Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The blood of Christ was venerated in a growing number of churches after the eleventh century. A phial of Christ’s blood was discovered in Mantua as early as 804, and created a profound sensation. Charlemagne asked the pope to investigate its authenticity but the outcome of this inquiry and the subsequent fate of the relic are not known. However, the memory of the event was revived when a second phial of blood was unearthed in the garden of the hospice of St. Andrew in Mantua in 1048. On this occasion, the cult took root, and Mantua became an important stage on the pilgrim’s route to Rome. We do not know how the clergy of Mantua explained the existence of their relic or reconciled it with the doctrine of the resurrection. But when relics of the blood of Christ began to multiply in the thirteenth century, the commonest explanation given was that the blood had been miraculously exuded by a eucharistic host or an image of the Lord struck by heretics or Jews (see plate 11 b). This legend, which has an ancient lineage, served to account for the relics of the Divine Blood exhibited in many western churches in the late middle ages, especially in the Low Countries. A typical variation on the theme was given out by the clergy of Aasche in the fourteenth century. A woman had been inveigled by the Jews into stealing a consecrated host one Easter Sunday, but on the way home she took fright and hastily buried the incriminating host in a tree trunk at the side of the road. There it bled profusely until the inhabitants of the area alerted the local clergy, who took the bloodstained wood away and preserved it in the church at Aasche. Stories of this kind were already commonplace in the time of Thomas Aquinas who declares them to be theologically sound, though he does not speak of them with any enthusiasm. A number of churches traced the origin of their phials of blood to the celebrated wooden statue of Christ at Beirut which had begun to bleed when pierced with nails by Jews. A small quantity of it kept by the Franciscans of La Rochelle aroused ‘certain dissentions’ in the diocese, which were referred in 1448 to the arbitration of the university of Paris. The faculty of theology declared that the veneration of the blood was in no way repugnant to the faith, and their opinion was confirmed by pope Nicholas V.

  More controversial was the blood which was alleged to come from the very wounds of Christ. This Thomas Aquinas declared to be impossible. But several churches, notably the Norman abbey of the Trinity at Fécamp, claimed to possess it, and when a vase of blood was presented to Henry III of England by the military orders in 1247, Robert Grosseteste applied his considerable scholarship to its defence. Nothing was more probable, he argued than that when Christ was taken down from the cross, His blood had splashed over Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Grosseteste listed five occasions when His blood had been shed and suggested that the disciples would naturally have gathered it up and preserved it.

  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries churches which displayed the divine blood found powerful defenders in the Franciscan order, which had espoused the cult of the Passion of Our Lord since its inception. In 1351 the Franciscan prior of Barcelona stated in a public sermon that the blood shed at the crucifixion thereupon lost its divinity and so remained on earth after the resurrection. He was immediately prosecuted by the Inquisitor of Aragon and obliged to make a humiliating retraction. But more than a century later another Franciscan, Giacomo della Marca, revived the forbidden doctrine in a sermon at Brescia and was accused by the Dominicans of heresy. In December 1463 a formal debate between representatives of the two orders was held in the presence of Pius V, at which the matter was argued with such vehemence that although it was December the protagonists were shortly bathed in sweat. As the Franciscans pointed out, the relics venerated at Rome, Mantua, Bruges, and countless lesser shrines depended on the outcome. Perhaps it was for this reason that the jury of cardinals adjourned the debate, and no decision was ever made public.

  This softening of the official attitude was the result of continuous popular pressure. The great processions in honour of the Holy Blood at Bruges were spectacular displays of popular devotion, and the plebeian nature of such cults was increasingly recognized by the growing band of critics. John Hus observed that there were now ‘innumerable places where the Devil has moved the people through the wickedness of greedy priests to worship the body and blood of the Lord as a relic’. It was in the fourteenth century that the practice began of displaying the host from the altar in a monstrance. Tabernacles made their appearance at the same time, where the Eucharist would be placed for the adoration of the faithful instead of being left in the sacristy between services.

  The extensive devotional literature surrounding the pilgrimage to the Holy Blood at Fécamp demonstrates beyond doubt that belief in the bodily relics of Christ was a form of eucharistic piety. The blood of Fécamp was already venerated in 1120 when Baudri of Deuil visited the abbey of the Trinity and remarked on ‘the blood of Christ, buried by Nicodemus, … and now solemnly revered by large crowds of pilgrims’. In a twelfth-century poem composed for the abbey, pilgrims are urged to come to win their redemption at Fécamp by beholding the precious blood of Christ ‘not as you do in the sacrament but just as it flowed from the Saviour’s side when he died for us’:

  Non pas comment u sacrement

  Mes en sa fourme proprement

  Vermel comment il le sengna

  Quant pour nous mort soufrir degna.

  The same passionate desire to translate the mysteries of the faith into realities is reflected in every aspect of the cult of relics. Ordinary men looked on the saints as individuals no less immediate, no less visible and tangible in death than they had been in life. It was essential to this view of things that a saint should be considered to inhabit the place where his relics were preserved, and in that place he should above all be venerated. Hence the fact, observed in the fifteenth century by Reynold Pecock, that many of those who went on pilgrimages to Mont-St.-Michel expected to find there the bones of the archangel. From this Pecock drew the perceptive conclusion that ‘without rememorative signs of a thing, … the rememoration or remembrance of that thing … must needs be feebler, as experience sufficiently witnesseth. And therefore, since the body, or the bones, or other relics of any person is a full rememorative sign of the same person, it is full reasonable and full worthy that where the body or bones or any relic of a saint may be had, it be set up in a common place to which people may have their devout … access.’

