Specialized roads included saltways (for the distribution of salt from Cheshire and Worcestershire) and drove-roads (for cattle). These avoided both regular roads and towns. Causeways were common in the Fenlands. Three of them, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, linked Ely to firmer ground. Other causeways were at York and in a section of the highway between London and Banbury. Another linked Nottingham with the bridge across the Trent.
Both weather and road conditions made travel times unpredictable. In mid-sixteenth-century England the journey between London and Northamptonshire (eighty miles or so) could take anywhere from two days to a week. During the winter months, some country houses in the Midlands and North were completely cut off from civilization for weeks at a time.
In 1555, Parliament passed an Act requiring every parish to elect two surveyors to keep the highways in repair by forced labor. Over the next 100 years, however, little was done beyond spot repair of the worst holes. London to Durham was still reckoned a four- to five-day journey, London to York, four days, and London to Newcastle, two days.
The Coach
In the Middle Ages, women often rode in four-wheeled covered wagons drawn by three or four horses in tandem. These “chariots” were large, lumbering vehicles made of wood and iron. The interior was padded with cushions and a small stepladder was used to get in and out.
The closed, four-wheeled vehicle with seats inside for passengers and one seat outside for the driver (but as yet without window glass) first appeared in Hungary sometime after 1470, a development from the design of the carriages used to transport artillery. The word coach may have been derived from Kocs, a small village between Vienna and Budapest. The first coach was imported into England from the Netherlands in 1555 for the earl of Rutland. Mary I had one by 1556. Queen Elizabeth ordered one from Holland in 1560 and in 1566 possessed a “blue coach.” The first coach arrived in Scotland from France with Mary, Queen of Scots in 1561.
Coaches might be drawn by two or more horses or by mules. The duke of Buckingham was the first to use a six-horse team in London, but more horses were common in the country, where they were needed to pull the coaches out of the muck and mire. There is one record of a lady in Kent whose coach was drawn by six oxen.
Once introduced to the British Isles, coaches quickly caught on. The earliest models were quite primitive, although they were upholstered and elaborately carved and painted. The first vehicles to resemble our modern concept of a coach were not seen until 1580.
By 1599, Londoners were complaining about traffic jams. In 1601 a bill was introduced in the House of Lords to restrain excessive use of coaches but it did not pass. A Discourse on Leather (1629) claimed the twin cities of London and Westminster contained between them as many as 5,000 coaches and carouches (the calash and the carouche were names for smaller four-wheeled coaches designed for in-town use). In 1636, Coach and Sedan Pleasantly Disputing for Place and Precedence included a code of conduct for vehicles.
In 1641 a new coach cost the earl of Bedford more than £30 but the old one could be traded in at a value of £5. Six new coach horses added another £150 to the price. The most popular coach horses were dappled Flanders mares and a pair cost £47 in 1608.
Hackney Coaches
Coaches could be hired for special journeys as early as 1595, when John Dee sent his wife and family from Mortlake to Coventry in a coach drawn by two horses. The cost was 10s. per day. The first coaches for hire in the way we use taxicabs were nicknamed Hackney Hell Carts. The word came from the French haquenee, an ambling nag. These coaches were able to carry two passengers and were drawn by two horses, one ridden by the driver. They were already being blamed for congestion in London in 1619. By 1625 there were twenty of them operating there.
The first regular coach stand was across from Bedford House on the Strand. A retired sea captain named Bailey began to hire out four coaches and coachmen in livery in 1633, saving passengers the trouble of going to a stable to find a coach for hire. By 1635, hackney coaches had become so numerous, based at inns all over the city, that King Charles limited their numbers and also regulated their fares. The cost of a coach for an entire day in London was 8s. 6d.
Weekly service between Aldersgate and St. Albans was available by 1637. The journey from London to Salisbury took two days by stagecoach and cost anywhere from 20s. to 30s. The trip from London to Chester took four days, as did that from London to Exeter. From London to Newcastle was a six-day journey. The average distance covered in a day was thirty to forty miles.
