Touring in 1600

Italians had a sauce of their own, according to Moryson (who has also supplied all the above German recipes), made of bread steeped in broth, walnuts, some leaves of marjoram pounded in a mortar, and gooseberry juice. Much need they had of a sauce, too, for by the "lex Foscarini" it was forbidden to kill an ox until he was unfit for work in the fields. It may be suggested that it is time the "lex Foscarini" was repealed. In the north was plenty of mutton and veal; variety of fish and poultry, mushrooms, snails, and frogs; in Tuscany, kid and boar. First and last everywhere came butter and cheese; everywhere, that is, where any pretence was made of catering for tourists; at Carrara Moryson found the inns only fit for labourers, and dined on herbs, eggs, and chestnuts, while Peter Mundy, near Turin, had to pay the equivalent of six shillings for "an egg and a frog and bad wine." De Thou, moreover, using a main road, that from Naples to Rome, became so done up through the badness of the inns as to seem to have completed a long and troublesome illness rather than a journey. But something might be said for the average Italian inn as seen from the street. Through the great open windows – really open, for there was rarely glass in Italian windows except at Venice – the tables were in view, always spread with white cloths, strewn with flowers and fig-leaves and fruits, with glasses set filled with different coloured wines; during summer, the glasses would be floating in an earthen vessel, for coolness.

In France, for some reason, Normandy seems to have made foreigners more comfortable than elsewhere, yet Picardy, so little distant, was just the opposite. Picardy, however, at this time was stamped with the character of border-country more disastrously than any other district of France. Nothing remained, indeed, to the country as a whole, as regards cooking, but a reputation for entrées, or, as they were called then, "quelques-choses." "A hard bed and an empty kitchen" was a common experience in different districts; one party arrived at Antibes, on the Riviera, in 1606, to find one melon constituting all the provisions of the only inn.

Comparison of the fare in the various countries of Europe shows no more striking inequalities of supply than is the case with butter: in Poland so plentiful as to be used for greasing cart-wheels; in France so scarce and so bad that English ambassadors used to import theirs from home; in Spain still scarcer, except in cow-breeding Estremadura. A German, when he wanted to buy butter, was directed to an apothecary, who produced a little, and that much rancid, preserved in a she-goat's bladder for use as an ingredient in salves, telling him there was not such another quantity in all Castile.

It was not merely on account of the sleeping accommodation that those who had been to Spain thanked God for their return and wondered at it. The wine, they said, was undrinkable, owing to the flavour imparted to it by the skins that held it; and as for eatables, all had to be bought separately by the traveller and cooked by him when he was tired. A still greater trouble was to find any to buy. One complains that his stomach roared for want of victuals and had to be answered with nothing but roast onions; and so on. But here again can be traced the effects of their buying their experience in the north: what the south thought of the north may be guessed from the Andalusian hero of a picaresque tale recollecting how the food of a Catalan acquaintance of his consisted of hard bread once every three days. The force of prejudice may be exemplified by a note or two from the journal of a courtier95 who followed after Prince Charles when the latter went incognito to Madrid. His chief complaints as to food are: At the first stopping-place past Santander, whither notice of their coming had been sent a fortnight earlier, they had a plank instead of a table, a few eggs, half a kid burnt black, and no table linen. At a tavern in a wood, the woman laid a cloth on a stool by way of a table, and placed two loaves on it while she fried eggs and bacon for them: enter, from the wood, two black swine who knock the stool over and depart with a loaf each. And yet, although he has noted having enjoyed a good fat turkey at one place and very good hens at another, when he lands at Weymouth he says that there was more meat on the table than he had seen in two hundred miles riding in Spain.

