Traveller

The etymology of ‘traveller’ is closely linked to the hardship of travelling, originating from the old French travail and its associated verb, travailer. Both travail and travailer meant bodily or mental toil and exertion, and usage in the Middle Ages often linked them closely to childbirth, as well as to agricultural labour. ¹ As one medieval author wrote, ‘Call the workmen and yield him here travail’, whilst the fourteenth-century poet William Langland spoke of ‘trewe travaillours and tilieres of þe erthe’. ² By the fifteenth century, travail and the travailer were associated with journeying. While in France travailleur continued to be associated with toil and arduous journeys, in England the word became interchangeable with the identity of the traveller. Mandeville's Travels refers to a ‘way es comoun and wele ynogh knawen with all men þat usez trauvaile’ whilst Thomas Hoby, in his translation of The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, would later write of Castiglione's ‘yeeres travaile abrode’ as part of his civil education. ³ By the sixteenth century, the ‘traveller’ could be both a labourer and a journeyer. Thus on the one hand, a late sixteenth-century sermon could describe ‘the traveller’ as an individual who ‘passeth from towne unto towne, until he comes to his Inne’. ⁴ On the other, the geographer Richard Hakluyt described his labour of compiling the travel accounts in The Principal Navigations (1589) as an act of travel and travail, lamenting ‘what restlesse nights, what painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I have indured; how many long & chargeable journeys I have traveiled’ in the making of his compendium. ⁵