Chapter I

The fashion of going on pilgrimage seems to have sprung up in the fourth century. The first object of pilgrimage was the Holy Land. Jerome said, at the outset, the most powerful thing which can be said against it; viz., that the way to heaven is as short from Britain as from Jerusalem--a consolatory reflection to those who were obliged, or who preferred, to stay at home; but it did not succeed in quenching the zeal of those many thousands who desired to see, with their own eyes, the places which had been hallowed by the presence and the deeds of their Lord--to tread, with their own footsteps,

"Those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet,
Which "eighteen" hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage on the bitter cross;"[167]

to kneel down and pray for pardon for their sins upon that very spot where the Great Sacrifice for sin was actually offered up; to stand upon the summit of Mount Olivet, and gaze up into that very pathway through the sky by which He ascended to His kingdom in Heaven.

We should, however, open up too wide a field if we were to enter into the subject of the early pilgrims to the Holy Land;[168] to trace their route from Britain, usually _viâ_ Rome, by sea and land; to describe how a pilgrim passenger-traffic sprung up, of which adventurous ship-owners took advantage; how hospitals[169] were founded here and there along the road, to give refuge to the weary pilgrims, until they reached the Hospital _par excellence_, which stood beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; how Saxon kings made treaties to secure their safe conduct through foreign countries;[170] how the Order of the Knights of the Temple was founded to escort the caravans of pilgrims from one to another of the holy places, and protect them from marauding Saracens and Arabs; how the Crusades were organised partly, no doubt, to stem the course of Mahommedan conquest, but ostensibly to wrest the holy places from the hands of the infidel: this part of the subject of pilgrimage would occupy too much of our space here. Our design is to give a sketch of the less known portion of the subject, which relates to the pilgrimages which sprung up in after-times, when the veneration for the holy places had extended to the shrines of saints; and when, still later, veneration had run wild into the grossest superstition, and crowds of sane men and women flocked to relic-worships, which would be ludicrous if they were not so pitiable and humiliating. This part of the subject forms a chapter in the history of the manners of the Middle Ages, which is little known to any but the antiquarian student; but it is an important chapter to all who desire thoroughly to understand what were the modes of thought and habits of life of our English forefathers in the Middle Ages.

The most usual foreign pilgrimages were to the Holy Land, the scene of our Lord's earthly life; to Rome, the centre of western Christianity; and to the shrine of St. James at Compostella.[171]

The number of pilgrims to these places must have been comparatively limited; for a man who had any regular business or profession could not well undertake so long an absence from home. The rich of no occupation could afford the leisure and the cost; and the poor who chose to abandon their lawful occupation could make these pilgrimages at the cost of others; for the pilgrim was sure of entertainment at every hospital, or monastery, or priory, probably at every parish priest's rectory and every gentleman's hall,[172] on his way; and there were not a few poor men and women who indulged a vagabond humour in a pilgrim's life. The poor pilgrim repaid his entertainer's hospitality by bringing the news of the countries[173] through which he had passed, and by amusing the household after supper with marvellous saintly legends, and traveller's tales. He raised a little money for his inevitable travelling expenses by retailing holy trifles and curiosities, such as were sold wholesale at all the shrines frequented by pilgrims, and which were usually supposed to have some saintly efficacy attached to them. Sometimes the pilgrim would take a bolder flight, and carry with him some fragment of a relic--a joint of a bone, or a pinch of dust, or a nail-paring, or a couple of hairs of the saint, or a rag of his clothing; and the people gladly paid the pilgrim for thus bringing to their doors some of the advantages of the holy shrines which he had visited. Thus Chaucer's Pardoner--"That strait was comen from the Court of Rome"--

"In his mail[174] he had a pilwebere,[175]
Which as he saidé was oure Lady's veil;
He said he had a gobbet of the sail
Thatte St. Peter had whan that he went
Upon the sea, till Jesu Christ him hent.[176]
He had a cross of laton full of stones;[177]
And in a glass he haddé piggés bones.[178]
But with these relics whanné that he fond
A poure parson dwelling upon lond,
Upon a day he gat him more monie
Than that the parson gat in monthes tweie.
And thus with feined flattering and japes,
He made the parson and the people his apes."

In a subsequent chapter, on the Merchants of the Middle Ages, will be found some illustrations of mediæval shipping, which also illustrate the present subject. One is a representation of Sir John Mandeville and his companions in mantle, hat, and staff, just landed at a foreign town on their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Another represents Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in mantle, hat, and staff, embarking in his own ship on his departure for a similar pilgrimage. Another illustration in the subsequent chapter on Secular Clergy represents Earl Richard at Rome, being presented to the Pope.