Litters and Sedan Chairs
Horse litters had been used since the Middle Ages. These were suspended between two horses and carried ladies and the infirm. Padded with cushions and sometimes mattresses, they were more comfortable than coaches or chariots for long journeys. In the mid-seventeenth century, Ann Clifford, countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, traveled between residences in northern England in a horse litter, her ladies in waiting and other female servants following in coaches and her menservants on horseback, with a train of baggage wagons bringing up to the rear. Queen Elizabeth used a litter carried by men rather than horses.
The sedan chair, a seat enclosed in a box and carried on poles by two men, was invented by 1581. It was common in France but rarely seen in England before the reign of Charles 1. In 1634 a proposal was made to use sedan chairs as an alternative to the hired coach in order to relieve traffic congestion. The idea caught on but did little to decrease the number of coaches. Rather, it cut into the watermen’s business.
TRAVEL BY WATER
The Thames
London had some 2,000 watermen licensed to take passengers across the Thames. About one-third of the householders in the Liberty of the Clink earned their living that way, charging 1d. for each crossing. For one man to hire a boat for a trip to Westminster from London cost 6d. with the tide and more against. To Chiswick it was 2s. 6d. for a round trip fare.
Wherries were upholstered, with embroidered cushions for seats, and held two to five passengers. Public barges and tilt-boats (tilts were canopies) competed for passengers on the route from Windsor to Gravesend and back. Each could carry around twenty-five people. Barges charged 4s. a boatload. Tilt-boats cost 10s.-15s. for the boatload.
The Thames was a major delivery route for dairy products from Essex and Suffolk, fruits, vegetables, and hops from Kent, cattle and sheep fattened in East Anglia, the midlands, and home counties, and coal from Newcastle, which was transferred from lighters to barges to travel to Reading, Henley, or Abingdon and be exchanged for a cargo of corn or malt. London shipped out foreign luxuries like wine, sugar, and prunes and bulky native commodities like chalk and fuller’s earth. In general, water transport was cheaper than land transport. Freight that cost 1d. per mile by water would cost anywhere from 4d. to 12d. per mile overland. Barges were used to carry goods. Eight men could handle one large enough to carry more than forty five-horsed wagons. The fare for a horse was 2½ times that for a person for all voyages except daylight ferrying on which the horse did not have to be fed or watered.
Downstream travel was swift, but moving upstream required the use of sails, oars, or poles, or that the craft be hauled upstream by oxen or horses walking a towpath. Thames barges going upriver from London took four days to reach Henley, a distance of some forty miles. Tow-paths also had high tolls.
Some wealthy men owned their own barges, and had bargemen in livery. The earl of Bedford’s bargemen wore broadcloth lined with orange baize to correspond with the gowns of the porters at Woburn Abbey.
Other Waterways
Some waterways no longer navigable today were still used during this period. In 1600 the Thames went to Reading and to within two miles of Oxford. The Trent reached beyond Nottingham. The Avon was navigable to within four miles of Warwick and reached Stratford. The Cam reached Cambridge. The Dee went to Chester, the Lea to Hertford, and the Medway to five miles above Maidstone. The Humber-Ouse waterway was important between Hull and York because the m
ain road had to keep to the better-drained land to the west. The Great Ouse went to Bedford, the Little Ouse to Thetford, and the Yorkshire Ouse to York. On the Severn, most cargoes went downstream from Worcester to Bristol. The principal upstream terminus was Bewdley. Small, seagoing vessels could get as far as Tewkesbury. Shrewsbury could also be reached by river. On the Exe, seagoing ships reached Topsham.
