The late 17th and early 18th centuries heralded not only industrial and domestic innovations, but also notable changes in England’s social structure. Hers was a new age in which a wealthy businessman could expect to buy himself into ‘good society’ despite his lack of noble lineage. Celia, it seems, greatly approved of this new, more democratic society. Her own sister, in 1684, married Edmund Harrison, a ‘Turkey merchant’, and at Newbury, she writes, she ‘called on an old acquaintance marryed to a tradesman’.

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But Celia also found much to be displeased with, and never failed to point out society’s shortcomings. She had a critical eye for the towns, checking the cleanliness of the streets and their pitch. Her criticism extended to the people she met along her way, particularly the Scots, whom she encountered on a brief foray over the border: ‘I tooke them for people which were sick, seeing 2 or 3 great wenches as tall and bigg as any woman sat hovering between their bed and the chimney corner, all idle doing nothing or at least was not settled to any work tho’ it was nine of the clock when I came thither.’ Celia, a staunch Puritan, subscribed to the theory that the poverty was a vice rather than an affliction, and concluded that laziness lay behind Scots’ indigent circumstances.

Although Celia’s haphazard writing style makes it appear at first that she wrote as she rode, textual evidence suggests that she most likely composed the journal in 1702, following her return from her travels. In the foreword to the journal, she explains her recklessness: ‘As most I converse with knows both the freedom and easyness I speak and write as well as my defect in all, so they will not expect exactness or politeness in this book, tho’ such embellishments might have adorned the descriptions and suited the nicer taste.’

Following her travels, and the pleasant task of reflecting upon them in her journal, in 1738, at the age of 76, Celia Fiennes wrote her will, providing for her austere burial, ‘without ostentation only put into a leaden coffin . . . all to be as privat as can be a hearse and one coach and to go out early in the morning and go the backside of the Town.’ The will was detailed; at the end of a listing of silver Celia Fiennes remained modernist: ‘let but the canisters be sold being old.’

Although the will did not mention the diary, her zestful travels are a bequest to all–a wonderfully comprehensive picture of England at the close of the 17th century.

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