Touring in 1600

Here again the traveller by waggon went more cheaply than the horseman. What with the absence of sign-posts, the scarcity of persons to ask, the frequent indistinguishableness of the road from its margin and its surroundings, a stranger was practically forced to be guided. In 1648 this brought the cost of a journey from London to Dover to £1 15s. 10d.132 [say, £8]. In a town this applied to every one who had no friends there. Every single feature on which one depends nowadays was absent, or, if present, present only in embryo, – visible street-names, printed suggestions other than historical, detailed plans, the wide, straight streets which allow the mystified to discover his whereabouts without climbing a church-tower. In short, what was worth seeing was mostly heard of only by word of mouth, and to find it one needed to be led there. Expenditure on guides reached its highest point when the Alps were snowbound; after a heavy fall he who wished to pass must wait till others had made fresh tracks or pay anything up to fifty crowns [£75] to have it done for him.

To pass Mont Cenis cost in the ordinary way the equivalent of about £4 10s.; that is, about half what the 'vetturino' would want to take each one of several from Lyons to Turin – six crowns, which latter sum is about ten times as much as the second-class fare to-day. But then the journey takes twelve hours now and took seven days then, with food all the while at travellers' prices.

The length of journeys stands out as the chief factor in the comparative costliness. Take a typical case, that of the five middle-class men133 who left Venice on February 20, 1655, who wasted no time on the way, reached England on March 29, and spent one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Reckoning this as equalling £625, this works out as the equivalent of £125 each for thirty-seven days, or £3 7s. 7d. a day. If a man left Venice now on February 20, he might break the journey at Bâle, to do things comfortably, and arrive in London at 5.38 A. M. on February 22. Second-class fare would be £5 10s. 7d.; add £2 for meals and incidentals, £7 10s. 7d. in all, an average of £3 3s. a day. The other thirty-four and a half days of the thirty-seven his food would be paid for at home rates, say 2s. 6d. a day, £4 6s. 3d., which, added to the £7 10s. 7d., gives £11 16s. 10d. Now the daily average of about 7s. higher in the cost of travel apart from food, as above represented, – mainly accounted for by the relative cost of horses and guides as against railway fares, – only comes to £13 in thirty-seven days. On this basis the journey from Venice to London two hundred and fifty years ago cost between nine and ten times as much as it would to-day, solely on account of the difference in speed. That the expenditure of these five middle-class men was very reasonable is easily verifiable, as, for example, by the accounts of Muscorno,134 another Venetian secretary, whose bill for coming to England, for himself and a servant, comes to three hundred and two ducats [£385]. If there was one place where travelling ought to have worked out relatively cheaply, it was Muscovy, seeing that on the sledges a peasant would take a passenger fifty leagues for three or four crowns; but it does not seem to have lowered the expenses of one Dr. Willes, whose overland journey thither in 1600 cost eighty pounds, including payments to guides. His own share may be reckoned as equivalent to two hundred and forty pounds as compared with the fifteen pounds the same route would cost to-day.

Luggage would frequently entail the same fare as the owner, since an extra horse would be needed to carry a box. Leather trunks were to be purchased which might be carried in front of the rider, but these did not protect the contents against rain. As to what carriers took as free luggage and what as "excess," there is no evidence but that of one Englishman135 who found he was entitled to five pounds free on the Calais-Paris road and paid ten shillings surcharge on the rest without comment. Any advice the experienced have to offer as regards reduction of luggage for economy is in view far less of carriage than of customs-duties. In Italy the exactions were severest; almost every day's journey would take one over some boundary and at every bridge there were two or three quattrini [twopence] to pay; at every gate six or eight soldi [one shilling], besides baggage dues. Any article carried through Italy would cost its price over again in dues; a sword, for instance, you had to give up at the gate, pay a man to carry it to the inn, where the host took care of it till your departure, when you had to pay again for its carriage to the gate. The Papal states had the lowest scale of charges, yet on crossing their boundary, there was a giulio [3s. 6d.] to pay for the smallest hand-bag; and at Florence even your corpse would be taxed a crown [£1 10s.] if it went in or out of the city for burial. In Germany, where the burden was lighter, Sir Thomas Hoby, coming down the Rhine in 1555, paid toll at twenty-one custom-houses between Mainz and Herzogensbosch to fourteen authorities. As a rule, too, the taxes were farmed, which increased the tourists' sufferings from them, inasmuch as they were exacted with greater rigour and it was the harder to get redress in cases of extortion, especially when, as in Poland and Spain, the 'farmers' were Jews or of Jewish blood. Bribery, however, was often practicable, and where practicable, economical; one of the best guides to Spain repeats concerning every custom-house that the traveller should say he has nothing to declare and tip the officials only if they take his word, that is, if they do not do their duty. It is true there were passes to be obtained from a central authority, overriding the right of search, such as the imperial pass in Germany, and the indefinite rights of ambassadors, but how far these were respected seems to have been mainly a matter of bluff. Navagero, in Spain early in the sixteenth century, ambassador though he was, had to pay duties even on the rings on his fingers.

