Coryat's Crudities
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Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in Five Moneth's Travels was a 1611 travel and gastronomic book published by Thomas Coryat of Odcombe, an English traveller and mild eccentric. Based on a long foot journey through European countries he took in 1608, it is credited with beginning the craze of the Grand Tour, and introducing the use of the fork to England.
Coryat undertook the 1,975-mile (3,175 km) walk to Venice and to write the subsequent account in order to impress the court of the Henry, Prince of Wales, where he was regarded as a buffoon and jester, rather than the wit and intellectual he considered himself. His original manuscript, which was an artistic and economic treatise on France and northern Europe, peppered with personal anecdotes displaying what Coryat thought of as his piety and resourcefulness, was edited by a panel of wits and poets. At the behest of the teenage prince it was changed almost beyond recognition, into a work in which the role of the hero was turned to that of a fool. The panel, which included John Donne and Ben Jonson, took especial liberties with the personal anecdotes, finding his self-importance a ripe source of humor.
Upset by this, Coryat set himself the more ambitious task of documenting his walk to India, and after leaving in 1613, arrived in the northern city of Ajmer, ten months and 3,300 miles (5310km) later. He died shortly afterwards, however, before he could start work on the account of his journey.
Despite the ridicule (to an extent, some of it invited) he endured in his own lifetime, the model he set in Coryat's Crudities (for a self-improving journey to view the arts and culture of Europe) had a real and profound influence on subsequent British history, encouraging an openness to Continental ideas over the next two centuries to a frequently isolated Britain.
