What You’d Need to Survive Medieval Travel
Before setting out on any journey in medieval England, it was worth knowing what lay ahead — and the honest answer was a great deal of hard going.
The main roads were old Roman routes, worn by a thousand years of use into a mess of potholes, subsidence, and mud. Chaucer’s pilgrims on their way to Canterbury were travelling along the old Roman Watling Street, and the road from London to York via Lincoln followed Ermine Street. There were no signposts and no reliable maps, so anyone straying from the main route had to find a guide or ask directions from locals, who were often suspicious of strangers and not especially helpful. People travelled in groups because bandits were a real danger; the law even required trees and undergrowth to be cleared back a hundred yards on either side of the road, to deny robbers cover for an ambush.
At the end of the day, abbeys and priories were expected to give a traveller bed and board for a night. A donation was expected in return, or a day’s work if the traveller was short of coin. That bed might well be shared with a stranger, along with the usual fleas, bedbugs, and lice, so a small bottle of lavender water to keep the insects at bay was a sensible thing to pack — even though no one at the time realised that fleas spread the plague. Travellers also carried their own seasoning: a small flask containing vinegar, mustard seed, salt, herbs, and garlic. It made dubious inn and abbey food more palatable and, as it happens, had antiseptic properties too.
Explore the complete Draychester Chronicles reading order and book collection.