The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (35 page)

An alternative to buying a horse is to hire one. You can do this at many inns, where they are lent out to trustworthy clients. Or you might hire a post-horse. Early in the sixteenth century three post routes from London are established. One goes north to Berwick, on the Scottish border. Another goes to Dover – by way of Dartford, Rochester, Sittingbourne and Canterbury – and a third to Plymouth. Each ‘post’ is a series of stations, approximately twenty miles apart, where you can hire horses at the standard rate of 3d per mile (2½d if you are on government business), dropping off the horse at a another post house or station, and paying an extra 6d for the ‘post-boy’ to return it. In each place at least two horses have to be kept by law constantly ready day and night, fully harnessed, with two bags for any state packets that need to be carried. If you are travelling, you can ‘ride with the post’ on the other horse, the official messenger bringing it back. In some places more horses are kept at the town’s expense (Leicester, for instance, keeps four).
³⁴
Sir Thomas Randolph is appointed chief postmaster in 1571 and briefly introduces a fourth post, to Beaumaris in Wales and across to Ireland; but this falters after five months and is not revived until 1598.
³⁵
Anyone can make use of the post in Elizabeth’s reign, but private packets have to go as ‘bye-letters’ – they can only be taken with the state packets, not separately. If you want to send a package privately, use a carrier: someone who regularly rides between towns transporting goods.

How fast will you be able to travel? This depends on several factors: the season, the weather, the cost of changing horses on a long-distance ride, and how long you can stay in the saddle. On dry roads in midsummer, presuming you have a strong backside and thighs, you should be able to keep going for the post’s minimum speed of seven
miles per hour. People riding their own horses in a hurry to get to London from Exeter are able to do the 170-mile journey in three days. Riding back with the post to Dover in late October 1599, Thomas Platter manages to do the forty-four miles from Gravesend in five hours (nine miles an hour), which he calls ‘great speed’.
³⁶
In summer you should be able to cover a hundred miles in a day – if your thighs can withstand the strain. In winter, however, with the roads muddy and only eight hours of light, and with no change of horses, you will be very lucky to do much more than two or three miles an hour – twenty rain-soaked miserable miles in a day. The most impressive record is that set by Sir Robert Carey, who is given the task of riding from London to Scotland to announce to King James VI of Scotland that Queen Elizabeth is dead. He sets out between nine and ten o’clock on the morning of 25 March 1603 and reaches Doncaster that night, having covered 162 miles in one day. The following day he rides another 136 miles to his own house at Widdrington. Due to a bad fall on the afternoon of the third day, which leaves him with a bleeding head, he has to ride more slowly; but still he manages to complete the last ninety-nine miles to Edinburgh by nightfall. He rides the whole journey of 397 miles in three days, covering the first 347 miles in two days and three hours.
³⁷

FINDING YOUR WAY

You cannot carry a road map with you. Christopher Saxton’s stunning set of maps is printed in 1579 but it is bulky and costly. Even though it is the most advanced set of English county maps yet made, and will provide the basis for all other maps for more than a century, it is still not detailed enough to guide you. More practical guides take the form of printed tables that give distances between towns and the directions in which you need to travel. Some are arranged in a circular form, with London at the centre and all other cities and towns radiating out in a sequence of circles, with the distance from the preceding town given in brackets. Other versions are printed in French for the benefit of foreign visitors, such as
La Guide des Chemins d’Angleterre
(Paris, 1579).

The other solution to finding your way, of course, is to ask directions:

Traveller
: I pray you set me a little in my right way out of the village.

Ploughman
: Keep still to the right hand until you come to the corner of a wood, then turn at the left hand.

Traveller
: Have we no thieves in the forest?

Ploughman
: No sir, for the provost-marshal hung the other day half a dozen at the gallows, which you see before you at the top of that hill.

Traveller
: Truly I fear lest we be here robbed. We shall spur a little harder for it waxeth night.
³⁸

If travelling at night, it will be the moon you need to guide you, as Alessandro Magno finds out on a return journey from Richmond in 1562:

Seeing that we were faring badly and not knowing what we ought to do – whether to go on or turn back – we were very frightened. Then one of my companions spoke up. He said that London lay to the east, and as the moon rises in the east we should follow it so as not to get lost … We could hear on all sides many owls hooting and my companion, who was greatly afraid, begged me to hurry saying that these were robbers who were calling to one another … Finally we came to a village where my companion wanted to remain. He reminded me that the way was unsafe, dark and extremely muddy and that we had to pass through places where, only a few days before, people had been murdered … Since we did not wish to stray from the way but had to admit that we did not know it, we hired a man as our guide and, having armed him sufficiently, we placed him on horseback. When we got back to the path which my companion had said was unsafe, he still wished to turn back. He argued also that it was dangerous to approach London at that hour for, although there were soldiers around at that time who had been ordered by the queen to help the Huguenots, one should not believe that the road would be safe.
³⁹

We normally associate highwaymen with the eighteenth century, but there are just as many in Elizabethan England – if not more. Vagrancy has greatly inflated the numbers of desperate thieves who will lurk behind trees and bushes to take travellers by surprise. Notorious places for thieves are Gad’s Hill near Rochester, Shooter’s
Hill by Blackheath, Salisbury Plain and Newmarket Heath.
⁴⁰
These are just the most famous. Between 1567 and 1602 suspected criminals are tried for the theft of more than £1,000 of money and jewels stolen on the highways in Essex – and that figure only represents the sixty cases that come to court.
⁴¹
If you travel anywhere near Cambridge, watch out for Gamaliel Ratsey, a gentleman soldier who has become a notorious highwayman, complete with a mask and wicked sense of humour. He has been known to make a Cambridge scholar give an oration while being robbed, and has himself lectured a company of actors on their art, after relieving them of their valuables.