Passports, for one purpose or another, may be said to have been as much the rule then as they have since become the exception; an Englishman must pay five shillings for leave to travel and another five shillings if he wished to take his horse with him. A Frenchman at Milan speaks of getting a passport, stating his destination and the colour of his hair; and so on. But few mention such expenses being entailed as does one Italian,136 leaving Dover in 1606. Apparently he had to pay for separate passports for each of his suite as well as himself, as these cost forty reals. The "real of eight" was nearly equal to five shillings English. The captain of the vessel demanded copies which "cost very dear" and the harbour-keeper, furthermore, who had exacted two giuli [six shillings], (each person?) on arrival, required double at departure.

Guide-books seem to have been from two to four times the price of Baedekers, a minor item, but considerable, like food and lodging. It may seem, at first sight, as if food and lodging were far from minor items, and that truly, of course, if only the total expenditure is considered. But in considering, as is being done here, relative cost only, that is, the cost of travel in so far as it has altered since three centuries ago, it has to be borne in mind that the average cost of food and shelter never alters; it is only standards of living that alter. If any one took the average price of meals, say, in Europe then and average prices now, and showed a difference of net cost between them, his calculations must either be based on misleading information, or else would prove that the figure he was multiplying with to equate values was a wrong one. This, of course, refers to necessaries; luxuries must be ruled out for two reasons: first, all attempts to fix a standard or strike an average breaks down for lack of a basis; second, they do not test what any one is called upon to spend but only how much he can spend if he is fool enough to try. Thus, for example, when Montaigne tells us that the charges at the "Vaso d'Oro" at Rome would be about twenty crowns [£35] a month, we may conclude that if we ascertain what the average charges would be for the same accommodation at a first-rate hotel to-day, it is a more reasonable plan to take the difference as the difference between their money-values and ours than to accept a surplus in either, according to the usually accepted multiplying figure, as defining an increase or decrease in hotel charges.

Yet for all this, something remains to be said. A modern tourist often finds himself in the position of drawing his income from a locality where money is cheaper or dearer than in the districts where he is making his payments. Now, three hundred years ago, he would have met with these fluctuations more frequently and more suddenly than would be the case to-day; and when met with, they would often have been more violent. In so far as this was the case, so far is the relative cost affected. The causes of these fluctuations may be divided into (1) local custom, (2) insufficient linking-up of supply and demand. Hungary may be taken as an example of the latter, Germany of the former, cause; Poland and Spain of districts where social and economic forces jib at separate classification. In Hungary and the districts southeast of it the most seasoned traveller never failed to be astonished at the ideal natural conditions; "wheat," as Sir Thomas Browne's son said of Transylvania in particular a little later, "had no value in relation to the subsistence of a human being." There was no outlet for its products; the continual state of war kept commerce paralysed; Vienna had little need of it, Constantinople none at all; what the fertility of the soil produced so abundantly was thus available for local consumption only. Especially was this the case with products that needed no human tending; the man who ate a whole penn'orth of fish risked bursting. In Germany prices ruled low, yet so excessive was the drunkenness, and so general, that it was a moral impossibility to live cheaply without cutting one's self off from human society. Supper over, for instance, the "schlafftrinke" was set on the table, and whoever touched a drop of it had, by custom, to pay an even share with those who drank till morning.