But those who could not spare time or money to go to Jerusalem, or Rome, or Compostella, could spare both for a shorter expedition; and pilgrimages to English shrines appear to have been very common. By far the most popular of our English pilgrimages was to the shrine of St. Thomas-à-Becket, at Canterbury, and it was popular not only in England, but all over Europe. The one which stood next in popular estimation, was the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham. But nearly every cathedral and great monastery, and many a parish church besides, had its famous saint to whom the people resorted. There was St. Cuthbert at Durham, and St. William at York, and little St. William at Norwich, and St. Hugh at Lincoln, and St. Edward Confessor at Westminster, and St. Erkenwald in the cathedral of London, and St. Wulstan at Worcester, and St. Swithin at Winchester, and St. Edmund at Bury, and SS. Etheldreda and Withburga at Ely, and many more, whose remains were esteemed holy relics, and whose shrines were frequented by the devout. Some came to pray at the tomb for the intercession of the saint in their behalf; or to seek the cure of disease by the touch of the relic; or to offer up thanks for deliverance believed to have been vouchsafed in time of peril through the saint's prayers; or to obtain the number of days' pardon--_i.e._ of remission of their time in purgatory--offered by Papal bulls to those who should pray at the tomb. Then there were famous roods, the Rood of Chester and of Bromholme; and statues of the Virgin, as Our Lady of Wilsden, and of Boxley, and of this, that, and the other place. There were scores of holy wells besides, under saintly invocations, of which St. Winifred's well with her chapel over it still remains an excellent example.[179] Some of these were springs of medicinal water, and were doubtless of some efficacy in the cures for which they were noted; in others a saint had baptized his converts; others had simply afforded water to a saint in his neighbouring cell.[180]

Before any man[181] went on pilgrimage, he first went to his church, and received the Church's blessing on his pious enterprise, and her prayers for his good success and safe return. The office of pilgrims (_officium peregrinorum_) may be found in the old service-books. We give a few notes of it from a Sarum missal, date 1554, in the British Museum.[182] The pilgrim is previously to have confessed. At the opening of the service he lies prostrate before the altar, while the priest and choir sing over him certain appropriate psalms, viz. the 24th, 50th, and 90th. Then follow some versicles, and three collects, for safety, &c., in which the pilgrim is mentioned by name, "thy servant, N." Then he rises, and there follows the benediction of his scrip and staff; and the priest sprinkles the scrip with holy water, and places it on the neck of the pilgrim, saying, "In the name of, &c., take this scrip, the habit of your pilgrimage, that, corrected and saved, you may be worthy to reach the thresholds of the saints to which you desire to go, and, your journey done, may return to us in safety." Then the priest delivers the staff, saying, "Take this staff, the support of your journey, and of the labour of your pilgrimage, that you may be able to conquer all the bands of the enemy, and to come safely to the threshold of the saints to which you desire to go, and, your journey obediently performed, return to us with joy." If any one of the pilgrims present is going to Jerusalem, he is to bring a habit signed with the cross, and the priest blesses it:--"... we pray that Thou wilt vouchsafe to bless this cross, that the banner of the sacred cross, whose figure is signed upon him, may be to Thy servant an invincible strength against the evil temptations of the old enemy, a defence by the way, a protection in Thy house, and may be to us everywhere a guard, through our Lord, &c." Then he sprinkles the habit with holy water, and gives it to the pilgrim, saying, "Take this habit, signed with the cross of the Lord our Saviour, that by it you may come safely to his sepulchre, who, with the Father," &c. Then follows mass; and after mass, certain prayers over the pilgrims, prostrate at the altar; then, "let them communicate, and so depart in the name of the Lord." The service runs in the plural, as if there were usually a number of pilgrims to be dispatched together.

