Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  PILGRIMAGE

  AN IMAGE OF MEDIAEVAL RELIGION

  Jonathan Sumption

  TO MY FRIENDS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Preface

  I INTRODUCTION

  II THE CULT OF RELICS

  III THE SAINTS AND THEIR RELICS

  IV THE PURSUIT OF THE MIRACULOUS

  V THE MEDICINE OF THE SICK

  VI ORIGINS AND IDEALS

  VII THE PENITENTIAL PILGRIMAGE

  VIII THE GREAT AGE OF PILGRIMAGE

  IX THE LEGACY OF THE CRUSADES

  X THE GROWTH OF A CULT

  XI THE JOURNEY

  XII THE SANCTUARY

  XIII ROME

  XIV THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 1 ‘LIGHT-MINDED AND INQUISITIVE PERSONS’

  XV THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 2 ‘BASE-BORN MEN’

  XVI MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIANITY RELIGION TO RITUAL

  Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PLATES

  between pages 184 and 185

  I Statue-reliquary of St. Foy, Conques (Aveyron) (Jean Dieuzaide Yan, Toulouse)

  II a St. Thomas appears to a sleeping monk From a stained glass window of Canterbury cathedral (Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown copyright)

  II b A bleeding image of Christ From Bibl. Nat. Ms. Fr. 2810, fol. 171vo (Photo Bibliothèque Nationale Paris)

  III a A view of Rome in 1456 From Cod. Reg. Vat. Lat. 1882 fol. 2 (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

  III b Pilgrims paying toll at the gates of Tyre From Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 24189, fol. 8 (Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board)

  IV a The sudarium of Veronica By the Master of St. Veronica (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

  IV b Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne cathedral (Foto Archiv, Marburg)

  MAPS

  I Principal sanctuaries of France and Spain

  II The Holy Land and eastern Europe

  PREFACE

  I began by imagining (perhaps all historians do) that the subject of this book could be neatly confined between two convenient dates, like a row of disintegrating French paperbacks between two bookends. 1050 to 1250 was the period I had in mind. In fact, religious history cannot be divided into digestible slabs in this convenient fashion. Mediaeval Christianity inherited certain ideas from the classical past and bequeathed others to the modern world. The spiritual ideals of St. Bernard’s day are incomprehensible when divorced from their origins, and misleading without some account of the process of distortion and decay which ultimately overcame them. Even the Reformation is not as decisive a break as one would suppose.

  So, as it stands, the book is an attempt to draw a thin line through a very long period of history. In an age of academic specialization this approach has advantages and disadvantages. It does make it possible to present a reasonably coherent picture of mediaeval spiritual life as a whole, through the medium of an important and, I believe, representative part of it. So much for the advantages; now the disadvantages, of which the chief is that I may often have indulged in broad generalizations which lack of space has prevented me from justifying at length. I wish it were possible to write about the middle ages as Keith Thomas has recently done about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the evidence does not exist. The search for origins and consequences in mediaeval history is bound to be fruitless. Finality is an illusion. The conclusions drawn here must be regarded as my own impressions buttressed by examples which I consider representative. For every example, a counter-example could easily be cited. I have tried to avoid a tone of bold confidence, but there are no doubt places where the reader should insert a mental ‘probably’ at the beginning of a sentence.

  One major omission should be mentioned. I have concentrated heavily on France and on the cultural world of which France was the centre – England, northern Spain, central and southern Italy. Germany has not been entirely ignored, but major sanctuaries like Cologne and Aachen have not received, the attention they deserve. There are a number of reasons for this, amongst them the extreme sparseness of the evidence before the fifteenth century. But I cannot deny that self-indulgence has been an important factor. I love France. German history bores me. There is, moreover, a homogeneity about the French cultural world which makes it possible to speak of it as a whole. Germany and central Europe are in some respects exceptional and ought to be considered separately. This is already a long book. I had no desire to make it longer.

  I owe a very considerable debt to the President and fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, for the leisure and agreeable surroundings which I have enjoyed there both as an undergraduate and as a fellow. I have benefited enormously from conversations with my old tutor, Karl Leyser, more, perhaps, than he realizes. Dr. Hugh Sinclair and Dr. David Robson have helped me out with some medical matters in chapter five. The staff of at least a dozen libraries in this country and in France and Italy have been unfailingly helpful, none more so than the staff of the Bodleian Library, who staggered daily to seat U.219 bowed down beneath the weight of ancient folios. My greatest debt is to my wife, and the fact that this is a common experience among authors will not prevent me from saying so.

  J.P.C.S.

  Greenwich, 1974

  CHAPTER I

  INTRODUCTION

  The world which the mediaeval pilgrim left behind him was a small and exclusive community. The geographic and social facts of life made it oppressive and isolated and, except in the vicinity of major towns and truck roads, the chief qualities of human life were its monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions. Existence, for the great majority, meant rural existence. Towns were few and small, and separated themselves from the country by moats of legal privilege. Villages asserted their independence and marked out their territory with rows of stakes and crosses. Even where migration occurred, it was not allowed to disturb the placid conventions of rural life. English villages of the thirteenth century were forbidden to receive strangers, and were held collectively responsible for crimes committed in their midst. Townsmen were enjoined to watch for strangers and lock their gates at sunset.