The Spanish diet, which was such a trial to the inside if the stranger did conform to it, was equally a trial to his pocket if he did not. One tried both ways on one day in 1670.137 At noon he shared the landlord's dinner, paying a real [2s. 6d.] for vegetables, dried fish, fruit; but when in the evening he was one of six who dined on four fowls and neck of mutton, his bill came to the equivalent of £1 5s. not including wine. Poland, on the contrary, being the granary of Europe and exporting much else besides grain, rich in serf labour, and with its retail trade in the hands of denationalised aliens who were well under control, could afford to import plenty of luxuries and enjoyed abundance of necessaries: a goose or a pig for the equivalent of 1s. 6d., a loin of mutton for 1s. – such were prices in Poland.

A good test of relative cheapness is the value of the coin most generally useful; in Poland these were the brass 'banns,' worth about a penny farthing in to-day's values. Of Italy a similar statement may be made; of England just the contrary. And this presence, or absence, of plenty of small coins affects the tourist in two ways; partly in relation to his food, because the more common small change is, the more commonly customary is it to sell food in quantities suited to a single meal for one; secondly, the smaller the change, the smaller the tips. Before leaving the subject of food, an example may be quoted of the violence of the fluctuations in prices at that date when the means of carriage and of making wants known in time were so crude. Sir Henry Wotton writes, of his own knowledge, that the price of victuals at Venice was three times as high in 1608 as it had been in 1604.

Lastly, as regards necessary expenditure, what did their money itself cost them?

To begin with, the far greater length of time usually necessary then to prove identity, or to confirm references, must not be lost sight of, seeing how much it added to the seriousness of the hope deferred that maketh the pocket empty.

Next, to deal with the ways of remedying this – there were three ways, (1) Carrying cash; (2) depositing money with a merchant, or a friend, who either remits coins or advises an amount; (3) letters of credit.

Carrying cash meant carrying coins. At any rate, not one of these travellers mentions using the bank-notes of the day, the 'segni reppresentativi' just introduced by the Italian bankers, nor even the ancient semi-currency of jewels, unless one includes Henri III, who, when escaping from the throne of Poland to that of France, carried off three hundred thousand crowns' worth. Carrying coins for future use meant, in the ordinary way, sewing them up in one's clothes. The favourite place was inside a waistband of the breeches, a double one designed for that purpose, made of leather or canvas, forming a series of little pockets, all closed by pulling one string. It was so that Lithgow was carrying one hundred and thirty-seven double pieces of gold [probably double pistoles, equal to £500], when he and the gold were seized by the Inquisition at Malaga. Next to the waistband, under the arm-pits was the most usual spot; but it is given as advisable to use one's shabbiest garments in any case for this purpose, as the least likely to be searched thoroughly by robbers. In Muscovy the boots were more often used than other articles. A small reserve might be wrapped round with mending-material, with needles sticking into it to add to the innocence of its appearance; or it might be hidden at the bottom of a pot of ointment. By this latter means Moryson saved himself from utter destitution when robbed, having chosen ointment which smelt, apparently, like the Muscovite's fish. Equally ingenious and successful was another who smuggled all his money past the Mohammedan customs by hiding it in pork. Mohammedans themselves used their turbans.

QUITTANCE DU 18 JUIN 1548

Je moy Francoys Rabeles medecin de monseigneur reverendissime du Bellay confesse avoir receu de M. Benvenuto Olivier et comp(agnie) de Rome la somme de trente deulx escuz d'or en or lesquelz 32 escus il m'ont payez en vertu d'une lettre de change du XVIII e de may dernier passé de Thomas Delbenne et comp(agnie) de Paris et eulx à l'instance de M e Arnauld Combraglia. Et en foy de ce j'ay faict faire la presente tierze quittance laquel sera soubscripte de ma propre main. Ce XVIII e de juing 1548 en Rome.

Ita est. F. Rabelais, manu propriâ.RABELAIS RECEIVES SOME MONEY

The advantages of carrying money in this way – that of having it at hand for certain – was outweighed by the chances of robbery or confiscation; the latter by reason of there being legal limits to the amounts that might be taken away from countries and towns. Lyons was the most liberal, allowing sometimes eighty, sometimes one hundred "crowns of the sun" [£144 to £180]. Turin allowed fifty silver crowns [£75], Naples twenty-five; Rome, according to an edict in 1592, no more than five gold crowns [£8]. The rule in Spain was that no gold was to leave the country, and Spanish towns often enforced this against each other; from Murcia in 1617 no more than ten "reals of eight" [£11 5s.] might be taken free, but gold was not confiscated, duty being levied instead.