Robberies often follow a pattern. After a night carousing in an inn with your fellow travellers you head off to bed. But the inn’s servants know that you have money to spend and which way you are heading. They watch to see how many are in your party when you set out in the morning and a messenger leaves the inn in a hurry. Your party makes its way beneath overhanging trees and around muddy stretches of road in jolly conversation, when you suddenly find yourselves confronted by men bearing swords, cudgels and possibly a caliver or arquebus (long-barrelled gun). You turn, only to find the path behind cut off. What do you do? You realise that you can either live without your cash and other valuables or fight to keep them. The highwaymen will normally take all your money and jewels, any expensive items of clothing and your horses, and leave you tied up away from the highway, but in such a manner that you can work yourself free after an hour or so. As you start to walk on to the next inn or town in nothing but your underclothes, you can take some small comfort from the fact that you are not the first and won’t be the last to experience this humiliation.

And then it will start to rain.

River Transport

Small rivers are obstacles and, for the traveller, a nuisance. Large rivers, however, enhance your travel options. Where a river is significantly deep, you will normally find a ferry. In some places, such as along the River Witham between Lincoln and Boston, there are no bridges, but five established ferry routes. These will either transport you across the river or, one after the other, take you down the 24-mile stretch of
water to Boston.
⁴²
Similarly the Long Ferry travels up the river from Gravesend to London. This picks up the passengers riding with the post from Dover and takes them up to the city. Catch it just after breakfast and it should deliver you into the city about 2 p.m., or sooner if the tide is in your favour.
⁴³

In London, the River Thames is so crucial to transport that you will soon come to think of it as the city’s main highway. There are many alleys and lanes leading to stairs down to the water where you can pick up a wherry. This is a water-borne taxi system: each wherry normally has one waterman who will row his passengers directly to their destination, whether upstream, downstream or on the far bank. You will never have difficulty finding one: there are more than 2,000 on the river.
⁴⁴
In the mornings you will see them all tied up to the jetties and stairways, bobbing about on the tide. Each has an upholstered seat at the back wide enough for two people to sit side by side.
⁴⁵
Over this seat is a canopy, which can be raised or lowered according to the weather. The Venetian Alessandro Magno remarks on the wherries:

They have no cabins but sometimes they put cloths up to act as canopies, when necessary, and one man alone can steer them with two oars. The boats are broad at the back but dart quickly hither and thither across the river, according to the whims of those inside. There are some river boats – as at the moorings in Venice – at various points that are used by groups of people to travel to various towns, or to cross the river, or to enjoy themselves in the evenings. It is just as pleasant as it is to go in summertime along the Grand Canal in Venice.
⁴⁶

Crossing the river – for instance to go from the city to the playhouses on the south bank – will cost you a penny each way. Travelling upstream or downstream is more expensive: the fare from Temple to Westminster is 2d, and from Blackfriars to Westminster 3d. The fare also changes with the tide; a trip to Greenwich from the city costs 8d with the tide, but 12d if the tide is against you.
⁴⁷

If there are many of you travelling together, you may consider hiring a barge or a tilt boat. Passenger barges are rowed by a team of oarsmen; many noblemen have their own, simply hiring watermen when they need them. A tilt boat is a barge with a canopy running its whole length and it has neither oarsmen nor a sail; rather it is
pulled along by oarsmen in a separate steerage boat. It will cost you 10s to travel in one all the way from London to Windsor and back. The queen has an impressive glass-sided boat for such journeys, kept in a dock on the Thames and attracting many curious sightseers.

Reference to barges may make you wonder whether there are any canals in England. Several Acts are passed in the sixteenth century permitting canals to be built, but the first actually to be dug is the Exeter Ship Canal. The original waterway, the River Exe, was blocked up by a weir built by the countess of Devon in the Middle Ages, forcing all the trade to go through her port at Topsham. Work begins on the canal in 1564 and is completed in early 1567, once again opening up direct trade between Exeter and the rest of the world. It is three feet deep, sixteen feet wide and re-enters the Exe just below the old weir.
⁴⁸
Encouraged by its success, a few other Acts are passed, but actually building the canals is a very slow process.
⁴⁹
Throughout the country canals remain few and far between, and short in length, until the Industrial Revolution.

Travelling by water is not without its dangers. In London and Rochester, where the great bridges are built on starlings, there is the problem of the tide. When the tide goes out, the Thames turns into rapids under London Bridge, rushing out with considerable force. This makes it impossible to row or sail upstream under the bridge and highly dangerous to attempt to go downstream: an exploit called ‘shooting the bridge’. In 1599 some Catholic fugitives are caught by the river at night:

They rowed back towards the bridge but by now the tide had turned and was flowing strongly. It forced their little boat against the piles driven into the bed of the river, to break the force of the water. It stuck, and it was impossible to move it forwards or backwards. Meanwhile the water was rising and striking the boat with such force that with every wave it looked as if it would capsize and the occupants be thrown into the river. They could only pray to God and shout for help.
⁵⁰

If you fear ending up in this situation, then make sure you have a life preserver with you. These are made from pigs’ bladders and inflated by blowing into them.
⁵¹
If going anywhere near London Bridge it might be a good idea to have one or two blown up in advance.

Seafaring

We have seen at the beginning of the book that the appearance of an English town in 1558 is not hugely changed from the late Middle Ages. The same cannot be said for the docks in England. Most seagoing vessels need to be rebuilt every twenty-five or thirty years, but in the sixteenth century designs are developing so rapidly that ships built before the mid-1550s are regarded as too old-fashioned to be rebuilt and are simply broken up. Only one royal ship facing the Armada fleet in July 1588, the 200-ton
Bull
, is more than forty years old; the average age of the thirty-four vessels in the English navy is just fifteen years.