Chapter III: Pilgrims and Pilgrimages (1)

I

In spite of the merits of physicians, soothsayers, and sorcerers, maladies sometimes resisted the best remedies, and the patient would then vow to go on a pilgrimage, ride, walk, or have himself carried there, and pray for his cure. He went to our Lady of Walsingham, for example, or to St. Thomas of Canterbury, whose medical powers were considered, beyond comparison, the best of all: “Optimus egrorum, medicus fit Thomas bonorum,” was the motto stamped on some of the pewter ampullæ, with miraculous water in them, which pilgrims brought back as a souvenir from Canterbury: “For good people that are sick, Thomas is the best of physicians.” And surely praying at his shrine, after an open-air journey on foot or horseback, was a better way of preserving one’s health than swallowing the black beetles and fat bats of John of Gaddesden, the court physician. {339}

Pilgrimages were incessant; they were made to fulfil a vow as in cases of illness or of great peril, or in expiation of sins. Confessors frequently gave the going on a pilgrimage as penance, and sometimes ordered that the traveller should go barefoot or in his shirt. “Commune penaunce,” says Chaucer’s parson in his great sermon, speaking of atonement which must be public, “commune,” because the sin has been public too, “is that prestes enjoynen men comunly in certeyn caas, as for to goon, peradventure, naked in pilgrimage or barfot,” that is to say, naked in their shirts. In accordance with a vow made during a tempest, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, walked ten miles barefoot on the frozen ground, to White Kirk, near North Berwick, and had, on his return, “to be born, rather than led by his servants.”[463]

Another motive for pilgrimages, and, more than any other, characteristic of the times, was to annoy the king. Thus in the fourteenth century English people flocked to the tomb of the selfish, narrow-minded and vengeful Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, of whom popular prejudice had made a saint.[464] The crowd hastened through a spirit of opposition to Pontefract, where the rebel had been decapitated, by order of his relative, King Edward II, and the pilgrims became every year more numerous, to the great scandal of the sovereign and of the Archbishop of York. A letter of this prelate shows the uselessness of the {340} prohibitions: the idea of a semblance of persecution of believers devised by an archbishop only excited zeal and devotion; men hoped to please the martyr by allowing themselves to be slightly martyred. Thus, while awaiting a canonization that never came, though insisted upon by the next king, crowds collected near the tomb, so numerous and tumultuous that there happened “homicides and mortal wounds, . . . and that greater dangers yet and doubtless most imminent are to be feared.”[465]

All this began the very year after the execution of the “saint.” The official was enjoined to hinder these meetings by any means, and to disperse them until the Pope should pronounce. But the gatherings continued, and Henry of Lancaster wrote in 1327 to the Archbishop of York asking him to refer the matter to the Sovereign Pontiff, and “bear witness to the fame of the miracles which God works by our very dear lord and brother.”[466] The same year the Commons took the question in hand and petitioned for the canonization of the same Thomas, which was scarcely parliamentary business.[467] In 1338, a London pepperer had for sale a mazer bowl ornamented with an “image of St. Thomas of Lancester.”[468] Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, who died in 1361, bequeathed money for pious men to make a variety of pilgrimages on his behalf, and he specially recommended that “a good man and true” should be {341} hired and charged to go to “Pountfreyt and to offer there, at the tomb of Thomas, late earl of Lancaster, 40s.”[469]

To make a saint of a rebel was the most energetic means of protesting against the king, and the people would not miss this opportunity under some of their sovereigns. Henry III, in 1266, had been obliged to forbid Simon de Montfort being considered as a saint, although Simon having died under excommunication, as was represented to the king by the bishops and barons, authors of the petitions comprised in the “Dictum de Kenilworth,”[470] had little chance of ever being canonized. Latin hymns were nevertheless composed in his honour, as for a saint.[471]

The rebel was hardly dead than popular feeling, often unfavourable to him during his life, forthwith recognized in him nothing else than the hero who had fought against a tyrant, and, through sympathy for the man, or antipathy for the king, assigned therefore to him a place in heaven. The active revolt, rudely interrupted {342} by punishment, continued thus in the latent state, and every one came to see God Himself take the part of the oppressed, and proclaim the injustice of the ruler by working miracles at the tomb of his victim. The sovereign defended himself as he could; he dispersed the rabble and prohibited the miracles.

De par le Roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu,

read an ironical distich written in France in the “Diacre Paris” days. Similarly disposed, Edward II, on October 2, 1323, wrote “to his faithful John de Stonore and John de Bousser,” ordering an inquiry which would be followed by graver measures. He recalled to them that “a little time ago Henry de Montfort and Henry de Wylynton, our enemies and rebels, on the advice of the royal Court, were drawn and hanged at Bristol, and it had been decided that their bodies should remain attached to the gibbet, so that others might abstain from similar crimes and misdeeds against us.” But on the contrary, the people made relics of these bloody and mutilated remains, and surrounded them with respect. Reginald de Montfort, William de Clyf, William Curteys, and John his brother, and some others, in order to render the king odious to the people, had organized false miracles at the gibbet where the corpses of these rebels were still hanging, which was nothing short of “idolatry.”

