts of princes. About anno 1545,the wife of a certain duke obtained from him, with greatdifficulty, permission to use a covered carriage in a journeyto the baths, in which permission there was, however, thisexpress stipulation, that none of her attendants were to bepermitted this indulgence; though much pomp was dis-played upon this occasion by the duchess, as Beckmann in-forms us, from Sattler’s Historischer Bes'creibung des Herzog-thums Wurtemberg, im ersten theile, beg erlauterung einerurkunde vomjahr, 1389.

Notwithstanding, about the end of the fifteenth century,emperors, kings, and princes began to employ covered car-riages in journeys, and afterwards on public solemnities.When Richard II . towards the close of the fourteenth cen-tury, was compelled to fly from his rebellious subjects, him-self with all his followers were on horseback; but his mother,who was weak and sick, rode in a carriage. But this be-came afterwards unfashionable here, for that monarch’s

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