People who were ill, or very old and incapacitated, sometimes travelled in litters carried by servants on foot or drawn by horses; but there were no carriages or coaches at the beginning of the Tudor Age. The first coaches to be seen in England appeared in the streets of London in the 1550s. Walter Rippon, a Dutchman living in London, built a coach for the Earl of Rutland in 1555; in 1564 he built a coach for Elizabeth I, for whom he built another coach twenty years later. But even at the end of the Tudor Age there were only a few coaches in England; they did not become common until the seventeenth century.
Some people on the road in 1500 were travelling further than the nearest market town. Pilgrims went to the famous shrines to pray beside the corpses or bones of the saints. They came from all over England, and from many parts of Western Europe, to the most famous of them all, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk and the tomb of St Thomas of Canterbury – Archbishop Thomas Becket – in the cathedral where he had been assassinated by order of King Henry II in 1170. Scholars travelled to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge from all parts of England, and learned foreign doctors came there from the universities of Europe. English and foreign merchants travelled far to attend the great national and international fairs in London and the Stourbridge Fair in Cambridge. They came from Antwerp, Scandinavia and the Hansa towns of North Germany to Harwich or Ipswich by sea and on from there to Cambridge along the Essex and Suffolk roads.
Many Englishmen, and an even larger number of Englishwomen, never in their lives left the parish in which they were born, lived and died; but others, more adventurous, travelled to London or elsewhere to seek their fortune, or just to visit friends, though they risked arrest and a flogging if they left their parish without a licence from the authorities, and could give no satisfactory explanation of their reason for travelling. There were also the officials travelling on government business, and the couriers taking letters, reports and instructions from the Privy Council and royal officials in Westminster to the local administrators in the country, and returning with the administrators’ reports to the Council. Foreign ambassadors regularly sent long letters to their Kings containing reports on the situation in England; at times of crisis, they might write several times a week. Their couriers were constantly riding along the roads of England and Western Europe, in all weathers and at all seasons of the year, with these letters in their pouches.
If the common man wished to travel a great distance across England, he usually walked. As the old song put it:
Which is the way to London town?
One foot up, the other foot down,
That is the way to London town.
If a man was not wealthy enough to own a horse, he could hire one for his journey; but this was expensive, for it cost one shilling – three days’ wages for the agricultural labourer – to hire a horse for the thirty miles from Southwark to Rochester.
The traveller on foot could not hope to go much more than twenty miles a day at the most, and the ordinary horseman went only a little further. It was unusual for a traveller to ride more than thirty miles a day; and in bad weather, on the muddy roads, or in hilly country, progress could be restricted to two miles an hour, or some fifteen miles a day. The roads had been deteriorating for over a thousand years, ever since the days of the Romans. A minimum of road repairs was carried out by forced labour. An Act passed by Queen Mary’s Parliament in 1555 required every cottager and householder to work for eight hours a day on four days in the year repairing the roads in his parish, or to find someone else to do his stint for him. Every landowner holding land which was worth £50 a year or more was required to provide two men to work on the roads for this length of time. In 1563, an Act of Elizabeth I’s Parliament increased the labour to eight hours a day for six days in the year.
Greater efforts were made to improve the streets in some of the towns and busy approach roads to London. In 1534 the inhabitants of Holborn petitioned Henry VIII to take action about the state of the road leading out of London from Holborn Bridge to the bars at the west end of the street, for ‘not alonely your subjects and inhabitants within the said street of Holborn’ but also the carriers and other travellers ‘repairing weekly and monthly to your city of London’ along the street (which was ‘the common passage for all carryings carried from the west and north-west parts of the realm’) were in danger of their lives from the risk of falling into the holes in the road. An Act was therefore passed which required every landowner whose property had a frontage on the road to pave his side of the road. This principle was extended by an Act of 1543 to many streets in London and Westminster, from Tothill Street and Petty France along the Strand and as far as Moorgate and Smithfield. A statute of 1571 ordered that the roads between Aldgate and Whitechapel, and between the Tower and Ratcliff, should be paved by the landowners, because travellers ‘on horseback and on foot are become so mired and foul in the winter time as hard it is to have any passage for the same through the said ways’.