Severe measures were required in several places at the same time; while these bodies were venerated at Bristol, a mere image of Thomas of Lancaster, in the Cathedral of London, was attracting pilgrims and working miracles. In this same year, 1323, on June 28th, Edward II is found writing with great irritation to the Bishop of London:

“It has come to our ears—and it is very displeasing to us—that many among the people of God, confided to your charge, victims of a diabolical trickery, crowd round {343} a panel placed in your church of St. Paul’s, where are to be seen statues, sculptures, or images, and among others that of Thomas, late Earl of Lancaster, a rebel, our enemy. Silly visitors, without any authorization from the Roman Church, venerate and worship this image as a holy thing, and affirm that it there works miracles: this is a disgrace for the whole Church, a shame for us and for you, a manifest danger for the souls of the aforesaid people, and a dangerous example to others.”[472]

The bishop knows it, continues the king, and secretly encourages these practices without any other motive than that of profiting by the offerings, thus making “shameful gains. . . . By which,” adds Edward II, “we are deeply afflicted.” The usual prohibitions follow.[473]

These were occasional pilgrimages. Others were in favour for a much longer time owing to the reputation of the departed for sanctity, and not to political motives. For many years crowds came, as we have seen, to visit the tomb of Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole. Even in this, fashion ruled; some relics or tombs of hermits or of saints enjoyed for a period universal favour; then all of a sudden, through some great miracle, another saint rose to pre-eminence, and the others, by degrees, sank into obscurity.

Convents, which had neither relics nor bodies of illustrious saints to attract pilgrims, nor a marvellous thorn-tree like that of Glastonbury, would have sometimes a pious artist to fabricate an image fit to draw visitors; it would be inaugurated with solemnity, work miracles, it was hoped, and enjoy a more or less wide fame. Thomas of Burton, Abbot of Meaux, near Beverley, relates in the chronicle of his rich monastery, written by himself at the end of the fourteenth century, one of the most remarkable facts of this kind. Abbot Hugh of Leven, one of his {344} predecessors, had in the first half of the century ordered a new crucifix for the choir of the chapel: “And the artist never worked at any fine and important part, except on Fridays, fasting on bread and water. And he had all the time a naked man under his eyes, and he laboured to give to his crucifix the beauty of the model. By the means of this crucifix, the Almighty worked open miracles continually. It was then thought that if access to this crucifix were allowed to women, the common devotion would be increased and great advantages would result from it for our monastery. Upon which the Abbot of Citeaux, by our request, granted us leave to let men and honest women approach the said crucifix, provided, however, that the women did not enter the cloister, the dormitory, and other parts of the monastery. . . . But profiting by this license, to our misfortune, women began to come in increasing numbers to the said crucifix, while in them devotion is cool, and all they want is to see the church, and they increase our expenses by our having to receive them.”[474]

This naïve complaint is interesting from several points of view; it plainly shows what was done to bring such or such a sanctuary into favour with the pilgrims;[475] in the present case the effort did not succeed, the prodigies do not seem to have long responded to the expectation, {345} and people came only from curiosity to visit the church and the fine crucifix of the monastery. From the artistic point of view the fact is still more important, for this is the most ancient example of sculpture from the nude living model to be found in mediæval England; and this anonymous sculptor ought to be remembered, which he is not, as one of the precursors of the Renaissance in his country.

Another attempt to make a chapel popular had been tried in the parochial church of Foston; but the Archbishop of York, William Grenefeld, was scandalized, and by a letter full of good sense put an end to the “great concourse of simple people who came to visit a certain image of the Holy Virgin recently placed in the church, as if this image had something more divine than any other images of the sort.”[476]

The fact was, as may be noticed even in our days, that, with or without the co-operation of the clergy, some statues had a far better reputation than others; wonders were expected of them, and they were worshipped accordingly; the same vicissitudes were observable for images as for relics and tombs of saints. This statue had healed sick people without number, and that one was known to have moved, to have made a sign, to have spoken a word. Pictures of miracles worked by statues constantly recur in manuscripts; one, for instance, is to be found in several English books of the fourteenth century.[477] It shows how a poor painter, being busy colouring and gilding {346} a statue of the Virgin, with a most ugly devil under her feet, the Evil One, angry at such an unflattering portrait, came and broke the ladder on which the artist was standing; but as he was falling and about to be killed, the stone Virgin bent towards him, and extending her arm held him safe until help came.

Statues did not always act so graciously, but were guided by circumstances, as was seen in the church of St. Paul-extra-muros at Rome. A visitor, according to the relation of the learned Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford, had insulted the image of the saint, saying: “‘Why hast thou got a sword, I mean to have thy sword,’ and he was trying to take it out of the hands of the statue. But through God’s doing, the statue raised its sword on the impious man, and clove his head to the chin; and then death followed. This happened at the time when Eugene IV was Pope of Rome, and a witness of the scene reported it to me; this witness was a beadel of the said Pope, called Master Erasmus Fullar, a priest of the kingdom of Hungary.”[478]

II

Apart from pilgrimages, in fashion but for a time, English people usually went to Durham to visit the tomb of the holy Confessor Cuthbert, and the place where was kept his ever-victorious banner; to the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in Westminster; to St. Albans, St. Edmund’s Bury, St. David’s, on account of the saints after whom these towns are named; to Chichester, to worship the body of St. Richard the Bishop; to Glastonbury, with its holy thorn-tree, and its church founded {347} by St. Joseph of Arimathea; to Waltham, where a cross of black marble had been miraculously found in the time of King Knut. Lincoln, York, Peterborough, Hayles with its Holy Blood, Winchester (for St. Swithin, who, among other merits, had had that of being a bridge builder), Holywell, Beverley with its St. John, and a number of other places,[479] shrines and miraculous and wishing wells had also attractions for the pilgrim; but none could stand comparison with Walsingham and Canterbury.

