Travel Speed over the Longue Durée

Abstract

In the premodern world, slow travel speed increased a ruler’s governance costs and acted as a barrier to trade. However, current estimates of medieval European travel speed are sparse, and the estimates that do exist rely on parsimonious data. Using the daily travel itineraries of medieval kings, I create near-continuous time series of road and riverine travel speed for England and France over four centuries. Average travel speed along the Roman roads is estimated to be around 24 to 25 miles per day, while riverine travel speed was about 33 to 40 miles per day. Those estimates remain fairly stable over the entire medieval period. The relative ratio of river to road speed was about 1.5 to 1.

Keywords: travel speed, transport costs, medieval, itinerant kings

JEL Classification: N73, N13, R41