Between 1544 and 1549 the streets of Cambridge, Chester and Calais were paved, for Parliament did not know that Calais would be captured by the French nine years later and would never again be an English town. Acts of Mary’s Parliament in 1553 required the roads from Shaftesbury to Sherborne and from Gloucester to Bristol to be paved by the inhabitants of the parishes all along the roads. Elizabeth I’s Parliaments in 1576, 1581, 1597 and 1601 ordered the paving of the streets of Chichester and of all the roads within five miles of Oxford, and the repair of the bridges at Rochester, Chepstow, Newport, Caerleon and Wye, and the two bridges over the River Eden near Carlisle; but nothing was done to repair the dangerous wooden bridge across the Tweed at Berwick until the reign of James I. James had been very frightened when he crossed the bridge at his first entry into his new realm of England in 1603, and he ordered that the bridge should be demolished and replaced by a new stone bridge which, under the name of the Old Bridge, still stands.
The roads in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey and Kent were a special problem, because the carts in which the ironmasters carried coal to their foundries, and their iron products from the foundries to their destination, caused a great deal of damage to the roads. After various other remedies had failed, an Act of 1597 required every ironmaster in the Weald who carried three loads of coal or 1 ton of iron for more than one mile along the roads between 12 October and 1 May, or thirty loads of coal or 10 tons of iron in the summer, to contribute to the cost of repairing the road with cinders, gravel, stone or chalk.
There were four great long-distance roads in England which were kept in a relatively good state of repair and were used by many important travellers. There was the Great North Road from London to Berwick and on across the Border into Scotland; the Watling Street from London to Chester, which was used by travellers to Ireland; the Dover Road, which travellers used to go from London to Dover for the crossing to Calais; and the great road from London to the West, to Exeter and on to Plymouth. The King’s messengers used the relays of fresh horses which were awaiting them at the ‘staging posts’ along these roads; the staging posts were usually inns about twenty or thirty miles apart. Riders travelling ‘in post’ could cover much greater distances in a day than the ordinary traveller.
The Great North Road left London through Bishopsgate, and passed through Islington, Enfield, Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham and Doncaster on the way to York. North of York, the traveller entered a very sparsely populated area, but the Great North Road continued through Thirsk and Northallerton to Darneton (Darlington), which was an important military post and the rear headquarters of the military administrative staff during campaigns against the Scots; then on through Durham, Newcastle and Alnwick to the frontier town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the important bridgehead across the Tweed which the English had captured in 1296 and recaptured in 1482, and which they regarded as the counterpart of their other bridgehead, Calais, on the French side of the Channel. The Great North Road continued into Scotland for another si
xty miles along the coast by Dunbar and Haddington to Edinburgh.
The Great North Road was one of only six roads which existed in England north of York. Another was the road into Scotland from Newcastle by Otterburn across the Cheviot Hills to Jedburgh and Kelso, which was the shortest way to Edinburgh, but much more dangerous for travellers than the Great North Road, because of the ‘moss-troopers’, the bandits who robbed and killed travellers on both sides of the Border. The King’s Street ran north from Lancaster to Penrith and Carlisle. Two roads went from east to west, the road from York by Catterick Bridge to Penrith and the road running from Newcastle to Carlisle by Hexham and Haltwhistle along the north bank of the Tyne. The sixth road north of York was the road from York to the port of Scarborough, from where a busy trade was carried on with Scandinavia.
