Delivering mail, hostels, and so on in medieval settings

[OgreBattle]

Just read this post about how Romans had messenger houses set up every 28km for impotant people to use: https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Roman-leg ... erto-Yagos

Here's a wiki article about those houses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_publicus

there's lots of fantsay RPG's with inns and owns and so on, but they seem to be spread for plot reasons instead of 'logic', like logically how often would you find an inn to rest at, would there be one without a surrounding town, etc.

[Antariuk]

I've used gallopers or message riders often in my games. I think it just makes a lot of sense in any quasi medieval society where mounts are available, and even in D&D land.

The way I see it, a lot of the cliché inns in D&D adventures essentially are message rider stations because they can be found at crossroads, have stables and one or three of the king's soldiers sitting inside, but many authors just don't realize that aspect at all and therefore don't utilize it.

Which is a shame because a messenger or mail system like that provides all sorts of interesting adventure opportunities.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Classic fantasy-style inns are anachronistic, relative to the ambient technology. Hospitality in ~11th-14th century Europe was mostly a cottage industry, where you'd pay a farmer for lodging and food. The upside was that you'd usually get the best room in the house, because you'd sleep in the farmer's bed, along with the rest of his family, which was the style at the time. In a similar fashion, you'd be eating a helping of whatever the family were making to eat anyway.

It's not wholly an invention of latter-day writers projecting their own experiences into the past, though. Medieval romances sometimes included what we'd recognize as the classic inn, presumably a wish of the traveling entertainer (and any travelers in his audience) for better circumstances on the road.

The upside of the realistic model is that you can potentially find lodging anywhere you can find someone's house. Classic-style inns are only supportable either in substantially-sized towns, or on high-traffic roads between substantially-sized towns; even then they'd probably shut down or convert into a different business during the off-season.

What makes the classic-style inn endure is that it's very convenient, both narratively and at the table. Particularly for RPGs, that convenience is probably worth more than the authenticity you get for doing the cottage-industry version.

[rasmuswagner]

I loved the free-market mail in Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles: Payment on delivery, which makes the letter a trade good.

[Prak]

Another model I've seen occasionally in games is where an Inn is really just "a place where you can drinks and pay for a spot on the floor at night." IIRC, that was in a game of Runequest, and so was either a product of Stafford's "authenticity"-obsessed reconstructionism hardon when making the game, or the GM's own knowledge of history. I have no clue which.

[tussock]

In the 14th century, people didn't go anywhere. Even people on pilgrimages, once in a lifetime deal, only went a day down the road to the nearest decent size town. Only people going anywhere were armies, and they billeted with local townsfolk who would put up with that or get stabbed to death. All of England had like 80 transport ships, and they were often too busy moving troops around for war to get on with trade.

Stuff like attending parliament was once a year. There's canals for getting the wool bales from one river to another to use a better port, and ... maybe people use the local Roman road now and then, but mostly it's for moving livestock to pasture near a city butchers, from where maybe your idiot son Jack brings home "magic beans" instead of coins, and you plant them and they just seem like regular beans! Christ's Mercy! What did we do wrong to break their magic???

Regular people only existed so the noblemen could fight wars about who was the least bastardised relation to some dead guy, and they would gather up armies and do just that a couple times every generation. When the peasants objected to that by rising up they would be slaughtered in extremely large number, generally by tricking them into not fighting any more and then just walking the army around their villages and killing whoever the village picked out for you to punish for it. Might just be that idiot Jack again, because maybe that'll make the magic beans work.

There's just not much demand for an Inn on the road in those sort of societies. There's probably an ale house or two somewhere in each town, and quite a lot of whorehouses, a guild hall or two, and even in the villages you can probably sleep somewhere similar in exchange for the right amount of turnips.

Maybe even stay at the manor house, though care needs taken there because some of them can read and may have seen the magic beans story before. Probably talk your ear off about that bastard John and his obviously false claim to the local Lord's inherited right of taxation on salt moved through the parish from east to west during summer months, which is devilishly tricky to enforce in the first place.

Don't mention how dark it is inside. Window tax, no one talks about it, just so annoying.

[virgil]

Tussock, your (lack of) understanding of history continues to amaze me...

Inns appeared in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...

There's a royal statute from 13th century England very specifically citing hostels & inns. I mean, hell, inns were a major feature in Canterbury Tales - so they're clearly not foreign concepts. Outside of England, caravanserai were essentially iconic inns; existing since the the 5th century BC and were still seeing use into the 11th century (not sure how much past). Italy's Jubilees from the 11th-15th centuries saw numerous inns and had laws written around them.

I suppose if you don't count the aristocracy, merchants, and large swaths of of the clergy, nobody moved around enough to justify buildings dedicated to just that purpose. Oh, and restrict your definition of medieval to 14th century England - except for the 17th century window tax, because that is relevant.

Your setting is 95% likely to be not set on Earth, so "historical accuracy" is a pointless endeavor. Now, if you want something like D&D inns, you need to ensure the local culture is one that can support them. You need a sufficiently large demographic or two that travels regularly through the areas that you want inns.

[infected slut princess]

you'd sleep in the farmer's bed, along with the rest of his family,

ooooh baby.

[erik]

I was gonna say, it's a good thing people didn't travel in the 14th century, otherwise plagues could have done a real number on them.

