Hi, I had some inspiration for writing a fantasy novella the other day that features an itinerant "knight" having to travel between village to village all over the kingdom. The problem is that, upon reflecting on it, I don't really know how people used to travel prior to carriages & automobiles. I mean, I have some idea that pack animals would be brought along and the knight probably wouldn't be wearing their armor at all times while travelling, but I want to try and write something a little more grounded/plausible. Hence the title, where I'm looking for any sort of book that looks at how people moved between places, preferably one that showcases the differences in travelling between the elite, the "middle class" who could afford a horse / pack animal, and those who had to travel on their own two feet.
Some of my naive questions that I would hope to have answered in this book are as follows:
Just how far would people travel in a day? I know that this depends on the pace that they were trying to set, but let's assume a casual pace. How much quicker would people travel on horses? Would people ever "push" their horses into a gallop when travelling? Or is that just a good way to mistreat your horse? If you didn't have a horse, would you have to pull a cart of some kind?
How was arms & armor transported while travelling? I know that while plate armour was actually more ergonomic than most people believe that it still wouldn't be worn all day while travelling. Would anything lighter be worn instead for longer-term wear? Like a mail shirt or gambeson? Were swords worn in sheathes while travelling or packed away in bags?
How spaced apart were villages (I know this is going to vastly depend on the terrain in question) but could you usually make it from one to the other in a day's travel? Would people pitch tents in the night if they were stuck out in the woods? If the traveler stopped for the night in a foreign village on the way to their destination, would there actually be "inns" for them to stay in?
Any and everything related to food. Were there specific kinds of food that were seen more as "travel rations"? I am picturing stuff like hard tack & jerky, something that stays preserved.
All sorts of other things.
If anyone could recommend any good resources on learning more about this topic I would greatly appreciate it, thank you!
It's a gigantic topic. Here are some basic places to start, and you will want to mine the bibliographies for more focused stuff, probably in journal essay form.
Newman, Paul B. 2011. Travel and trade in the Middle Ages. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.
covers mode of travel, timeframes, infrastructure, obstacles
Taylor et al. 2010. Encyclopedia of medieval pilgrimage. Leiden: Brill.
not directly related but probably a useful resource to have for specific topics
Bork and Kann. 2008. The art, science, and technology of medieval travel. Ashgate.
some discussion of maps, mapping, and navigation (in part 3) in particular
Webb, Diana. 1999. Pilgrims and pilgrimage in the medieval West. London: I.B. Tauris.
this one gets down to the nitty-gritty. Similar to Newman above.
Ohler, Norbert. 1989. The medieval traveller. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell.
Romano, John F. 2020. Medieval travel and travelers: a reader. University of Toronto Press.
a "reader" is a book format that showcases (mostly) primary source documents.
Legassie, Shayne. 2017. The medieval invention of travel. University of Chicago Press.
this is about the concept of traveling for traveling's sake, not so much the nuts and bolts of the act
Gascoigne, Alison L., Leonie V. Hicks, and Marianne O'Doherty. 2016. Journeying along medieval routes in Europe and the Middle East. Brepols.
Since /u/Alkibiades415 has already posted a quite extensive book list, I have very little to add to it.
+++
Just how far would people travel in a day?
To calculate the average traveling distance per day, I mainly made use of [the article citing] the medieval pilgrim itinerary (plus modern road map/ Google map) below:
I suppose you can refer at least to Ortenberg's seminal article on the basic information on the itinerary on Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from southern England to Rome: ORTENBERG, VERONICA. “Archbishop Sigeric’s Journey to Rome in 990.” Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990): 197–246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44509958.
In the end of the Middle Ages, a few visual map of the network of such pilgrimage road also became available (as shown in Erhard Etzlaub's map, published in Nürnberg around 1500), but until then (or at least by the end of the 14th century), our knowledge on the stations and itinerary is mainly based on narrative sources like the itinerary.
How spaced apart were villages (I know this is going to vastly depend on the terrain in question) but could you usually make it from one to the other in a day's travel?
My previous brief and clumsy summary of the safe conduct (geleit) system within HRE during the later Middle Ages, found in: I'm a traveler in ad1200 going from Lübeck across the HRE to Rome on secular business; Do I travel alone or in a group? Do we camp every night in the woods or am I in a Tavern/Inn every night? and/or In many video games, movies, fiction books, etc there are wooden signposts between Medieval towns pointing in the direction of the next town down that road. Were such signposts common? Who built and maintained them?, is actually also drawn mainly from: Spufford, Peter. Power & Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
