Sociable Knowledge. Elizabeth Yale

sender’s last letter. An exchange between Aubrey and the Aberdeen antiquary and professor James Garden illustrated the balance that correspondents struck. Between June 1694 and March 1695 a number of letters Aubrey sent to Garden failed to reach their destination. In the letter that finally reached Garden, dated 9 March 1694/95, Aubrey expressed a fear, not that his letters had been misdirected, but that Garden might be dead since he had failed to respond to any of the previous letters. Since Aubrey sent this last letter, his hopes and fears must have been balanced somewhere between the possibility that none of his previous letters had arrived and that his correspondent was dead. The postal system was reliable but not so reliable that multiple letters sent from London to Aberdeen could not go missing, as Garden confirmed was the case in his reply to Aubrey.³²

      Despite advances over the course of the seventeenth century, in the 1690s there were still reaches of Britain that remained unconnected to the postal system, especially in the dark and stormy months of winter. For months at a time in his travels through the wilds of Wales and Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, Edward Lhuyd was unable to post letters detailing his progress to his patrons and friends back home in Oxford and London. Lhuyd’s solution was to save up material for less frequent but fatter letters home. In December 1699, six months after his last letter, he wrote to Martin Lister, “This comes heartily to beg your pardon for so seldome writing; the chief occasion whereof was my rambles of late through countreys so retir’d, that they affoarded neither post nor carrier; as not having much communication (this time of the year especially) with the cultivated parts of the kingdome.”³³ Lhuyd wrote from Bathgate, a town near Edinburgh, after some months’ sojourn in the Highlands. His correspondence with the physician Tancred Robinson had been similarly impeded.³⁴

      International correspondence operated according to different rules. While naturalists’ correspondence within Britain tended to travel point to point (that is, between individuals), international correspondence was typically funneled through “intelligencers,” such as Henry Oldenburg and Samuel Hartlib. Intelligencers were individuals possessed of a particularly “active and large correspondence.” They occupied a privileged position within the community of naturalists. Acting as information brokers, they transmitted letters from one person to another, and when they received a letter that they judged to be of broad interest, they copied and shared it with a wider audience (a generally accepted practice at the time). They could negotiate for naturalists the practical difficulties of sending mail internationally, the primary one being that there were no stable, public international systems for mail delivery. The main international mail delivery systems were privately run by business concerns; as early as the sixteenth century the Fugger family, for example, ran regular mails connecting their various offices, delivering private mail as well as business correspondence.³⁵ Intelligencing on an international scale was thus close kin to commerce, relying on similar protocols. Naturalists contracted out to intelligencers a certain kind of “local knowledge.” If correspondence was funneled through an intelligencer, correspondents needed to keep track of only one address rather than many. When Oldenburg accompanied Robert Boyle’s nephew on his Grand Tour in 1657–1658, all of his correspondence with Boyle and the boy’s mother, Lady Ranelagh, was sent and received through Samuel Hartlib.³⁶ Famously, Oldenburg acted as a conduit for communication between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens.³⁷ Intelligencers seized on opportunities to become more than just relay stations. Oldenburg, for example, used his position as middleman to attempt to smooth over differences and mediate between naturalists locked in fierce disputes. Some intelligencers attempted to transform their work into a source of income, though these plans tended to come to naught. Hartlib sought to formalize his role through the creation of the “Office of Address,” a Parliament-funded bureau for the exchange of information about new mechanical inventions, improvements in husbandry and agriculture, and employment opportunities. Parliament promised a stipend but was not forthcoming with the money. The Royal Society once promised to cover the “Expence of letters” and even provide “something of an honorarium besides” for John Aubrey “to keepe a Correspondence with my numerous company of ingeniose Virtuosi in severall Counties.”³⁸ But these promises seem to have been castles in the air. Although an intelligencer’s services were essential to the functioning of the learned correspondence, it was a challenge to make them pay.

      The Carrier’s Trade: Moving Books and Papers

      While letters traveled by post, packages were sent by carrier.³⁹ Carriers traveled many of the same routes as the Royal Mail but were organized and managed privately. Although some carriers were solely devoted to the business, it could also be a side occupation. Farmers, for example, seeking profitable employment for themselves, their horses, and their wagons turned to carrying in the off-season. In some parts of England, wagons came into fashion only in the first half of the seventeenth century; before that goods were moved over land in two-wheeled carts.⁴⁰ In the farther reaches of Britain—the Welsh Marches or Derbyshire, for example—carrier wagons were likely to be replaced by packhorses, which could better navigate treacherous, narrow roads.⁴¹ Rates were regulated by local authorities. In the early 1690s Parliament passed an act specifically obligating justices of the peace, also responsible for overseeing local road maintenance, to regulate carrier fees in their domain.⁴² In 1692 justices of the peace in the West Riding of Yorkshire set rates from London to towns no farther north than Leeds (a distance of about two hundred miles) at one pence per pound.⁴³ Typically each town had a carrier who waited one day a week (or more, depending on how many packages a particular area generated each week) at a local public house to accept packages for delivery.⁴⁴ Carriers typically had a fixed route connecting a provincial town with London or another urban center. A guide published in 1637, The carriers cosmographie, listed all the carriers in inns near and in London, what days of the week they could be found at the inns, and where they carried goods.⁴⁵ In the 1690s the apothecary John Houghton regularly published a table of carrier routes, drop-off points, and charges in his weekly periodical, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. Destinations from London were primarily market towns and regional centers such as Nottingham, Colchester, Cambridge, Derby, and Warwick.⁴⁶ Coaches, which carried people, were differentiated from carriers, who transported goods. One issue of Houghton’s Collection lists fifty-six different carriers and twenty-nine coaches; perhaps there was more of a need to move goods than people in the late seventeenth century.⁴⁷

      Carriers were plagued with the same problems that affected the mail. Detailed local knowledge was required to send and receive packages by carrier. Such information was neither reliably nor regularly made known beyond localities (as the publication dates of The carriers cosmographie and Houghton’s Collection attest). In a letter to William Musgrave requesting back issues of Philosophical Transactions, the physician Robert Peirce gave Musgrave detailed instructions for sending them by the Oxford-Bristol carrier, who passed through the village of Marshfield once or twice a week. Packages and letters would reach Peirce via “a foote man” who delivered letters that had been left at the post inn in Marshfield.⁴⁸ Peirce’s instructions make it clear that one could not assume that one’s correspondent possessed basic knowledge about how to send a package between two towns less than one hundred miles apart. This was so because carrier routes, as well as correspondents’ addresses, were often vague, ill-publicized, or unstable. This was so even in Peirce’s instructions: he thought the post inn was called “the Starre,” but he was not sure.⁴⁹ Local, personal knowledge of how packages were delivered in a particular community was paramount, and the system could tolerate a fair degree of fuzziness.

      Naturalists were sometimes suspicious of their carriers, not trusting them to transmit precious books and boxes safely. On 18 November 1691 the botanist John Ray received a jarring letter from his friend John Aubrey. Aubrey inquired after the manuscripts of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire he had sent to Ray for his perusal in September of that year. By the time Ray read the letter, he had already read and annotated his friend’s book in the comfort of his home in the village of Black Notley in Essex and had remitted it to the local carrier—who made the round trip between Essex and London once a week—with careful instructions to return it to Aubrey. Somehow, however, the package failed to make it into Aubrey’s hands, as an alarmed Aubrey informed