I've read answers to questions on here about how far people in the Middle Ages could travel in a day and what travel was like, but I was wondering what would be considered a long trip (in terms of either days spent traveling or distance traveled) around the 15th century. Would conceptions of what constituted a long trip differ between lower and upper classes, since upper class people were able to travel faster and more easily?
Then as today, this question is too subjective to have one answer. "Long trip," after all, can refer to total distance traveled, distance traveled in one day, total time spent away from home, or time spent in transit. It can depend on the mode of transportation: villagers who came into Hedon (England) to buy and sell at market came from an average distance of 10-12km away if they were walking in on roads; an average distance of 20km if they were sailing down the Humber River.
It can depend on the travel experience of the traveler: papal nuncios in the 13C could make it from Rome to London in 30 days; teenage Catherine of Siena panicked when she walked so far in one day she realized she could not make it back home by sundown. And it can depend on individual circumstances. It took English princess Margaret, the new duchess of Brabant, 18 days to travel the first 85 miles of the journey to her new home because her wardrobe of belongings was too large for the team of horses to haul any faster. But in the early Reformation, stories abound of entire villages walking 11 miles in one direction to hear sermons from the "right" preacher.
So if this question only has meaning subjectively, in context, then we can answer it in context by shifting the wording slightly. Rather than what is a long trip, we ask, "what was a longer trip" in comparison to a shorter one of the same type. As we will see, a couple of important patterns will become apparent.
Marjorie Boyer calculated that the average distance traveled per day on a multiday trip, in 14C France, was around 30 miles. A horseback rider alone, with no accompanying pedestrians, could average in the upper thirties. To get beyond that, however, special measures had to be taken. Namely, the traveler would have to switch out horses multiple times. If this were done, distances of 52 and 56 miles traveled are recorded in sources. So notching 40-55 miles took significant extra effort, which is one way to define a longer trip.
Christopher Dyer studied the trading and market reach of English towns through a metropole/hinterland paradigm. As mentioned above, he found that the median distance traveled by villagers to a market or fair was around 10km (the range of medians for the different towns was 8-12.5). Other studies of the decline of markets in the late medieval English countryside have supported the "within 10km of a basic market" metric. However, there were standard exceptions: people from Bidford often preferred to travel the ~13km to Stratford rather than ~9k to Alcester to do their trading, which suggests 13 was still a "short" trip that would allow a person to spend the necessary time at market. On the other hand, as we saw earlier, 10km was a good distance for coming into Alcester over roads, but riverborne travelers came from a median distance of 20 km. So somewhere between 10 and 20 presumably clicked over from "shorter" to "longer."
To put one more comparison on the market travel idea: in contrast to the 10km median radius for travel to market, travel to immigrate to a town looking for work had a much wider sweep. New immigrants to Grimsby came from a median of 24km away. That would certainly be "longer" for people hoping to visit family members in one direction or another, but not yet "too long", since they were willing to go there but less so to towns farther away with equal or better opportunities.
Pilgrimage versus merchant, communications, and scholarly/pastoral travel introduced metrics for distance besides straight-up numbers. Looking at corpses buried with pilgrimage badges in Scandinavia suggests an interesting conception of "more prestigious" (ergo, "longer") pilgrimages. While overall surviving badges don't show a clear pattern of the largest number from the closest shrines, graves absolutely do. Which is to say: Scandinavian (mostly modern Swedish) people were not buried with pilgrimage badges from Scandinavian sites. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, but never Sweden. However, in terms of surviving ones from non-mortuary excavation, Scandinavian sites produced the second, third, and fourth highest survivals (after Santiago de Compostela). Here, it seems, a "long trip" was anything abroad.
Sacred math also plays a role in conceiving "longer" in terms of time. When offering indulgences for pilgrims to Rome during the 1350 jubilee, the papacy mandated that people living nearby spent 30 days participating in events and prayers at Rome. For travelers from abroad, only 15 days were required. So 7 days of travel in each direction was evidently set aside as some kind of purgatorial equivalency. (Pilgrims to Rome often ended up camping in the hills near the city rather than staying in inns).
Time of travel also made a different for messengers and errand-runners. Boyer found some pressure on people to pull off round trips in one day, complete with a bit of time to accomplish the errand. For this, 15 miles in one direction seems to have been standard. This should be set next to the 30-38 average miles traveled per day over longer trips. (These trips, I think, would be more likely to be a single rider or riders on horseback, unencumbered by walking support staff).
15 miles also makes an appearance in one final, intriguing source of a "long" trip. When we look at cases of exile as legal punishment in late medieval cities, the radius of the banned zone does vary--England is most famous for banishing people from the island altogether, of course, but in Italy I've seen numbers ranging up to fifty miles. However, our good friend 15 miles makes an appearance frequently--I've seen it typically in Nuremberg and Augsburg (and when Nuremberg cases are different, it's often remarked as such by scholars), but came across a couple of Italian cases as well. It seems that 15 miles was a good benchmark for "long enough."
And for one final comparative metric of a long trip, we go back to little Catherine of Siena discovering the Italian countryside for the first time. When she realized it was getting late and she would not make it home in time to not worry her parents, God himself intervened and transported her miraculously home. For the deity himself, it seems, one day of travel was indeed "long enough."