TBF this was par for the course for most country folk before about the mid-1800s.
Without having a very good idea of the source data, I take all such claims with a big chunk of salt; I suspect a lot is people projecting what they think is reasonable, it's not like we have movement tracking data.
When 5 miles was like a 1.5-2 hour walk, it probably would not be a daily thing for most people (unless your fields or pastures were scattered.) But market towns, fairs, pilgrimages (even for poor people), and military service were all things that could pull one out of one's usual range, not to mention even just going for a long walk. So "most never went more than 5 miles" is a pretty strong claim, IMO.
I said most for a reason. As always there were exceptions - seasonal laborers for example routinely traveled remarkable distances to where extra hands were needed, pilgrimages were a thing, and trainee craftsmen were called "journeymen" for a reason. Hell professional herdsmen could move substantial distances every year between the summer and winter pastures of their charges.
But these were always a minority. Serious pilgrimages were a matter of great social prestige for a reason. The average peasant farmer's (that is to the average human being's from the invention of agriculture up to about the mid 1800s, because those formed the overwhelming majority of people over that vast stretch of time) life, bar some dramatic upheaval forcing them onto the road and those were the kind of thing people prayed to avoid, was typically spent within a microcosm of maybe a day's journey from his place of residence - and women were usually even less mobile. Case in point, for years my family used to rent a summer cottage out in the archipelago when I was a kid back in the Eighties; my mother notes the married islander women didn't seem to leave their farm yards at all except for the regular church visits... meanwhile their husbands cheerfully sailed all over the place in the fine tradition of seaside inhabitants everywhere.
Hell depending on context the peasants might just straight up be legally forbidden from traveling beyond the nearest market without explicit permission from the local landowner or his representative because lol, serfdom or as close as makes no difference. (We may incidentally note here that due to accidents of socioeconomic history the English language is inconveniently poor in the vocabulary relating to the wide variety of carefully delineated and jealously guarded legal statuses and rights of different stratas of rural folk that proliferated elsewhere; academicians discussing such things usually just straight up pull the relevant terminology from other languages.)
The proliferation of universal military service (for males), alongside dramatically improved transportation networks and various major economic sea changes just encouraging or outright obliging more, over the 1800s was specifically one of the big things that broke this ancient pattern. Also one of the major catalysts for more abstract "national" identities subsuming previous regional and local self-identifications ("now we must create the Italian people" as it were).
last edited at Oct 7, 2021 7:26AM
