Let us add that the search for the philosopher’s stone was the

constant occupation of many renowned doctors; every one had not

that clear good sense, good humour and penetrating spirit which

permitted Chaucer to smilingly unravel before us the mysteries

of the alchemist, shaking the alembics and retorts, and in the

odd-shaped apparatus which frightened the imagination, showing not

the newly created ingot of pure metal, but the mixture prepared

beforehand by the impostor.[458] Not a plant or a stone without

supernatural virtues; the vain beliefs inherited from the ancients

had been rejuvenated and expanded. People thirsted for such pretended

learning. Gower thinks he does well to insert in a love poem all he

believes he knows on the constitution of the world and the virtues

of things;[459] even with professionally learned men the mass of

fabulous statements fills volumes. Bartholomew the Englishman, whose

work is an encyclopædia of scientific knowledge in the thirteenth

century, is positive that the diamond destroys the effect of venom

and of magic incantations, and that it reveals its wearer’s fear;

that the topaz prevents sudden death, etc.[460]

A pleasure it is, and like a whiff of fresh air when emerging from

a damp cellar, to remember that in an age not totally exempt from

these weaknesses no one condemned them with more eloquence than our

Molière: “Without speaking of other things,” said he, “I have {336}

never been able to conceive how even the smallest peculiarities of

the fortune of the least man could be found written in the skies.

What relation, what intercourse, what correspondence can there be

between us and worlds separated from our earth by so frightful a

distance? and whence can this fine science have come to men? What

god has revealed it? or what experience can have shaped it from the

observation of that great number of stars which have not been seen

twice in the same arrangement?”

[Illustration 61. A PARDONER (CHAUCER’S PARDONER).

(_From the Ellesmere MS._)]

Trouble and eloquence lost; there will always be a Timocles to

observe with a wise air: “I am incredulous enough as to a great many

things, but for astrology, there is nothing more certain and more

constant than the success of the horoscopes which it draws.”[461]

So vanished into smoke the tempests which Chaucer, Langland, and

Wyclif raised against the hypocritical pardoners of their day. They

lingered on till the {337} sixteenth century, and then were entirely

suppressed in the twenty-first session of the œcumenical council of

Trent, July 16, 1562, Pius IV being Pope. It is stated in the ninth

chapter of the “Decree of Reform,” published in that session, that

since “no further hope can be entertained of amending the questors

of alms” (_eleemosynarum quæstores_), otherwise pardoners, “the

use of them and their name are entirely abolished henceforth in

all Christendom:”[462] the first of old-time wayfarers to entirely

disappear.

{338}

[Illustration 62. A PILGRIMAGE TOWN, ROCAMADOUR, IN GUYENNE.

(_Present state._)]

CHAPTER III

PILGRIMS AND PILGRIMAGES

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.

[Illustration 63. AN ENGLISH PILGRIM.

(_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]

Setting out again, they went to Boulogne to pray to a miraculous

virgin, whose hand still exists enclosed in a reliquary. The statue

itself was thrown into a well by the Protestants in 1567, replaced

on the altar in 1630, pulled down again at the Revolution and burnt,

but one of the faithful saved the hand, which the church of Notre

Dame preserves to this day. Chaucer’s travelled gossip, the Wife of

Bath, had among other pilgrimages, made this one to Boulogne.[525]

People also went to Amiens to venerate the head, or rather one of

the heads, of St. John the Baptist.[526] Great was their wonder

when, {372} continuing their journey, they fell in with another

at Constantinople. Perhaps, let us hope, they were content with

remarking as “Mandeville” does: Which is the true one? “I wot nere,

but God knowethe; but in what wyse than men worschipen it, the

blessed seynt John holt him a-payd.”[527] Then also people went to

the shrine of the three kings at Cologne, to Paris where innumerable

relics were kept, to Chartres, where, besides a famous statue of the

Virgin, was shown the tunic she wore on the day of the Annunciation

(preserved in the cathedral since 861),[528] to Vezelay, Tours, Le

Puy, and to many other places in France, among which the celebrated

and to the present day most frequented church of Our Lady of

Rocamadour in Guyenne. The fame of this pilgrimage among Englishmen

is attested by Langland, when he advises people belonging to the

religious orders to cease pilgrimage-making, and rather practice

virtue at home:

“Right so, if thow be religious · renne thou never ferther

To Rome ne to Rochemadore.”[529]

[Illustration 64. FORTIFIED ENTRANCE TO THE SANCTUARIES OF

ROCAMADOUR. (_Restored._)]

It was a shrine of great renown. Roland, according to a legend, went

there before starting for the ill-fated expedition in which he met

his death, and a large piece of rusted iron is still shown in the

old church as part of the famous Durandal. Henry II of England came

there, too, as a pilgrim, as did many other illustrious travellers,

Simon de Montfort among them.[530] The place was fortified; it had

a part to play in the Hundred Years’ War, {375} and Froissart

has told us “howe Sir Robert Carrol and Sir John Chandos . . . toke

Guaches, Rochemador, and diuers other townes, the which wer newly

turned frenche.”[531]

Then there were Spanish pilgrimages, and especially the world-famous

one at Compostela, where English travellers went in large numbers,

most of them direct by sea, though some preferred the lengthy,

picturesque land road, dotted with famous shrines good for the soul,

and where all sorts of adventures might be expected.[532] Licences

authorizing the owners and the captain of such or such a ship to

carry to St. James’s a fixed number of pilgrims fill pages in Rymer’s

“Fœdera.” They were granted pursuant to the before-mentioned statute

of Richard II, and are all drawn after one or two models, the text

in Latin, with the name of the ship in French, like the one here

translated, of the year 1394:

“The king, to all and each of his Admirals, etc., greeting.

“Know you that we have given licence to Oto Chambernoun, William

Gilbert, and Richard Gilbert, to receive and embark in the harbour

of Dartmouth a hundred pilgrims in a certain ship belonging to the

same Oto, William, and Richard, called la Charité de Paynton, of

which Peter Cok is captain; and to take them to Saint James’s, there

to fulfil their vows, and from thence to bring them back to England,

freely and without hindrance, notwithstanding any ordinances to the

contrary.”[533] {376}

A few provisos are added, the keeping of which the pilgrims should

swear to before leaving England; they must upon their oath bind

themselves to do nothing contrary to the obedience and fealty they

owe the king; they must not take out of the realm gold or silver in

money or bullion beyond what is necessary to their journey, and they

must not, it is sometimes added, reveal the secrets of the kingdom.

During the following century these licences became innumerable, or

maybe they have been preserved in larger numbers. They show that, in

fact, fleets loaded with English pilgrims plied towards St. James’s.

We find that “Le Petre de Darthmouth” is allowed to carry sixty

pilgrims; “La Marie de Southampton,” a hundred; “La Sainte Marie de

Blakney,” sixty; “Le Garlond de Crowemere,” sixty; “La Trinité de

Wells,” forty; “Le Thomas de Saltash,” sixty; and so on. Numbers

usually vary from thirty to one hundred.[534]

[Illustration 65. TRAVELLING BY SEA IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

(_From the MS. Harl. 1319._)]

{378}

It must not be thought that these ships, carrying as much as a

hundred passengers besides their crew on this rather long journey,

were great, well-appointed vessels. They very much resembled the

pilgrim-ships of the present day, which carry every year to Jeddah,

on the Red Sea, crowds of Arabs on their way to Mecca. The travellers

were huddled together in most uncomfortable fashion, and had ample

opportunities to do penance and offer their sufferings to the saint.

This is no surmise, for one of those English pilgrims duly allowed to

go to Galicia, provided they did not reveal the secrets of the realm,

has rimed an account of his experiences, so we know what they were.

Do not think of laughing, says he, when you go by sea to St. James’s;

there is sea-sickness; the sailors push you about under pretext that

you hinder the working of the ship; the smell is not pleasant: {379}

“Men may leve alle gamys

That saylen to Seynt Jamys!

Ffor many a man hit gramys (vexes)

When they begin to sayle.

Ffor when they have take the see,

At Sandwych or at Wynchylsee,

At Bristow, or where that hit bee,

Theyr hertes begyn to fayle.”

The mocking remarks of the seamen are painful to bear. Says the

captain:

“Some ar lyke to cowgh and grone

Or hit be full mydnyght;”

and then turning to his men:

“‘Hale the bowelyne! now, vere the shete!

Cooke, make redy anoon our mete,

Our pylgryms have no lust to ete,

I pray God yeve hem rest!’

‘Go to the helm! what, howe! no nere?

