CHAPTER VIII
THE PURSE
A traveller! by my faith, you have great reason to be sad: I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's.
As You Like It (about 1599).
The cost of travelling divides itself into two kinds; direct and indirect: that is, into the outlay which the traveller must reckon on and that which he has to reckon with. The first kind, the necessities, consists of fares, food, lodging, passports, tolls, etc., together with loss by exchange of money or by charges on remittances. The second kind, the possibilities, includes loss by robbery, by war, by disease, lack of legal privileges, ignorance of local custom, and such like eventualities in so far as any one was liable to suffer from them through being a stranger in a strange land.
But before considering the most elementary necessaries, some working arrangement must be established about translating payments into terms of English money of the present day. In the first place, between 1542 and 1642 money fell from about nine times its present value to about five times. Dates must therefore be found within which the multiplication figure must become successively nine, eight, seven, six. Suppose the first figure be taken up to 1556, when the States General met at Brussels to deal with Philip II's debt; the second figure thence to 1589, the year when the failure of the Spanish Armada began to tell on economics; seven from 1589 to 1612, at which date the bankruptcy of the Welser firm affected all Europe; and six thenceforward. If these are reasonable fictions, it is the utmost that can be achieved; in so far as they are not, the definiteness of the system makes correction of it easier. Amounts arrived at by these reckonings are given in square brackets. Usually, however, the original amounts have first to be translated out of continental coinage into contemporary English, a process which involves a series of comparisons too long to be tabulated here, and often, even then, needing modification as a result of the context in which the particular statement occurs. This is mentioned only as indicating a fresh source of uncertainty, and possibly of error. A third factor in these amounts as here given is as reliable as the two former factors are unreliable; every original amount represents an actual transaction by a traveller between 1542 and 1642, except where otherwise stated.
Necessities and possibilities are sometimes found considered jointly in general estimates. Sir Philip Sidney considered his brother should have two hundred pounds a year allowed him for travelling. This was in 1578, and he would be reckoning according to the highest standard that a young Englishman would have a use for.
Dallington, a guide-book writer, speaking for Englishmen in France in 1598, estimates eighty pounds a year; if one servant is taken and riding-lessons required, one hundred and fifty pounds; over two hundred pounds is excessive; while another, Cleland, in his "Institution of a Young Nobleman" (1607) considers two hundred pounds a year enough for four persons. Howell (1642) says three hundred pounds for the youngster at Paris, with fifty pounds each in addition for a cook, a valet, and a page; but then Howell had acted as tutor and no doubt hoped to do so again as soon as he could get free from the Fleet Prison, where he lay when his pamphlet was published. Under these circumstances he was likely to be considering his own pocket rather than the father's. Nevertheless, two of the brothers Coligny [Henri II's courtiers], when planning a year's tour through Italy in 1546, were said to have put aside fourteen thousand scudi [£30,000] for expenses; which annoyed their uncle.[117] But within a year or two of this estimate, Evelyn was travelling farther afield than Paris,—he stayed seven months in Rome alone,—keeping one servant throughout, sometimes two, learning under several masters, and making costly and extensive purchases, on less than three hundred pounds annually. Of Sir Richard Fanshawe, again, his wife records that "during some years of travel" (less than seven, for certain) "he had spent a considerable part of his stock"; this stock consisted of what his parents had bequeathed him, fifteen hundred pounds, and fifty pounds a year: his travel lay mainly in France and Spain previous to 1630.
Fynes Moryson, too, gives his expenditure as from fifty to sixty pounds a year, which included the cost of two journeys, one in spring, one in autumn. He was accustomed to the best standard of living at home, but his income was hardly adequate to his social position and by temperament he was a temperate and adaptable man; more so, to say the least, than the son of Davison, the Secretary of State whom Queen Elizabeth made the scapegoat for the death of Queen Mary Stewart.