  Nowhere was the closeness of these communities more apparent than in their religious life. ‘What is a parish?’, asked the thirteenth-century canonist Henry of Susa; ‘it is a place with well-defined frontiers whose inhabitants belong to a single church.’ The parishioner ‘belonged’ in a very real sense to his church, and lived his whole life under its shadow. There, and there alone, he was baptized and married, attended Sunday Mass, paid his tithe and offerings, and there he was buried when he died. The statutes of the church constantly reminded him of the fact. No one may receive the sacraments in any church but his own. ‘On no account admit to confession any person from another parish.’ ‘No stranger is to be allowed burial or marriage in the parish church.’ A thirteenth-century archbishop of Bordeaux excommunicated ‘all strangers who have abandoned their own parish churches which they ought to be attending, … for the parish priest should be able to see the face of every member of his flock.’ Pierre de Collemieu, archbishop of Rouen, required parish priests to keep a list of their parishioners, and to eject any strangers whom they found in their churches on Sundays except for noblemen and beggars. It was not unknown for those who died outside their own parishes to be exhumed and brought back to their own churchyards.

  The Lateran council of 1215 reinforced this dependence on the parish by making every layman confess his sins at least once a year to his parish priest, and to no
one else. Only bona fide travellers and those in danger of death were permitted to confess to a strange priest, while those clergy who had no parishes were forbidden to hear confessions at all. The right of the mendicant orders to hear them was hotly resisted by the secular clergy as an intrusion upon their prerogatives, and was only tardily recognized by the papacy. Confession, the most personal act of piety which the ordinary man performed, was far from being the anonymous ceremony found in the modern Roman Catholic Church. It is true that the actual words spoken were inaudible, but the sacrament itself was held in public, ‘openly, and not in some private place, especially in the case of women’, as the synod of Nîmes ordained in 1284. Moreover the parish priest was expected to probe for further, undeclared, sins, and to inflict a lengthy cross-examination on the penitent. Several hand-books for priests were available in which useful and pertinent questions were set out for this purpose.

  Dignity and privacy were not concepts dear to the hearts of mediaeval men, who conducted their communal lives on the unspoken assumption that the sins of one were the business of all. This was particularly true of breaches of sexual morality. In a small village near Bonneval in the Loire valley, the repentance of a prostitute at the end of the twelfth century was an event of public importance. Most of the inhabitants gathered in the street to debate whether she should go immediately to the nearest priest in Bonneval, or await his arrival for Mass on the following day. They decided to wait. In the morning they accompanied the sinner in a body to the church and, all speaking at once, recited her history to the priest. After a short homily, the priest confessed her in the presence of the villagers and sentenced her to an annual pilgrimage to Chartres. Then he absolved her amid scenes of emotion and jubilation. In the records of episcopal visitations it is clear that the majority of witnesses regarded eavesdropping and peeping through windows as a duty. When bishop Trefnant of Hereford visited his diocese in 1397, most of the laymen who appeared before him were accused by their neighbours of adultery, bigamy, quarrelling with their wives, denying conjugal rights to their husbands, and other matters which would now be regarded as private. A similar picture emerges from the records of a provincial society in France. When a Poitevin peasant-woman, Clémente Gaboreau, failed to appear in church one Sunday in 1387, her fellow parishioners recalled that she had often been seen entering and leaving the house of one Guillaume Achale and immediately suspected the worst. It was common knowledge in the village of Asnois (Poitou) that the wife of Pierre Vigoureux was the mistress of the parish priest. Jean Bourdeau, carpenter of Courlay (Poitou) was completely unaware that his wife was unfaithful to him, until several peeping-Toms told him so, whereupon he killed her with a sickle. The fifteenth-century author of a manual for parish priests no doubt had such incidents in mind when he warned his readers against ‘all that standeth or hearkeneth by nights under walls, doors, or windows, for to spy touching evil.’

  The popularity of the mendicant friars and of local holy hermits, was undoubtedly due in part to the fact that they offered an escape from the stifling framework of parish life. Pilgrimage offered another escape. A surprisingly large number of pilgrims seem to have left their homes solely in order to deny their parish priest his monopoly over their spiritual welfare. Contemporary churchmen frequently accused them of seeking to confess to a strange priest or to avoid the moral censure which they deserved. In one extreme case a lady of London, on learning that she was dying, had herself carried in a litter to Canterbury in order to avoid the payment of a five shilling burial fee to her parish priest. At the end of the fifteenth century a writer castigating the excessive devotion of the populace to pilgrimages reflected that their principal motives were ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands.’