Steward, felow! A pot of bere!’—

‘Ye shalle have sir, with good chere,

Anon alle of the best.’”

Sick pilgrims could not eat, and were jeered at, they found the time

long; some, with a book on their knees, tried to read, but then they

felt as if their head would burst:

“Som layde theyr bookys on theyr kne,

And rad so long they myght nat se;—

‘Allas! myne hede wolle cleve on thre!’”

When at their worst, comes a facetious sailor to bawl out in their

ears: Cheer up, in a moment we shall be in a storm! {380}

“Then cometh oone and seyth: ‘Be mery;

Ye shall have a storme or a pery’ (a squall)

* * * * *

Thys mene whyle the pylgryms ly

And have theyr bowlys (basins) fast theym by,

And cry after hot malvesy.”

In short, they were very unhappy, and as the narrator said at first,

little inclined to games and laughter.[535]

Votive offerings plentifully adorned venerated sanctuaries; if, by

striking a wax statuette while making appropriate incantations an

enemy might do you great harm, on the other hand, by placing your

image in the chapel of a saint, great favours might be gained for

you, especially in cases of sickness.[536] Thus were to be seen

prisoners’ irons, warriors’ swords, cripples’ crutches, jewels and

precious stones, sculpted or painted images representing devotees

or actual miracles performed for them, tablets and offerings of all

sorts.[537] At Rocamadour tresses of women’s hair were shown as a

threat as well as an admonition. “They were,” relates the knight

of La Tour Landry, those of “ladies and gentille women that had

be[en] wasshe in wyne, and in other thinges for to make the here of

colour otherwise thanne God made {383} it, the whiche ladies and

gentille women that aught (owned) the tresses were comynge thedirward

on pilgrimage, but they may never have powere to come withinne the

chirche dore unto the tyme that thei hadde cutte of the tresses of

her here,”[538] which, says he, were still there in his day.

[Illustration 66. THE SOUTHERN ENTRANCE TO SAINT JAMES OF COMPOSTELA.

_Twelfth Century._]

Another story to the same effect is told by Miélot, who reports

how a very fair lady, who had led an ill life, lost her sight as a

punishment, through the will of Heaven. She went on a pilgrimage to

Rocamadour, prayed to the Virgin, and was healed, but could not,

however, enter the sanctuaries. She then confessed on the spot to a

priest, who, “looking at her fair face,” said: “Dear friend, I well

know that with these fair tresses of your hair you have done great

hurt to those to whom you have shown them. I decide that they must

be cut off in honour of God and of our Lady.” This was done; “the

tresses were cut, and the priest had them carried inside the church

on a pole, on which were placed the tresses of women who would be

saved.” Then the lady was able to enter the church, and she praised

the Virgin. But as she was going away she could not help thinking “of

her fair hair that she had left,” and she exclaimed: “Holy Mary, my

heart is sorrowful for my hair that I leave you, and I cannot well

make up my mind to it.” She had scarcely spoken when the tresses

were at once restored to her “as fair as they were before;” but the

blindness came back too, and blind she remained for ever, which is

a good example, “ung bel exemplaire,” for ladies that “seek false

pleasures in their fine waists and faces.”[539]

Indulgences were an immense attraction; they had {384} been freely

granted on a large scale to every important shrine, and popular

imagination still further magnified them. The pilgrim from Rome,

back in his village, exaggerated as willingly their amount as that

of the marvels which he had seen, or thought he had seen. One such

pilgrim, an Englishman of the fourteenth century, dazzled by his

recollections, has rimed his impressions of a journey taken by him

to Italy. As a poet he does not rank high, but he does not pretend

to, and his only aim is to supply precise figures and definite

information. His strong narrow devotion allowed him to pay attention

to nothing except thousands of bodies of martyrs that he never

tires of enumerating. By thousands also are reckoned the years

of indulgence which he flashes in the eyes of his stay-at-home

countrymen:

“Gif men wuste (knew), grete and smale,

The pardoun that is at grete Rome,

Thei wolde tellen in heore dome (in their opinion),

Hit were no neod to mon in cristiante

To passe in to the holy lond over the see

To Jerusalem, ne to Kateryne.”[540]

His readers will have first a brief and simplified history of Rome;

it is a city to which came long ago the Duchess of Troy with her

two sons, Romulus and Romulon, who afterwards founded the town. The

duchess thus seems to have chosen to settle in a city which did not

yet exist, but Rome is a land of wonders. It was pagan, until Peter

and Paul (and then the very facts inject their eloquence into our

traveller’s lines):

“Hit hedde i-bought,

With gold ne selver, ne with no goode,

Bot with heore flesch and with heore blode.”

The enumeration of the churches thereupon begins, and for each of

them are invariably told the amount of {385} indulgences attached

to it and of relics kept there. The benefits are proportioned to the

merits; thus when a man sees the _vernicle_, that is, the holy sudary

which received the image of the Saviour, he gets three thousand years

of pardon if he dwells in Rome, nine thousand if he comes from a

neighbouring country,

“And thou that passest over the see,

Twelve thousend yer is graunted to the.”

When you enter Sts. Vitus and Modestus, the third of your sins are

remitted. Then, you descend into the catacombs:

“But thou most take candel liht,

Elles thou gost merk (dark) as niht,

For under the eorthe most thou wende,

Thou maight not see bifore ne bihynde,

For thider fledde mony men

For drede of deth to saven hem,

And suffrede peynes harde and sore,

In hevene to dwelle for ever more.”

The bodies of martyrs are countless;[541] four thousand of them at

Saint Prudence, thirteen hundred at Saint Prassede, seven thousand at

Sts. Vitus and Modestus. From time to time a famous name brings up an

historic glimpse, such as the account of the foundation of Rome, or

an abridged life of Constantine; at first a pagan and a leper,

“In Mahoun was al his thouht.” {386}

But according to our author’s information, he was converted and cured

by Pope Sylvester. The church of St. Mary the Round formerly bore

another name:

“Agrippa dude hit make

For Sibyl and Neptanes sake. . . .

He gaf hit name Panteon.”

He placed there a magnificent golden idol sitting, of a peculiar form:

“Hit looked forth as a cat,

He called it Neptan.”

This idol had a cap or cover of brass which was one day blown off by

the wind, and carried to the church of St. Peter. Then Pope Boniface

asked the Emperor Julian to give him the Pantheon, to which that

prince consented; and one year, on November 1st, the hatless cat

having been removed, the sovereign pontiff consecrated the building,

and baptized it St. Mary the Round.

As for relics, there are few objects mentioned in Holy Writ which

have not been recovered, and may not be venerated at Rome.[542] The

table of the Last Supper is there, as well as Aaron’s rod, fragments

of the multiplied loaves and fishes, hay from the stall at Bethlehem,

a swaddling-cloth of the infant Jesus, and several other things, some

of which are strange enough. Part of these relics are still in the

same churches, for instance, at Santa Maria Maggiore,[543] “Seinte

Marie the Maiour,” the portrait {387} of the Virgin painted by St.

Luke. This is not, however, according to our pilgrim, a picture

really made by St. Luke; he was going to do it, and had prepared his

colours, when he suddenly found the portrait before him, finished by

the hands of angels:

“Seint Luik while he lived in londe,

Wolde have peynted hit with his honde,

And whon he hedde ordeyned so

Alle colours that schulde ther to,

He fond an ymage al a-pert,

Non such ther was middelert,

Mad with angel hond and not with his

As men in Rome witnesseth this.”[544]

More complete and conscientious in his descriptions, an educated

Englishman of the following century, a voracious reader, and active

writer, of books, no other than the chronicler and theologian,

John Capgrave, prior of King’s Lynn, having gone to Rome on a

pilgrimage, about the year 1450, composed, on his return, a “Solace

of Pilgrimes,” wanting to imitate, he said, Pythagoras, Plato, St.

Jerome, Marco Polo, and him whom he considered as his compatriot,

the then unmasked Mandeville, who, all of them, having travelled,

wrote of their journeys: {388} “Also there was a man of Venys whech

they called Marcus Paulus; he laboured all the Soudane’s londe and

descryved on to us the nature of the cuntre, the condiciones of the

men and the stately aray of the great Cane (khan) houshold. Eke Jon

Maundevyle Knyth of Yngland, aftir his laboure, made a book ful

solacious on to his nacyoun. After all these grete cryeris of many

wonderfull thingis I wyl folow with a smal pypyng of such straunge

sitis (sights) as I have seyn and swech straunge thingis as I have

herd.”[545]

This justice must be rendered him that, while his book is full of

“straunge thingis,” he never adds any of his own invention; when he

says, this I have seen, it can, if not afterwards destroyed, still

be seen to-day; when he copies an inscription, his copy, as can be

easily verified, is accurate. But, fond of books, he believed in

them; who ever failed to believe in what he loved? The “Mirabilia

Romæ” are the guide of this guide-book maker;[546] so that to the

enumeration of the holy places with their relics and indulgences,

and his description of the ancient, now vanished, church of St.