But even in the north different tales are told sometimes. Charles II, when in exile, writes from Saragossa,96 "But I am very much deceived in the travelling in Spain, for, by all reports, I did expect ill cheer and worse living, and hitherto we have found both the beds, and especially the meat very good… God keep you, and send you to eat as good mutton as we have every meal." Lady Fanshawe is more detailed. "I find it a received opinion that Spain affords not food either good or plentiful; true it is that strangers who have neither skill to choose, nor money to buy, will find themselves at a loss: but there is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle, and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world; bacon beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger and fatter than ours; mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours… They have the best partridges I ever eat, and the best sausages; and salmons, pikes, and sea-breams which they send up in pickle to Madrid, and dolphins, which are excellent meat and carps, and many other sorts of fish. The cream, called 'nata,' is much sweeter and thicker than any I ever saw in England; their eggs much exceed ours; and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. What I most admired are melons, peaches, burgamot pears, grapes, oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, pomegranates; besides that I have eaten many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats I have not here mentioned."

Both these quotations, it is true, refer to the middle of the seventeenth century.

England was a land of plenty in these days; Poland no less so. The sum of the experience of those who had first-hand means of comparison suggests that Poland was as great an importer of luxuries as any country in Europe. Muscovy did not import, but was well off, nevertheless; plenty of beef, mutton, pork, and veal, and all the more of them for foreigners seeing that, with fast-days so numerous as they were, the natives had become so used to salt fish that they ate little meat, although the salt fish, insufficiently salted, was often in a state like that of the fish which the good angel provided for Tobit to protect him from a demon, the scent whereof was so terrible that it drove the fiend into the uttermost parts of Egypt. In Lent butter was replaced by caviare. An ambassador's secretary has a pleasant picture to draw of wayside fare; when they reached a village, the local priest would appear with gooseberries, or fish, or a hen, or some eggs, as a present; was rewarded with aqua-vitæ, and generally went home drunk.

As for food at sea, on small boats no fires were allowed. Then you were limited, in the Mediterranean, to biscuit, onions, garlic, and dried fish. On the bigger ships there was garlic again, to roast which and call it "pigeon" was a stock joke with the Greek sailors. On an Italian ship of nine hundred tons one traveller fared well: there were two table-d'hôte rates; he chose the higher one: knife, spoon, fork, and a glass to himself were provided, fresh bread for three days after leaving a harbour, fresh meat at first and afterwards salt meat, and on fast days, eggs, fish, vegetables, and fruit. An English idea97 of victualling a ship included wheat, rice, currants, sugar, prunes, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves, oil, old cheese, wine, vinegar, canary sack, aqua-vitæ, water, lemon juice, biscuit, oatmeal, bacon, dried neats' tongues, roast beef preserved in vinegar, and legs of mutton minced and stewed and packed in butter in earthen pots; together with a few luxuries, such as marmalade and almonds.

Finally, there is the food to be met with in Ireland, concerning which it is enough to quote:98 "Your diet shall be more welcome and plentiful than cleanly and handsome; for although they did never see you before, they will make you the best cheer their country yieldeth for two or three days and take not anything therefor."

Except in Italy, fingers invariably did the work of forks; and often of knives, too. The French were the only people who were in the habit of washing before they sat down to table; but this is by no means so much to their credit as it seems at first sight, for it was the result of their getting into such a state previously as to render them intolerable even to themselves. Except for the effects of drunkenness, the Germans appear to have been the pleasantest table companions, in spite of all sitting at one round table; or rather, because of it, for men were the more careful of behaving in a way to which they would have no objection if their neighbours imitated it. Moreover Germans made a practice of having a bath every Saturday night. From this common table no one was excluded in Germany except the hangman, for whose exclusive use a separate table was reserved. The rest of the dining-room furniture consisted of a leather-covered couch for those who were too drunk to do anything but lie down.

As to plates and vessels, no general statement would serve, not even for one country, owing to the rapidity with which the supply of silver increased during these centuries. In 1517 an Italian99 notes of Flanders that all their vessels, of the church, the kitchen, and the bedroom, were of English brass, but that statement no one confirms later. Wood was common in proportion to the unpretentiousness of the inn; except in Muscovy, where it was almost invariable through the frequency and thoroughness of destruction by fires which caused the use of the most easily replaceable material; the few silver tankards they possessed were rendered unattractive by their custom of cleaning drinking vessels but once a year.

