Perhaps Willibald set the style for medieval English travelers, for certainly no pilgrim was ever more deeply affected than he. “What spot was there which had witnessed the Lord’s miracles,” says his chronicle, “on which Willibald, the man of God did not imprint his kisses? What altar was there that he did not bedew with his tears and sighs?”
So ardent were his feelings that he made four sojourns in Jerusalem during his extended stay of several years in the Holy Land. In between he visited all the usual places of religious interest throughout the country and one unusual one, a church on Mt. Tabor consecrated jointly to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. He drank sour ewe’s milk without approval, remarked on the extraordinary native sheep “all one color” (were eighth-century English sheep parti-colored?), and once on a plain thick with olive trees he encountered a lion that roared dreadfully but when approached “hurried off in another direction.”
Sometimes he traveled alone, at another time in company with seven unnamed countrymen. On one occasion all eight were arrested on suspicion and imprisoned by the Saracens. “The townsmen used then to come to look at them because they were young and handsome and clad in good garments.” When they were brought before the King of the Saracens he asked whence they came and was told: “These men come from the west country where the sun never sets and we know of no land beyond them, but water only.” Apparently not regarding such origin as a crime, the King replied: “Why ought we to punish them? They have not sinned against us. Give them leave and let them go.”
Each side trip Willibald made required a letter of safe-conduct from the Caliph, a matter of some difficulty, for on one occasion he and his companions could not find the sovereign “because he had fled out of his kingdom.” This was the same Emir-al-Mumenin who had earlier released the English party from prison. Perhaps he was too tolerant toward unbelievers to please his subjects.
Tyre and Sidon, Antioch and Damascus, Constantinople and Nicaea were visited before Willibald finally sailed for Sicily and Italy, where he settled for a time at Monte Cassino just ten years after leaving home.
After Willibald there is a long silence, for the times were not friendly to the survival of manuscripts. During the ninth and tenth centuries, while Moslem civilization was at its height both in the arts of peace and in temporal power, Europe was sunk in the darkest period of the Dark Ages. Barbarism, cruelty, moral decrepitude, and cultural lethargy held sway. No light or inspiration came from Rome, where the Church was in the hands of persons described by the great papal historian, Caesar Baronius, as “monstrous men, depraved in life, abandoned in morals, utterly corrupt.” Men of the sword, unbridled by established law or strong rulers, left no man’s life safe. In England the ravaging Danes burned, destroyed, and slaughtered wherever they passed, with only King Alfred in the southwest offering a valiant resistance. Meeting destruction on every hand, men became disgusted with the world on earth and in a desperate search for security entered monasteries in droves or set off to seek the threshold of heaven in the Holy Land. A period of religious hysteria, in which the year 1000 was expected to bring the end of the world, afflicted all of Western Europe like an epidemic. Hastening to the scene of man’s Redemption before the final awful moment of reckoning, “hordes,” according to some chroniclers, poured into the Holy Land, of whom a large proportion never returned. Some died of want, some of plague, some were killed by marauding Arabs, some were lost at sea by storms or shipwreck or pirates. Only the lucky or the well provided came back alive.
A highly imaginative account of a mass pilgrimage supposed to have taken place in 1064 is incorporated by the otherwise circumstantial historian, Florence of Worcester, whose chronicle was written in the last quarter of the eleventh century, shortly after the event was supposed to have taken place. He tells of a multitude of 7,000 who accompanied the Archbishop of Mentz (Mainz) and the Bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Ratisbon on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They were attacked by the Saracens, who, in search of the gold the Christians were supposed to have swallowed when in fear of capture, pinned as many as they could catch to the earth in the shape of a cross and slit them open from throat to belly. Of the 7,000 a remnant of 2,000 escaped and survived. Although this adventure apparently does not involve people from England, it was included in a chronicle of English history and was probably typical of the atrocity stories circulating at the time, which helped to arouse the fervor for the First Crusade.