Peter, and all the famous sanctuaries of the papal city, he adds the

wonders of fabulous Rome, with the temple on Capitol hill, and in

it, “a mervelous craft, that of every region of the world stood an

ymage made all of tre and in his hand a lytil belle; as often as ony

of these regiones was in purpos to rebelle a geyn the grete mageste

of Rome, a non this ymage that was assigned to that regioun schulde

knylle his bell.” This device, so celebrated in the middle ages, was

due to that great enchanter “Virgil,” the magic of whose lines had

been appreciated for different motives in Roman days. {389}

The attractions of Rome were, for the pilgrim, without peer in

Italy, but other cities could almost rival it; Venice especially was

full of wonders, and was admired and visited accordingly, witness,

for example, the travelling notes of a troop of French pilgrims in

the year 1395. In this “most excellent, noble, great and fine town

all seated in the sea,” may be seen, they aver, the arm of “our

Lord St. George,” the burdon (staff) of St. Nicholas, one of the

water-pots of Cana, one ear of St. Paul, some of the “roasted flesh

of St. Lawrence turned to powder,” three of the stones thrown at

St. Stephen, the body of St. Mark, “which is a very fine and noble

thing.” There is, besides, “in the Maison-Dieu of Venice one of the

molar teeth of a giant that was called Goliath, which giant David

killed, and know you that this tooth is more than half a foot long

and weighs twelve pounds.”[547]

Thus did returning travellers relate their recollections, to the

delighted wonderment of their countrymen. The wish to set out in

their turn was awakened in them, and those who remained in their

village associated themselves to the pious journey by their prayers

and some small gift of money. All along his road the pilgrim found

similar dispositions; to receive and help him was to share in his

merits, and thus it was that people in the humblest ranks, assisted

from place to place,[548] could accomplish distant pilgrimages. The

rules of several gilds provided for the case of a member setting

out to fulfil a vow. In order to participate in his good work, all

the “bretheren and sisteren” accompanied him out of the town, and

on bidding him farewell offered him their gift. {390} They watched

their friend go off with his deliberate step, beginning a journey

across many countries, to last many months, sometimes several years.

They returned to the town, and the elders, who knew the world, no

doubt told what strange things their friend was like to see in those

distant lands, and what subjects for edification he would meet with

on his way.

The gild of the Resurrection at Lincoln, founded in 1374, had among

its rules, “If any brother or sister wishes to make pilgrimage to

Rome, St. James of Galicia, or the Holy Land, he shall forewarn the

gild; and all the bretheren and sisteren shall go with him to the

city gate, and each shall give him a half-penny at least.” The same

rule was observed by the Fullers’ gild of Lincoln, founded in 1297;

the pilgrim going to Rome was accompanied as far as Queen’s Cross,

outside the town, if he left on a Sunday or a feast-day; and if he

could let them know of his return, and it were not a working day,

all went to meet him at the same place and accompanied him to the

monastery. The tailors of the same city also gave a half-penny to him

among them who was going to Rome or St. James, and a penny to him

who went to the Holy Land. The ordinances of the Gild of the Virgin,

founded at Hull in 1357, had: “If any brother or sister of the gild

wishes, at any time, to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then,

in order that all the gild may share in his pilgrimage, he shall be

fully released from his yearly payment until his return.”

Some gilds kept open house for pilgrims, always with the same object

of having a part thereby in the merits of the traveller. Thus the

gild-merchant of Coventry, founded in 1340, maintained “a common

lodging-house of thirteen beds,” to receive poor travellers who cross

the country going on pilgrimage or from any other pious motive. This

hostelry was managed by a governor, aided by a woman who washed

the feet of the {391} guests and took care of them. The annual

expenditure on this foundation was ten pounds sterling.[549]

When one of the king’s servants had a pilgrimage to make, the prince,

in consideration of his motive, willingly authorized him to depart,

and even helped him with money. Edward III gave to William Clerk,

one of his messengers, one pound six shillings and eightpence, to

help him in his expenses during the pilgrimage undertaken by him to

Jerusalem and Mount Sinai.[550] If the man were of great importance,

and especially if he intended to fight the unbelievers, public

prayers were offered for his journey, his “triumphal fighting,” and

his safe return, as was done when Henry of Lancaster, cousin to

Edward III, went “to the parts beyond sea with certain great and

noble men of this realm” to attack the enemies of the cross, in this

case, the pagans of Prussia. The prayers were prescribed for Sundays

and fête days, when there would be “the greatest multitude of people

in the churches.”[551]

All this in spite of the fourteenth century’s not being, as we

have seen, an age of deep and true devotion. The Popes lived at

Avignon, their prestige was declining, particularly in England; even

bishops showed at times scant respect for the Roman Court. Nowhere

can be found, not even in Wyclif, more daring accusations and more

scandalous anecdotes concerning the Pope than in the chronicle

written by Thomas of Burton, Abbot of Meaux, near Beverley. He even

speaks with a tinge of irony of indulgences. As a special favour

to the faithful who died during a pilgrimage to Rome, Clement VI

“ordered the angels of Paradise,” writes the abbot, “to lead their

souls straight to the gates of heaven without {392} making them pass

through purgatory.” The same Pope granted what the pilgrim of the

“Stacions” seems to have ignored, that those who looked upon the

holy sudary should return to the state they were in before baptism.

Lastly, “he confirmed all the indulgences granted by two hundred

sovereign pontiffs his predecessors, which are innumerable.”[552]

Clement was, indeed, the two hundredth.

At the period when monastic chroniclers did not scruple to record

anecdotes on the Roman Court like those in Thomas of Burton’s,

general devotion was not merely lessened, it was disorganized,

unbalanced. The chroniclers show, indeed, that excesses of impiety

coexisted with excesses of fervour; the false pardoner, retailer of

the merits of the saints, fell in upon the highway with the bleeding

flagellant.[553] The papacy might show commendable good sense by its

condemnations of both;[554] its decrees did not suffice to restore

the equilibrium of {393} men’s minds, and the bounds of reason were

continually being passed; in ardent piety as in impious revolt men

went to the verge of madness. The account of the repulsive sacrileges

committed in York Cathedral by the partisans of the Bishop of Durham

seems unbelievable, yet the facts cannot be doubted, being reported

by the archbishop himself.[555] Faith weakened or went astray; men

became at once sceptical and intolerant. It was not in them the

modern, serenely cold and imperturbable scepticism, but a violent

movement of the entire being, impelled to burn what it adores. The

man acts by fits; he doubts his doubt, his burst of laughter dazes

him; he has had his revel and his orgy, and when the white light

of morning comes he will be the prey of despair, shed tears, be

racked with anguish, proclaim his conversion and vow maybe to go on

a pilgrimage. Walsingham sees one of the causes of the peasants’

revolt in the incredulity of the barons: “Some among them believe, it

is said, that there is no God, they deny the sacrament of the altar

and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the end of the

beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.”[556]

Such incredulity did not exclude superstitious practices. To go

straight forward was the privilege of the happy few; the many,

instead of opening the gates of heaven with their own hands, imagined

they could have it done by that of others; they had Paradise gained

for them by the neighbouring monastery, as they had their {394} lands

tilled for them by their tenants; eternal welfare had become a matter

of commerce and could be bought with the letters of fraternity of the

mendicant friars and the lying indulgences of false pardoners. Men

lived at their ease, and when the sad hour came, made pious donations

in their wills, as if they could, according to the strong words of

the French historian, Claude de Seyssel, “corrupt and win over by

gifts God and the saints, whom we ought to appease by good works and

by penitence for our sins.”[557] Very instructive reading is that of

the last wills and testaments of the rich lords of the fourteenth

century. Pages are filled with devotional bequests; gifts are left to

shrines, convents, chapels, and hermits; testators who had abstained

from going in their lifetime, made pilgrimages by proxy after their

death, paying the proxy. The same Humphrey Bohun who sent “a good man

and true” to the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster, also ordered that after

his demise a priest should be sent to Jerusalem, “chiefly,” said he,

“for my lady mother, and for my lord father, and for ourselves,”

with the obligation to say masses at all the chapels which he might

meet on his way.[558] Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, ordered by her

will, that five men-at-arms should fight in her name in case there

should be a “comune vyage,” otherwise a crusade, within seven years

following her death. They would receive one hundred marks each, and

the merit of their fights would accrue to their employer, and not to

themselves, their own recompense being of this world, and consisting

in the hundred marks.[559] {395}

V

Most difficult and holiest of all, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem

remained, in spite of so many indulgences attached by the Popes to

the churches in Rome, the one without peer, as well as it was the

oldest established; it dated back, indeed, from, at least, the days

of Constantine. Settled in Palestine during the fourth century, St.

