Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 133

This book offers the inviting prospect of an exploration of the ways in which travel featured in the works of literature penned by authors in the early modern period. Through an assured analysis of a large selection of texts, chosen because they engage substantially with issues of sixteenth and seventeenth-century personal mobility, Andrew McRae examines how contemporaries understood mobility and made sense of the increasing geographical connectedness of England. He opens proceedings, somewhat conventionally, with the itineraries of John Leland and perhaps slightly overstates notions of the ‘parochial xenophobia’ and ‘intense localism’ that gripped England in the early Tudor era (p.8). However, in taking Leland and Defoe as the ‘bookends’ of his study, McRae neatly locates his survey in a time when both the volume and the acceptability of domestic travel within England undoubtedly increased. He also reveals changes in the way in which mobility was reflected in English literature.

Once the broad context has been established, a beguiling and fascinating first chapter discusses literature devoted to England’s rivers. Citing ‘river poems’, such as William Vallan’s A tale of two swannes, McRae shows how ideas about connection, representation and national identity were evoked. It is a compelling thesis, enriched by references to John Leland’s Cygnea Cantio, which describes another swan on a journey from Abingdon to Oxford; and to William Camden’s De Connubio Tamae, which traces the Isis, the Tame and the Thames. The better-known works of Spenser and Drayton are similarly deconstructed. A petition presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1585 in the form of a poem by the Thames watermen, John Byshop, offers a glimpse of new thinking about the need to divest rivers of obstacles and other impediments to travel. Byshop’s sentiments found an echo half a century later in the extraordinary pamphlets of another Thames waterman, John Taylor. Attention then turns to the evocations of place, mobility and contested uses in the ‘prospect poems’ of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew and Andrew Marvell. The latter’s Upon Appleton House, for example, refers uneasily to itinerant mowers arriving to harvest meadow grass for hay. Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill offers reflections on the Thames as a floating highway for the movement of agricultural products and general merchandise.

Unlike rivers, roads were apparently ‘not considered poetic’ (p.69). Of all the early modern poets, only Michael Drayton in Poly-Olbion gives them any considered attention. The author therefore turns to written itineraries, road maps, and pamphlets of directions for peddlers and chapmen. These sources are, of course, all very well known. However, McRae’s analysis of the so-called ‘rogue pamphlets’ is especially valuable. Thus, Thomas Harman’s 1566 Caveat for common cursitors vulgarly called vagabonds shows how fears about the supposed risks of road travel were being stoked up. Suspicions and misgivings crystallized into legislation, such as the 1598 vagrancy statute, which sought to restrict mobility that was considered morally dangerous and socially subversive. Paradoxically, however, the expansion of commerce positively encouraged travel and publications designed to make journeys easier, such as pocket itineraries and distance tables, poured forth. Ogilby’s road maps may thus be seen less as something entirely new, and more as just a culmination of responses made to growing demand. At the same time, Chamberlayne, Procter, Mace, and Defoe offered practical suggestions about how England’s highways might be improved and better managed.

Works such as Laurence Clarkson’s The lost sheep found, intertwine the realities of quotidian travel on England’s ways and highways with allegorical journeys through life. This leitmotif, of course, found its fullest and best-known expression in Bunyan’s The pilgrim’s progress. The genre presents roads as spaces of mobility and as complex networks offering many choices, but the correct path leads to spiritual understanding and reward. A powerful image of how travel was conceptualized and imagined is thus provided.

A chapter on inns, alehouses and taverns shows how early modern literature captures their ‘edgy social dynamics’ (p.129). As points of temporary stasis in the ever-shifting geography of mobility, where the local and the alien fleetingly mingled, these establishments were presented as places of hospitality and repose; and as spaces of degeneracy and criminality: unpaid bills, horse theft, robbery, and nefarious business transactions. As expected, Mistress Quickly’s London tavern, featured in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, is shown as a place of material threats and social challenges, as well as human warmth and conviviality. A fascinating deconstruction is provided of the little-known Ben Jonson play, The New Inn, which emphasizes the transience that such establishments inevitably embodied, and their potential for causing discomfort and disorder.

Contemporary poetry and prose richly captures royal progresses: from the ‘highly theatricalized performance of authority’ (p.146) perfected by Elizabeth I, to the ignominious flight in disguise of Charles I from Oxford in 1646. Royal ‘progress roads’ are evoked as spaces of political connectivity and for the demonstration of dynastic legitimacy. Authors who chronicle the collapse of royal power in the Civil War envision journeys and highways as metaphors for instability and uncertainty.

Travel writing as a genre is traced from John Leland to Celia Fiennes, by whose time the ‘recreational journey’ was unremarkable. A cameo appearance is made by Thomas Coryat, whose 1611 account of his low-budget foreign travels prefigured the era of the Grand Tour. Consideration is given to the so-called ‘journey poems’ which originated in 1583 with Richard Eede’s Iter Boreale, and flowered fully in the post-Restoration era. When accounts of their peregrinations were written by Evelyn and Pepys, the observations resulting from the tourist’s gaze were commonplace. From them and others we learn of growth in the volumes and varieties of traffic using England’s ways: a burgeoning internal trade that offered the most visible expression of the country’s ‘changing pattern of domestic mobility’ (p.210).

The 14 pamphlets published between the 1610s and the 1640s by the Thames waterman, John Taylor (the self-styled ‘water poet’) are dissected and perhaps best encapsulate the central message about the transformation in mobility and domestic travel in England which McRae’s book presents. Thus, ‘Taylor perceives all places, both within England and beyond, as potentially connectable with all other places’ (p.231). And when Defoe produced his Tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain in the 1720s, he presented an image of nationhood based on geography, realized in a complex web of trade networks; it stood as an emblem of ‘wider patterns of mobility, commodities and information’ (p.237). That such a perception would by then have been widely shared, in a manner that it would not have been in the days of John Leland, is a central argument in this most erudite and scholarly volume.