At Walsingham there were a church and a chapel, now destroyed, the latter with a miraculous bejewelled statue of the Virgin, and some of her milk, the chapel being exactly similar, it was said, to the Santa Casa of Loretto, which was a wonder in itself, for the English copy had been built in the eleventh century, long before the Casa was heard of. Owing to innumerable gifts the place was resplendent with gold and precious stones. Visiting Cologne and the famous shrine of the wise men of the East, Roger Ascham writes: “The three kings be not so rich, I believe, as was the Lady of Walsingham.”[480] People came in crowds; many among the British kings came too;[481] the road leading to Walsingham was called the palmers’ way, and chapels were built along its line. The town was full of inns, hospitals, and religious buildings, as was usually the case with the more famous of these places.

The milk and the image, as most of the pilgrimage statues, were destroyed at the Reformation, some of the wooden ones being burnt like the heretics, or with them, at Smithfield, as happened when Friar Forest died at {348} the stake.[482] The gold and silver ones were turned to more practical uses. “I have pullyd down,” Dr. London, one of the Visitors of religious houses, writes to Thomas Cromwell, “the image of our Lady at Caversham, wherunto wasse great pilgremage. The image ys platyd over with sylver, and I have putte yt in a cheste fast lackyd (locked) and naylyd uppe, and by the next bardge that commyth from Redyng to London yt shall be browght to your Lordeschippe. I have also pullyd down the place she stode in with all other ceremonyes, as lights, schrds (shrouds), crowchys (crosses), and imagies of wex hangyng about the chapel, and have defacyed the same thorowly in exchuyng of any farther resortt thedyr. . . . At Caversham ys a propre lodginge wher the chanon lay, with a fayer garden and an orchard mete to be bestowed upon som frynde of your lordeschip’s in thees parties.”[483]

In especially large numbers people hired horses at Southwark, with relays at Rochester, and set out for St. Thomas of Canterbury. This was the highroad to the continent; a regular service of hired horses had been established along it. Twelvepence was paid from Southwark to Rochester, twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury, sixpence from Canterbury to Dover. The horses were branded in a prominent manner, so that unscrupulous travellers should not be tempted to quit the road and appropriate their steeds.[484] The sanctuary of St. Thomas had, indeed, a world-wide reputation.

We can scarcely realize now the thrill of horror that went throughout Christendom, as far as the Levant, as far as Iceland, when the news came that Archbishop {349} Thomas Becket,[485] Legate of the Pope, former chancellor of England, had been massacred in his cathedral of Canterbury by four knights of Henry II, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 1170, his brain and blood splashing the pavement. Everything combined to increase the enormity of the crime; the holiness of the place, which should have afforded sanctuary, even to a murderer, the rank of the victim in the hierarchy of the Church, the dying man’s brave and pious words, the presence of the cross born at his side by his assistant, Edward Grim, himself severely wounded, and, above all, the fame and character of the prelate, an archbishop Turpin of real life, who, like the companion of Roland, and while already engaged in holy orders, had proved a plucky military leader, unimpeachable, moreover, from the moral point of view, and fearless throughout his life. Like the Archbishop of Reims of the “Song of Roland,” whose brain had flowed down his face,[486] he had died at the hands of barbarians, who had not, however, the excuse of being infidels.

Rarely did a single act cause such universal indignation. Public opinion proclaimed Thomas a saint even before the Pope could take action, which he did, however, with a promptitude rare in such cases, canonization being proclaimed in February, 1173. The body was scarcely buried in the crypt of the cathedral,[487] than pilgrims came to it, their numbers ceaselessly increasing. The life of the archbishop was the subject of numberless miniatures,[488] {350} sculptures,[489] painted windows. Some of the latter, dating back to the thirteenth century, still remain at Canterbury, Sens, Chartres, and other places. Matthew Paris wrote and illuminated with his own hand, Walsingham tells us, a biography of the archbishop; churches dedicated to him multiplied in England and out of England: “On the heights of Fourvières,” wrote Dean Stanley, “overlooking the city of Lyons, is a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Four years before his death, it is said, he was walking on the terraced bank of the river underneath, and being asked to whom the chapel should be dedicated, he replied, ‘To the next martyr,’ on which his companion remarked, ‘Perhaps, then, to you.’”[490]

The prophecy was fulfilled. Entirely renovated, and forming now part of the pilgrimage church at Fourvières, such a chapel still exists, still dedicated to St. Thomas; it has been allotted to the fraternity of “Notre Dame de Compassion” for their exercises, which consist chiefly in praying for the conversion of England. On the threshold are engraved four riming Latin lines: “Happy the place, happy the church where Thomas’s memory survives; happy the land which gave birth to the prelate, happy that which received him, an exile.”[491]