[maglag]

Indeed most people in 14th century Europe were serfs and couldn't leave their lands at all (and infidel foreigners weren't exactly welcome either), and at the end of the plague there were more than enough people left for all european countries to rebuild and move on to start conquering the other continents.

If Europe was like, say, the Inca empire that had an extremely efficient road system that allowed even sick people to move around relatively fast, then there would've been nothing left of european civilization but ruins.

[tussock]

Virgil, "Inns" in Tudor Britain are branches of the church located off site, built for distant church officials to stay at when in the cities. "Hostels" are the same thing. There's the odd one for other groups like Parliament where the elected stay when Parliament is in session, and if you knew the right people you might stay there on business when it's not. The church ones also served as a place for pilgrims travelling to those distance churches for pilgrimage to gather into groups of safe size for travelling. The pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales start at an Inn and camp on the side of the road thereafter, they tell stories around their campfire each night, that's the whole deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tabard

Inns became a place for general travellers to stay, after the monasteries were abolished under Henry VIII, their buildings sold off and the money pocketed by the king, and lots of other regular travellers where actually a thing, in the fucking 16th century.

And then more so in the 17th century when laws were passed to provide regular funding for the maintenance of roads for the first time in about a thousand years. People in medieval times didn't travel in the winter because the roads didn't work in the winter, or in the wet summers much either.

--

erik, The plague summers were wet years, with even less travel. Funny thing about plagues, and how a handful of people are noted to have spread them by fleeing from all the surrounding death, multiple times as a single carrier who would just then find lodgings in ordinary households and start the next town's infection off. Over and over again.

What stopped plague was the concept of quarantine, invented in 1477, late 15th century that is, which said that anyone entering a city would stay in a Hospital (the name for buildings where they would put those suspected of plague in later waves, which caused a lot of people to hide it) for thirty days before heading out to do business (later forty days, because thirty days was not long enough to stop the plague reliably). Likewise, everyone in each place who got infected was quarantined in their house, and often left to starve. Which worked, and was why the first wave killed millions, and the later ones killed thousands, they just stopped sick people wandering around spreading it everywhere within each place, and held people entering each place isolated for a month.

Which was in fact recorded as being a bit of a pain in the ass, for traders, but was also just life so they did it, for centuries after. Europeans settling in NZ in the 19th century often sat in quarantine for forty days on the boat, in the harbour, to avoid spreading whatever was going around. Welcome to history.

--

You need a sufficiently large demographic or two that travels regularly through the areas that you want inns.

There's totally little taverns all over the place in towns and you can totally just sleep on the floor there with the other drunks to avoid ending up in the stocks for sleeping in the streets. If you can avoid a lethal fight with a drunk (murder rate of strangers in town being obnoxiously high with all the PTSD suffering drunk ex-soldiers everywhere, when fucking everyone carries big nasty daggers).

Or, realistically, the party is in the employ of someone. Like the church, or the baron, or a mercantile company with a boat. They should probably have tiny rooms somewhere for their adventurers, who might be ex-military, a vagabond, a man of the cloth, and the fourth daughter of the earl of somewhere who studied magic at university.

[deaddmwalking]

If Europe was like, say, the Inca empire that had an extremely efficient road system that allowed even sick people to move around relatively fast, then there would've been nothing left of european civilization but ruins.

That's not really true.

History is complicated, and different places were different in different ways at different times. Trying to paint with a broad brush 'European History' for 1200 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire is difficult.

Regarding diseases, Europeans had been exposed to a lot more diseases than Native Americans by the 15th century. This was largely because Europeans lived in close proximity to livestock. Ie, it was not uncommon to let cows sleep in the house at night - the house was basically a barn with an area for humans to sleep and the extra warmth the animals provided was worthwhile. Europeans died a lot from diseases, but that in turn made them more resistant to those diseases. When they traveled to the New World, they released a cocktail of terrible diseases that Native Americans had no resistance from.

Better roads and communication would have resulted in similar numbers killed. Because exposure was widespread. You can look at cities and towns with at least one plague death to see that (depending on which plague you're talking about).

D&D is ahistorical anyway. Inns make sense for a bunch of reasons. In real-life, it was uncommon for a traveler with a literal ton of gold to walk around relying on their personal arsenal to defend themselves. If there is money, there will be inns.

[virgil]

Tussock, your half-remembered history grognard ramblings (19th century quarantine practices of New Zealand, wtf...) are less than helpful.

@Ogrebattle - Antariuk's suggestion really is a great idea for a foundation. Having a messenger network supported with subsidized lodgings would support a number of background traits in stereotypical D&D. The commonly seen hamlets get a social-hub tavern and one room (just enough to qualify as an inn for tax purposes), while the larger towns that have full-scale caravanserai.

[maglag]

Better roads and communication would have resulted in similar numbers killed. Because exposure was widespread. You can look at cities and towns with at least one plague death to see that (depending on which plague you're talking about).

That's not really true.

The black plague in Europe literally followed the main trade routes, and places away from the main trade routes (read: no easy way to travel there) suffered a lot less plague. The Pyrenees population away from the coast in particular only suffered minor outbreaks despite the plague being pretty heavy all around because they lived in rocky mountainous area with no proper roads, joke's on you Incas filling all your mountains with nice walkways.

[Thaluikhain]

Regarding diseases, Europeans had been exposed to a lot more diseases than Native Americans by the 15th century. This was largely because Europeans lived in close proximity to livestock.

A minor point, but also because there was more long distance trade in Europe. Got plagues from all over.