And now the tourist's last and longest journey has been told; he is at home safe, leaving us with nothing fresh to tell except the incidentals of his journeyings, and leaving us, one tourist, at least, with his blessing: "In the meantime I leave thee, gentle reader, travelling towards the heavenly Jerusalem, where God grant at length we may all arrive, Jesus Christ being our pilot and Janizary to conduct us thereunto."
CHAPTER VI
INNS
| Servus. | ... Però con licentia, quando quierese ir vuessa merced? | Sed bona venia, quando vult recedere T. D.? | |
| Viator. | Mañana, plaziendo à Dios, en caso que pueda madrugar | Cras, si Deo placet, si possim diluculo surgere. | |
| Servus. | Paraque no se queda aqui aun algunos dias? | Quare non manet hic adhuc per aliquot dies? | |
| Viator. | El huesped y el pesce en tres dias hiede | Hospes et piscis post triduum foetent. |
Müller, "Linguæ Hispanicæ Institutio," 1630.
It is a most unsatisfactory thing—reading about what you would like to see; but if seeing sixteenth-century Europe implied spending the nights in sixteenth-century inns there is much to be said for preferring the experience in print only. Luxury of a kind certainly was to be had. At the "Vasa d'Oro" at Rome were gorgeous beds, hung with silk and cloth of gold, worth four to five hundred crowns each; at the "Ecu" at Châlons silken bedding, too; and Germany occasionally provided sheets trimmed with lace four-fingers'-breadth wide in panelled rooms, while by 1652 Amsterdam possessed a hotel reckoned the best in Europe, every room in which was floored with black and white marble and hung with pictures, with one room containing an organ and decorated with gilded leather in place of tapestries. But these superfluities did not imply that a comfortable medium was easily found. In any case, accommodation divided itself into bedroom and dining-room; of anything approaching a sitting-room there is rarely a word. The chief exception to this is the five or six halls, decorated and furnished like those of a rich gentleman, at the inn outside Sinigaglia. This was the finest hotel in Italy when built, shortly before 1578, by the Duke of Urbino, who allowed no other there. Its forty bedrooms, with no more than two beds in each, all opened on to one long gallery by separate doors.[93]
The Italian host the traveller would often see before the inn came in sight; sometimes the latter would have touts as far away as seven or eight leagues to buttonhole foreigners, carry their luggage, promise anything and behave with the utmost servility—till the morning of departure. But with all this to expect them to provide clean sheets was expecting too much, and as the nation was grievously afflicted with the itch, it was desirable for the visitor to carry his own bedding. In many cases, too, we find the tourist sleeping on a table in his clothes to avoid the dirtiness of the bed, or the vermin. Still, in Italy, you shared your bed with these permanent occupants only, as a rule; in Spain you were sure to do so; one man, one bed, was the custom there—a result of the enforcement of the penalty of burning alive for sodomy. In Germany the custom was just the reverse; in fact, if the tourist did not find a companion for himself, the host chose for him, and his bedfellow might be a gentleman, or he might be a carter; all that could safely be prophesied about him was that he would be drunk when he came to bed. The bed would be one of several in a room; the covering a quilt, warm enough to be too warm for summer, and narrow enough to leave one side of each person exposed in winter. This is supposing there were beds: in northern Germany rest for the night would be on a bench in a "stove," as they called the room, because the stove was so invariably part of the furniture that the words "room" and "stove" became synonymous. Windows were never opened at night, to retain the heat in the room; all the travellers lay there, men and women, gentlemen and "rammish clowns," as near the stove as they could manage. The heat was such that the effect on one unaccustomed to it was "as if a snake was twining about his legs." Further, if several met together, says a Frenchman, one might as well try to sleep in a market-place on market-day. In upper Germany, the bedrooms were separate, without fires or the means of making one, and the change from the one temperature to the other was very trying. As many beds were put in a room as the room would hold; fairly clean ones, however, as the Germans treated them with some disinfectant. In Saxony there were no beds, no benches, no stove, even. All lay in the straw among the cows, the chief disadvantage of which was that your pillow was liable to be eaten in the night. So in Poland, too, where it meant a cold and dangerous night, in the country parts, at least, for any one who did not adapt himself to the custom of the country by using the long coat lined with wolfskins which served the Pole as cloak by day and bedding by night.
As a relief from the general statements, a particular instance may be quoted to exemplify a night by the way in Poland. The sleeping-room struck the writer as something between a stable and a subterranean furnace. Six soldiers lay on the ground as if dead; the peasant-tenant, his wife, children, and servants, lay on benches round the walls, with coverings of straw and feathers; in one corner slept a Calvinist, a baron's secretary; in another, on the peasant's straw pallet, an ambassador's chaplain, a Roman Catholic; and between the two, to save each, it seemed, from the heels of the other, was lying a huge Tartar, a captain in the Polish army, who had made up a bed of hay for himself. About the room were dogs, geese, pigs, fowls; while the corner by the oven was conceded to a woman who had just given birth to a child. The baby cried, the mother moaned, the tired servants and soldiers snored; and early in the morning the writer rose from the shelf he was sharing with some leggings, spurs, and muskets, and escaped.[94]
Speaking generally, there were no beds to be found in the North. In Muscovy everything had to be carried along; without a hatchet, tinder-box, and kettle there was no hot food for the wayfarer till he reached a monastery or a town, much less shelter; unless by chance he came across somebody's one-story cabin which would have no outlet for the smoke except the door, and accommodation below the level of the average stable, one room shared between the family, visitors, and live-stock. When Sir Jerome Horsey was at Arensberg, in the island of Oesel, near the gulf of Riga, in 1580, snakes crept about bed and table and the hens came and pecked at them in the flour and the milk.