Beginning in the eleventh century crowned heads and mitred bishops, fat abbots and helmeted barons joined the simpler people on the road to Jerusalem. Olaf Tryggvason, first Christian king of Norway, made the pilgrimage in 1003, Duke Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror, followed in 1035, and Ealdred, Archbishop of York, who was later to perform the coronation of William the Conqueror, went in 1058 with “such splendour as none other had displayed before him.”
In the same decade Earl Sweyn, rascally elder brother of Harold, who was to be King of England, went to Jerusalem in expiation of his many sins and died at Constantinople on his way home about the year 1055. His career seems to have been unusually conscienceless even for the eleventh century. He began by seducing Edviga, the Abbess of Leominster, who he ordered “should be fetched unto him and he had her as long as he listed and afterwards let her fare home.” Not so much the act of seduction as its choice of a bride of Christ as victim shocked his countrymen, who thereupon pronounced him an outlaw. He took refuge in Denmark, but was apparently not a bit chastened, for by some further crime he “ruined himself with the Danes.” Allowed to return home to plead for remission of the sentence of outlawry, he promptly murdered his cousin Earl Beorn, who had received part of Sweyn’s lands and whom Sweyn had induced to meet him under a truce. Again it was not the murder so much as the violation of the truce that prompted his next punishment. Though he was the eldest son of Earl Godwin, regent of the kingdom, he was pronounced a nithing, or man without honor, the lowest form of manhood known to Saxon society. He again took refuge on the Continent, but in the following year, 1050, he was brought home, pardoned, and restored to his earldom—a rash act, granted his reputation, though it may have been motivated by some phase in the bewildering rivalries of the Saxon nobles, whose disunity was soon to open the way to William the Conqueror.
The pattern is repeated with monotonous regularity. Sweyn is again outlawed in 1051 for some offense that no chronicler mentions. This time apparently his family has had enough of him, and either to get him out of the country for a long time or to earn him a last chance of forgiveness he is somehow induced to set off for Jerusalem in 1053.
Earl Sweyn as an individual would not warrant much attention were it not that he is the first recorded instance of the type of pilgrim that is to become all too frequent during the Crusades. This is the criminal who joined the pilgrims’ ranks to escape imprisonment or execution, as later criminals joined the Foreign Legion. Once having received the blessing of the Church on his journey and the Cross to sew on his cloak, the pilgrim traveled under ecclesiastical protection that put him beyond the reach of the secular arm, just as a fugitive claiming sanctuary inside a church was safe from all pursuers. Moreover the church had a regular table of indulgences that could be won by pilgrimages to holy places. According to one count there were ninety-six holy places in Jerusalem alone, and thirty-three more in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, not to mention many hundreds in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, and elsewhere. Neither Rome nor St. James of Compostella, the other two most favored pilgrimages, had anything like this to offer. By adding up partial indulgences granted at each of a number of holy places, five days from one, forty from another, a pilgrim could reduce his expected stay in purgatory to very little, perhaps to nothing. Or if he were a highly placed person or came with an important letter of introduction or made rich gifts to the monastic orders that administered the holy places, he might even secure a plenary indulgence remitting all punishment. Certificates were given to pilgrims testifying to the places they had visited and th
e devotions performed. On payment of a fee they might even be made Knights of the Sepulcher. Clearly the journey to Palestine provided a convenient out for the man who had made his home too hot to hold him. He could not only place himself beyond the reach of the law and his enemies for a long time, but he could at the same time commute the penalty he might otherwise expect to pay either on earth or in the after life. This system proved so attractive to transgressors that cutthroats and misfits aplenty mingled with the pious, the adventurous, and the purely curious amid the pilgrim multitudes.
