The Pleasures
and the Perils of
Forreine Travell

For the Well-to-Do,
Going on the Road
Meant High Adventure.

By Ronald Fritze
Posted on September 29, 2011, from Athens, Alabama

The open ear of youth doth always listen;
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.

William Shakespeare,
Richard II, II.1, lines 20-23

One of the common assumptions about people living in past societies is that the vast majority of them never traveled more than twenty miles from where they were born. In fact, historical records show that a surprisingly large portion of people in the past managed to undertake some substantial journeys.

Keep in mind that the technology of travel remained fairly static for most of human history. One historian I have read pointed out that Napoleon, whose career spanned the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, could travel no faster with his army than Julius Caesar had been able to travel with his armies. The coming of the railroad changed the situation dramatically in the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as did the appearance of steam powered ships. Automobiles, superhighways, and airliners added to the speed of travel, a luxury we can all enjoy today — at least as long as the oil holds out.

Feats of Memorization and the Telling of Tales
Kept Travelers Entertained and Focused.

Despite the lack of technology, the people of Tudor and Stuart England managed to do their fair share of traveling. Thomas Cromwell, the future principle secretary of Henry VIII, made a business trip to Italy during which he memorized the New Testament. (By the way, memorization and memory work, like penmanship, is another lost art in the educational process.) Such activities were a way to pass the time with some meaningful activity. From a slightly earlier era, we know from The Canterbury Tales that the band of pilgrims entertained themselves by telling stories to one another. (Entertaining oneself and others is another dying art thanks to television and computer games.)

Still, travel remained predominantly an activity of the well-to-do and the rich. Nobles thought, quite rightly, that travel represented a valuable learning experience back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is less so today. Our contemporary world is a globalized place, homogenized and branded, and travel for entertainment usually supercedes travel for enlightenment and edification.

It's Hard to Make a Memorable Adventure
At Mickey D's and the Holiday Inn.

As Americans, we can visit most places in the world and find a McDonalds or a Kentucky Fried. These days, tourists can go to exotic places to shop at department stores stocked with goods virtually identical to those found in New York or Chicago.  They can stay in Holiday Inns just like those back home, or sun themselves on faraway beaches that are indistinguishable from those of Florida or the nearby Caribbean.

For the unadventurous in matters of food, lodging, and entertainment, the homogenization of world culture is a godsend and a safe-haven. But seeking out the familiar in a foreign land does detract from the potential adventures that travel can bring.

Any seasoned traveler will tell you that the mistakes of travel, along with truly unique experiences that are sure to follow the bold and daring wayfarer, are what get talked about long after the trip is over, providing memories that may never be forgotten.

For Young Englishmen of Nobility and Wealth,
Travel Became a Way to Enrich and to Sow.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the embryonic stage of the English institution known as the Grand Tour, a rite of passage that gradually flowered and then flourished during the eighteenth century. Young Englishmen of nobility and wealth would be sent to the continent of Europe to travel around, enrich their minds, and, perhaps, sow some wild oats.

When the Tudor dynasty began in 1485, Italy was the most cosmopolitan place in Europe. It was a land of wealth and culture thanks to the Renaissance and the trading ventures of the Venetians and the Genoese. Many English scholars went there to learn Greek and bring that knowledge back to England. John Colet (?1466-1519), William Grocyn (?1446-1519), and Thomas Linacre (?1460-1524) were all prominent English humanists who studied in Italy.

Advice to travelers began to appear in print. One of the more eloquent pieces of advice came from Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an Elizabethan and Jacobean jurist, politician, and polymath scholar. Bacon is known as the man who introduced the literary genre of the essay to the English language — the Frenchman Michael de Montaigne had earlier perfected the essay as a literary form. During his lifetime Bacon brought out editions of his essays in 1597, 1612, and 1625. The second and third editions both contained many new essays.

It's Better to Know the Territory.

