Although none of these issues was eliminated by Charles I’s reforms, conditions for sending and receiving correspondence within Britain did become increasingly uniform. As a means of private communication, mail became somewhat more accessible, more trusted, and more impersonal. Posts were laid according to regular, well-maintained routes from London to the north and west, and they ran all day and all night. Spurs led off the main roads to connect provincial towns.26 Although the speed of the post continued to vary somewhat, depending on the weather, the quality of the horses kept at each postal station along the route, and the diligence of individual postmasters, round trip from London to Edinburgh was supposed to be six days.27 The carriage of foreign letters was assimilated into the national post by a 1657 act of Parliament that also incorporated Ireland into the British postal system.28 By the late seventeenth century the British post was a wellestablished royal bureaucracy, a valuable state monopoly.
On a practical level, how did an individual send and receive letters? What kind of knowledge did one need? At the very least, in order for a letter to reach a correspondent, one had to know where to send it. This may seem a trivial thing; after all, in the twenty-first-century world we have a multitude of options for communicating across distances: we can send a letter, an e-mail, a fax, or a telegram; we can pick up the phone or dial through our personal computer to reach a friend on her land line, mobile phone, or computer. In early modern Britain, by contrast, in order to communicate with someone, one had to know his or her physical location or at the very least where that person received letters (which might not always be a home). In the days before public directory listings, phone books, or Google searches, the only way to get an address was to ask someone, either the person directly or someone who knew that person. The act of communication entailed a minimum degree of acquaintance with the recipient of one’s letter. No seventeenth-century letter was directed to “the resident” or “current occupant” of a house.
Compared to their twenty-first-century counterparts, the addresses on seventeenth-century letters varied wildly. They only sometimes included street names. There were no street numbers; in cities and towns lodgings or businesses were identified by the signs hanging outside buildings (and a sign did not necessarily bear any intrinsic connection to the trade carried on inside the building—for example, booksellers Abel Swall and Awnsham Churchill operated shops under the signs of the unicorn and the black swan, respectively).29 In the country an address might simply be the name of an estate or a house. After the Restoration even London coffeehouses served as points for sending and receiving mail (though no one guaranteed the privacy of letters sent and received therefrom).30 John Aubrey variously received letters addressed “For John Aubrey Esq fellow of the Royall Society, to be left with Mr Bridgeman, at Mr Gregorys in Linco{l}ns Inne fields, next dore to little Turne Style the Diall house / London” (all that in one address); “These to John Aubrey Esqr at Mr White’s house Chymist in Holywell Parish in Oxford”; and “To his verie lovinge friende Mr John Awbrey at his fathers howse in Broad-chalke close to / WILTSHIRE. Leave these at the holly Lambe in {Sarum}.”31 According to the latter, the letter was to be left at the “holly Lambe,” a public house in Salisbury (with the city referred to in the address by its Latin name). Rather than using numbers, such addresses defined the recipients’ locations in reference to local establishments and landmarks and the people who lived in and owned those places. Not even Aubrey’s name was stable but rather fluctuated from Aubrey to Awbrey and back again depending on his correspondent’s whim. Letter carriers were expected to have, or acquire, a minimum degree of personal knowledge about the people sending and receiving letters. Who took the letters at the inn at the sign of the Holy Lamb in Salisbury? Where in Holywell Parish, an area of Oxford just west of the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum buildings, did Mr White, the chemist, keep his shop? Restoration letter carriers needed to know these things.
Correspondents were not particularly surprised when letters failed to reach their destinations. To hedge against this possibility, many letters opened with a summary of the 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