The journey from London to Edinburgh took the normal traveller a fortnight at his rate of thirty miles a day; but messengers in post could do it in five days. The record for the journey was set up in March 1603, when the news of Elizabeth I’s death was carried to her heir, King James VI of Scotland, by Sir Robert Carey, a gentleman of Northumberland, who earlier had won a wager of £2,000 by walking the 340 miles from London to Berwick in twelve days. Elizabeth died at Richmond in Surrey at about two o’clock in the morning of Thursday 24 March 1603. Carey left Richmond at once and, after waiting for a few hours in Westminster, rode that day to Doncaster, a distance of 155 miles. Next day he rode 140 miles to Widrington in Northumberland, and on the Saturday went on for 100 miles to Edinburgh, reaching James’s palace of Holyroodhouse just as the King was sitting down to supper at 6 p.m., having covered the distance from London in less than sixty hours. His achievement was not equalled till it was surpassed by a stage-coach which brought the news from London to Glasgow of the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832; and soon after this, the building of the railways made it possible for any traveller to do the journey from London to Edinburgh in ten hours.
The Dover Road ran across London Bridge and along the south bank of the Thames to Gravesend, though wealthy travellers usually covered the first lap of the journey by barge down the river. From Gravesend they proceeded overland to Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Canterbury, and across Barham down to Dover. The seventy-mile journey could just be done in two days by the ordinary traveller; but there were good posthorses on the road, and a fit and strong rider travelling in post could do the whole journey in one long day’s hard riding.
A third great road ran along the route of the old Roman road, the Watling Street, from London by Dunstable, Stony Stratford, and Tamworth to Shrewsbury, and on to Chester, which was the chief port of embarkation for the Tudor sovereigns’ second realm of Ireland. The fourth road went west from London to Exeter and Plymouth; but travellers who went further west into Cornwall had to go by tracks and byways.
The 215-mile journey from London to Plymouth took the ordinary traveller a week; but by Elizabeth’s reign posthorses were available at eighteen staging posts along the road, and government officials and messengers travelling in post regularly covered the distance, by Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Honiton, Exeter and Ashburton, in thirty-six hours. In 1595 a letter from a local official to the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, at Windsor, left Plymouth at 9.30 a.m. on 23 September, was at Exeter by 4.30 p.m., at Sherborne by midnight, at Andover by 6.30 a.m., and was received at Staines at 5 p.m. on 24 September.
Cardinal Wolsey made a famous rapid journey along the Dover Road when he was a rising junior official in Henry VII’s service. The King, who was at his palace at Richmond, ordered Wolsey to go on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, which was probably at or near Gravelines in the Netherlands; and Henry impressed on Wolsey the urgency of the business. Wolsey left Richmond at noon, and rode to London, where he took a barge to Gravesend. He arrived at Gravesend after a three-hour journey, and rode through the night in post to Dover. He reached Dover early in the morning, and, as the wind was favourable, he crossed to Calais in three hours and rode to Gravelines, reaching the Emperor’s court there on the evening of the second day. Next morning he had an audience with the Emperor, and left by noon with Maximilian’s reply to Henry’s message. He was in Calais by nightfall, and, crossing the Channel on the morning of the fourth day, was in Dover by 10 a.m. and at court at Richmond that night. When the King saw Wolsey next morning, ninety-six hours after he had ordered him to go on his journey, he reprimanded him for not having left already; but he was amazed, and very favourably impressed, when Wolsey explained that he had already been and returned.
But if ambitious young men travelled quickly, established dignitaries travelled slowly. Today it is considered smart to travel fast, but in the Tudor Age the smart thing was to travel slowly. In 1518, when Henry VIII sent the Earl of Worcester on a diplomatic mission to Paris, Worcester took ten days to travel from Boulogne to St Denis, and waited for two days at Senlis, because, as he explained to Henry, a nobleman could not fittingly travel on ‘Our Lady’s Day’ (8 December) though a gentleman of lower rank might have done so. When Wolsey, thirteen years after his quick journey to Flanders, went from Calais to Bruges on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Charles V, he insisted on travelling at a pace which was consistent with his rank as Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England, and a Papal Legate; and though the Emperor was waiting impatiently for him, and urging him to hurry, he took three days over the sixty-mile journey.