There was a certain costume appropriate to the pilgrim, which old writers speak of under the title of pilgrims' weeds; the illustrations of this paper will give examples of it. It consisted of a robe and hat, a staff and scrip. The robe called _sclavina_ by Du Cange, and other writers, is said to have been always of wool, and sometimes of shaggy stuff, like that represented in the accompanying woodcut of the latter part of the fourteenth century, from the Harleian MS., 4,826. It seems intended to represent St. John Baptist's robe of camel's hair. Its colour does not appear in the illuminations, but old writers speak of it as grey. The hat seems to be commonly a round hat, of felt, and, apparently, does not differ from the hats which travellers not uncommonly wore over their hoods in those days.[183]

The pilgrim who was sent on pilgrimage as a penance seems usually to have been ordered to go barefoot, and probably many others voluntarily inflicted this hardship upon themselves in order to heighten the merit and efficacy of their good deed. They often also made a vow not to cut the hair or beard until the pilgrimage had been accomplished. But the special insignia of a pilgrim were the staff and scrip. In the religious service with which the pilgrims initiated their journey, we have seen that the staff and scrip are the only insignia mentioned, except in the case of one going to the Holy Land, who has a robe signed with the cross; the staff and the scrip were specially blessed by the priest, and the pilgrim formally invested with them by his hands.

The staff, or bourdon, was not of an invariable shape. On a fourteenth-century grave-stone at Haltwhistle, Northumberland, it is like a rather long walking-stick, with a natural knob at the top. In the cut from Erasmus's "Praise of Folly," which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Nichols's "Pilgrimages of Canterbury and Walsingham," it is a similar walking-stick; but, usually, it was a long staff, some five, six, or seven feet long, turned in the lathe, with a knob at the top, and another about a foot lower down. Sometimes a little below the lower knob there is a hook, or a staple, to which we occasionally find a water-bottle or a small bundle attached. The hook is seen on the staff of Lydgate's pilgrim (p. 163). Sir John Hawkins tells us[184] that the staff was sometimes hollowed out into a kind of flute, on which the pilgrim could play. The same kind of staff we find in illuminated MSS. in the hands of beggars and shepherds, as well as pilgrims.

The scrip was a small bag, slung at the side by a cord over the shoulder, to contain the pilgrim's food and his few necessaries.[185] Sometimes it was made of leather; but probably the material varied according to the taste and wealth of the pilgrim. We find it of different shape and size in different examples. In the monumental effigy of a pilgrim of rank at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the scrip is rather long, widest at bottom, and is ornamented with three tassels at the bottom, something like the bag in which the Lord Chancellor carries the great seal, and it has scallop shells fixed upon its front. In the grave-stone of a knight at Haltwhistle, already alluded to, the knight's arms, sculptured upon the shield on one side of his grave cross, are a _fess_ between three _garbs_ (_i.e._ wheat-sheaves); and a _garb_ is represented upon his scrip, which is square and otherwise plain. The tomb of Abbot Chillenham, at Tewkesbury, has the pilgrim's staff and scrip sculptured upon it as an architectural ornament; the scrip is like the mediæval purse, with a scallop shell on the front of it, very like that on p. 163.[186] The pilgrim is sometimes represented with a bottle, often with a rosary, and sometimes with other conveniences for travelling or helps to devotion. There is a very good example in Hans Burgmaier's "Images de Saints, &c., of the Familly of the Emp. Maximilian I." fol. 112.

But though the conventional pilgrim is always represented with robe, and hat, and staff, and scrip, the actual pilgrim seems sometimes to have dispensed with some, if not with all, of these insignia. For example, Chaucer minutely describes the costume of the principal personages in his company of Canterbury Pilgrims, and he not only does not describe what would have been so marked and picturesque features in their appearance, but his description seems to preclude the pilgrim's robe and hat. His knight is described in the ordinary jupon,

"Of fustian he wered a jupon."

And the squire--

"Short was his gowne with sleves long and wide."

And the yeoman--

"Was clad in cote and hood of green."

And the serjeant of the law--

"Rode but homely in a medlee cote,
Girt with a seint[187] of silk with barres small."

The merchant was in motley--

"And on his hed a Flaundrish bever hat."

And so with all the rest, they are clearly described in the ordinary dress of their class, which the pilgrim's robe would have concealed. It seems very doubtful whether they even bore the especial insignia of staff and scrip. Perhaps when men and women went their pilgrimage on horseback, they did not go through the mere form of carrying a long walking-staff. The equestrian pilgrim, of whom we shall give a woodcut hereafter, though he is very correctly habited in robe and hat, with pilgrim signs on each, and his rosary round his neck, does not carry the bourdon. The only trace of pilgrim costume about Chaucer's Pilgrims, is in the Pardoner--

"A vernicle hadde he sewed in his cappe"--

but that was a sign of a former pilgrimage to Rome; and it is enough to prove--if proof were needed--that Chaucer did not forget to clothe his personages in pilgrim weeds, but that they did not wear them.