Churches dedicated to him were especially numerous in Normandy, from which his family came, a chapel at {351} Caen bearing the grim name of “Saint Thomas l’Abattu” (the stricken down). His life was told in verse and prose, in Latin, French, Icelandic, the most noteworthy of those lives being that in French verse by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, as remarkable for its literary as for its historical value, the author, a contemporary, having taken as much pains to ascertain the truth as would the most conscientious of the historians of to-day.[492] He had begun writing two years after the event, and had remodelled several times his poem because new documents, of which several are versified into his text, or new facts had come to his knowledge. He established himself at “Chantorbire,” where every man, every stone had been a witness, and he appealed, in order to learn the truth, to the friends, the servants, the sister of Saint Thomas. His work was thereby delayed, but he preferred that:

A Chantorbire alai; la vérité oï;
Des amis saint Thoma la vérité cuilli,
Et de cels ki l’aveient dès l’enfance servi,
D’oster et de remettre le travail en suffri.

Proud of the trouble he had taken, he was proud also of the good French he spoke, far better, of course, than that of ordinary Anglo-Norman writers: “My language is good, for I was born in France.” He thereupon submits to the custom, not yet quite obsolete, of abusing those who write on the same subject. Don’t forget, he says to his readers in the first lines of his poem, that “all physicians are not good healers; and it is not all clerks who know how to well sing and well read. . . . Some claim to be the best, and are in reality the worst.” He, however, claims to be the best; and though his boast may incline us to be the more critical, yet we must needs grant that it is not groundless, considering his accuracy, {352} the excellence of his French, the lifelike vividness of his scenes and dialogues, the interest of the views and sentiments, at times very liberal, expressed by him: “God loves the humble and the poor, who live by their work, whose every day is a hard one . . . and who lead clean lives; God will exalt them.”

To the mass of pilgrims who from the earliest moment had begun to visit Canterbury, Garnier, “standing by the tomb, a number of times read his sermon about Saint Thomas the martyr and his passion. And they heard nothing but truth absolute.”[493]

Great and small, by land and by sea, from every part of Christendom, “men of foreign countries, of a variety of languages,” says Garnier, flocked henceforth to the place in such numbers, that the road, followed by pilgrims from the West of England, or by foreigners from abroad, landing at Southampton, to reach Canterbury by way of Winchester, was, and is still, called “The Pilgrims’ Way.”[494]

Kings and emperors came with the rest; first of all, the cause of the tragedy, Henry II, who, to avoid excommunication, after a first penance at Avranches, in the course of which he had promised to go on a pilgrimage, at the Pope’s choice, to Rome, Jerusalem, or St. James’s, appeared for a severer test at the shrine of his dead enemy, on July 12, 1174. Walking the streets barefoot, dressed in haircloth and a woollen shirt, looking a “mendif” (beggar), having fasted for days on bread and water, the bells in the minster tolling a funeral knell, he kissed the {353} pavement of the cathedral at the place where Thomas had fallen. Led, then, to the crypt, the proud Plantagenet, the ruler of England and of half of France, conqueror of Ireland, suzerain of Scotland, was flogged on his bare shoulders by the prelates present, beginning with Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London:

“Li evesques de Lundres tint el puing le balai.”

Thus, “beaten and punished,” he spent the night, on the cold pavement, “in psalms and orisons,” before the tomb, and gave to the sister of the saint a mill, well worth ten marks of revenue—

“Bien valt dis mars par an la rente qu’ele en a.”[495]

Henry’s rival and suzerain, the King of France, the former crusader, brave, pious and inefficient Louis VII, came shortly after; a prodigious and unparalleled event, the first time a king of France had ever set foot on British soil. Feeling that for him death was near, and having had, although three times married, only one son, he decided in 1179 to have the young prince crowned at once, but before the ceremony, Philip, aged fourteen, while boar hunting, lost his way in the forest of Compiègne, and, separated from his companions, endured for days such hardships before a charcoal-burner found him and led him out of the maze that his life was despaired of. The king, in his anguish, had at night a vision of St. Thomas Becket, whom he had well known, promising life for his son if he himself went to Canterbury as a pilgrim. Louis’s advisers recommended not to risk a journey which would place him at the mercy of his enemy, the Plantagenet king. But again, and yet again, St. Thomas appeared at night, now threatening disaster. Louis started then with a brilliant retinue, and no untoward event marred the journey. Henry II, on the contrary, very meek {354} now when his former chancellor was in question, came to meet the French monarch at Dover; both went together to Canterbury; Louis remained two days in prayer, and offered the monks a gold cup and a magnificent gem shown henceforth to pilgrims as the “regale of France.” By a special charter he granted them, besides, one hundred casks of wine to be taken yearly for ever, at vintage time, from his cellars of Poissy-sur-Seine.