The transition from pewter to silver is most clearly marked in France. The former was in general use as late as Montaigne's time; even he, who owns to making himself in a horrid mess at meal-times, was glad to escape from its greasiness. By the middle of the next century an Italian priest notes that the inn-utensils were mostly of silver, although the chalices which he was given for mass were mostly tin; and De Gourville, in his autobiography, mentions that, on being asked by the government for an estimate of the total amount of silver in France, gave a higher estimate than the other experts because he based his on what he had noticed in the course of his frequent journeys about the provinces, in the middle of the seventeenth century, how every tavern had spoons and forks of silver and some a basin and ewer. And as silver drinking-vessels were common among the English middle-classes earlier than this, it may be assumed that inns were so provided, too; in fact, in England silver was considered somewhat vulgar for drinking purposes, gentlemen preferring Venetian glass. The Venetians themselves used glass, as did other Italians; likewise the French; Germans drank from pewter or stone, and their plates were often of wood, when they had any; it would give an altogether too high idea of sixteenth-century luxury to imagine that every one was given a plate. Certainly no one had more than one at a meal, though there is nothing to show that he might not turn it over to use the clean side – unless he was at sea, in which case he would risk being thrown overboard, because every sailor knew that a plate upside down signified shipwreck.

Inseparable from the inns are the bathing-places; in most cases the baths formed part of the inn premises. At Abano, near Padua, the chief bathing resort of Italy, were private rooms with a "guarderobbe"100 adjoining, through which latter a stream of the water could be turned on. Baden in Switzerland was exceptional in having baths under public control, for poor as well as for rich, besides those in private hands. The inn Montaigne stayed at had eleven kitchens, three hundred persons were catered for each day, one hundred and seventy-seven beds made, and every one could reach his room without passing through any one else's. His party engaged four rooms, containing no more than nine beds; two of the rooms had stoves; and a private bath adjoined. Swiss Baden possessed sixty baths, German Baden three hundred. Spa was much visited, but most of the watering-places have been practically forgotten, so far as the water is concerned, Pougues-les-Eaux, the chief centre in France, for instance, and Aachen, where there existed forty baths outside the town, although the chief ones were within.

The object of the visitors was as much medicinal nominally and as little so really, as might be expected. "Many come thither with no disease but that of love: and many times find remedy."101 The conditions seem somewhat free and easy: in Rome it was customary to go accompanied by a lady friend in spite of the masseurs being male; of Plombières Montaigne says that it was reckoned indecent for men to bathe naked or for women to wear less than a chemise; from which it may be gathered what ordinary conditions were. The bathing there was "mixed," as at the German baths where these restrictions were not in force and where, consequently, the sight of scores of young couples and parties, some family parties, some not, in a state of nature, or very nearly so, amusing themselves with games played at floating tables, or without any help at all, excited the shame, the interest, and the participation of foreigners from all quarters. Ladies, however, who needed baths and preferred decency, were provided for at Swiss Baden, where private baths were for hire, well lighted by glazed windows, painted, panelled, and clean, with conveniences for reading. The building of Turkish baths seemed to Della Valle to afford more likelihood of a chill than the Italian; but it was, he says, all one could expect for the price, which was much lower. How much lower is not clear, but evidently considerably so, the result of a difference of habit; in Italy the poor did not bathe, in Turkey the rich bathed at home.

Quite apart from bathing customs, however, the position of the lady traveller must frequently have been embarrassing. Many a nephew, perhaps, may disbelieve that they ever did travel in the days when no hot-water bottles existed; but that would be a mistake; there is record of at least two substitutes: (1) a bag of semolina, or millet, heated, (2) a dog. A more serious objection is that the privacy of the bedroom was not respected. Even in France, a murderer was lodged in Gölnitz's room for the night together with the six guardians who were escorting him to the place of trial, and in Picardy bedrooms were merely partitioned off; doors and windows lying open all night with no means of fastening them. But a permanently open window would have been welcome on occasions; as when in 1652 Mademoiselle de Montpensier lodged at an inn in Franche-Comté with no window at all in her room, and consequently had to do her hair at the door.