Jerome writes to Paulinus: “From all the world people are flocking

here. The whole of mankind fills the city.”[560]

This is confirmed by his friend the enthusiastic Paula, in whose

veins flowed the ardent blood of the Scipios and the Gracchi, and

who trying to persuade her beloved Marcella, a rich and pious Roman

matron, to join them there, tells her that all the greatest and

best, those from Gaul, those from Britain, “divisus ab orbe nostro

Britannus” (for she, too, knows those classics whom Jerome constantly

quotes), without speaking of the Persians, the Armenians, and all

the East, are to be met in the Holy Land: “A variety of languages,

but one only religion.” There are “so many places of prayer that one

cannot visit them all in one day.” And such places! “What sentences,

what words would be appropriate to tell you of the cave of our

Saviour? and of that stable where, as a babe, He cried: a spot to

be honoured rather by silence than by inadequate words. Where are

the vast porticoes, the gilt canopies? . . . In this poor earthly

place the Maker of heaven was born; here He was wrapped in swadling

clothes, here seen by the shepherds, here revealed by a star, here

adored by the Magi.” Come, Oh come! “Will not the moment arrive

when a breathless traveller shall announce to us that our Marcella

has reached Palestine . . . Will not the day come when we can visit

together the Saviour’s grotto, {396} weep at His tomb, kiss the wood

of the cross, and be raised in our minds with the rising Lord on the

Mount of Olives?”[561]

But even then, thoughtful, level-headed St. Jerome feared that

enthusiasm might be carried too far, and everyday duties neglected

for the excitement of the Palestine journey. It was, of course, in

itself a pious and laudable thing, if one could properly do so,

to come and venerate “the places where the feet of our Lord had

stood, and the almost recent traces left of His nativity and His

passion.” But this should not be considered a Christian’s chief

duty: “Do not think that something is lacking in your faith because

you have not seen Jerusalem. I do not consider myself any better

because I live here.” To lead a good life is the chief thing: “What

is praiseworthy is not to have been at Jerusalem, but to have lived

righteously there. . . . The places where the cross was and the

Resurrection occurred, benefit those who bear their cross and who,

with Christ, rise again every day. . . . The palace of heaven is just

as accessible from Britain as from Jerusalem.” To thousands who have

never seen the holy city “the gate of paradise is wide open. . . . A

grand thing it is to be a Christian, not to seem one.”[562]

The movement, however, once started never stopped. On the contrary,

it gathered strength; hospices for pilgrims going to Jerusalem

dotted the roads leading to their usual places of embarkation

(chiefly Marseilles and Venice), several being built at the principal

crossings of the Alps, the Great and the Little Saint Bernard, the

St. Gothard, Mount Cenis, etc. A “Confrérie des Pélerins {397} de

la Terre Sainte” had been founded in Paris for them by Louis, first

Duke of Bourbon, who, greatly interested, like his grand father Saint

Louis, in the freeing of the Holy Sepulchre, and bearing for a time

the empty title of King of Thessalonica, had been chosen as leader of

one of those numerous crusades that never took place.[563]

During a period of two hundred years pilgrimages to Jerusalem had

had, indeed, for their object a conquest and not simply an inspection

of the holy places. All nations had taken part, from the first of

those prodigious attempts, the crusades, in 1096, to the last one in

1270, in which St. Louis died before the walls of Tunis, while his

companion, young Edward of England, loth to give up, had sworn not to

go home without having struck a blow at the Saracens in Holy Land,

and returned as King Edward I, wounded, but having occupied Acre and

kept his word.

The crusade, after those great expeditions, eight in number,

continued to be talked about as much as ever; mere talk, it is true,

in most cases. In the midst of their wars the kings of France and

of England berated each other for being the only hindrance to the

departure of the Christians, for neither would go, leaving his rival

behind, free to act in his absence. Philip VI of Valois and Edward

III both protest that, but for the other, they would go and fight the

Saracen. “It is the fault of the English,” writes Philip, “that the

holy journey beyond sea has been hindered.” It is the doing of the

King of {398} France, solemnly proclaims Edward III to the world,

which has turned him from the “sancto passagio transmarino.”[564]

The utmost that was usually attempted,[565] now consisted in small,

ineffectual expeditions, so ill-conceived at times as to cause

the wonderment and even the merriment of the infidel: such as the

Franco-Anglo-Genoese crusade of 1390, with Louis, third Duke of

Bourbon, as commander-in-chief, and which, on the recommendation

of the Genoese, who suffered more than any from the inroads of

the Barbaresques, went to lay siege, of all places, to the city

of Mahdia, the “Aufrike” of Froissart,[566] on the east coast of

Tunisia. The French were apparently the most numerous, but, says

Froissart, “Also the Duke of Lancastre had a bastarde sonne called

Henry of Lancastre: he had devocion to go in the same voyage, and

he provided him of good knightes and squiers of Englande that

accompanyed him in that voyage.” The comte de Foix had also, ready

at hand, a “bastarde sonne” of his own, whom he sent with a large

retinue. The English prince was not, however, the future Henry IV,

who was no bastard, but his half-brother, John Beaufort, who being an

adulterine son well answered to the description. Henry had intended

to go, hence Froissart’s mistake, but he went instead to fight the

pagans in Prussia and Lithuania, and, being fond of pilgrimages and

shrines, performed, as a pilgrim, the journeys to Rome and Jerusalem,

before he assumed the crown and had, in spite of his religious

dispositions, his cousin Richard assassinated. {399}

The start from Genoa for the new Tunisian expedition was splendid

to see; so the starts usually were: “Great pleasure it was,” says

Froissart, “to beholde their departynge, and to se their standardes,

getornes (banners) and penons, wavynge in the wynde, shynynge against

the sonne, and to here the trompettes and claryons sowning in the

ayre with other mynstrelsy,” so that the whole sea rang with the

music.[567]

The Saracens were dumbfounded at this visit: what had they done,

and what could be the object? That the Genoese had grudges against

them was natural enough; but what ailed the others? Ready for the

stoutest defence of their walled Mahdia, they were, however, curious

to ascertain the reason, and they sent one of their number, who spoke

Italian, to explain “howe we have in nothynge trespassed them; of

a trouthe, afore this tyme, there hath been warre bytwene us and

the Genovoys,” but that does not concern Christians from “farre

countreys.” The Genoese “are our neighbours, they take of us and we

of them; we have been auncyente enemyes and shall be, excepte whan

treuce is betwene us.” But why are the others interfering?

The leaders of the army agreed that a reply should be sent; they held

council, twelve of them, “in the duke of Burbons tent,” and gave an

answer to the effect that the reason why they made this war “was

bycause the Sonne of God, called Jesu Chryst . . . by their lyne and

generacyon, was put to deth and crucyfyed,” and also because the

Saracens did not believe in baptism, nor “in the Virgyn Mary, Mother

to Jhesu Cryst. . . .”

“At this aunswere the Sarazyns dyd nothinge but laugh and sayd

howe that aunswere was nothynge {400} reasonable, for it was the

Jewes that put Chryst to dethe and not they. Thus the siege still

endured.”[568]

The usual ally of the infidel did not fail him: sickness, fevers,

and epidemics worked havoc among the besiegers, who had, of all

months, selected July for their attempt. They tried to storm the

city, but were repulsed with great loss, and after some eight weeks

of fruitless labour, brilliant combats, and many deaths, accepted a

patched-up treaty granting the Genoese some slight advantage; raised

the siege, and returned home, with probably less “trompettes and

claryons sowning in the ayre” than when they had started.

The acceptance of a discussion with the infidel during this abortive

crusade was characteristic of the time. More prone than before

to examine inherited beliefs, a good many men were found in the

fourteenth century to question the very principle of the crusade.

We crush the infidel, why not convert him? Is it not wiser, more

reasonable, and even more conformable to the religion of Christ?

Were the apostles whom He sent to us Gentiles covered with armour

and provided with swords? Reflections like these occur in the works,

not only of reforming minds like Wyclif or Langland,[569] but of

pious well-meaning conservative thinkers like Gower, who says in his

“Confessio Amantis”:

“To sleen and fighten they us bidde

Hem whom they shuld, as the boke saith, {401}

Converten unto Cristes feith.