He returned to find his son on the way to recovery; and, having had him crowned, died within a year. The son, one of whose first acts was to confirm his father’s hundred casks’ charter, was that famous Philip August whose victory at Bouvines, in 1214, settled the fate of France and made it certain that she would be a great nation.[496]

It became henceforth a sort of tradition for British kings to make this pilgrimage. Back from Palestine and his Austrian prison, Richard Cœur-de-Lion went, on his return, to Canterbury out of gratitude for his recovered freedom. When king in his turn, his brother, John, went too; so did Henry III, Edward I, and nearly all English monarchs; so did the French king, John the Good, when a prisoner in England[497]; so did, in {355} December 1400, Manuel II, Palæologus, emperor of Constantinople[498]; so did, in 1416, Emperor Sigismund, grandson of the blind King Jean de Luxembourg, who had been killed at Crécy, himself then the dominant figure in Europe, a quick-witted and, for the time, liberal-minded sovereign, who, present one day in the Paris Parliament, when justice was being rendered, and seeing a plebeian about to lose his suit simply because he was a plebeian, rose from his seat, and, to the wonder of the assembly, touching him with his sword, made him a knight. A remarkable man was that Canterbury pilgrim, as a man as well as an emperor.

Accompanied by another emperor, Charles V, King Henry VIII came too, but having changed his mind later about a great many matters, he ordered every shrine to be destroyed, showing especial vindictiveness towards all that recalled Thomas Becket. If alive, he thought, the archbishop would have probably been, just as the recently beheaded More and Fisher, opposed to the new dogma of the royal supremacy: most probably, indeed. No mercy should therefore be shown to his bones and to that shrine, where Henry must have seen in former days a silver image of his own father bequeathed to be placed as near the tomb as it could possibly be. The monument was razed with particular care, and the long venerated bones scattered. Having appointed himself Head of the Church, Henry considered that he was free to undo what another Head of the Church, a Pope of long ago, had done, and, if it so pleased him, to un-canonize a saint. While, therefore, allowing many other British saints to remain on the calendar, he issued in 1539 “certain injunctions,” in which, after having informed his {356} priests that if they continued to marry he would send them to jail, he reviewed the life of Becket, showed to his own satisfaction that he was no saint, but rather “a rebel and a traitor to his prince,” that “he gave opprobious names to the gentlemen which then counselled him to leave his stubornness,” that a scuffle ensued with these “gentlemen,” and so “in the throng Becket was slain.”

The King, therefore, commands English people to cease calling the most famous of all the saints they had a saint, “and that his images, and pictures, through the whole realm . . . be plucked down . . . to the intent his grace’s loving subjects shall be no longer blindly lead and abused to commit idolatry”; if they persist, they will go to jail, “at his grace’s pleasure.”[499] In the same way had they been recommended shortly before not to call this one, or that one, of their loving sovereign’s daughters legitimate, so long as he himself chose to call them bastards; there was a gradation in the penalties, and in the case of the daughters it was death.

Equally inimical dispositions were shown during the next reign by Archbishop Cranmer towards his predecessor, and one of the articles of his “Visitation to be had within the diocese of Canterbury” had for its object to ascertain “whether they have put out of their church books this word Papa and the name and service of Thomas Becket.”[500]

Times had changed. But,

“Whan that Aprille, with his showres swoote,”

had long before, in the year 1388, caused spring flowers {357} to bloom, matters were different, and, as all know who can read English,

“from every schires end
Of England, to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seeke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.”

III

In those holy journeys, as in Chaucer’s book, all ranks of society were mingled together. The majority of these pilgrims were sincere and in good faith; they had made a vow and came to fulfil it. With such dispositions, the knight who found a pilgrim like himself upon the road would not be inclined to keep haughtily aloof; besides, if the distances were great between class and class at this period, familiarity was still greater. The distance has indeed diminished at the present day, and familiarity also, as though in compensation. The noble felt himself sufficiently raised above the common people not to be afraid of using a kind of jovial intimacy with them on occasion; at the present time, when superiority of rank is of less importance, many are more attentive and take care not to overstep a limit which is not now so patent as before.

Arrived at the end of the journey, all prayed; prayed with fervour in the humblest posture. The soul was filled with religious emotion when from the end of the majestic alley formed by the great pillars of the church, through the coloured twilight of the nave, the heart divined, rather than the eye saw, the mysterious object of veneration for which such a distance had been traversed at the cost of such fatigue. Though the practical man galloping up to bargain with the saint for the favour of God, though the emissary sent to make offering in the name of his master might keep a dry and clear eye, tears {358} coursed down the cheeks of the poor and simple in heart; he tasted fully of the pious emotion he had come to seek, the peace of heaven descended into his bosom, and he went away consoled.

Such was the happy lot of humble devout souls. Pilgrims, however, were undoubtedly a very mixed race; no reader of Chaucer needs to be reminded that the talk on the way was not limited to edifying subjects, and that pilgrims themselves, even allowing the greater number to have been sincere, were not all of them vessels of election. Some went like gypsies to a fair and tried to gather money by begging; some went for the pleasures of the journey and the merriments of the road; so that reformers and satirists, paying more attention to the abuse than to the less visible good that came along with it, began to raise a cry which grew louder and louder until, at the time of the Reformation, it was something like a storm. Whom did Langland see on Palmers’ way, near Walsingham? Those same false hermits we have already met by the highroads and at the corner of bridges, and in what objectionable company!

