Carts and Wagons and Wains, Oh My!
Hello, medieval and fantasy writers, D&D parties, and all other people who like pedantic details about old-school transport technology! There are many words for the wheeled vehicle pulled behind an animal (or several animals). And while a lot of people use them interchangeably, you can have much more fun if you use the names to refer to the specific types!
A cart is a two-wheeled vehicle, with its single axle mounted solidly to the frame, and a small amount of weight on the back of the animal pulling it. They can only carry as much as a single axle will bear, but because they can pivot around that single axle, they're much more maneuverable.
The driver might sit on the cart, or on the animal, or even lead the animal on foot, depending on how much there is to carry. And be careful of how you load it, because you might weigh down the animal too much, or not enough.
There are more specifically named carts as well, usually based around their usage. A hay cart can become a turnip cart just by taking out the hay and getting in some root vegetables. Any cart can become a dung cart, but you might not be able to turn it back afterwards.
A wagon (from Middle Dutch wagen, from Proto-Germanic *wagn) or wain (from Middle English Weyn, from Old English wæġn (Old English pronounced g as y sometimes), ALSO from Proto-Germanic *wagn) is a four-wheeled vehicle that doesn't put any of its weight on the animal pulling it.
The big drawback is that you need to make the front axle able to pivot, so that you can steer the dang thing. That's harder to do, and not as strong as a solidly mounted axle. But you can get a longer bed and more weight, and also often more animals to pull it.
"Wain" is a little more old-timey in usage and mostly survives in its use in compounds like "haywain", a wain for carrying hay, a wain specifically for the transportation of hay </kronk>.
A chariot is a cart (with some exceptions) made specifically for speed and for only carrying people. Heavily armed people.
Sometimes there were super-heavy four-wheeled chariots, but long before the English language existed, and infrequent enough to not really have a word for them.
Usually a chariot would have one or two horses, but the Roman racing chariot, the Quadriga, was named because it had a team of four horses (the inner two taking the weight to balance the vehicle, the outer two just being there to pull).
A carriage is ... well, basically a wagon, but specifically one made for the transportation of people. Instead of a flat bed for whatever cargo, you have at least some kind of seating.
These can be as basic as a hay wagon but with seats, or as fancy as the gilded liveried ridiculousness shown above.
You know what would make a carriage more comfortable? A roof. Technically a sub-category of carriage, a coach is "what if carriage, but it was a little room to stay warm and dry in". The driver sits outside though, maybe with a little roof, because the windshield has yet to be invented, and also he needs to hold the reins. They can also have extra seating on top, because "what if this flat surface had seats on it" was already how we got from wagon to carriage, and then they added another flat surface.
Not actually a design, but a whole system. When you need rapid transportation of passengers and light cargo (i.e. mail), you can only drive the horses at full speed for a certain amount of time before they're exhausted and need at least the rest of the day off. So you work out a deal with the coaching inns to have spare sets of horses, and while most people will go from one inn to the next in about a day's travel (that's why they spaced them out as they did), if you rush through them and just stop to change horses, you can get a lot further in a day at the cost of a lot more horse feed and keeping, and a really sore butt on bad roads.
Think of the Pony Express, but instead of a rider changing horse, a whole coach changes a full team of horses. By the time the next stage coach comes through, that set of horses should have had some time to recover.
Did you know that, technically, chariot racing never went away? It's just that these days, the one-horse carts are made super super light — think of all the tech we developed to make bike frames as light as they are, especially the wheels. Usually called harness racing, but the vehicle itself is a sulky. The other big difference between a sulky and a quadriga (other than a quarter the horsepower) is that the jockey can't whip his competitors.
Hope this helped. Or was interesting.
