No public post
In the Middle Ages there was no general postal service open to ordinary people. Anyone who wanted to send a message had to find someone willing to carry it. That could be a servant, a friend traveling in the right direction, a pilgrim, a merchant’s agent or a paid courier. Most people in the period could not read or write, and most of the messages they needed to send were spoken, passed on by word of mouth. Written letters were mainly the tool of rulers, the church, nobles and merchants.
Who wrote letters
Writing was a specialized skill. Clerics and monks were often the scribes, and a king or lord would usually dictate to a clerk rather than write himself. Royal and noble households maintained writing offices, called chanceries, that produced letters and charters. Church officials wrote to one another about administration, discipline and doctrine, and collections of such letters survive as sources for historians.
Merchants wrote too, and as commerce expanded, business letters became more common. Trading firms with agents in several cities relied on correspondence for orders, price news and instructions. Later in the period, more laypeople learned to read and write, and family letters survive in some regions, but the surviving examples are skewed toward wealthier households.
Letters were made on parchment, a prepared animal skin, which was costly, and increasingly on paper in the later Middle Ages as it became cheaper and more available in Europe. A letter was folded and sealed with wax, and the seal served two purposes: it kept the contents private and it identified the sender. Because the messenger might not be able to read, the seal and sometimes a spoken password or a token helped prove that a message was genuine.
The messengers
Rulers and great lords employed couriers who carried messages as a regular duty. Royal accounts, where they survive, record payments to messengers, which shows that sending letters was a recurring cost. Fast messengers could change horses at stages along the way if arrangements had been made, but this was an expensive privilege rather than a standing system. Some religious houses and universities kept their own messengers, who carried letters, money and small parcels for members. The relay stations that the Mongols maintained across their huge territory during the Pax Mongolica formed a far more developed network than anything in western Europe, and they appear in the accounts of European travelers who saw them.
Merchants often carried each other’s letters. A shipment of goods going abroad might include correspondence for the recipient, and merchants traveling to fairs carried letters for associates. Pilgrims, friars and traveling scholars also played this role informally.
Heralds had a distinct position. Associated with noble households and tournaments, a herald could carry messages between rival lords, including formal challenges and declarations, and could travel under a measure of protection because of his role. In war, heralds were used to deliver demands to besieged towns, to negotiate over prisoners and to identify the dead after a battle by their coats of arms. A herald’s status gave him some safety, though safe passage was never absolute.
Beyond individual couriers, communities used public means for broadcasting news. Town criers read announcements aloud, proclamations were posted or read in marketplaces, and church bells signaled events and emergencies. Sermons and village gossip also carried news, sometimes with distortions.
How slow was it?
Speed depended on distance, season, terrain and who was carrying the message. A rider on a good road in fair weather could cover a considerable distance in a day, but ordinary road travel was far slower, and winter, flooding, war or sea conditions could add days or weeks. Crossing the sea depended on the wind. A letter going from northern Europe to the Mediterranean might take weeks, and a message to the Holy Land could take longer, with the exact time varying widely.
This had practical effects. A commander might be forced to act without orders. A king abroad might be out of reach for months. Merchants might buy or sell on information that was already out of date when it arrived. Prices and political circumstances could change before a reply came back.
Important news could move surprisingly quickly when it was valuable enough. Rulers sometimes arranged relays of riders for urgent messages, and merchants could pay for faster service on lucrative routes. Even so, certainty was rarely possible, and news often traveled by uneven paths.
Risks and reliability
Messages could be lost, stolen, delayed or tampered with. Messengers faced the same dangers as other travelers: bad roads, robbers, storms and political hostilities. Because letters might not arrive, important ones were often sent in duplicate by different routes, and a sender might include a summary of earlier correspondence in case the first letter was lost.
Forgery was a concern, which is part of why seals and handwriting were so important. A message could also be inaccurate even when authentic, since rumor or poor information might have shaped what the writer believed. Medieval writers often phrase news cautiously, saying that something is “said” or “reported”, an acknowledgment of the uncertain chain by which news reached them.
Secrecy was limited. A courier could read a letter if he could read and had broken the seal, and some correspondents sent the most sensitive points by word of mouth, trusting the messenger to deliver a spoken message that could not be intercepted on parchment. The use of codes existed in some contexts, especially in later medieval diplomacy, but it was not widespread.
Why it mattered
Slow communication helps explain many features of medieval life. Rulers governed through local officials with considerable independence because they could not oversee everything personally. Merchants relied on trusted agents and on reputation. Church organization depended on traveling clerics and carried letters. Even the way people understood events, as rumors that gradually firmed into accepted accounts, reflected the pace and manner of communication. Understanding the limits of messages helps explain why medieval political and economic arrangements look the way they do.