  The twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis describes the dreadful fate of a priest who went with his mistress on a pilgrimage to St.-Gilles, in order to avoid the opprobrium of his family and friends. But many of the penitential pilgrims who filled the great shrines no doubt honestly felt that they would never live down their obsessions of guilt so long as they remained at home. St. Hugh of Lincoln once met a man in Rochester who admitted that he had led an evil life in his youth, ‘until, unable to endure my shame and hating the scene of my destruction, I secretly left my mother’s house and the city where I had been born, … and wandered I knew not whither.’ Paul Walther, a German Franciscan who visited the Holy Land in 1481, confessed before his departure that he had not lived up to the requirements of the Franciscan rule ‘and therefore I have resolved to go away to a place where the German language is unknown, and there I shall exorcize my sins from my wretched body.’

  The Reality of Evil

  The peculiar intensity of mediaeval piety had as many causes as it had symptoms. But pre-eminent among them was a view of the natural world as a chaos in which the perpetual intervention of God was the only guiding law. God appeared to control the entire natural world from moment to moment. He was the direct and immediate cause of everything that happened, from the most trivial to the most vital incidents of human life. Indeed it was not until the eighteenth century that men were prepared to concede to nature any power of her own, or to attribute the workings of the natural world to anything other than divine intervention. In these circumstances, men were inclined to feel that their lives were directed by irresistible forces. Since they could not control them, the only remedies available were supplication, and the performance of pious acts considered likely to propitiate them.

  The reactions of men when faced with what they conceived to be overpowering supernatural forces, changed remarkably little in a thousand years of Christian history. At the end of the sixth century Gregory of Tours collected eight books of the miracles of the saints, every page of which demonstrates that the most normal incidents of daily life were interpreted as signs of divine favour or disfavour, provoking displays of general jubilation or incalculable terror. Simple men were terrified of the dark, sometimes to the point of insanity. Thunder storms brought panic to whole communities and drove them to take refuge round the altars of the saints. A flash of lightning created havoc in a small village, ‘the people all fearing that the punishment of God was about to descend on them wherever they might try to escape.’ Terrible cries were heard during an eclipse of the moon. Since all such phenomena sprang not from natural causes but from the direct action of God, it followed that the will of God could be discerned in them if only men knew how. To the people of Paris, a red sky at night three times in succession was a certain presage of war. A partial eclipse of the sun foretold disaster in the Auvergne. The heavens themselves blazed forth the death of princes.

  These attitudes are not peculiar to the sixth century. They are found throughout the mediaeval period, and indeed afterwards. Unreasonable fear of the dark was one of the popular superstitions condemned by the eleventh-century canonist Burchard of Worms; ‘many men dare not leave their houses before dawn, saying that … evil spirits have more power to harm them before cock-crow than afterwards.’ Guibert of Nogent used to keep the lamp as close to his bed as possible in order to ward off demons. Shortly after the death of Robert the Pious, king of France, in 1031, it was recorded that the event had been presaged by three years of epidemics, famines, and ‘prodigies’. In the fourteenth century it was still generally accepted that natural calamities were the just punishments inflicted by God on sinners. This was, for example, the moral drawn from the hurricane which struck southern England in January 1362, uprooting the fruit trees and destroying the harvest. In Piers Plowman Reason preached before the King and

  … proved that this pestilence were for pure sin,

  And the south west wind on Saturday at even

  Was pertlich for pure pride and for no point else.

  The same notion that a conflict of irresistible forces governed individual lives gave a desperate, almost frenzied quality to the religious life of
the later middle ages. Jean de Meung, one of the authors of the Roman de la Rose attributed this belief to most of his contemporaries, though he does not seem to have subscribed to it himself. Because of it, he observed, men attached excessive importance to trivial events. Of this attitude was born the conviction that they had been set upon by demons. Sick men were driven to panic, sometimes to hysteria. Sorcery, necromancy, conjuring of spirits, visions of Heaven and Hell, were all, in the poet’s view, products of the same aberration.

  Ordinary men could not regard evil as an abstract force; to them it was real, visible, and tangible, capable of inflicting actual physical damage. A crude pantheistic view of nature suggested to them that the physical world harboured malignant powers hostile to men. A gust of wind might be the breath of Satan. Gregory of Tours once met a woman of the Limousin who believed that her child had been struck blind because she failed to make the sign of the cross when the wind blew up. Even at the end of the fifteenth century a gust of wind which blew open the doors of an abbey near Dunkirk was enough to strike panic in the hearts of the inmates. The friars of one Dominican convent of northern Germany habitually went about in pairs for fear of the Devil, who had broken all the windows of their church. According to St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian order, devils, the incarnation of all evil, moved in the air and in the dust that floated in every stream of light; ‘a breath of wind, a turbulence in the air, the gust that blows men to the ground and harms their crops, these are the whistlings of the Devil.’ The whole atmosphere, thought Ivo of Chartres, was filled with the spirit of evil, ubiquitous, all-knowing, powerful, spying out the inner thoughts and weaknesses of men. Anything which inspired fear might be evil, and thus the daily accidents of life suddenly took on a sinister import.