In the late 1600s, a young wealthy Englishwoman decided to lead a very different life than her aristocratic sisters: this was one Celia Finnes (1662-1741), who decided not to marry and instead to travel all over the countryside on horseback — for over two decades.
Celia Finnes had a couple servants who joined her, but travel for the sake of travel wasn’t a common thing at the time. She crossed every county in England, at one point almost held up by robbers, another time risking drowning when the river Ely flooded.
Finnes liked big fancy houses and wrote about them a lot, but she was even more interested in mines and quarries, and wrote in great detail about the wealth to be had from such industries. She’s a perfect example of the rising Middle Class of the 17th century — praising industriousness and showing prejudice towards Scottish people by describing them as lazy, with their indolence being cause for their poverty.
Celia Finnes wrote about her travels in a journal which was published in the 19th century, after the English landscape had been completely changed by the Industrial Revolution. The ability of women to vote was centuries away from her lifetime, but Celia thought that women could benefit by seeking out things to sharpen their minds and improve their lives. Thus would death be “less fformidable [sic] and [your] future State more happy”.
Source: Kat Eschner, “See 17th-century England through the eyes of one of the first modern travel writers_, June 7, 2017. Smithsonian Magazine. @ British Heritage.com/travel, “The journeys of Celia Finnes through 17th-century England,” Jean Ducey, June 28, 2022.
