“motion and rest, liberty and confinement, indeterminacy and definition”

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasure . . . . These factors—the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminacies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating that one ‘really’ is independent of one context or set of defining associations—remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.

According to the laws of Henry II, a Lord who wished to free his serf had first to declare that intention in a church, a market, or a county court, to bestow a sword or a lance upon his former bondsman, and then take him to a crossroads to show him that ‘all ways lie open to his feet’.

Travel for pleasure remains as it was through the ages a mark of success and status, while travel under compulsion of some necessity or in service of need is a mark of commonality and common fate.