The first canal in England was built from Exeter to Topsham in 1564-8 and was three miles long. The upper reaches of the Thames, especially above Burcott, were regulated by inefficient single locks and weirs (dams), usually erected in connection with mills. In 1578, seven weirs, twenty-three locks, sixteen floodgates, and more than twenty mills existed on the Thames between Maidenhead and Oxford. In 1580, citizens of Abingdon listed twenty-five weirs, locks, and mills as hampering movement between their town and Maidenhead. The first double-gated locks (called turnpikes) appeared on the Thames circa 1606.
POSTAL SERVICE
A “common carrier” was used by most towns to provide a regular service to London by around 1400. The first postal system was established in 1482, covering the 335 miles from Berwick to London in relays of thirty miles. An organized system for hiring hackney horses at stages along the entire route from Gravesend to Dover was in operation by early in the sixteenth century. In 1511 a traveler paid half a crown a stage. Henry VIII appointed Brian Tuke the first Master of the Posts in 1517. When Thomas Randolph took over that position in 1572, the posting (postal) system, with a chief post office in London, became a permanent institution.
Early postboys carried a horn, blown when they passed through a town, every time they met anyone, and at least three times a mile to announce their coming. They carried the post in satchels slung over the shoulder. Postbags were leather, lined with good cotton or baize and it was forbidden to carry anything in them but letters and writings. These were of two types. Packets, which could be one letter or a bundle, were the official mail and had to go out again at each stage within a quarter hour. Bye-letters were private letters rather than official mail and waited for forwarding until the next official packet ran. The most urgent letters were marked with a sketch of a man dangling from a gallows (an unofficial custom) to indicate that the postboy should deliver it with as much speed as if it were a pardon. As early as 1523 a similar message was conveyed to those postboys who could read by the inscription “Haste, Post, haste for life.”
A foot post continued to be used along with post-horses, because over long distances most horses were not as fast as a well-trained man on foot. A well-cared-for horse, however, bred for distance, could carry over two hundred pounds for more than fifty miles a day. Foot posts averaged seven miles per hour in summer and five in winter and usually covered sixteen to eighteen miles a day.
There were posts over most of England by 1628 and the postal service finally became official in 1629. At this point, letters were put into a “portmantle” which was carried on a second horse.
There were always complaints about how slow the mail was, although one letter (in 1599) traveled 193 miles in forty-eight hours with some of the journey undertaken at night. In 1635, post-horses for a “stafetto” or packet post covered twenty miles a day. One could send a letter from London to Edinburgh and have a reply back within six days. In 1647 the coach from London to Rye cost £7. The same trip riding post would have cost a traveler 18s. The round trip from London to Bristol (240 miles) might cost a traveler as much as £8 bythe fastest post-horse relay (though a royal packet went for 40s. 2d.) but riding with the regular post was only 15s.
Letters were also carried by private goods carriers, by friends, and by servants. A “running footman” was part of many gentlemen’s households. In one case a footman covered 148 miles in less than forty-two hours to fetch medicine, with only one stop for sleep. Until late in the sixteenth century, letters sent overseas often made better time than those sent to remote areas of England by any method. The average time for a letter to reach Calais from London was two days. Letters from Antwerp took about a week.
INNS
Although inns were still almost entirely unknown in Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century, a census of twenty-seven English counties in 1577 lists 2,000 of them, along with 14,000 alehouses and 300 taverns. Some few inns were large enough to house from 200-300 people at a time.
In June 1564, the maximum price an innkeeper of Norwich could charge for a meal was set at fourpence. At most inns, a meal could be had for sixpence or less. Inns were plentiful in England and had a good reputation compared to those in Europe. In Dover, which had a great deal of traffic in travelers, there were ten inns, each with between three and sixteen beds (the largest inn was the Lion), and twenty-six victualing houses. The latter were private homes licensed to offer lodging and food. Those in Dover each had three to nine beds.
Of Dover’s inns, only the Angel had no stabling available. All of Worcester’s twelve inns had stables. The inventory of one also boasted of ninety-five pairs of sheets for eleven bedrooms. Typical inn servants were chamberlains (rather than chambermaids), ostlers, and tapsters.