Bacon’s essay “Of Travel” first appeared in the third edition. One of his pieces of advice was that young travelers should be accompanied by an experienced older man who knew the local languages, had visited those lands already, and possessed the authority to keep the youngster from getting into too much trouble. Bacon also advised first-time travelers to learn a bit of the local languages and to get some sort of guidebooks. By Bacon’s time, travel was common enough that a ready market for guidebooks existed, so Rick Steves of Europe through the Backdoor fame is part of a long tradition rather than a pioneer.

Bacon also advised travelers to keep moving so they could see and experience as much as possible. He even suggested that travelers staying in a large city should change lodgings to experience the different neighborhoods of a city. That advice was more appropriate to the situation of a wealthy traveler who had servants to hump their luggage around. Bacon also suggested that travelers keep a diary or a journal of their travels, a very good suggestion. Otherwise some of the details of a trip can fade quickly along with the order of how things occurred. Bacon also advised that young travelers seek out and make the acquaintance of prominent people in the countries they visited. When the traveler returned home, they should continue to correspond with their new friends. In other words, travel should be used to expand one’s network.

Howell's 'Forreine Travell'
Warns of 'Derogating' and Tall Tales.

Not everyone agreed with Bacon that travel was quite the great educational opportunity. James Howell (?1593-1666) was a diplomat and administrator during the reign of Charles I. In 1642 he published his Instructions for Forreine Travell. According to his complaint, some of his fellow countrymen travelers “strive to degenerate as much as they can from Englishmen, and all their talk is foreign, or at least will bring it to be so, though it be by head and shoulders, magnifying other nations, and derogating from their own. Nor can one hardly exchange three words with them at an ordinary (or elsewhere) but presently they are th’ other side of the sea, commending either the wines of France, the fruits of Italy, or the oil and salads of Spain.”

The modern equivalent of Howell’s stereotype is the American graduate student in England who somehow manages to pick up an English accent within 48 hours of landing at Heathrow and then manages to retain it for a lifetime while teaching at a university in Oklahoma or Wyoming.

Another of Howell’s complaints concerned the tall tales that travelers brought back home with them, such as reports stating “the Indian fly to be as big as a fox, China birds as big as some horses, and their mice to be as big as monkeys.” But of these travel-liars, Howell pointed out, “they have the wit to fetch this [story] far enough off, because the hearer may rather believe it than make a voyage far to disprove it.”

Howell was also critical of people who brought home and ostentatiously continued to practice foreign customs or wear foreign clothing. Furthermore, Howell warned that some travelers “retain the vice of a country, and will discourse learnedly thereupon, but pass by and forget the good” along with those who “by their diseases more than by their discourses, discover themselves to have been abroad under hot climates.”

In 'The Scholemaster,' Once Wondrous Italy
Becomes a Pit of Sin, Lust and Vanity.

Not everyone in early modern England thought that Italy was a particularly good place to send young men to study. Roger Ascham (1515/16-1568) was a distinguished classicist, diplomat, and during 1548 the tutor of the young Princess Elizabeth. Although Ascham traveled and studied in Italy and respected Italian scholarship, he considered it to be no country for young men. His criticisms appeared in his educational treatise The Scholemaster, which his widow published posthumously for him in 1570.

For Ascham, Italian society had declined drastically from the greatness of ancient Rome. As he put it, “Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world. Vice now maketh that country slave to them that were before glad to serve it.” Italy was a land consumed by sin, lust, and vanity. But Ascham knew that some young English travelers were far more interested in experiencing that sin and lust than learning Greek like he did. As he put it, “I am afraid that many of our travelers into Italy do not eschew the way to Circe’s court, but go, and ride, and run, and fly thither.” Remember, Circe was the sorceress and demi-goddess who tried to make Odysseus her boy-toy along with other travelers who visited her island home of Aeaea.

Furthermore, Ascham pointed out that even the Italians considered Italianate Englishmen to be devils incarnate. He even worried that some Italian books translated into English and sold in the London bookshops would further corrupt the minds and characters of young Englishmen and even undermine the Protestant religion. In the judgment of Ascham, “More papists be made, by your merry books of Italy, than by your earnest books of Louvain.” (Louvain was a university in a town of the same name in Brabant in what is now Belgium. It was a center of Catholic polemical literature.)