But herof have I great merveile

How they wol bidde me traveile;

A Saracen if I slee shall,

I slee the soule forth withall,

And that was never Cristes lore.”

Failing crusades, then, just as before those great military

undertakings had begun, small troops of pilgrims, privately formed,

started on the road to Jerusalem, still in their eyes, in spite of

all St. Jerome might have said, the best road to heaven. They were,

however, many of them, inspired by mixed motives, for this was also

the road to adventure, and there, again, were very apparent the

chivalric and restless instincts of the period.

A good number of such caravans came from England; the English were

already, and had been even before, and continue to this day, great

travellers. They were to be met everywhere, and their knowledge of

French stood them in good stead in most of the countries they went

through. This was, as “Mandeville” states, the common language of the

upper classes everywhere;[570] it was also that spoken in the East

by the European, the “Frank.” Trevisa, finding that the English were

forgetting that language, deplores it; how will they do if they go

abroad? “That is harme for hem and they schulle passe the see and

travaille in straunge landes and in many other places.”[571] They

tried to acquire notions of it before setting out on their travels,

and employed competent persons to compose manuals of conversation for

them to learn, in the words {402} of the author of one such work,

an Englishman of the fourteenth century, “how to speak and pronounce

well, and to write correctly sweet French, which is the finest and

most graceful language, the noblest to speak of any in the world

after Latin of the schools, and is better prized and loved than any

other by all men; for God made it so sweet and lovable chiefly to His

own praise and honour. And therefore it may well compare with the

language of the angels in heaven, on account of its great sweetness

and beauty.” So spoke this teacher of what he had to teach.[572]

The English went much abroad; every author who draws their portrait

lays stress on their taste for moving about, and their love of

distant travel; the moon is considered, in consequence, as their

planet. According to Gower, the moon’s influence is the cause why

they visit so many far-off countries:

“Bot what man under his [_i.e._, the moon’s] pouer

Is bore, he schall his place change

And seche manye londes strange;

And as of this condicion

The Mones disposicion

Upon the lond of Alemaigne

Is set, and ek upon Bretaigne,

Which nou is cleped Engelond,

For thei travaile in every lond.”[573]

Wyclif places them under the patronage of the same planet, but

draws different conclusions therefrom;[574] {403} Ralph Higden the

chronicler expresses himself in these terms, most of which seem

prophetic, they have proved so exact: “That people are curious

enough that they may know and tell the wonders that they have seen;

they cultivate other regions, and succeed still better in distant

countries than in their own, . . . wherefore it is that they are

spread so wide through the earth, considering every other land that

they inhabit as their own country. They are a race able for every

industry.”[575]

A number of those adventure seekers were established in Italy,

where they had become _condottieri_, and went fighting up and

down the peninsula according to the will of whomsoever paid them.

Such were John Hawkwood, whose tomb still adorns the cathedral at

Florence,[576] William Gold, and several others. Fierce folk they

were, with ardent passions, ready sometimes, as in Homeric days,

to do and sacrifice as much to recover a fugitive girl as to take

a town. One letter of William Gold may give an idea of the temper

of these bellicose wanderers. On August 9, 1378, he wrote to Louis

Gonzaga, lord of Mantua, concerning the girl Jeannette, of France:

“. . . Let her be detained at my suit, for if you should have a

thousand golden florins spent for her, I will pay them without

delay; for if I should have to follow her to Avignon I will obtain

this woman. Now, my lord, should I be asking a trifle contrary to

law, yet ought you not to cross me in this, for some day I shall

do more for you than a thousand united French women could effect;

{404} and if there be need of me in a matter of greater import, you

shall have for the asking a thousand spears at my back. Therefore,

in conclusion, again and again, I entreat that this Janet may be put

in a safe place unknown to anybody, and there kept until I send some

servant of mine for her with a letter from myself, for I would do

more for you in greater matters. And I pray you, thwart me not about

putting her in a safe place, for you alone, and no one else are lord

in Mantua.

“_The Camp under Verona, August 9, 1378._

“P.S.—I beseech by all means that [the] said Janet may not quit

Mantua, but be in safe custody, and so you will have obliged me for

ever.”

No less determined as a warrior than as a lover, and accustomed, as

it seems, in both cases, to put people to flight, William Gold was

made a citizen of Venice in recognition of his services on April 27,

1380, and in July of the same year received from the Doge Andrea

Contarini a pension of 500 gold ducats for life.[577]

Thinking less of the Jeannettes to be met on the way, troops of

pilgrims sailed from England, beginning their long journey towards

the Holy Land, usually provided with letters from their sovereign, to

serve both as passports and as recommendations in case of need. The

tenor of these documents, written in French or in Latin, was usually

similar to that of the following letter granted by Edward III in 1354

to one who, it is true, was more of a fighter than a pilgrim: “Know

all men that the noble Jean le Meingre, knight, otherwise Bussigand

[Boucicaut], our prisoner, is about to set forth, duly licensed by

us, with twelve knights to St. James, and thence to march against the

enemies of Christ in the Holy Land; and that we have taken him and

his twelve companions, {405} their servants, horses, and harnesses

under our protection and safe conduct.”[578]

Such travellers were well received by the French King of Cyprus,

of the famous Lusignan family; they brought him news of the outer

world, with them came variety and hope; they also were sometimes able

to actually assist him in his difficulties, which were ceaseless,

and the king showed his pleasure in his letters. Thus James I of

Lusignan, “King of Jerusalem and Cyprus,” writes from Nicosia,

in 1393, to Richard II, that a knight has no need of a personal

recommendation to be welcome in the island; his subjects always are.

It was for him an honour and delight to be visited by “your noble

relative the lord Henry Percy.”[579] In the same manner the troop of

French pilgrims, to which belonged the lord of Anglure, was welcomed

in Cyprus, by the same king, in 1396. They reached the island on

their way home, after a fearful storm, in which they nearly lost

their lives.[580] As soon as James heard of their having landed he

sent to them {406} provisions in plenty: a hundred chickens, twenty

sheep, two oxen, much good red wine and good white bread. Then he

asked them to his Court, where they were delightfully entertained

by him, by the queen, and their four sons and five daughters. Being

himself a great huntsman, James asked them to go hunting with him, a

pleasant offer after so many trials, and one not to be refused.

Combats, hunts, storms, encounters of all sorts, in a word,

adventure, were thus associated with the idea of the voyage, the

holiness of which sometimes disappeared in the midst of so many

profane incidents. Well may one wonder whether Saint James was

the real attraction, for a De Werchin, Seneschal de Hainaut, who,

about to start on a pilgrimage to the shrine of this saint, in

1402, would make it publicly known that, “in the name of God, of

our Lord St. George, and of his own lady,” he would accept during

his whole journey the friendly combat of arms with any knight for

whom he should not have to turn from his road more than 20 leagues.

He announced his itinerary beforehand, so that any one might make

ready.[581]

The strange man, Jean de Bourgogne by name, who chose to sign his

book of travels “Jean de Mandeville,”[582] {407} gives somewhat

similar reasons to explain why he undertook his journey to the East

in 1322 through perilous seas and countries—or rather, according to

modern discoveries—through the books of his library. He started, or,

anyhow, he studied and wrote, partly, says he, to sanctify himself,

partly to know the world and its wonders, and to be able to speak of

them; for many persons, he observes, are much pleased with hearing

the marvels of distant regions described. The reason he publishes

his impressions is, first, because numbers of people like stories of

the Holy Land, and find great consolation and comfort in them; and,

secondly, to make a guide, in order that small companies or caravans,

like that of Boucicaut and others, may profit by his knowledge.

His ideas as to the road to be followed are not unreasonable. Thus,

“to go the direct way” from England to Palestine, he advises the

following itinerary: France, Burgundy, Lombardy, Venice, Famagusta

in Cyprus, Jaffa, Jerusalem. Very often people went to Jerusalem by

way of Egypt. It was a tradition of long standing that the greater

part of the difficulties concerning the Holy Land had their root in

Egypt; many tombs of saints also attracted the pilgrims there, so

that crusaders, or mere pilgrims, often took that road to Jerusalem.

