The Road-Books and Itineraries of Great Britain, 1570 to 1850: a Catalogue with an Introduction and a Bibliography

Abstract

ROAD-BOOKS and itineraries are dear to the heart of the collector, but, unlike most collectors' books, they have a wider interest, and their value to the antiquarian and the topographer is considerable. Many, however, and especially the earlier, are rare and difficult to obtain, and Sir H. G. Fordham's bibliography, which is a revised and amplified reprint of a paper published in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society in 1916, will be of considerable assistance to those who wish to make use of the material to be found in these guide-books of our ancestors. In this catalogue, road-books are taken to include only such as set out individual roads, with distances and stages all grouped together as a book or atlas, and prepared for the use of travellers. They may vary from a mere enumeration of stages to a full descriptive text. The earliest entry is John Leland's Itinerary published in or about 1535-1543. In the later part of the sixteenth century tables of the principal British highways based on the old British mile of 1500 Roman paces, equivalent to 2428 statute yards, were associated with lists of fairs for commercial purposes. Tables of highways of a similar type were published by Charles Etienne in 1552, while in Germany the earliest would appear to be a publication of 1597, containing 187 roads on the Continent and eleven from London to various parts of England and Wales.