1600s England Through the Eyes of One of the First Modern Travel Writers (2017) | Hacker News Reader

1600s England Through the Eyes of One of the First Modern Travel Writers (2017)

smithsonianmag.com

95 pointsThevet16 comments

It's about Celia Fiennes' Through England on a Side Saddle In the Time of William and Mary

"She travelled around England on horseback between 1684 and about 1703, "to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise". At this time the idea of travel for its own sake was still novel, and Fiennes was exceptional as an enthusiastic woman traveller."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_Fiennes

Download her book as pdf, epub etc: https://archive.org/details/throughenglando00fiengoog

That 1888 edition is the first complete one.

And I found this: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/travellers/

Which has Celia's book (or most of it) with the locations marked on maps, and books by dozens of other early travellers around Britain.

That century was not a quiet one, either. It was a very important time for Scotland, and a bloody one at that.

Haven’t read through it yet but I wonder how far north she went

If the name Fiennes brings to mind actor Ralph Fiennes and his cousin explorer Ranulph Fiennes, it's no coincidence: they are related.

Wikipedia has several overview pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fiennes_family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes_fami...

Drop back a few decades and Pepys’ Diary is another fine slice of life of urban England. I’m finishing a public domain production of the 1893 edition[1] for Standard Ebooks[2] at the moment but in the meantime they’re all online and cross referenced at https://www.pepysdiary.com/ ; it’s fun to dive in and read an entry or two.

[1] https://github.com/robinwhittleton/samuel-pepys_the-diary-of...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/

Oh that pepysdiary site looks awesome, thanks for the link. I really like the font. It's amazing how awful and hard-to-take-seriously stuff more than, say, 200 years old can look with a typical web font of today. What a great job.

There is also @samuelpepys on Twitter, doing a more or less real time replay of parts of the diary.

Peyps also created one of the great treasures of English folk history, a collection of over 1,800 broadside ballads. Broadsides are the closest thing we have to a 17th century newspaper - cheaply printed, sold in the street and fundamentally ephemeral. Browsing his collection gives a remarkable insight into the zeitgeist.

https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/pepys

If you want an account of these times written in modern English, "The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain" is a lively and entertaining read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Restoration-B...

I note with interest how her travelogue was rediscovered. How will this work a couple hundred years from now when people of our generation put stuff online instead of pen to paper? Will there hopefully be a local copy on their computer, assuming the SSD or HD hasn't died and later generations can read it? Or will it simply perish when the hosting bill isn't paid, or the account is inactive?

A lot of memoirs from this writer's era certainly didn't survive either, but it seems like there was a greater chance back then even considering the cost of pen, ink and paper.

I think about that every time I am visiting an archaeological site with stone inscriptions.

Looking 5000 years in the future, no one will be able to read our documents, like we do with those written 5000 years ago.

Reading 25 year old documents is hard enough. I mean, none of my current computers even has an optical drive, let alone a 3.5" floppy. To say nothing of the actually-floppy floppies.

If you've read Neal Stephenson's "system of the world" this book is a voice straight out of that timeline. And for more contemporary references "the favourite"

Interesting article, but I'm slightly puzzled by the [sic] comments following many of the quotes. The use of English looks correct for the time.

Surely the [sic] annotations are to indicate that the quotations are unchanged from the original source text, which contains somewhat archaic language and misspellings of words when compared to modern English.

You're right. I'm so used to seeing it used in a snarky way that I was overlooking the original meaning of "sic erat scriptum" (thus was it written).

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