“Eremytes on an hep · with hokede staves,
Wenten to Walsyngham · and hure (their) wenches after:
Grete lobies and longe · that loth were to swynke,
Clothede hem in copis · to be knowe fro othere,
And made hem-selve eremytes · hure eise to have.”[501]

Wyclif denounced pilgrimages most persistently, so much so that, when later some of his followers had to renounce their heresies, belief in the usefulness and sanctity of pilgrimages was one of the articles they had to subscribe. Thus, in his vow of abjuration, the Lollard William Dynet of Nottingham, on December 1, 1395, swears in these words: “Fro this day forthwarde I shall worshipe ymages, with praying and offering unto hem, in the {359} worschepe of the seintes that they be made after; and also I shal nevermore despyse pylgremage.”[502]

But other Lollards refused to recant. Questioned by Archbishop Arundel the irreconcilable enemy of his sect, William Thorpe confesses in 1407 having preached against that passion “to seek and visit the bones or images . . . of this saint and of that,” so uncontrollable that, “ofttimes divers men and women of these runners thus madly hither and thither into pilgrimage, borrow hereto other men’s goods (yea, and sometimes they steal men’s goods hereto), and they pay them never again.”[503]

For “divers men and women” those journeys being chiefly pleasure trips, nothing, Thorpe continues, is forgotten that may make them more pleasurable, “and finding out one pilgrimage, they will ordain beforehand to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs; and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the king came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels.”

Chaucer’s pilgrims had not, perhaps, quite so magnificent a record, and when they crossed Dartford or Rochester did not outnoise the king himself; they had, in any case, no women singers; but their miller was provided with a sonorous bagpipe:

“A baggepype wel coude he blowe and sowne,
And ther-with-al he broghte us out of towne.”

Their monk’s bridle was heard jingling “as loude as {360} dooth the chapel-belle”; they talked boisterously, wrangled, and made merry,

“For trewely, confort ne mirthe is noon
To ryde by the weye doumb as a stoon,”

and dogs, of course, did not remain “doumb” for them any more than for the king.

One more objection of Thorpe’s to those journeys was that, “if these men and women be a month out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be, a half-year after, great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars.” Chaucer’s pilgrims were certainly, in their way, and no one nowadays objects, great “tale-tellers.”

Archbishop Arundel, who seems at times to be the one interrogated (but we must not forget that we have only Thorpe’s version, unrevised by the other party), makes a more picturesque than telling answer: “Lewd losell! thou seest not far enough in this matter! for thou considerest not the great travail of pilgrims. . . . I say to thee that it is right well done, that pilgrims have with them both singers and also pipers: that when one of them that goeth barefoot striketh his toe upon a stone, and hurteth him sore and maketh him to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow begin then a song or else take out of his bosom a bagpipe to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow.”

Lay writers of a reforming mind objected to pilgrimages, not so much on account of the worship of images, but because they thought these travels an encouragement to laziness and idle living. We know the opinion of Langland. The same views are expressed by an author of a quite different turn of mind, the one who wrote the “Roman de Renart,” and who has a special chapter to inform us “of the pilgrimage of Reynard and how he went to Rome.” Reynard cannot but consider that he has greatly {361} and many a time sinned, and feeling some anxiety about his misdeeds, goes to a hermit and confesses himself. Such are the faults he has to declare that the holy man does not dare absolve him, but advises him to go to Rome and ask the absolution of the Pope. Reynard accordingly “takes his scrip and burdon [that is, his wallet and staff, as did all pilgrims], and begins to move on, and takes his way; he looks quite like a pilgrim, his scrip fits his neck beautifully.” But travelling alone is not pleasant; he meets Belin the Sheep, and persuades him to come with him, and a little farther “Bernart the arch-priest,” a donkey, who was eating thistles in a ditch; he also secures this new companion.

As night is coming, the three, finding themselves near the house of Primaut the Wolf, enter without ceremony and make themselves at home, while the owner of the place is away. They find there “salted meat, cheese, and eggs . . . and good ale. Belin drinks so much that he loses his head, and then begins to sing, and the arch-priest to organ-bray, and Master Reynard sings in falsetto.” But their merriment is soon at an end. The alarm has been given; Ysengrin, Hersent, and a number of other wolves, relations, friends, compeers of Primaut, who all of them owe grudges to Reynard, come round and besiege the pilgrims. They escape with great difficulty. Ill-pleased with these grievous adventures, they agree not to go to Rome at all, and Reynard, to whom, rather against likelihood, the author here lends his own thoughts, winds up the enterprise with a speech: “‘My lords,’ says he, ‘by my head, this wandering is loathsome and tiring. There is in the world many a good man that has never been to Rome; such an one has come back from the Seven Saints who is worse than he ever was. I mean to take my way home, and I shall live by my labour and seek honest earnings; I shall be charitable to poor people.’ Then they cried, ‘Be it so, {362} be it so,’ and they betook themselves homewards,” converts to better lives, for a time.[504]

The same mode of reasoning was used later on, at the time of the Renaissance, by no less a man than Erasmus, who has described in his most satirical vein the vanities of pilgrims and pilgrimages. He supposes a meeting of two friends, Menedemus and Ogygyus, the latter just back from Compostela, and, what is more interesting for us, from Walsingham, “the most holy name in all England. . . . The towne is almost susteynyd by the resort of pylgrymes.” The faithful believer Ogygyus goes on describing the wonders of the place, the gold and silver and precious stones offered to the miraculous statue of our Lady, the marvels worked at the holy wells, the miracle of the knight towards whom the portal of the church stretched out, the beautiful relics, and especially the crystal phial containing the Virgin’s milk. “Whan ye sexten sawe us, he dyd runne to the aultre, and put apon hym his surplese and his stole about his nekke, knelyd downe relygyously and worshipyd it, and streghtforthe dyd offre the mylke to us to kysse.” The same ceremony with surplice and kneeling, though it has disappeared at Walsingham with the phial itself, may still be seen elsewhere any day, in Milan, for example, at the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo.