But besides the ordinary insignia of pilgrimage, every pilgrimage had its special signs, which the pilgrim on his return wore conspicuously upon his hat or his scrip, or hanging round his neck, in token that he had accomplished that particular pilgrimage. The pilgrim who had made a long pilgrimage, paying his devotions at every shrine in his way, might come back as thickly decorated with signs as a modern soldier, who has been through a stirring campaign, with medals and clasps.

The pilgrim to the Holy Land had this distinction above all others, that he wore a special sign from the very hour that he took the vow upon him to make that most honourable pilgrimage. This sign was a cross, formed of two strips of coloured cloth sewn upon the shoulder of the robe; the English pilgrim wore the cross of white, the French of red, the Flemish of green. Some, in their fierce earnestness, had the sacred sign cut into their flesh; in the romance of "Sir Isumbras," we read--

"With a sharpe knyfe he share
A cross upon his shoulder bare."

Others had it branded upon them with a hot iron; one pilgrim in the "Mirac. de S. Thomæ" of Abbot Benedict gives the obvious reason, that though his clothes should be torn away, no one should be able to tear the cross from his breast. At the end of the _Officium peregrinorum_, which we have described, we find a rubric calling attention to the fact, that burning the cross in the flesh is forbidden by the canon law on pain of the greater excommunication; the prohibition is proof enough that at one time it was a not uncommon practice. But when the pilgrim reached the Holy Land, and had visited the usual round of the holy places, he became entitled to wear the palm in token of his accomplishment of that great pilgrimage; and from this badge he derived the name of Palmer. How the palm was borne does not quite certainly appear; some say that it was a branch of palm, which the returning pilgrim bore in his hand or affixed to the top of his staff;[188] but probably in the general case it was in the shape of sprigs of palm sewn crosswise upon the hat and scrip.

The Roman pilgrimage seems always to have ranked next in popular estimation to that of the Holy Land;[189] and with reason, for Rome was then the great centre of the religion and the civilization of Western Christendom. The plenary indulgence which Boniface VIII. published in 1300, to all who should make the Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome, no doubt had its effect in popularizing this pilgrimage _ad limina apostolorum_. Two hundred thousand pilgrims, it is said, visited Rome in one month during the first Jubilee; and succeeding popes shortened the interval between these great spiritual fairs, first to fifty, then to thirty-three, and lastly to twenty-five years. The pilgrim to Rome doubtless visited many shrines in that great Christian capital, and was entitled to wear as many signs; but the chief signs of the Roman pilgrimage were a badge with the effigies of St. Peter and St. Paul, the cross-keys, and the vernicle. Concerning the first, there is a grant from Innocent III. to the arch-priest and canons of St. Peter's at Rome,[190] which confirms to them (or to those to whom they shall concede it) the right to cast and to sell the lead or pewter signs, bearing the effigies of the Apostles Peter and Paul, with which those who have visited their threshold decorate themselves for the increase of their devotion and a testimony of their pilgrimage. Dr. Rock says[191] "that a friend of his has one of these Roman pilgrim signs, which was dug up at Launde Abbey, Leicestershire. It is of copper, in the shape of a quatrefoil, one and three-quarter inches in diameter, and has the cross-keys on one side, the other side being plain." An equestrian pilgrim represented in Hans Burgmaier's "Der Weise Koenige," seems to bear on his cloak and his hat the cross-keys. The vernicle was the kerchief of Veronica, with which, said a very popular legend, she wiped the brow of the Saviour, when he fainted under His cross in the Via Dolorosa, and which was found to have had miraculously transferred to it an imprint of the sacred countenance. Chaucer's Pardoner, as we have already seen--

"Strait was comen from the Court of Rome,"

and, therefore,

"A vernicle had he sewed upon his cap."

