Our best authority in this period of travelling is Fynes Moryson, whose Precepts for Travellers[184] are particularly full.  Moryson is well known as one of the most experienced travellers of the late Elizabethan era.  On a travelling Fellowship from Peterhouse College, Cambridge, in 1591-1595 he made a tour of Europe, when the Continent was bristling with dangers for Englishmen.  Spain and the Inquisition infected Italy and the Low Countries; France was full of desperate marauding soldiers; Germany nourished robbers and free-booters in every forest.  It was the particular delight of Fynes Moryson to run into all these dangers and then devise means of escaping them.  He never swerved from seeing whatever his curiosity prompted him to, no matter how forbidden and perilous was the venture.  Disguised as a German he successfully viewed the inside of a Spanish fort;[185] in the character of a Frenchman he entered the jaws of the Jesuit College at Rome.[186] He made his way through German robbers by dressing as a poor Bohemian, without cloak or sword, with his hands in his hose, and his countenance servile.[187] His triumphs were due not so much to a dashing and magnificent bravery, as to a nice ingenuity.  For instance, when he was plucked bare by the French soldiers of even his inner doublet, in which he had quilted his money, he was by no means left penniless, for he had concealed some gold crowns in a box of “stinking ointment” which the soldiers threw down in disgust.[188]

His Precepts for Travellers are characteristically canny.  Never tell anyone you can swim, he advises, because in case of shipwreck “others trusting therein take hold of you, and make you perish with them."[189] Upon duels and resentment of injury in strange lands he throws cold common sense.  “I advise young men to moderate their aptnesse to quarrell, lest they perish with it.  We are not all like Amadis or Rinalldo, to incounter an hoste of men."[190] Very thoughtful is this paragraph on the night’s lodging: 

“In all Innes, but especially in suspected places, let him bolt or locke the doore of his chamber:  let him take heed of his chamber fellows, and always have his Sword by his side, or by his bed-side; let him lay his purse under his pillow, but always foulded with his garters, or some thing hee first useth in the morning, lest hee forget to put it up before hee goe out of his chamber.  And to the end he may leave nothing behind him in his Innes, let the visiting of his chamber, and gathering his things together, be the last thing he doth, before hee put his foote into the stirrup."[191]