Ogygyus and his friends make their offerings, not without remarking that some unscrupulous visitors, by a clever trick, pick money out of the plate instead of leaving in it any of their own: a trick which, as we have seen, was used by Panurge on a certain day when he was somewhat “escorné et taciturne” for lack of pence.

Erasmus ends his dialogue in the same strain as the author of “Reynard”: {363}

“I have enough to do,” says sceptical Menedemus, “with my statyons of Rome.

“_Ogygyus._ Of Rome, that dyd never see Rome?

“_Menedemus._ I wyll tell you, thus I go my statyons at home. I go in to the parler, and I se unto the chast lyvynge of my doughters; agayne frome thense I go in to my shope, I beholde what my servauntes, bothe men and women, be doynge. From thense into the kytchyn, lokynge abowt, if ther nede any of my cownsell; frome thense hyther and thyther, observynge howe my chylderne be occupyed, what my wyffe dothe, beynge carefull that every thynge be in ordre: these be statyons of Rome.

“_Ogygyus._ But these thynges saynt James wold dow for yow.

“_Menedemus._ That I shuld se unto these thynges holy Scripture commaundethe; that I shuld commyt the charge to sayntes I dyd rede yt never commaunded.”[505]

Thus far Menedemus, whose task in life seems to have consisted in seeing to it that others fulfilled theirs. The friend of Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, took the opposite view, and wrote a dialogue in defence of images, relics, and pilgrimages, but in vain.[506] The time of the Reformation had come; doubt was becoming general, and from peasant to baron all the people assimilated arguments like those of Latimer:

“What thinke ye of these images that are had more then their felowes in reputation? that are gone unto with such labour and werines of the body, frequented {364} with such our cost, sought out and visited with such confidence? what say ye by these images, that are so famous, so noble, so noted, beying of them so many and so divers in England. Do you thinke that this preferryng of picture to picture, image to image, is the right use, and not rather the abuse of images?”[507]

These times were yet to be. In the Middle Ages pilgrims came to offer their prayers, and also money, each one according to his means. When the king, in his perpetual goings and comings, turned aside to visit a revered shrine, he usually gave seven shillings, as shown by the ordinances of Edward II for his household.[508]

Before going away the pilgrims, who had admired, besides the shrine and its jewels, the stained glass of the church, the monumental curiosities of the place and sometimes its fortifications,[509] bought, just as now, medals or signs as remembrances of their journey.[510] The author of the supplement to the “Canterbury Tales” at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shows the pilgrims purchasing in the town various sorts of _sygnys_ or _brochis_, so {365} that people who saw them might know where they had been:

“Then, as manere and custom is, signes there they boughte,
Ffor men of contre shulde know whom they hadde [s]oughte.”[511]

They were of lead or pewter, and perforated to be more easily sewn on the breast or cap, like those sold at the present day at St. Anne d’Auray in Brittany, but larger. At Canterbury they represented St. Thomas, or were in the shape of an ampulla or tiny flask, containing water from the miraculous well; at St. James’s they represented shells; at Amiens the head of St. John the Baptist: “Ecce signum faciei beati Johannis Baptiste”; at Rome the holy sudary, called the vernicle;[512] at Rocamadour the Holy Virgin.[513] The right of selling these signs was a source of profit, and it sometimes belonged exclusively to a convent or to a private family. At Rocamadour this {366} right had been conceded in return, it seems, for military services, to the De Valon family, lords of Thegra.[514] They and the Bishop of Tulle appointed a deputy to superintend the sale, and the product was divided by halves between them and the bishop. Such were the benefits derived from these sales that clandestine manufactories of pewter medals were established by the inhabitants, who sold numbers of them, to the great detriment of the authorized shop and in defiance of ever-recurring prohibitions. Once, however, in 1425, free sale was allowed to all the people of the place; the country had been reduced to such poverty that the bishop renounced his privilege for two years, out of charity and for the benefit of his flock.

Pilgrims when going home were careful to wear prominently sewn on their garments these testimonials of their holy travels. In the above-quoted dialogue of Erasmus, the sceptical Menedemus wonders at the appearance of his friend: “I pray you, what araye is this that you be in; me thynke that you be clothyd with cockle schelles, and be laden on every side with bruches of lead and tynne. And you be pretely garnyshed with wrethes of strawe, and your arme is full of snakes eggs,” thus uncivilly designating the beads of his chaplet. The French king Louis XI, of grim memory, was never without some such pewter medals and brooches, and wore them on his hat. “And truly,” writes his contemporary, Claude de Seyssel, “his devotion seemed more superstitious than religious. For to whatever image or church of God and the saints or of Our Lady that he heard the people were devoted, or where miracles were worked, he went there to make offerings, or sent a man there expressly. He had, besides, his hat quite full of images, mostly of lead or pewter, which he kissed on all occasions when any good or bad news arrived, or that his fancy prompted him; casting himself upon his knees so {367} suddenly at times, in whatever place he might be, that he seemed more like one wounded in his understanding than a rational man.”[515]