Shortly after the pilgrimage of the Saxon Sweyn the sovereignty of England passed to the Norman conquerors, and five years later, in 1071, the sovereignty of Palestine passed from the caliphate of Bagdad to a newer branch of Islam, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk conquest provoked the First Crusade; the Norman conquest caused England’s participation in what was chiefly a Continental project. During the ensuing two hundred years of intermittent crusades there was of course a constant flow of travelers between England and Palestine, but few English diaries of individual pilgrimages from this period survive. One that has survived is the diary of Saewulf, a prosperous merchant given to fits of piety between periods of indulgence in earthly pleasures. In one of the former he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1102. Only three years had passed since the taking of Jerusalem by the warriors of the First Crusade, and the Latin kingdom they had established there was in the springtime of its power. For the first time in five hundred years the holy places were in Christian hands. New trade opportunities were opened. Ambitious nobles dreamed of new fiefs that could be carved from the infidel’s lands with a battle-ax and a few men-at-arms. Saewulf notes the crowds of travelers going to Palestine, both noble and poor, clergy and lay, true pilgrims and piratical adventurers “embarking with crews of desperate marauders … plundering and devastating on their way.”
On his arrival Saewulf narrowly escaped death in a terrible storm that wrecked his ship a few hours after he debarked at Jaffa. He has left a harrowing description of the crashing and splintering ships in the harbor, the shrieks of the drowning, the roaring of the wind, the awful sight of a falling mast knocking off a man’s head, and in the morning the derelict fragments of twenty-three vessels and the beach strewn with a thousand bodies.
Then comes the hazardous climb up to Jerusalem through the hills where Saracens lie in wait in caves to pounce on unwary travelers and where many unburied corpses lie scattered on the way, “for there is not much earth on the hard rock to dig a grave.” This suggests that Palestine already had begun to suffer the soil erosion that during the centuries of Arab cultivation reduced it from the one-time land of milk and honey to a stony goat pasture.
Saewulf spent eight months visiting Jerusalem and the Biblical towns around from Hebron in the south, where Abraham settled and was buried, up through Jericho to Nazareth, Tiberias, and Capernaum in the north. Typical of many medieval travel diaries, Saewulf’s narrative passes without a comma from things he actually saw to gossip and popular lore gathered from local guides at each stopping place. To separate out the nuggets of fact is not easy, but his account is valuable less for what it tells of Palestine than for what it tells of the furnishings of the mind of the average twelfth-century tourist. Knowledge of geography and history was not a strong point. When he visited the Mosque of Omar, then in the hands of the Latin monks, Saewulf refers to it as the Temple of Solomon, endows it with an entirely fictitious history according to which it was rebuilt somewhere along the line by Hadrian or Heraclius or “some say it was by Justinian” (Saewulf is not particular), and indicates only the vaguest notion of how and when the Mohammedans entered the picture.
Likewise his description of an enemy fleet encountered on the way home shows how history happening under his eyes was interpreted in terms of ancient history learned from the Bible. “Twenty-six ships of the Saracens suddenly came into sight,” he writes. “[They were] the forces of the Admiral of Tyre and Sidon which were carrying an army to Babylonia to assist the Chaldeans in making war on the King of Jerusalem.” One would think Saewulf was somehow transported back to the sixth century B.C. when the Chaldean kings of ancient Babylon made war on Jerusalem and took the Israelites into captivity. But of course the king of Jerusalem whom Saewulf is talking about is the crusader king, Baldwin I, and the “Babylonia” he refers to is not the ancient city on the banks of the Euphrates, but Cairo, called Babylon in his time. Saewulf knew well enough where it was, but he peoples it with “Chaldeans” out of confusion with the Biblical city, for to him modern enemies of Jerusalem were the same as the enemy that had come out of the other Babylon to attack it 1,500 years before. Similarly he identified the Christians under King Baldwin of Jerusalem with the city’s ancient proprietors, the people of Israel. One finds King Richard in the Third Crusade calling on his troops to “restore the kingdom of Israel.” This self-identification with the ancient though not the contemporary Jews was taken for granted by the Christian powers, who, as the heirs of Christ, regarded themselves as the rightful inheritors of the Holy Land and considered it their duty, in Mandeville’s words, to “conquer our right heritage.”