As for England, Hentzner found the limit of £10 in 1599, as did Gölnitz in some year soon after 1618, although Moryson, writing between these dates, gives £20. Still earlier, the Frenchman Perlin, who was here at the beginning of Queen Mary's reign, says that a pedestrian may take no more than ten crowns [£27], a horseman twenty, out of the realm; adding, however, that a man may convert the rest of his cash into goods and so, by realising these goods later, prevent confiscation; and also, that by accompanying an ambassador one is exempt from search. When it is remembered, further, that Francis Davison got inserted in his license to travel a clause enabling him to carry fifty pounds across with him (for three persons), that there were trustworthy merchants who would authorise correspondents abroad to pay the traveller whatever the latter might have deposited with them, and that these customs concerning the export of gold and silver were in use throughout Europe, it will be seen that if a traveller suffered loss by confiscation, he deserved his losses.

By far the greater number had their money advised at a cost of five to fifteen per cent, usually ten per cent, as against the three-quarters per cent which would probably represent a maximum of loss by exchange to-day to tourists. An unknown quantity lay in the differences of values, which might yield a profit, or might involve heavy loss. Bimetallism prevailed all over Europe, and the values of gold and silver both relative to each other and positive, fluctuated far more violently than is the case to-day. When Cavendish returned to England after his first circumnavigation of the world, the plunder depreciated gold in London by one twelfth; in 1603 the exchange from Venice to London was twenty-eight per cent in favour of Venice; in 1606 it was six per cent higher London to Venice than Venice to London.

But with all its disadvantages, remitting by advice was the most generally satisfactory and used method. The tenour of an average bill, however, has changed somewhat, "at sight" being the only one of the variable terms equally customary both then and now. Bills not drawn "at sight" were drawn at "usance," "half usance," or "double usance"; "usance" signifying a month as a rule. Exceptions were, of course, for longer distances, such as London and Venice, when "usance" meant three months; and how completely "usance" is a term of the past is shown by the fact that the periods implied by "usance," in the rare cases in which it is still found in use, have not altered since the sixteenth century, in spite of the advance in the quickness of communications. "Thirds of exchange," now nearly as extinct as "usances," were then kept in regular use by the uncertainty of the posts; and in view of the difficulties in the way of identification and the advantage that money-changers were likely to take of them, advices often contained a description of the payee.138

Method No. 3, letters of credit, was a more expensive one than remittance by advice, but for places for which no "usance" was established, was obligatory; under favourable circumstances it might cost no more than ten per cent. There is evidence enough to justify conjecture that the English government allowed their credit to be used sometimes for the convenience of tourists in order to facilitate a watch being kept on their movements.139

Barter also ought not to be wholly left out of sight. In Norway dried fish was more serviceable than coin, as was tobacco among Turks, the only people prompt to copy the English in the use of it for pleasure; but by the middle of the seventeenth century the same might be said of Western Russia. And there is the case of one Thomas Douglas in 1600 who could not make arrangements for four hundred crowns to be advised for him at Algiers, applying to the English government for leave to take with him duty-free the broadcloth he had bought with the money and meant to realise there, to discharge the ransom which the money represented.140

Supposing, however, that all these means failed? The tourist became a beggar till he found friends. He might try, of course, to raise a loan, but only on terms which would possibly induce him to prefer beggary. The "German Ulysses," Karl Nützel of Nuremberg, was robbed at Alexandria of his capital; at Cairo he persuaded a ship's captain to lend him four hundred ducats, undertaking to pay him six hundred at Constantinople. They arrived thither in two months; the interest was therefore at the rate of three hundred per cent.141 Sir Henry Wotton, when an ambassador, paid twenty per cent for a loan at Venice.

In considering loans we have passed away from necessities into the second half of the subject of cost, – its reasonable possibilities. These consist of the risks and difficulties to which the traveller was liable, nowhere summarised so well as in the English Litany, which was written at this period: —

"From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder; and from sudden death,

"Good Lord, deliver us."