Again, respectable women would not be travelling alone, and as bedrooms were so few they would always have to be prepared to share the room with their escort, even if with no other man, a condition which persisted up to far more recent times. In 1762, writes M. Babeau, a lawyer, travelling through Périgord with a lady client, her son, and a girl, had to put up at an inn which owned but two beds and those both in one room. This room, by the way, possessed two doors, one opening on a meadow, and with joinery so imperfect that a dog could have crept in underneath it; no dog took the chance, it is true, but the wind did. In the previous century was often reprinted a "Traité de la civilité qui se pratique parmi les honnêtes gens" which established the procedure to be followed in these embarrassing circumstances. The escort must allow the lady to undress and get into bed first, and, for himself, take care to undress at a distance from her bed and remain "tranquille et paisible" through the night. In the morning he ought to be well advanced with his dressing before she awoke. But this book was evidently unknown to Sterne when he pursued his "Sentimental Journey," for when he had to share his room with a lady who was a total stranger, they drew up a special treaty which both promised to observe and which each accused the other of breaking.

Of lodgings and "pensions" and houses for hire, it is unnecessary to speak, because apart from the conditions of living that have already been indicated there is nothing to distinguish them from those of to-day; "pensions" are doubtless still to be found in the same variety now as two hundred and fifty years ago at Blois – "dainty, magnificent, dirty, pretty fair, and stinking."

Supervision over the inns was far stricter than at present, especially in Italy. At Lucca and Florence all the inns were in a single street; and in many towns the new arrival was taken before the authorities by the guard at the gates previous to choosing his inn, to which he would be conducted by a soldier. At Lucca, too, was a department of the judiciary, called "della loggia," which was specially concerned with strangers, and to this the innkeepers had to send a daily report on each guest. Yet to judge by the tourists' accounts, the supervision might well have been carried further and reports on the innkeepers required from the tourists. Such a system of double reports would have been a check on the murdering innkeeper, to whom there are occasional references; one had been detected at Poictiers shortly before Lauder's arrival, and at Stralesund, another's tale runs, eight hundred (!) persons had disappeared at one inn. They had reappeared, it is true – pickled. Another kind of innkeeper who ran less risk but was equally dangerous was he who was in league with robbers; it was common enough, if travellers may be believed, for robbers to have spies in the inns. At Acciaruolo, near Naples, another device was practised by the keeper of an atrocious inn. He had an understanding with the captains of coasting-vessels, the result of which was that the latter found it impossible to get any further that night or to let the passengers sleep in the boat.

It must have occurred to the reader that this is a most one-sided chapter: the tourist has been having his say so uninterruptedly that even a clergyman in the pulpit might envy him. What of the innkeepers' side of the question? Fortunately that can be presented, too, with the help of a manuscript so unique that it must be described now instead of being buried in the bibliography. It is nothing less than an account of an Innkeepers' Congress in 1610, written by a delegate. At least, an expert palæographer (whose name I am not permitted to give for fear of another expert palæographer) affirms it to be in a fairly recent commercial script; and it certainly is in English. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. There is no inn, for example, of the three hundred and fifty-eight referred to above which is not mentioned in it; neither is there any inn that is so mentioned that is not to be found among the said three hundred and fifty-eight. Subjective tests, moreover, however dangerous, have their value, and it will appear that the wealth, and, so far as it can be checked, the accuracy of detail, the turns of phrase and of mind, equally characteristic of the innkeeper and the sixteenth century, leave no more room for doubt here than, to take a report of a meeting, in the case of the account of the sayings and doings of the agriculturists in session of which Flaubert made such instructive use in his biography of the late Madame Bovary.

The congress was held at Rothenburg on the Tauber, not so very far from Nuremberg, that town being chosen because no tourist was ever known to go there, any more then than now; and consequently none was better adapted to prevent more than one side of the question being heard, – which, as every one knows, means life or death to a congress.