The sign of the Compostella pilgrimage was the scallop shell.[192] The legend which the old Spanish writers give in explanation of the badge is this:--When the body of the saint was being miraculously conveyed in a ship without sails or oars, from Joppa to Galicia, it passed the village of Bonzas, on the coast of Portugal, on the day that a marriage had been celebrated there. The bridegroom with his friends were amusing themselves on horseback on the sands, when his horse became unmanageable and plunged into the sea; whereupon the miraculous ship stopped in its voyage, and presently the bridegroom emerged, horse and man, close beside it. A conversation ensued between the knight and the saint's disciples on board, in which they apprised him that it was the saint who had saved him from a watery grave, and explained the Christian religion to him. He believed, and was baptized there and then. And immediately the ship resumed its voyage, and the knight came galloping back over the sea to rejoin his astonished friends. He told them all that had happened, and they too were converted, and the knight baptized his bride with his own hand. Now, when the knight emerged from the sea, both his dress and the trappings of his horse were covered with scallop shells; and, therefore, the Galicians took the scallop shell as the sign of St. James. The legend is found represented in churches dedicated to St. James, and in ancient illuminated MSS.[193] The scallop shell is not unfrequently found in armorial bearings. It is hardly probable that it would be given to a man merely because he had made the common pilgrimage to Compostella; perhaps it was earned by service under the banner of Santiago, against the Moors in the Spanish crusades. The Popes Alexander III., Gregory IX., and Clement V., granted a faculty to the Archbishops of Compostella, to excommunicate those who sell these shells to pilgrims anywhere except in the city of Santiago, and they assign this reason, because the shells are the badge of the Apostle Santiago.[194] The badge was not always an actual shell, but sometimes a jewel made in the shape of a scallop shell. In the "Journal of the Archæological Association," iii. 126, is a woodcut of a scallop shell of silver gilt, with a circular piece of jet set in the middle, on which is carved an equestrian figure of Santiago.

The chief sign of the Canterbury pilgrimage was an ampul (_ampulla_, a flask); we are told all about its origin and meaning by Abbot Benedict, who wrote a book on the miracles of St. Thomas.[195] The monks had carefully collected from the pavement the blood of the martyr which had been shed upon it, and preserved it as one of the precious relics. A sick lady who visited the shrine, begged for a drop of this blood as a medicine; it worked a miraculous cure, and the fame of the miracle spread far and wide, and future pilgrims were not satisfied unless they too might be permitted the same high privilege. A drop of it used to be mixed with a chalice full of water, that the colour and flavour might not offend the senses, and they were allowed to taste of it. It wrought, says the abbot, miraculous cures; and so, not only vast crowds came to take this strange and unheard-of medicine, but those who came were anxious to take some of it home for their sick friends and neighbours. At first they put it into wooden vessels, but these were split by the liquid; and many of the fragments of these vessels were hung up about the martyr's tomb in token of this wonder. At last it came into the head of a certain young man to cast little flasks--_ampullæ_--of lead and pewter. And then the miracle of the breaking ceased, and they knew that it was the Divine will that the Canterbury medicine should be carried in these ampullæ throughout the world, and that these ampullæ should be recognised by all the world as the sign of this pilgrimage and these wonderful cures. At first the pilgrims had carried the wooden vases concealed under their clothes; but these ampullæ were carried suspended round the neck; and when the pilgrims reached home, says another authority,[196] they hung these ampullæ in their churches for sacred relics, that the glory of the blessed martyr might be known throughout the world. Some of these curious relics still exist. They are thin, flat on one side, and slightly rounded on the other, with two little ears or loops through which a cord might be passed to suspend them. The mouth might have been closed by solder, or even by folding over the edges of the metal. There is a little flask figured in Gardner's "History of Dunwich," pl. iii., which has a T upon the side of it, and which may very probably have been one of these ampullæ. But one of a much more elaborate and interesting type is here engraved, from an example preserved in the museum at York. The principal figure is a somewhat stern representation of the blessed archbishop; above is a rude representation of his shrine; and round the margin is the rhyming legend--"Optimus egrorum: Medicus fit Thoma bonorum" ("Thomas is the best physician for the pious sick"). On the reverse of the ampul is a design whose intention is not very clear; two monks or priests are apparently saying some service out of a book, and one of them is laying down a pastoral staff; perhaps it represents the shrine with its attendants. From the style of art, this design may be of the early part of the thirteenth century. But though this ampul is clearly designated by the monkish writers, whom we have quoted, as the special sign of the Canterbury pilgrimage, there was another sign which seems to have been peculiar to it, and that is a bell. Whether these bells were hand-bells, which the pilgrims carried in their hands, and rang from time to time, or whether they were little bells, like hawks' bells, fastened to their dress--as such bells sometimes were to a canon's cope--does not certainly appear. W. Thorpe, in the passage hereafter quoted at length from Fox, speaks of "the noise of their singing and the sound of their piping, and the jangling of their Canterbury bells," as a body of pilgrims passed through a town. One of the prettiest of our wild-flowers, the _Campanula rotundifolia_, which has clusters of blue, bell-like flowers, has obtained the common name of Canterbury Bells.[197] There were other religious trinkets also sold and used by pilgrims as mementoes of their visit to the famous shrine. The most common of them seems to have been the head of St. Thomas,[198] cast in various ornamental devices, in silver or pewter; sometimes it was adapted to hang to a rosary,[199] more usually, in the examples which remain to us, it was made into a brooch to be fastened upon the cap or hood, or dress. In Mr. C. R. Smith's "Collectanea Antiqua," vol. i. pl. 31, 32, 33, and vol. ii. pl. 16, 17, 18, there are representations of no less than fifty-one English and foreign pilgrims' signs, of which a considerable proportion are heads of St. Thomas. The whole collection is very curious and interesting.[200]