“Mandeville” says he himself followed this itinerary. In 1422 Gilbert

de Lannoy wrote, “at the behest of King Henry of England, heir and

Regent of France,” that is, Henry V, a description in French of the

places through which a crusade might be led against the infidels,

for this prince, like his predecessors, continued dreaming of a

crusade. Lannoy, a practical soldier and diplomat, who speaks only

of what he has seen, gives a detailed account of all towns, stating

which are protected by walls, {408} towers and ditches; he notices

the Venetians’ warehouses for cotton at Acre, and the presence at

Beirut of a great number of Christian merchants, Venetians, Genoese,

Greeks, and others. He carefully mentions what sorts of provisions

in wood, water, etc., may be found in each part of the country, in

what plains an army can be easily arrayed, in what ports a fleet

shall be safe. He pays the greatest attention to Egypt, and describes

its several cities: “Item. There is Cairo, the chief town of Egypt,

on the river Nile which comes from Paradise.”[583] But the crusade,

in anticipation of which he wrote, never took place, and the next

military expedition to reach Syria through Egypt was destined to be a

French one, headed by that extraordinary pilgrim, Bonaparte.

Besides his account of a journey to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Central

Asia, and China, “Mandeville” gives a description of a number of

countries peopled by imaginary monsters. This fantastic part of his

work, where he anticipated no less famous a traveller than Gulliver

himself, did not diminish its success, quite the contrary; it was

translated into several languages, and above three hundred MSS. of

it now remain. But we, less confiding than our fathers, are loth to

accept the excuse he gives as a guarantee of, at least, his good

faith: “Things that are long past away from sight fall into oblivion,

and the memory of man cannot all retain and comprehend.”[584]

Many books, beginning with that of Lannoy, came after his, more

practical, less fantastic, and, of course, less famous.[585] While

the renewal of the crusades became {409} less and less probable, the

number of individual pilgrimages was on the increase. The word of

the priest which could no longer uproot and set on the move entire

nations, still detached here and there little groups of pious men or

adventure seekers, who went to visit the holy places under favour of

the Saracen’s tolerant and practical spirit. For the mass of them no

longer set out to fight the infidel, but to ask his permission to see

Jerusalem, which was the more readily granted that it had to be paid

for.

From the fourteenth century onwards, a regular service of transports

existed at Venice for the use of pilgrims: “It is the rule,” says a

traveller of the fourteenth century, “that the Venetians send every

year five galleys to the Holy Land. They all reach Beirut, which is

the port for Damascus in Syria; thence two of them bring the pilgrims

to Jaffa, which is the port for Jerusalem.”[586]

Many particulars about this service of transports, the purchases to

make before starting, and the provisions to take, are found in a

book written in the following century by William Wey, Fellow of Eton

College, an experienced pilgrim with a passion for such journeys.

He recommended that the price of the passage be carefully settled

before starting, and that a bed with its pillows, sheets, etc., be

procured. This was bought at Venice, near St. Mark’s, and cost three

ducats; after the journey the whole could be sold back to the vendor

for a ducat {410} and a half: “Also when ye com to Venyse ye schal

by a bedde by seynt Markys cherche; ye schal have a fedyr bedde, a

matres, too pylwys, too peyre schetis and a qwylt, and ye schal pay

iij dokettis; and when ye com ayen, bryng the same bedde to the man

that ye bowt hit of and ye schal have a doket and halfe ayen, thow

hyt be broke and worne.”[587] Such settled customs and fixed prices

show better than anything else the frequency of the intercourse.

William Wey is as obliging for his traveller as are modern guide-book

makers; he devises mnemonics of names to remember, a vocabulary of

the Greek words most important to know, and ready-made questions

which our manuals still repeat in more correct language:

“Good morrow. _Calomare._

Welcome. _Calosertys._

Tel me the way. _Dixiximo strata._

Gyff me that. _Doys me tutt._

Woman, haue ye goyd wyne? _Geneca esse calocrasse?_

Howe moche? _Posso?_”

He does not omit a sentence which must have been, and still is, of

especially frequent use: “I understond the not—_Apopon kystys_.” Wey

also gives a table of the rate of exchange for moneys from England

to Venice, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Syria; and a programme for the

employment of time, as now very parsimoniously distributed; he only

allows “thirteen or fourteen days” to see {411} everything and start

back again, specifying what should be seen each day. Lastly, he gives

a complete list of the towns to be traversed, with the distance from

one to the other, a map of the Holy Land with all the remarkable

places duly inscribed thereon,[588] a considerable catalogue of the

indulgences to be gained, and full details as to what is sacred or

curious in Palestine, or on the way thither, not forgetting the dogs

at Rhodes, who keep watch at night outside the castle, know perfectly

how to distinguish a Turk from a Christian, and who, if one of their

number “sleeps instead of taking his watch at night outside the

castle, kill him themselves,”[589] so great is their detestation of a

_slacker_.

Wey foresaw all the disagreeables to which the boorishness of the

captain of the galley might subject you; he recommends engaging a

berth in the highest part of the boat, “for in the lawyst [stage]

under hyt is ryght smolderyng hote and stynkynge.”[590] You must

not pay more than forty ducats from Venice to Jaffa, food included,

and should stipulate that the captain stop at certain ports to take

in fresh provisions. He is bound to give you hot meat at dinner and

supper, good wine, pure water, and biscuit; but it is well besides

to take provisions for private use, for even at the captain’s table

there is great risk of having bad bread and wine. “For thow ye

schal {412} be at the tabyl wyth yowre patrone, notwythstondynge,

ye schal oft tyme have nede to yowre vytelys, bred, chese, eggys,

frute, and bakyn, wyne, and other, to make yowre collasyun; for sum

tyme ye schal have febyl bred, wyne and stynkyng water, meny tymes ye

schal be ful fayne to ete of yowre owne.” It would even be prudent

to take some poultry: “Also by yow a cage for half a dozen of hennys

or chekyn to have with yow in the galey;” half a bushel of seed to

feed them must not be forgotten, nor what you will want to fry your

own bacon and drink your wine: “Also take with you a lytyl cawdren

and fryyng pan, dysches, platerrys, sawserys of tre (wood), cuppys

of glas, a grater for brede and such nessaryes.” You must also have

remedies, “confortatyvys, laxatyvys, restoratyvys,” saffron, pepper,

spices.[591]

On arrival at a port it is well to leap ashore one of the first, in

order to get served before others, and not to have the leavings;

this counsel of practical selfishness often recurs. On land heed

must be taken as to the fruits: “beware of dyverse frutys, for they

be not acordyng to youre complexioun, and they gender a blody fluxe

(dysentery), and yf an Englyschman have that sykenes hyt ys a marvel

and scape hyt but he dye thereof.”

Once in Palestine, one must be careful about robbers; beware of

Saracens coming to talk familiarly with you: “Also take goyd hede of

yowre knyves and other smal thynges that ye ber apon yow, for the

Sarsenes wyl go talkyng wyth yow and make goyd chere, but they wyl

stele fro yow that ye have and they may.” At Jaffa you must bestir

yourself and be quick, in order to have the best donkey, “Also when

ye schal take yowre asse at port Jaffe, be not to longe behynde yowre

felowys; for and ye com by tyme ye may chese the beste mule, other

asse, for ye schal pay no more fore the best then for the worst.

And ye must yeve youre asman curtesy {413} a grot.”[592] This last

recommendation shows the high antiquity of “pourboires,” one of the

best preserved of mediæval traditions. At last the caravan leaves the

seaside and proceeds towards the Holy City; and then it is prudent

not to straggle too far from your companions for fear of evildoers.

Worthy of notice is the fact that these visits to the Holy Land

were in great part performed on donkeys; knights themselves did not

disdain mounting these modest animals: “At this said inn did we

dismount from our asses,” says the narrator of the travels of the

lord of Anglure, who, as we have seen, visited Jerusalem at the end

of the fourteenth century; which tends to show that if there was, as

there still is, some danger of attacks by robbers, it was not very

serious. If there had been any chance of real fight knights would

hardly have ventured getting into it on donkey-back. In fact, many

of those reports of travels in the Holy Land give the impression

of mere tourists’ excursions, and what comes out most clearly from

them is the before-mentioned spirit of tolerance, coupled with the

spirit of profit, displayed by the Saracen. He did not forbid the

entry into Palestine of all these pilgrims, who often came as spies

and enemies, and he let their troops do very much as they liked,

provided they did not forget to pay.[593] The companions of the

lord {414} of Anglure, and half a century later of William Wey, go

where they will; returning when it is convenient, and making plans

of excursions beforehand as they would do at present. They admire

the beauty of the “muscas” or mosques, the quaint appearance of the

vaulted streets with light coming from apertures at the top of the

vault, and with shops for Saracen merchants on both sides, in other

words, the bazaar; they are led by and receive explanations from

their “drugemens;” at certain places they meet officers entrusted

with the permit of the “Soudan,” as to all affairs concerning

foreigners: these officers are called “consulles.” They find European

merchants established and doing much trade in the ports of the

infidel; they have, in fact, nothing to fear seriously but local wars

(about which they were pretty sure to get timely information), or

possibly calamitous encounters at sea. William Wey and his companions

learn with much uneasiness on their return that a Turkish fleet with

dubious purpose is ready to quit Constantinople, but happily they do

not meet it.