London was represented by Paolo Lucchese, and four Englishmen were also present, the four who saw most of foreigners who had been to England and of Englishmen who had been abroad: namely, William Cooke of Douay, the host of the "Golden Head" at Calais, another of Dieppe whose name and whose sign are alike illegible, and lastly the notorious Zacharias of Genoa, who told how he had been wrecked in West Indian seas and had swum twenty-two leagues with the ship's carpenter, pushing the latter's tool-chest before him, and how the tinder-box which he put in his hair did not even get wet; all just as he told it to Evelyn years afterwards, until every one got tired of him. The only Scot was Miltoun of the "Croix de Fer" at Paris (Rue St. Martin).

From France the delegates were Robert Buquet of Rouen, Du Peyrat of Loudun, Parracan of Arles, whose inn had no sign because his wine was so good that it needed none, Christopher Prezel of the "Lion d'Or de la Lanterne" of Lyons – but a full list is, after all, of no great interest. It is sufficient to say, to give some idea of the value that attaches to the report of the proceedings, that almost every delegate was a host in himself. For the rest, genealogists in the employ of American millionaires can have access direct to the manuscript; such things are best left in private hands.

The ladies, however, must not be omitted. Old Donna Justina of Venice was there, in spite of its being as much as thirty years earlier that De Thou had been recommended to her as the only innkeeper of the city in whose house none but respectable women were to be found. Berenguela de Rebolledo likewise attended, lady-in-waiting at an inn at Madrid, cheerful, inquisitive, and a flirt, just as Pablos de Segovia knew her, with a bit of a lisp, scared of mice, vain of her hands, and a blush-rose and gloire-de-Dijon complexion. Then there was Marie Beltram, who ran the "venta" the other side of Yrun, and the girl harpist who played at the inns at Brussels, of whom the appropriate remark to make was to quote, —

Haec habiles agili praetentat pollice chordas:Tam doctas quis non possit amare manus?

Two elderly parties were likewise present who, thirty years earlier, had been the two pretty daughters of the one-eyed host of the "Red Lion" at Dordrecht, the same host who warned Van Buchell, the antiquary, when a youngster, against French girls. They were given, he said, to making advances; once one kissed him, and for a long time afterwards he did not think he could live without her.

But the belle of the congress seems to have been the daughter of the innkeeper at Bourgoin, the second post-house this side of Chambéry, since there is a marginal note against her name, evidently retained from the original, "Ista capit biscottum." This confirms the account given of her by Lord Herbert of Cherbury in his autobiography; his friends had told him she was the most beautiful girl they had ever seen, so he rode over from Lyons to see her, "and after about an hour's stay departed thence without offering so much as the least incivility." Finally there was a widow from Tours; the one from the "Three Kings," known as "La Gogueline"; the other widow of Tours, of the "Three Moors," stayed at home, fearing to endanger her reputation as the "mother of the Germans" by so long an absence. Widow Gogueline, however, told the writer that the other was better known as their stepmother and that there was a rhyme which ran: —

Quand vostre bourse est trop pleineAllez aux 'Mores' en Touraine:Je vous jure que vous serezEn peu de temps en deschargez.

It was taken for granted that the president must be an Italian; and Francisco Marco of Venice was chosen for that geniality of his that in years to come was to charm James Howell. He opened the proceedings with some graceful presidential irrelevancies, commenting on the antiquity and fame of Rothenburg and so forth, and then explained the purposes of this Innkeepers' Congress as twofold. Its primary object, he said, was the advancement of God's glory; secondly, the furtherance of the interests of innkeepers and their customers, which, he added, were at bottom identical. The committee had invited certain of the delegates who were especially well acquainted with foreigners to explain, or refute, what visitors found objectionable. The assembled innkeepers could then return able to inform, each one his own countrymen, before the latter's departure, what must be looked for in the parts he was travelling towards, and how unavoidable, and even desirable, those characteristics were. The president therefore called upon Messer Bevigliano ("Chiavi d'Oro," Florence) to speak for Italy.