Professional pilgrims outshone in this respect all the others. For, beside the occasional pilgrim who came to make an offering to such or such a shrine in accomplishment of a vow and afterwards returned to take up again the course of his ordinary life, there was the pilgrim by calling or by penance (for such a life-long penance was sometimes inflicted), whose whole existence was spent travelling from one sanctuary to another, always on the road, and always begging. With the professional pardoner, the professional palmer, back from many countries, adorned with many tokens, the witness of many wonders, the hero of many adventures, was the most curious type of the religious wayfaring race, with hardly any equivalent in our days. Like the pardoner and the friar, the palmer could not but have a great experience of men and things; he had seen much, and he invented more. He too had to edify the multitude to whom he held out his hand for alms, and the fine stories, in which he rarely missed giving himself a part to play, were his livelihood; failing this, his daily bread failed too. By dint of repeating his tales, he came to almost believing them, then quite; and his voice henceforth took that accent of certitude which alone begets conviction in audiences. Besides, he came from so far that he might indeed have seen marvels; around us, of course, life flows on without prodigies, almost without events in its flat monotony; but it is common knowledge that in distant parts things are quite different. And the best proof is that none of those who have undertaken the journey comes back disappointed, quite the contrary; the {368} pleasure of believing them is moreover innocent enough, why should we deprive ourselves of an enjoyment exhilarating for the mind and good for the soul?

Clever people, poets, men of the world, deprived themselves of this pleasure, and made up for the loss by laughing at pilgrims and story-telling travellers. So did Chaucer, as we have already seen, who held up to ridicule in his “House of Fame,” shipmen and pilgrims, with their bags “brimful of lies.” To the same effect but in graver mood, Langland wrote in his “Visions”:

“Pylgrimis and palmers · plyghten hem to-gederes,
To seche saint Iame · and seyntys of rome,
Wenten forth in hure (their) way · with meny un-wyse tales,
And haven leve to lye · al hure lyf-tyme.”[516]

The crowd felt otherwise; they listened, laughed perhaps sometimes, but more often recollected themselves and remained attentive. The pilgrim was so interesting! he was a play in himself, a living story, he had on his feet the dust of Rome and of Jerusalem, and brought news of the “worshippers” of Mahomet. He was a picture too, with his bag hung at his side, not for lies, but for provisions, and his staff, at the top of which was a knob and sometimes a piece of metal with an appropriate motto like the device on a bronze ring found at Hitchin, a cross with these words, “Hæc in tute dirigat iter” (“May this safely guide thee on thy way”).[517] The staff had at the other end an iron point, like an alpenstock of the {369} present day; as may be seen in numerous drawings in mediæval manuscripts.

(_From the MS. 17 C. xxxviii._)]

The whole race of wanderers was, however, as we know, looked at askance by the king’s officers; these goings and comings disquieted the sheriff. We have already met labourers who, weary of their lord, left him under pretext of distant pilgrimages, and laid down without scruple the pilgrim’s staff at the door of a new master who would pay them better. False pilgrims were not less numerous than false pardoners and false hermits; they were condemned to repose, under pain of imprisonment, by the same statutes as the beggars and wandering workmen. Henceforward, orders Richard II in 1388, they too must have permits with a special seal affixed by certain worthy men.[518] Those without a permit should be forthwith arrested, unless infirm and incapable of work, for their good faith is then evident, and it is not for the love of vagabondage that they painfully go and visit “optimum ægrorum medicum,” Saint Thomas. Even greater severity was shown when it was a matter of {370} crossing the sea; would-be pilgrims must be furnished with regular passports; and the law applied to “all manner of people, as well clerks as other,” under pain of confiscation of all their goods. The exceptions made by the king show besides that it is wanderers of doubtful status and motives whom he has in view, for there are dispensations for the “lords and other great persons of the realm,” for the “true and notable merchants,” and lastly, for the “king’s soldiers.”[519]

This passport or “licence,” this “special leave of the king,” could only be available at certain ports, namely, London, Sandwich, Dover, Southampton, Plymouth, Dartmouth, Bristol, Yarmouth, Boston, Kingston-upon-Hull, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the ports of the coast facing Ireland. Heavy penalties were laid on all port wardens, inspectors, ship captains, etc., who were neglectful, or so bold as to show favour to roamers. In the year 1389, the king restrained pilgrims from embarking anywhere else than at Dover or Plymouth. To put to sea elsewhere, an “especial licence from the king himself” was necessary.[520] A number of such licences, as will be seen further, are still in existence.

IV

But the attraction of distant pilgrimages was great,[521] especially the three without equal: Rome, Jerusalem, and St. James’s of Galicia, held so sacred that, while most {371} of the vows taken by the benefactors of the great bridge at Avignon could be remitted on account of their gifts to this useful structure, exception was made if the question was of a pilgrimage to be performed to one of those three places.[522] With or without letters men crossed the Channel, for which they paid sixpence, or if they had a horse, two shillings.[523] They arrived at Calais, stopping there some time in a “Maison-Dieu,” or hospital, which had been built and endowed by pious souls with revenues “for the sustenance of the pilgrims and other poor folks repairing to the said town to rest and refresh them.”[524]