This is an oddly specific one, I know, but I thought it would be worth asking as I've been Googling and searching every database available to me and I'm not coming up on any useful or sourced answers!
I am writing an MA dissertation on travel writers in the long-eighteenth century. One of the lesser-known writers I'm using as a case study travelled exclusively on horseback, and it would be useful to one of my points of argument/speculation to know how much this might have cost her - preferably with any sources possible as obviously I can't use reddit as a source in my dissertation!
Thank you in advance to anyone who could possibly try to help me with this.
You want to read Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (continuum, 2007). It's a comprehensive work on the place of horses in society from working nags, saddle horses, military mounts and more. His bibliography is replete with useful secondary sources but also almost three pages of contemporary texts about keeping horses, many if which were printed in the mid to late 1600s and early 1700s. I am sure many of these are accessible through your institutional access.
Another one you might want to check out for your period is the work by Dorian Gerholdt who has written several articles (and a very good book 'carriers and coachmasters' but probably not for your topic) on issues of transportation and roads of the period, but importantly for you, drawing primarily from period texts and travellers guides which will be in the bibliography of his works.
Sorry I couldn't be of much use beyond recommending these but I'm mid-move and the books themselves are in boxes...somewhere otherwise I would have scoured them for you myself.
Best of luck with the MA!