ROYAL PROGRESSES
On progress, the court took everything, from equipment such as wax for seals and parchment, to furniture. The monarch always traveled with the royal bed. The chaplain took a portable altar. Sumpter mules and horses were used to transport all this, together with carts and wagons.
Queen Elizabeth traveled with more than 300 carts to carry her baggage. This huge entourage rarely covered more than ten or twelve miles a day. Annual progresses were the rule for most of the 1560s and 1570s, but Elizabeth rarely went far north and only once got as far west as Bristol.
FOREIGN TRAVEL
No one could leave England without a license from the monarch, the Privy Council, or the Warden of the Cinque Ports. Travelers were not to take more than £20 out of the country and were examined by the port commissioner on their return. France and Italy were the most usual destinations.
In 1591, Fynes Moryson made a trip to the Netherlands and Germany Once there, he traveled on foot and in disguise to reduce his chances of being robbed and to avoid calling attention to the fact that he was English. Thieves, the Inquisition, disease, and wolves were among the dangers travelers on the Continent faced. In Germany, however, there were public coaches which carried six to eight people. A coach from Hamburg to Nuremberg, a nine-day journey, cost about £2.
Estimates of how long it took to reach certain destinations varied widely. In 1553 a travel guide by Henri Estienne described France as twenty-two days wide and nineteen days long. A book written a century earlier by Gilles Le Bouvier (who estimated the length of England as an eight-day journey) gave France’s length as sixteen days. It was also said one could get from Venice to London in twenty-seven days. In 1579, John Chapman walked from Calais to Rheims, by way of Ardres and Cambrai (about 150 miles), in a week. A courier from London to Paris took eight days; a larger group, twelve days. But news of the death of Henri II of France was brought from Paris to Greenwich in forty-eight hours. A proclamation from the Low Countries reached Rye in five days.
However long they took, most journeys combined land and water routes, and navigable riverways were augmented by canals. By the fifteenth century, one canal linked the North Sea to the Baltic. There were, however, many delays, some caused by natural hazards and others by man. By the 1500s, watercraft had to stop every six or seven miles along the River Seine to pay tolls. Mountains slowed travel as well. A five week trip from Paris to Naples took travelers across the Alps through the Mont Cenis pass. That alone took five to seven days to traverse and it was blocked by snow from November to May.
SUMMARY OF APPROXIMATE TRAVEL TIMES
a man on foot 12 miles per day
pack train/ retinue 15 miles per day
foot post 16-18 miles per day
a man on horseback 20-30 miles per day
hackney coach 30-40 miles per day
horse post 50+ miles per day
Camusso, Lorenzo. Travel Guide to Europe 1492. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990.
Chandler, John. John Leland's Itinerary: Travels in Tudor England. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1993.
Crofts, J. Packhorse, Waggon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.
Dent, Anthony. Horses in Shakespeare's England. London: J.A. Allen, 1987.
Dovey, Zillah. An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen's Journey into East Anglia, 1578. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1996.
Hey, David. Packmen, Carriers & Packhorse Roads. Derbyshire: Landmark Publishing, 2001.
Parkes, Joan. Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
CHAPTER TWENTY: WITCHES, MAGIC, NECROMANCY AND SUPERSTITION
Everyone was superstitious in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A chapter in A. L. Rowse's The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), titled “Mentality and Belief: Witchcraft and Astrology,” is an excellent overview of the subject.
WITCHES
English witch trials were unique in Europe, principally because they had no connection to the Catholic Church and therefore lacked satanic elements until those began to be inserted by the “witchfinders” of the mid-seventeenth century. Under the Tudors, witchcraft was not even a crime from 1547 to 1563. Though there were charges (of heresy) which could he brought in ecclesiastical courts, the first English statute against witchcraft was not passed until 1542 and it was repealed in 1547.
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