Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far

Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far you could walk to the fields & still do a good day's work. Riding around on horseback was for a tiny elite, most places -- a horse eats more than a person, in a world where food was the majority of income. Once people could travel, they did, and the world got re-organized around this assumption. But still, bicycles took off as a technology when they were too expensive for farm-workers, as a sort-of upper-middle class leisure craze. Only later did they enable mass mobility. [comment moved]