The belief that Jerusalem was the geographical center of the world, which Saewulf faithfully repeats, was another concept of his time for which the Bible was responsible.
“For thus saith the Lord, This is Jerusalem, I have set her in the midst of the nations and the countries that are round about.” This passage from Ezekiel and other similar ones had by now quite blanketed out the work of the classical geographers, who were not victims of any such confusion. Medieval maps presented an entirely new visualization of the known world, in which Jerusalem is placed in its exact center. Ocean surrounds the circumference of the earth, and beyond the ocean strange animals, sea monsters, and oriental designs adorn the outer rim, representing barbarian lands of which cartographers knew nothing beyond the fact that they existed.
In the same year that Saewulf was in Palestine another pilgrim, Godric, who was to become a saint, also came there. Godric was a combination pirate, shipowner, and merchant whose two journeys to Palestine may have been undertaken in search of adventure and booty rather than salvation, but later came to be remembered as pilgrimages under the influence of the legends that grew up about his name. Godric must have traveled in his own ship, for though he left no personal record a contemporary chronicler reports that “Gudericus, pirata de regno Angliae,” took King Baldwin to Jerusalem by sea down the coast from Arsuf to Jaffa after the King’s forces met a defeat on the plains of Ramleh and were cut off from Jaffa by land.
In 1106 he made a second journey to the Holy Land, this time on foot, and returned to England to become a venerated hermit, the subject of many saintly adventures, while the legend of his pilgrimages grew yearly, studded with a variety of affecting details. He was said to have vowed never to change clothes or shoes or eat anything but barley bread and water until he should reach Palestine. Once there he bathed in the Jordan and arose cleansed, but threw away his shoes, vowing to walk barefoot ever after in emulation of Jesus, though perhaps the condition of his footgear may have had something to do with his resolve.
Until the Protestant reformation the pilgrim movement was a constant element in the life of the Middle Ages and the pilgrim or palmer a familiar figure to all men of his time. In the two blue-robed figures of the Palmer’s Window at Ludlow chapel he has attained the immortality of stained glass. In literature the simile of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is a familiar one, as in the poignant poem Sir Walter Raleigh wrote on the eve of the scaffold:
Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My Staffe of Faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, Immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation:
My gowne of glory, hopes true gage
And thus Ile take my pilgrimage.
Here are the familiar articles by which everyone recognized the palmer as he trudged along. His particular emblem was the scallop shell, derived pro
bably from the wayfarer’s use of it to scoop a drink of water from a stream. The staff lent support to his steps and could in an emergency be used as a weapon. The scrip or leather shoulder bag held what little food or clothing he carried as well as some saint’s bones or dust from the Via Dolorosa or splinters from the Cross, bought as souvenirs. The bottle attached to his belt was used to bring home water from the Jordan. Sometimes, too, he carried a bunch of faded palm branches and wore a collection of medallions stuck around the crown of his hat, one for each shrine he had visited. These were the “signs of Synay” worn by the Palmer in Piers Plowman, who boasts that he has visited not only Sinai but also Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Babylon, Alexandria, and Damascus. Indeed, the palmer’s journeyings made him a famous fellow of medieval life, a sort of foreign correspondent for the people back home, whom he entertained with tales of far-off lands and strange peoples. Though he acquired a reputation as an inveterate liar, men would always gather eagerly to hear him tell about the Holy City, about the wickedness and splendors of the paynim Saracen, the fabled glories of Byzantium, of wild beasts encountered, brigands and pirates foiled, and great personages met along the way.
Such a one was the Palmer of John Heywood’s play “The Four Ps,” with whom lying was “comen usage” and who spellbinds his fellow P’s—the Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedler—with an account of a barefoot tour of the Holy Places, of how “many a salt tere dyde I swete before thys carkes could come there.”
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 5