How did people in Britain get about before 1820?

[Dave the Walrus]

I have chosen 1820 because rail travel was not really available until after this time. I am thinking about people in rural areas, who were not at all wealthy.

I suggest that the bulk of the populace just had to walk. If they worked on farms, I suppose they could get the occasional lift on a farm wagon, or perhaps on market day, they all piled onto the farm cart and off they went.

I think that only the rich could afford a horse or horse and carriage. Travel by stagecoach was also out of the question, as being too expensive.
One idea springs to mind and that is travelling by boat, if you had one, just a simple rowing boat or barge, in the more industrialised areas.

This leads me to the point of all of this and that is I suggest that people tended to be restricted to their own neighbourhood: perhaps their own county, because it all depended upon how far you could walk in a day.

However, people must have made up their minds to go to another area, at times, to look for work perhaps and brought along the whole family later, when they had got settled in.

I got started on all of this because I am having difficulty finding a suitable "time zone" for a Charles Mabbutt from the Wiltshire area round about the year 1825: the nearest suitable matches seem to come from the Gloucester area and that got me wondering if this is a feasible match.

Best wishes,


Dave the Walrus

[mike175]

Hi Dave,

I think you just about summed it up, but don't underestimate the distances walked in pre-industrial times.

Today most people wouldn't dream of walking when there are so many faster alternatives, but for most of man's existence it was the only way. After all, our ancestors walked (in stages) from Africa to all parts of the world!

I'm sure it is possible to walk at least 20 miles a day, so within a week you could be well over 100 miles away . . .

Mike.

[genjen]

I think twenty miles a day is hugely underestimating the distances travelled on foot by many of our ancestors. Today, most people who do such distances in the UK do it for pleasure and take in a few mountain tops en route. But purposeful walking would take us many more miles than that.

If you look at the lifestyles in other parts of the world, walking long distances - or what we consider to be such - is still a normal part of life.

Agricultural labourers in the days about which you are talking moved from one area to another, following the availability of work. Some of mine wandered back and forth between Yorkshire and Durham, not a huge distance but it does make for some difficulties tracking them down!!

Jen

[Nick29]

Country folk used horses and traps (or horses and carts on farms), and in the bigger cities there were plenty of horse drawn vehicles - horse-drawn buses started in London in 1829.  Hay was put down in the streets in posher areas to quieten down the noise.

[youngtug]

The ordinary ag, lab, would not have been able to purchase, keep and maintain a horse/pony and trap. Not to say that they never travelled considerable distances by shanks's pony and the possibility of getting a lift along the way.

[IMBER]

Don't overlook canal passenger boats. Coastal passenger traffic was also considerable

[nainmaddie]

Also River traffic.  In Devon they quite often travelled up and down the river, so I was told by a more experienced librarian at the Record office.

[Jeuel]

Walking or "Shank's Pony" as my Mum always called it, was probably the most common method of transport.  Even in the 1930s when George Orwell visited the north for his book "The Road to Wigan Pier" he talked about miners walking several miles to their mine, and then facing a further several miles before they got to the coalface.

My grandfather thought nothing of a 13-mile walk as leisure, so a few miles to and from work would be nothing.

I had about a mile to walk to and from primary school, there, back for lunch, back to school and then home again.  Today, I work in a primary school where many children are driven and they complain about a short walk when we go into the town to the church or to explore the environment.  I still walk to work, about 1.5 miles and most of my car-owning colleagues think I'm mad.

[Dave the Walrus]

Hi Everybody,

I think you are right and that a 20 mile walk per day would be quite feasible. I had been basing my idea upon the march that a soldier could do, say in Napoleonic times, which is said to have been about 10 to 12 miles per day, but of course this was probably for a large body of men and involved "waiting" for supply wagons, so that they would not lag behind.

When we lived in Scotland, I forced myself and my boys to go for walks. A walk of 2 miles there and two miles back was standard for us and I know that all of our ancestors would fall about laughing at this and I can almost hear the jokes that they would make about it.

These people must have been much more fit than us.


Dave