The Dangers Of Travel Were Of A Nature To Alarm Mothers.
As well as
Catholics, there were shipwrecks, pirates, and highway robbers.
Moors
and Turks lay waiting "in a little port under the hill," to take
passenger vessels that went between Rome and Naples. "If we had come by
daye as we did by night, we had bin all taken slaves."[91] In dark
strait ways up the sides of mountains, or on some great heath in
Prussia, one was likely to meet a horseman "well furnyshed with daggs
(pistols), who myght well be called a Swarte Ritter - his face was as
black as a devill in a playe."[92] Inns were death-traps. A man dared
not make any display of money for fear of being murdered in the
night.[93] It was wiser to disguise himself as a humble country boy and
gall his feet by carrying all his gold in his boots. Even if by these
means he escaped common desperadoes, he might easily offend the deadly
University students, as did the eldest son of Sir Julius Caesar, slain in
a brawl in Padua,[94] or like the Admirable Crichton, stabbed by his
noble pupil in a dark street, bleed away his life in lonely
lodgings.[95] Still more dangerous were less romantic ills, resulting
from strange diet and the uncleanliness of inns. It was a rare treat to
have a bed to oneself. More probably the traveller was obliged to share
it with a stranger of disagreeable appearance, if not of
disposition.[96] At German ordinaries "every travyler must syt at the
ordinary table both master and servant," so that often they were driven
to sit with such "slaves" that in the rush to get the best pieces from
the common dish in the middle of the table, "a man wold abhor to se such
fylthye hands in his dish."[97] Many an eager tourist lay down with
small-pox before he had seen anything of the world worth mentioning, or
if he gained home, brought a broken constitution with him.
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