itinerans

Latin iter (a going, a journey, a road) gave itinerare (to travel) and itinerans (the traveling one, the one who goes). The related word itinerarium meant a travel route, an itinerary — the planned sequence of stops that organized a journey. Roman itineraria were practical documents: the Antonine Itinerary of the early 3rd century CE listed 255 routes across the Roman Empire with the distances between towns, an administrative document that served military and civil travel alike.

Itinerant workers, craftsmen, and preachers were a constant feature of medieval European life. Tinkers, knife-grinders, and other metalworkers traveled circuits between villages that could not support a permanent resident craftsman. Itinerant judges in England (the assizes) traveled circuit routes to bring the royal courts to the localities. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, rode an estimated 250,000 miles on horseback across Britain and America between 1738 and 1791, preaching in every village and town — a career of deliberate itinerancy.

The social status of the itinerant was ambiguous. Itinerant merchants, craftsmen, and entertainers were useful but also suspicious — they were not from here, not accountable to the local community, not fixed in the social hierarchy. Romani and Traveller peoples in Europe, who organized their lives around seasonal itinerancy, faced centuries of persecution partly rooted in the settled population's distrust of those who did not stay put.

Today itinerant describes workers who move from job to job and place to place — seasonal agricultural workers, touring musicians, construction workers following projects, NGO workers moving between postings. The word has lost much of its suspicion but retains the suggestion of a life organized around motion rather than place, of belonging defined by the journey rather than the destination.