All of these things worried Ascham and, like Bacon, he recommended to the parents of a young traveler that he “go under the keep and guard of such a man, as both by wisdom can, and authority dare rule him.”

Bandits and Brigands Run Riot
In Evelyn's Well Crafted Travel Diary.

Travel did not simply poise moral dangers. There were definite physical dangers as well. Shipwreck could be a problem, but there was also the problem of bandits and brigands robbing and sometimes killing travelers.

John Evelyn (1620-1706) was a well-to-do Englishman who as a young man visited Holland and the Low Countries in 1641 and traveled extensively in France, Italy, and Switzerland during 1643 and 1645. These travels allowed him to avoid the carnage of the English Civil War, although he was a royalist in his sympathies. He was a founding member of the Royal Society and served as an administrator in the governments of Charles II, James II, and William III.

Evelyn kept a diary that is a rich source for the events of his time and includes accounts of his travels. Evelyn related on 19 April 1644 that he and his companions traveled from Chartres through the Forest of Orleans to the city of Orleans. Their journey was uneventful, but the party traveling behind them was ambushed in the forest and had four of its members killed (including a Swiss captain in the regiment of Picardy) while the rest fled in terror. Soldiers entered the forest in pursuit of the murderous robbers and managed to kill two of them. As Evelyn gratefully wrote, “I have greate Cause to give God thanks for this Escape.”

On 28 January 1645 Evelyn and his English companions traveled down the Appian Way from Rome to Naples. After having a meal in the town of Sermoneta, the party passed a tower manned by a small garrison whose purpose was to prevent bandits from operating on that section of the ancient road. It was a lawless part of Italy where travelers were robbed and even killed almost every day. Once again Evelyn was lucky and avoided the brigands, but he recorded that another traveling Englishman, Lord Banbury, and his party had been robbed shortly before.

Robbed of Money, Boots and His Sword,
Evelyn Springs into Action to Save the Day.

England wasn’t any safer for travelers, and it was there that Evelyn’s luck ran out. Returning home after traveling on the Continent with his wife and family, Evelyn decided to arrange a family trip to Tunbridge Wells in Kent for the healing waters. Leaving home early to prepare for his family’s arrival, Evelyn was riding along a hedge row near Bromley on 23 June 1652 when two robbers assaulted him, knocking him off his horse with staves. They took him into the woods and robbed him of his money, jewels, sword, and boots. They left him tied up, but decided not to steal his horse, probably because it could be readily identified.

After a couple of hours Evelyn managed to loosen the ropes that bound him. Getting on his horse, he reported the robbery to local authorities, who raised the hue and cry. He also had five hundred cards printed that described the jewelry and other items the thieves had taken. It was money well spent as all his stolen goods except the sword soon appeared in shops of various goldsmiths. The thieves dumped Evelyn’s jewelry for a pittance before the descriptions circulated, but he was at least able to get his property back.

Amazingly, Evelyn received word by 10 July that one of the robbers had been arrested. Evelyn was summoned to testify against him. Not wanting to see the man hanged, Evelyn did not testify but the man was found guilty anyway. Still the man got a reprieve. It turned out, however, that the robber was a habitual and violent criminal who on occasion mixed murder and rape with his robberies. The man was a former soldier and had served in Ireland. When he was later arrested for yet another crime, he refused to enter a plea and so had to endure the nasty death of being pressed to death by having weights placed on his chest to suffocate him.

These episodes were just the ones that Evelyn experienced traveling overland. He and his friends also had some close calls with pirates during their voyages at sea. Clearly, travel during the early modern era was an adventure and not for the timid and faint of heart.

To read Dr. Fritze's previous Tudor and Stuart Britain essay, Henry VII and the Pretenders, click the reading glasses above.