Journeys in Industrious England, by Thomas Baskerville, edited by Anthea Jones

Except to a very few scholars the name of Thomas Baskerville (1630-1700) is entirely unknown. And yet, like his celebrated younger contemporary, Celia Fiennes, he rode hundreds of miles across many English counties in the later seventeenth century, and recorded in colourful detail where he went and what he observed. With a good horse, he claimed, a man could ride fifty miles in a day, and he seems to have put this boast into practice. Every few years he set off on a journey; ten journeys and some shorter expeditions were written up, but not published, even in part, for 200 years. Unvarnished and frank, his writing reveals his boundless curiosity about everyday working life in town and countryside. Baskerville's other writings were varied in style and subject matter. He described the course of some local rivers in verse, and copied out a ballad about St Winnifred. He recorded executions of Royalists and Parliamentarians and compiled a history of the Oxford colleges, incidentally including his experience in Barbados. He composed an account of his family and their relations. He collected the names of taverns in and around London. This book is a fascinating account of England seen through the eyes of an alert and cheerful man in the thirty years following the execution of Charles I. October 2023, x, 316pp, paperback, £20.00, ISBN 978-1-914407-51-2