I’ve been reading some Austen, and because I’m an engineer, I have a couple technical questions 
In*** Persuasion***, a family group travels from Uppercross to Lyme, a distance of 18 miles. How long would this take, traveling by carriage in no particular hurry?
Later, a character travels horseback back to Uppercross, bearing urgent news about Louisa’s health. How long would this have taken? Could he have galloped the entire way? Would the horse have to stop to rest periodically if he did?
Rough estimate a team of carriage horses, moving at a trot, not in a hurry in other words, would cover 20 miles a day, with breaks for meals, and rests for the horses. 18 miles would be a comfortable day’s trip.
18 miles for urgent news would probably be taken by one person on horseback rather than carriage. In a hurry, they would ride at a canter or faster when the road permitted, possibly switching horses 2-3 times at staging houses where horses were kept for this purpose, similar to the pony express. Yes, if he did not swap out horses, he would have to rest the horse unless it was trained for long distance running (there are 100 mile races believe it or not, although they don’t run the entire distance). I would guess half a day or so for the return.
This is a rough approximation. I have no idea of the terrain, or the state of the roads, or the quality of the horses, the weight of the equipment, etc.
Horse travel involve both speed and endurance, which are obviously related.
Horses walk at 4 mi/hr, and can do this for 6-8 hours.
Horses trot at 8-12 mi/hr; and can do so for 2-3 hours, then they would have to slow to a walk for 1/2 hour.
Horses canter* at 10-17 mi/hr; but only for 1/4 hour or less.
Horses gallop* at 20-30 mi/hr; but only for a few (2-4) minutes.
*Note that when driving a carriage, you do not normally canter or gallop – only walk or trot.
These are averages, for a well-conditioned horse in an average situation.
So for an 18-mile distance, a reasonable carriage (with only a person or 2 aboard) and in no particular hurry, would take 2-3 hours. Then a rest of an hour or two would be reasonable, before the journey home.
In the American West, railroads set up stations/towns about 12 miles apart. That was the distance that an average farm family could travel bringing their load of produce and going home with their supplies, starting after morning chores, and getting home in time to do the evening feeding for their animals.
The speeds given above are averages; world records are a bit better.
For a mile and a half distance, the world record is 37.8 mi/hr, by Secretariat 45 years ago. At a 1/4 mile, the world speed record goes up to 43.97 mi/hr, by Winning Brew in 2008.
This would depend upon the state of the roads and the weather and the modernity of the carriage. Rain could turn a road into a muddy quagmire. There were great advances in stagecoach and carriage technology during Austen’s lifetime. Around 1820 coaches reached 12 mph on good roads, so we’re looking at anything from half a day to two days.
Read about stagecoaches here.
Thanks for the information! ** Sunny Daze** mentions “staging houses” where you could swap horses. You’d arrive at home with a horse that wasn’t your own, wouldn’t you? I suppose the next day you sent a servant back along your route to return the borrowed horse?
They weren’t really aimed at the lone traveller but stagecoaches. Look up “Hobson’s Choice”. Indeed, the lone rider would not be travelling far in those lawless times.
But the answer stays the same regardless of how many people switched out horses.
It would either be that the staging house would send a ‘boy’ along slowly after your party (or back to your house if you were traveling somewhere else) with your own horse, and/or that your own servants (or the employees of the next staging house) would sort out and return the various borrowed horses in your wake later that day or in the next days.
I think it is highly optimistic to think carriages could average 6-9 mph. 18 miles would be one days trip under normal circumstances, the horse would be walking the whole way, faster gaits would create danger for the horses and the carriage. The horses would need to stop several times along the way to graze. As you indicate below, 24 miles round trip is about the max distance that could be expected in a day. 36 mile round trip would be too far.
As it happens, the party returns (or planned to return) the next day, so 18 miles in one day. Austen implies that they had plenty of time to socialize the afternoon/evening they arrived, which fits in well with about three-quarters of a day travel time, which is what I’m getting from you guys 
Which also fits in well with the 6-mile square “sections” that the West is surveyed into (thanks to the foresight of Thomas Jefferson).
Note also that staging houses maintained by stage coach companies would switch out horse teams for their own companies and not need to switch back the teams (think Wells Fargo). The next coach to come along would switch onto the rested team, and hand off their tired team, and so on. England also had coaching companies, but I don’t have their names to hand. I could find them with a little research if you need them.
I’m a big Austen geek, and have looked into travel speeds in her novels before. As described by Austen, an average of 6-7 miles an hour seems typical for travel by carriage. Someone in a big hurry might manage about 10 mph, presumably changing horses often. In Sense & Sensibility Willoughby travels 120 miles in one day, which seems to be the longest one-day trip in Austen. Northanger Abbey has an example of what seems to be a more typical trip, with Catherine Morland traveling 70 miles in a day (about 11 hours on the road).
In Northanger Abbey there’s also a scene where John Thorpe (the heroine’s unwanted suitor) and James Morland (the heroine’s brother) discuss a trip they made in John’s carriage, a one-horse gig. John boasts that his horse cannot travel at less than 10 mph, and claims the trip of 25 miles took them two and a half hours. The more trustworthy James points out that the distance was 23 miles and that they set out an hour earlier than John remembers. That works out to an average speed of about 6.5 mph.
For more info carriages and travel in Austen, I recommend the JASNA paper “Transports of Delight: How Jane Austen’s Characters Got Around” by Ed Ratcliffe.
Missed the edit window, but I should have said this was a more typical speed for travel by carriage. It’s supposed to be a long and tiring day of traveling.
Wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail covered 30 miles per day, basically 3 mph for 10 hours. Horses, oxen, cows, even people on foot could do that if the trail was in decent shape. If you want to go faster, a horse can pull a carriage maybe 10 mph but they can’t keep it up for 30 miles. Maximum gallop with just a single rider, a horse can go about 30 mph but no way could they keep that up for more than a couple minutes. I think maximum speed pulling a carriage would be more like 20 or 25, again only for a few minutes at a time.
I say 18 miles in two hours by carriage, at the end of which the horses would be tired but not exhausted. If you wanted to turn around and go right back again, you might need a fresh set of horses.
Read the link I gave. Coach and road technologies improved massively in Austen’s lifetime.
Sorry, did not notice your link before. Assuming good road conditions and commercial carriage services then I guess the higher speed travel was possible. I was thinking more along the line of the private carriage owner using his own horses.
Maybe you didn’t notice my post either, but Austen repeatedly describes private carriage owners traveling at speeds of 6-7 mph using their own horses, and is explicit about a trip of 23 miles realistically taking three and a half hours in a small, two-person carriage drawn by a single horse. That seems to be about as far as one could go without resting or changing the horses.
Northanger Abbey also has General Tilney and Catherine Morland set out at 10 am to travel “almost twenty miles” (apparently without stopping) with the General’s chaise-and-four to make a visit that lasts several hours and includes dinner. They leave at 6 pm and make it back to Northanger Abbey sometime that evening. So that’s about 40 miles round-trip in one day with one set of horses, and it’s depicted as a pleasant trip with a leisurely visit in the middle.
What kind of improvements to the early carriages did they make? Someone mentioned springs above. What kind of springs and where were they on the coach? Was there anything else?
Great stuff! Thanks.
The development of roads was just as important. There were Turnpike Trusts - basically private roads - and macadamisation was just coming in. Thomas Telford made great advances prior to that.