The ampul was not confined to St. Thomas of Canterbury. When his ampuls became so very popular, the guardians of the other famous shrines adopted it, and manufactured "waters," "aquæ reliquiarum," of their own. The relic of the saint, which they were so fortunate as to possess, was washed with or dipped in holy water, which was thereupon supposed to possess--diluted--the virtues of the relic itself. Thus there was a "Durham water," being the water in which the incorruptible body of St. Cuthbert had been washed at its last exposure; and Reginald of Durham, in his book on the admirable virtues of the blessed Cuthbert,[201] tells us how it used to be carried away in ampuls, and mentions a special example in which a little of this pleasant medicine poured into the mouth of a sick man, cured him on the spot. The same old writer tells us how the water held in a bowl that once belonged to Editha, queen and saint, in which a little bit of rag, which had once formed part of St. Cuthbert's garments, was soaked, acquired from these two relics so much virtue that it brought back health and strength to a dying clerk who drank it. In Gardner's "History of Dunwich" (pl. iii.) we find drawings of ampullæ like those of St. Thomas, one of which has upon its front a W surmounted by a crown, which it is conjectured may be the pilgrim sign of Our Lady of Walsingham, and contained, perhaps, water from the holy wells at Walsingham, hereinafter described. Another has an R surmounted by one of the symbols of the Blessed Virgin, a lily in a pot; the author hazards a conjecture that it may be the sign of St. Richard of Chichester. The pilgrim who brought away one of these flasks of medicine, or one of these blessed relics, we may suppose, did not always hang it up in church as an _ex voto_, but sometimes preserved it carefully in his house for use in time of sickness, and would often be applied to by a sick neighbour for the gift of a portion of the precious fluid out of his ampul, or for a touch of the trinket which had touched the saint. In the "Collectanea Antiqua," is a facsimile of a piece of paper bearing a rude woodcut of the adoration of the Magi, and an inscription setting forth that "Ces billets ont touché aux troi testes de saints Rois a Cologne: ils sont pour les voyageurs contre les malheurs des chemins, maux de teste, mal caduque, fièures, sorcellerie, toute sorte de malefice, et morte soubite." It was found upon the person of one William Jackson, who having been sentenced for murder in June, 1748-9, was found dead in prison a few hours before the time of his execution. It was the charmed billet, doubtless, which preserved him from the more ignominious death.

We find a description of a pilgrim in full costume, and decorated with signs, in "Piers Ploughman's Vision." He was apparelled--

"In pilgrym's wise.
He bare a burdoun[202] y-bounde with a broad list,
In a withwinde-wise y-wounden about;
A bolle[203] and a bagge he bare by his side,
An hundred of ampulles; on his hat seten
Signes of Synay[204] and shells of Galice,[205]
And many a crouche[206] on his cloke and keys of Rome,
And the vernicle before, for men sholde knowe,
And se bi his signes, whom he sought hadde.
These folk prayed[207] hym first fro whence he came?
'From Synay,' he seide, 'and from our Lordes Sepulcre:
In Bethlem and in Babiloyne I have ben in bothe;
In Armonye[208] and Alesaundre, in many other places.
Ye may se by my signes, that sitten in my hat,
That I have walked ful wide in weet and in drye,
And sought good seintes for my soules helthe.'"

The little bit of satire, for the sake of which this model pilgrim is introduced, is too telling--especially after the wretched superstitions which we have been noticing--to be omitted here. "Knowest thou?" asks the Ploughman--

"'Kondest thou aught a cor-saint[209] that men calle Truthe?
Canst thou aught weten[210] us the way where that wight dwelleth?'"

"Nay," replies the much-travelled pilgrim--

"'Nay, so me God helpe,
I saw nevere palmere with pyke and with scrippe
Ask after hym, ever til now in this place.'"