Of the eight risks here mentioned, to most of which an Englishman at least was more liable abroad than at home, all but two have been minimised since. And if we note how in all other clauses of the Litany, only those troubles or desires which have affinity with each other are grouped together, it becomes significant in what company travellers are prayed for; —

"That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons, and young children; and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord."

To take the risk of violence first, and, among the forms of violence, war, it has to be remembered that the United Provinces was the only State whose soldiers were paid punctually. An effect of this laxness may be traced in the experience of a tourist in Picardy when the latter had been reduced to such a state of destitution by war that the commandants could not wring anything further out of the inhabitants and therefore forced contributions from travellers who passed through. In 1594 Moryson wished to remit from Venice to Paris, but no one had any correspondence farther than Geneva on account of the civil wars, in spite of these being nominally at an end. And they assured him it was twenty to one he would be robbed by the disbanded soldiers (which came true), and, if robbed, would be killed, because if they took him for an enemy they would think him well killed; if a friend, they would kill him to avoid making restitution; and the marshals were so strictly looked after that they would kill anyone who seemed likely to make complaints. The effect on prices receives illustration by comparing Andrew Boorde's experience of Aquitaine after a long period of peace and prosperity, – that one pennyworth [say 10d.] of bread will feed a man a week, and they sell nine cakes a penny, each cake being enough to last a man a day, "except he be a ravener," – with a letter from a Venetian gentleman,142 fifty-four years later, by which time civil war had become chronic. He writes from England, where he found that a good meal could be had for ten soldi [2s. 6d.], comparing this with France, which he had just traversed, where the same could not be bought for less than sixty soldi, or even a whole gold crown [£1 13s.]. As to Germany, in 1623, only five years after the Thirty Years' War broke out, Wotton writes that prices have risen enormously, "insomuch as I am almost quite out of hope to find Conscience any more, since there is none among the very hills and deserts, whither I thought she had fled."

The effect on communications goes without saying. Even worse than that was the danger from those whom the horrible cruelty of sixteenth-century warfare drove half-mad with grief and loss, who shook off civilisation and robbed and murdered recklessly. According to Aubigné, who witnessed the horrors which he dwells on at length in his "Les Tragiques," war demoralised even the dogs in a way that endangered every passer-by. Speaking of those around Moncontour, where was fought one of the battles which left most bodies on the field,

Vous en voyez l'espreuve au champ de Moncontour;Héréditairement ils ont, depuis ce jour,La rage naturelle, et leur race enyvréeDu sang des vrais François, se sent de la curée.

But it may be objected that the evidence of a sectarian historian is not admissible on any question of fact. Take, then, what a sober correspondent writes from the scene of the Thirty Years' War in 1639, not of dogs, but of men: "It is an ordinary thing in Brandenburg country to eat man's flesh,"143 and he goes on to tell how a judge has just met his death that way.

Again, De Thou, approaching Mérindol, finds not a soul to be seen; all had retired to caves at the sight of armed men. Elsewhere he saw all the peasants at work armed, and of one town nothing remained intact but a fountain and one street; the work of a commander, in the king's name, for the gratification of his private revenge. The state produced is well described by Sir Thomas Overbury in 1609 as one in which there was "no man but had an enemy within three miles, and so the country became frontier all over." What "frontier" meant is well defined by an Italian of this time as country to which a few could do no harm and in which many could not live. The prosperity of the Empire while this was the state of France has been already outlined; what it became, as a result of the civil war, while France was becoming the best organised and most civilised country in Europe, may be guessed from Reresby's description of the district which in 1600 had been the most comfortable in Christendom, that between Augsburg and Frankfurt; villages and towns uninhabited, much ground untilled, no meat to be had, no sheets, sometimes no beds; for drink, milk and water, little wine and that sour and very dear; people so boorish as to resemble beasts. Significant, too, is it that while Sir Philip Sidney, defining the qualities of the dominions of Europe for his brother, writes, "Germany doth excel in good laws and well administering of justice," and while all subsequent travellers for forty years confirm this, a German, Zeiler, compiled his guide to Spain shortly before the date when the correspondent just quoted wrote his letter, and in this guide, in maintaining the claims of Spain on the attention of the student, puts among the characteristics in which Spain excels the rest of Europe, the inflexibility of justice there.