A comparison between the experiences of both troops of pilgrims, the

French and the English, is instructive, precisely because they are,

in so many cases, similar. The lord of Anglure[594] had no trouble in

reaching Jerusalem, being provided with the proper authorization:

“Shortly after, we started thence on foot, and with the license

of the lieutenant of the Sultan we entered the holy city of {415}

Jerusalem at the hour of vespers, and were all received and lodged

in the hospital where it is customary now for pilgrims to stay.”

Having bought tents, they travel by land without difficulty from

Palestine to Egypt, crossing the desert, noticing the places where

Moses performed his miracles, visiting Cairo, which deeply impresses

them by its beauty, its greatness, its gardens and monuments, and the

immense number of Saracens living there. They go partly by water,

partly on camels, observing on their way “two great black-feathered

ostriches trotting along,” to the places where St. Anthony had lived

with his “porcellet,” and where churches and abbeys prosper under the

rule of the unmeddling Saracen. They navigate the Nile, a large river

which “comes from Paradise,” and where “live several serpents called

cokatrices,” otherwise crocodiles, of which they see one “very great

and hideous” that dived into the water when they came near. There

only they have a rather narrow escape, being attacked in their boat

by “Arab robbers,” and some of their troop are wounded with arrows,

but none is killed.

Needless to say that, if Rome was full of relics, there was no want

of them in Jerusalem. All the places named in the Gospel, and some

others, had been identified with precision: “Item, continuing to go

up towards this mountain on the right hand side, there is a house

where the sweet Virgin Mary learnt at school.” Near the church of

the Holy Sepulchre is a large square “with two big stones on the one

of which our Lord used to sit when He preached to His disciples, and

our Lady sat opposite on the other.” The place is shown “where St.

John the Evangelist sang mass every day in the presence of our Lady

after the Ascension of our Lord.” You may see, too, the spot where

was roasted the paschal lamb; “even here was warmed the water with

which our Lord washed the feet of His apostles.” There is also a

cave or well “where King Herod had the Innocents {416} thrown, out

of spite.” At Bethlehem is a church of St. Nicholas, “in which place

the sweet Virgin Mary hid herself to draw her milk from her worthy

breasts when she would fly to Egypt. In this same church is a marble

column against which she leaned when she drew her worthy milk, and

this pillar continues moist since the time she leaned against it, and

when it is wiped, at once it sweats again; and in all places where

her worthy milk fell, the earth is still soft and white and has the

appearance of curded milk, and whoever likes takes of it, out of

devotion.”—Hence the milk at Walsingham?

In Egypt, too, the wonders are numerous, but many are of a different

order. Besides the churches and hermitages there are the “granaries

of Pharaoh,” namely the pyramids, which seem to the lord of Anglure

and his companions “the most marvellous thing they had yet seen in

all their travels.” They are cut “in the shape of a fine diamond,”

but inside they are full of animals, who stink horribly. Mandeville,

who had seen them some years before, gives them the same origin, and

utterly discards the belief that they might have been tombs of high

personages. He mentions the hieroglyphics, about the only thing in

all his book that he does not try to explain; he also has a word

for the grim inhabitants of the pyramids: “Thei ben alle fulle of

serpentes. And aboven the gernerers with outen ben many scriptures

of dyverse languages. And sum men seyn that they ben sepultures of

grete Lordes, that weren somtyme; but that is not trewe; for all

the comoun rymour and speche is of alle the peple there, bothe far

and nere, that thei ben the garneres of Joseph. And so fynden thei

in here scriptures and in here cronycles. On that other partie, yif

thei werein sepultures, thei scholden not ben voyd with inne. For yee

may well knowe that tombes and sepultures ne ben not made of suche

gretnesse ne of suche highnesse. Wherfore it is not to beleve that

thei {417} ben tombes or sepultures.”[595] This powerful mode of

reasoning did not, however, convince such sceptics as Mariette and

Maspéro.

Besides the pyramids, the companions of the Lord of Anglure notice

and greatly praise the houses with their terraces, the mosques and

their “fine lamps,” these same ornamented glass lamps which, after

having been admired by our pilgrims in 1395 when they were fresh and

new, can be seen now without going so far, in the Victoria and Albert

Museum. The Egyptian animals, too, are noted by our travellers as

being very striking; besides the crocodiles there are the long-necked

giraffes, so tall that “they could well take their provender on

the highest lances that it is the custom now to use,” and then the

elephants. A very strange beast an elephant: “It could never bend to

the ground to get its food on account of its great height, but it

has in its snout something like a bowel, put at the further end of

its snout,” and this bowel “hangs down almost to the ground,” and

with it the beast “takes its food and carries it to its mouth.” He

uses it also to drink, and “when he blows air through it the noise

is greater than that of any buccina,” and the sound “is terrible to

those unaccustomed.”

At last the time came when our pilgrims had seen everything, and they

had to wend their way homewards. Twice did William Wey undertake

the great journey, happy to have seen, fain to see again. When he

came back to England for the last time he bequeathed to a chapel,

built on the model of the Holy Sepulchre, the souvenirs which he had

brought back, that is to say, a stone from Calvary, another from the

Sepulchre itself, one from Mount Tabor, one from the place where the

cross stood, and other relics. As for the French troop of pilgrims

who had left Anglure-sur-Aube on July 16, {418} 1395, they came

back in the following year, complete in their numbers but for Simon

de Sarrebruck, who had died of fever in Cyprus during the journey

home, and lies interred in a church there. “And on Thursday, the

twenty-second day of June, and the day before the eve of the feast

of St. John the Baptist, in the year of grace of our Lord, 1396, we

found ourselves again dining in Anglure.”

[Illustration 67. A PILGRIM’S “SIGN,” OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM.

(_Original in the British Museum._)]

{419}

[Illustration 68. A BLIND BEGGAR CHEATED OF HIS DRINK BY HIS BOY.

(_From MS. 10 E. IV._)]

CONCLUSION

We have followed the race of roamers in many places: on the road, at

the hostelry, in woods, in taverns, in churches; we have seen them

exercising a host of different trades, a motley crew, minstrels,

buffoons, quacks, messengers, pedlars, pilgrims, wandering preachers,

beggars, friars, vagabonds of all sorts, labourers broken loose

from the soil, pardoners, knights in search of adventure. We have

accompanied them here and there over the highroads of England, and

followed them to Rome itself, and the Holy Land; there we shall

leave them. To the wandering class also belong the representatives

of many other professions, such as scribes, tinkers, cobblers,

masons, showers of animals or bearwards, like those whom Villard de

Honnecourt visited one day in order to draw “al vif,” a lion. But the

more important members are those above described.

The current of life represented by the multiplicity of these

wayfarers is powerful; notice has been taken of the great though not

very apparent part they played in the State. The labourer breaks

the bonds which for centuries have attached him to the manor, and

henceforward means {420} to be the master of his own person and

of his service, to hire himself by the day if he chooses, and for

a salary corresponding to the rise in prices and to the demand

there may be for his work. The reform is an inevitable one, which

will be realized by degrees, in spite of the laws and of the will

of the authorities. There is none more important, and its how and

wherefore are to be studied not only in the castle, but on the road

and by-ways, in the brushwood, where armed bands meet together during

church service, and on those unfrequented paths where the false

pilgrim throws down his staff to take up his tools and look for work

out of the reach of his hereditary master. These people promote

by their example and success the emancipation which the wandering

preachers justify in their discourses, showing it to be not simply

desirable, but rightful.

The great questions of the age, social and religious, move towards

their solution, partly on the road, through the influence of the

wanderers, a direct influence from the sincere ones, indirect from

the others. Begging friars go from door to door, pardoners grow

rich, pilgrims live by alms and by the recital of their adventures,

always on the way, always at work. What is this work? By constantly

addressing the crowd, they in the end make themselves known for what

they are, and cause their listeners to pass sentence upon them; by

disabusing them they render reform inevitable. Thereby, too, will the

rust and superstition of the middle ages drop away, and another step

be made towards modern civilization.

