This was originally a comment on the preceding thread. I decided to promote it to blog entry, just because. If you've read Season of Skulls you probably guessed I did some research on travel in England in plus before and after. So, some notes follow Stage coach services also matured, and turnpikes and well-maintained highways were largely walled off from woods to either side following enclosures -- as a result, the prospects for highwaymen became perilous it was a capital offense, and they couldn't leg it into the nearest woods, and the coaches were rolling faster.
Upshot, highway robbery fell off drastically after although there was a spike after Waterloo, as lots of penniless discharged soldiers found themselves at a loose end. In , a stagecoach or mail coach ticket from London to Edinburgh would cost roughly a month's wages for a servant, and the journey would take 48 hours or so depending on the weather.
Railways were barely a thing before , but by they'd changed everything. Again, same sort of pricing a month's wages to cross England from end to end , but the journey would be far faster with express trains running at up to 60mph and everyone got to sit inside, even if it was on a wooden bench in an unheated third class carriage.
So your go-to metaphor is: England in was about the size of the globe in , in terms of cost and duration of travel we went from stage coaches to jumbo jets but the time taken en route, and the chunk of your income it consumed, remained roughly the same. Now, recall that nowhere in Great Britain is more than about 40 miles from the sea. Good for bulk transport and freight you can cram a lot more stuff into a ship's hold than you can put on a horse-drawn coach but probably slower than the coach, and subject to weather delays due to storms or still air.
Finally, poor folks would walk long-ish distances that today we wouldn't dream of unless we were doing a recreational hike. My father who would be next year if he was still alive used to walk between Leeds and Dewsbury in the s -- that's about 12 miles -- to go to market. And my great-grandfather, per family legend, met my great-grandma in Poland in what was then part of Russia on the return leg of a trading trip he was a wool merchant, buying and selling stock from town to town that took him overland from western Poland to Tehran and back in about two years in the s.
