If you couldn't afford to buy your own carriage there were alternative ways of travelling around Regency England. One method was hiring transport for long or short distances.
Hackney Coaches
"Henry himself met me, and as soon as my trunk and basket could be routed out from all the other trunks and baskets in the world, we were on our way to Hans Place in the luxury of a nice, large, cool, dirty hackney coach."
[Letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, August 1814]
For short journeys, those living in London and a few other large towns could hail a Hackney Coach. This was a carriage for short distance hire, like our modern day taxi cab, and was driven by a Jarvey. (sometimes spelled Jarvie or Jarvis)
Hackney coaches during the Regency were usually four wheeled town coaches, and most had previously seen service in gentlemen's households before finding a second life plying for trade in the streets of London.
Every coach had to be licenced by the Hackney Coach Commissioners, and only 1,100 licences were available at any time. The licence cost five shillings a week and required the driver to carry up to four adults inside, plus a servant on the outside. The penalty for driving paying passengers in an unlicenced Hackney coach was forty shillings for each offence.
A licenced coach bore the name and licence number of the owner on each side of the carriage. The owner was not necessarily the driver, as owners could pay someone else to drive for them, although they had to provide the Commissioners with the driver's name and address. The Commissioners were required by law to inspect each coach, along with its horses, at least four times a year, and a licence could be revoked if the coach was found to be defective, or the horses unfit for their duty. Any horse pulling a hackney coach had to be a minimum of fourteen hands tall.
Between fares, a hackney coach would wait at a "stand"; a specific location where people could expect to find a vehicle for hire. Alternatively you could hail any unoccupied hackney coach that passed on the street:
"I had set my party down at the doctor's house, which was a few miles from town, and was returning back to my stand, when a servant proceeded hastily from a house in the paragon, and perceiving me to be disengaged, bid me draw up to the house from whence he came, where I found a party had fixed to visit Covent Garden Theatre that evening, in order to see Mrs Siddons."
["The interesting adventures of a hackney coach", by Henry Beauchamp, pub. 1813]
The driver could either charge by the distance travelled, or by the length of time the coach was at their disposal. If a person travelled from A to B, then they would be charged by miles travelled on a sliding scale, the lowest price being one shilling for up to one mile, rising at the rate of six pence for every half mile and an additional sixpence for every two miles completed. So a journey of five miles would cost six shillings, while a journey of ten miles would incur a charge of twelve shillings.
If a person wished to travel from A to B, then asked the driver to wait for half an hour before driving him on to a second destination, then he would charge for the time elapsed between the beginning and end of the hire.
Hackney coaches were not permitted to drive through Hyde Park.
The words cab and cabbie were unfamiliar for most of the Regency period, as they derive from the lighter two-wheeled cabriolets that began to see service as Hackney carriages in the late 1820s. Even later were the Hansom cabs, a common sight on the streets of Victorian London, which were not introduced until 1834.
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Reading the Regency
Non-FictionA guide to Regency England for readers of classic literature or historical fiction set in the early 19th century. England, as it was in the early 1800's, can sometimes be as confusing to a modern reader as travelling to a foreign country. Their clot...
