Traveling parties in medieval Europe were not exactly rolling in the options for transportation means: horses, carts, and human feet. That last was by far the most common. It is just incredible to think about people walking from Italian cities to the French coast, from Toledo to Salerno, from Paris to Constantinople. According to Marjorie Nice Boyer, who combed through records from fourteenth-century France, travellers on foot could expect to walk around 30 miles per day. That could mean somewhere between eight to ten hours of just walking, one step after another, and all of them without hiking boots, memory foam insoles, or Darn Tough socks.
Trundling along with carts, particularly ones laden with trade goods, might slow down the travelling party. For example, when Margaret, newly minted Duchess of Brabant, decided to move her entire clothing collection to her marital home in 1297, it took the cart eighteen days to travel the first 85 or so miles, from London to Ipswich. (And it took five horses to move the cart even that “speed.”)
Mounted travellers, on the other hand, could make much better speed. Here, Boyer calculated distances in the 30 to 40 miles a day range for the most part. Sometimes people pushed harder on shorter journeys, but a speed upwards of forty does not seem to have been very sustainable. Except in one very special circumstance: when matters were extremely pressing and money sufficient, a rider could periodically switch to a fresh horse.
Two of Boyer’s cases involving a professional messenger on a time-pressing errand saw their riders covering 52 and 56 miles per day. But the worst part of all? More often than not, mounted riders seem to have travelled with a valet or two—who walked while they rode.