When kings and queens travelled, they went even more slowly. Apart from the question of dignity, they were slowed down by the numerous bodyguards, servants and carts which accompanied them, and by the official receptions, with speeches and toasts in wine, at the county and parish boundaries. When Henry VIII and Elizabeth I went on a ‘progress’ through their realm, they did not usually travel more than ten miles a day.
On four occasions during his reign, Henry VIII visited ‘his town of Calais’ – on two occasions when he was at war with France, and twice to meet the French King at a friendly interview. On the first two occasions, in 1513 and 1520, he went from Greenwich to Gravesend by water, and then overland to Dover, taking five days over the journey, and staying overnight at Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Canterbury. On his last two visits, in 1532 and 1544, he went from Gravesend to Faversham by sea to avoid the plague which was raging at Rochester, and called on the way at the house of the Lord Warden of the Five Ports, Sir Thomas Cheyney, in the Isle of Sheppey.
During the Middle Ages, the Kings of England often travelled all over their kingdom, showing themselves to their people. Henry VII continued this tradition, going to Newcastle and Exeter, and on several occasions to York and Lincoln; but Henry VIII hardly ever left south-east England. Apart from his four visits to Calais, he went twice in his life north of the Trent, once to Nottingham and once to Lincoln and York; but for thirty years he never went north of Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire or west of Bristol, though his contemporary sovereigns, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France, travelled almost continuously throughout their dominions. Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, only once left the neighbourhood of London during his short life; and Henry’s daughter Mary, after she became Queen, never travelled further from London than Winchester. Elizabeth I often travelled throughout south-east England, but never went north of Worcester or west of Bristol.
This reluctance of the Tudor sovereigns to leave south-east England was only partly due to the bad state of the roads. A more important factor was probably their fear of what would happen if they went too far from London. In 1553, during the nine-day reign of Jane Grey, the Duke of Northumberland marched from London to Cambridge at the head of an army to suppress the rising in favour of Mary. His colleagues on the Privy Council carried out a coup d’état as soon as he had left London which put Mary on the throne and led to the execution of Jane Grey and Northumberland.
In 1541 Henry VIII at last decided to make his long-promised visit to Lincolnshire
and Yorkshire, where a serious revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had broken out five years before. In view of the possible danger to his life among his formerly rebellious subjects, he was escorted by 7,000 soldiers, who slept in tents while Henry and his councillors and courtiers stayed in the King’s hunting lodges and in the houses of the noblemen and gentlemen in the counties who had been ordered to receive and entertain him.
Henry left Whitehall on 30 June, and planned to take three weeks over the journey to Lincoln. He spent the first night at Enfield, the second at St Albans, the third at Dunstable, and the fourth at Ampthill. So far he was up to schedule, but at Ampthill he heard that a hundred miles to the north the roads had been flooded by the heavy rains of a very wet summer. He decided to wait at Ampthill until the floods had subsided, and stayed there for three weeks. He then moved north to Langley, to Grafton Regis and Pipewell in Northamptonshire, to Liddington in Rutlandshire, to Collyweston, to the Duke of Suffolk’s house at Grimsthorp near Bourne, and to Sleaford, and entered Lincoln in state on 9 August. He then went on to Gainsborough, to Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, and, after entering Yorkshire, to Hatfield Close, Cawood, Wressel in ‘Howdenshire’, and to Leconfield and Hull in the East Riding, before entering York on 18 September, having taken eighty-one days to travel there from Whitehall. After staying in York for nine days, he travelled home more quickly, taking only thirty-two days to go from York, by Hull, to Thornton Abbey across the Humber in Lincolnshire, to Ingoldsby, Sleaford, Collyweston, Fotheringhay, Higham Ferrers, Ampthill and Windsor to Hampton Court, where he arrived on 29 October.
A Brief History of the Tudor Age Page 6