Each of these strange types has, moreover, the advantage of showing,

very apparent in his own person, some characteristic side of the

tastes, the beliefs, and the aspirations of his time. Each of those

groups corresponds to a need, an eccentricity, a vice, or a merit of

the nation; through them we may examine, as it were, and reconstitute

piecemeal the souls of the men of long ago, and have those {421} men

stand before us, mind and body, complete, just as the nature of the

soil may be guessed from the flora of a country.

The general impression is that the English people then underwent

one of those profound transformations which present themselves to

the historian’s view like the turning of a highway. Coming out from

gorges and mountains the road suddenly leads to an opening, and the

rich, sunny, fertile plain is perceived in the distance. It has

not yet been reached, many hardships are still to be endured; it

will disappear again from sight at intervals, but the traveller has

seen it, and knows at least in what direction to tread in order to

attain it. During the age which was then beginning the emancipated

peasant was to enrich himself in spite of fierce wars especially

deadly for the nobility, and the Commons were to be possessed of an

instrument of control over the royal power, which would be used,

according to the period, more or less well, but which is the best

one invented up to our day. The Parliament sitting at Westminster

now is in its essential elements identical with the one that,

under the Plantagenets, drew up the statutes of the kingdom. In

the fourteenth century, despite ultra severe judgments from some

thinkers of fame (an age, says Stubbs, “of heartless selfishness and

moral degradation”), mankind did not recede, witness the host of

truly modern ideas which gained a hold on the mass of the people;

among the upper classes under the influence of higher education and

wider intercourse with foreign countries, which weakened the notion

of the immutability of custom; among the lower classes through the

effects of abuses long experienced by men who, though patient, were

no weaklings; ideas made popular and rendered practical by the

wayfarers, illiterate workmen, single-hearted preachers. All those

mad freaks, all the extravagance of the religious spirit, those

incessant revolts and follies which have been noticed, were sure

to cause a reaction, and a longing for something nearer that {422}

reign of reason which mankind, though less remote from the goal,

still continues to look for in the far distance.

On a number of questions, whether as the promoter or the object

of reform, as working man or as pardoner, whether an unconscious

instrument or not, wanderers will always have much to teach whoever

will question them. For good or evil it may be said that they

acted in mediæval history as “microbes,” a numerous, scarcely

visible, but powerful host. They will perhaps reveal the secret of

almost incomprehensible transformations, which might have seemed

to necessitate a total overturn, like the one that took place in

France at the end of the eighteenth century, a new or rather a first

_contrat social_. England, for many reasons, has not required this;

one among those reasons is the action of the roamers which, exerting

itself on a population temperamentally steadier than many others,

more persistently resolute, and less constantly troubled by wars on

its territory, united the people and, thanks to that union which made

it strong, allowed it to snatch in time the necessary concessions.

And as, however, the calmest changes cannot take place without some

disturbance, as also among the English there have been, in the course

of centuries, more than one bloody fray, the nomad may perhaps end

by answering his interrogator in the words of a common proverb of

certain, yet unhackneyed wisdom, which should prevent pessimism and

lack of hope: “Le bois tortu fait le feu droit”—Crooked log maketh

straight fire.

{425}

APPENDIX

I

(p. 44)

PATENT OF KING JOHN ENTRUSTING A FRENCHMAN WITH THE COMPLETION OF

LONDON BRIDGE (1201)

“Literæ patentes, etc. de edificatione et sustentatione pontis

Londinensis. Patent Roll 3º Iohannis, m. 2, no. 9.

“Iohannes Dei gratia rex, etc. dilectis et fidelibus suis majori

et civibus Londinensibus salutem. Attendentes qualiter circa

pontem Xanctonensem et pontem de Rupella Deus a modico tempore

sit operatus per sollicitudinem fidelis clerici nostri Isenberti,

magistri scolarum Xanctonensium, viri utique literati et honesti,

ipsum de consilio venerabilis patris in Christo H. Cantuariensis

Archiepiscopi[596] et aliorum, rogavimus et monuimus et etiam

coegimus ut pro vestra et multorum utilitate, de ponte vestro

faciendo curam habeat diligentem. Confidimus enim in Domino, quod

idem pons tam necessarius vobis et omnibus transeuntibus, ut scitis,

per ejus industriam, faciente Domino, poterit in proximo consumari.

Et ideo volumus et concedimus quod salvo jure nostro et conservata

indempnitate civitatis Londinensis, census edificiorum quæ super

pontem prædictum idem magister scolarum faciet fieri sint imperpetuum

ad eundem pontem reficiendum et operiendum et sustentandum. Quia

igitur idem pons tam necessarius sine vestro et aliorum auxilio

perfici non poterit, mandamus vobis, exhortantes quatinus memoratum

Isenbertum et suos pro vestra utilitate pariter et honore sicut {426}

decuerit benigne recipiatis et honoretis in hiis quæ dicta sunt,

consilium et auxilium vestrum eidem unanimiter impendentes. Quicquid

enim boni et honoris eidem Isenberto feceritis, nobis factum reputare

debetis. Si quis vero eidem Isenberto vel suis in aliquo foris

fecerit, quod non credimus, vos illud eisdem faciatis, quam citius

ad vos pertinet emendari. Teste meipso, apud Molinellum, xviii. die

Aprilis.

“Sub eadem forma scribitur omnibus fidelibus per regnum Angliæ

constitutis.”

Hearne, at the end of “Liber niger Scaccarii,” London, 1771, vol. i.

p. 470*; Thomas Duffus Hardy, “Rotuli Literarum Patentium in Turri

Londinensi asservati,” London, 1835, fol. p. 9.

II

(p. 53)

PETITION CONCERNING AN OLD BRIDGE, WHOSE ARCHES WERE TOO LOW AND TOO

NARROW TO PERMIT BOATS TO PASS

“Unto the ryght wise and discrete comons of this present Parlement;

besecheth mekely the comons off the countees of York, Lincoln,

Notyngham, and Derby; That whereas ther is, and of longe tyme hath

been, an usuall and a commune passage fro dyvers and many parties of

the seid countees unto the citees of York, Hull, Hedon, Holdernes,

Beverley, Barton, and Grymesby, and so forth, by the hie see, by

the costes, unto London and elles where, with all maner of shippes

charged with wolle, leed, stone, tymbre, vitaille, fewaille, and many

other marchandises, by a streme called the Dike, in the counte of

York, that daiely ebbith and floweth: over whiche streem ys made a

brigge of tymbre called Turnbrigg, in the parisshe of Snayth in the

same counte, so lowe, so ner the streem, so narrowe and so strayte

in the archees, that ther is, and of long tyme hath been a right

perilous passage, and ofte tymes perishinge of dyvers shippes; and

atte every tyme of creteyne[597] and abundaunce of water, ther may

no shippes passe under the seid brigge, by the space of half a yere

or more, and also a grete partie of the countees to the seid ryver

ajonyng, is yerely by the space of xx^{ti} myles and more surrownded,

by cause of the lowenes and straitenes of the said brigge, to the

grete hurt and damage as well to the kyng in his customes {427}

and subsidys, that shuld growe to him of the seid marchaundises,

chargeable with suche diverse, as to the seid shires, countres, cites

and burghes, and the inhabitants of theim. . . . .

“Please hit unto your right wise discretions, consideryng the

premisses, to pray and beseche the kyng our soverayn lord to graunte

. . . that hit shall be lefulle to what sum ever person or persons of

the seid shires, that will atte theire owne costages take away the

seid brigge, and ther with and profites therof, and in othir wise,

newe edifie and bilde anothir brigge there, lengere in lengthe by the

quantite of v. yerdes called the kynges standard, and in hieght a yerd

and a half by the same yerd heigher then the seid brigge that stondes

ther nowe, aswell for passage of all maner shippes comyng therto, and

voidaunce of water under the seid brigg as for passage of man, best

and carriage over the seid newe brigge so to be made, with a draght

lef[598] contenyng the space of iiij fete called Paules fete in brede,

for the voidying thorugh of the mastes of the shippes passinge under

the seid new brigg; and that every shipmen that wol passe under the

seid brigge with their shippes, may laufully lifte up and close the

seid lef att their pleser; and that the mayster of every shippe paie

for every liftyng of the seid lef 1d. to the lord of the soille for the

tyme beyng . . . for the lofe of Godd and in waye of charite. . . .

“_Responsio._ Le roy de l’advys et assent de lez seignurs espirituelx

et temporalx et lez communes esteantz en cest present parlement, ad

graunté tout le contenue en icell petition en toutz pointz.”

“Rolls of Parliament,” vol. v. p. 43; 20 Henry VI, A.D. 1442.

III

(p. 62)

LONDON BRIDGE AND ITS MAINTENANCE