  The process by which the veneration of the saints became associated with particular places is especially striking in the case of the Virgin Mary. The earliest collections of miracles of the Virgin, which date from the early twelfth century, were not associated with any particular sanctuary. The stories are set as far apart as Germany and Spain, Pisa and Mont-St.-Michel, and in none of them is there any question of relics. Pilgrimages to shrines of the Virgin were common in the east, but there is no mention of them in the west until the tenth century, when a monk of Bobbio observed that the Blessed Virgin frequently worked miracles for the benefit of those who came to the abbey of St. Columban with their troubles. Bodily relics of the Virgin were almost unknown, and thus when Geoffrey de Montbray, bishop of Coutances (d. 1110), discovered some of her hair in his cathedral, accompanied by imposing certificates of authenticity, some of the canons objected on the ground that ‘hitherto no relic of the Virgin was known to exist on earth.’ The popularity of the cult of the Virgin spread rapidly in the twelfth century, and as it did so countless relics came into existence. Laon cathedral had a ‘splendid little reliquary’ containing some hair of the Virgin at the beginning of the twelfth century, when it was carried about England and northern France to raise money for the rebuilding of the cathedral. More hair existed at Astorga in northern Spain; this caused some astonishment to Ida, countess of Boulogne, who arranged for eleven of the hairs to be sent to Boulogne and subjected them to the ordeal of fire. Most early relics of the Virgin consisted of parts of her clothing. The most celebrated of these was undoubtedly the tunic preserved in Chartres cathedral, which had a mass following in northern France, and was believed to ea
se the pains of pregnancy. But others, sometimes older than that of Chartres, were claimed by churches in Germany and eastern France. The bishops of Verdun possessed a tunic, ‘somewhat battered and torn’, in the tenth century, while another is found at Munchsmunster in a list of relics compiled in 1092. Other tunics were venerated at Regensberg and Trier at the same time. The church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome was alleged to have a large number of relics of the Nativity, including the original crib, together with parts of the Virgin’s hair, milk, and clothing. Milk of the Virgin made its appearance in the same period, though the days of its greatest popularity were yet to come. The famous area santa of Oviedo Cathedral was believed to contain a phial of milk of the Virgin; it is one of the items listed on the inscription which Alfonso VI caused to be engraved on the outside in 1075. The relic list of Munchsmunster includes ‘milk of the Virgin which flowed from her breast’, presumably labelled thus in order to distinguish it from ‘miraculous’ milk which was already appearing at Chartres and elsewhere.

  Thus the first result of the popularization of the cult of the Virgin during the eleventh and twelfth centuries was that the cult became ‘localized’ in a number of relatively new shrines. Pilgrimages did not, of course, supersede other forms of devotion to the Virgin, but they were the principal means by which that devotion was expressed by uneducated people. These people did not see the Virgin as the ubiquitous power, uncramped by time or place, who was venerated by St. Anselm or St. Bernard. To them she was Our Lady of Chartres or Our Lady of Soissons, and the distinction between them loomed large in the eyes of contemporaries. The author of the Miracles of Our Lady of Chartres tells of a lady of Audignecourt who was cured of a skin disease by praying to the Virgin. As she was about to set out for Notre-Dame de Soissons to give thanks, the Virgin appeared to inform her that it was by Notre-Dame de Chartres that she had been healed. The purpose of the miracle collection of Rocamadour was declared to be to demonstrate that ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary has chosen Rocamadour in Quercy above all other churches’. The enemies of Coutances cathedral attempted to dissuade a pilgrim from going there by asking her, ‘why go to a strange church to seek the help of the Blessed Virgin whose power is universal and could just as easily cure you in your own home?’ But they were confounded when the woman returned, fully cured, from Coutances. Indeed, the author of the Coutances miracle collection devoted much of his work to refuting opinions of this sort. He pointed, for example, to the fate of Vitalis, a Norman who came to the ‘insipid conclusion’ that ‘the Blessed Mary of Bayeux and the Blessed Mary of Coutances were one and the same person, that is, the mother of God; and that consequently the Virgin of Coutances could not possibly be more merciful or more powerful than the Virgin of Bayeux.’ Vitalis accordingly refused to accompany his fellow villagers on a mass pilgrimage to Coutances, for which the Virgin severely chastised him. Already pilgrims had accepted a plurality of Virgins inhabiting defined places, the view caricatured in the pleasant conversation once overheard by Sir Thomas More: ‘“of all Our Ladies, I love best Our Lady of Walsingham”; “and I”, saith the other, “Our Lady of Ipswich.”’

  The Image of the Saint

  The saint was physically present in the altar of his church. When his relics moved, he moved with them. He was the protector of the sanctuary, and offerings were made to him personally. The saint was quite capable of defending his property from his shrine. Thus, when, shortly after 946, the monks of Fleury quarrelled with the bishop of Orléans over the possession of a vineyard, they came to harvest the grapes bringing with them the remains of St. Benedict, whereupon the soldiers posted there by the bishop made way and departed. The monks of Bobbio brought the body of St. Columban to the royal court of Pavia in order to complain about the invasion of their lands by powerful noblemen. The notion of the saint residing in his reliquary is literally portrayed in the stained glass of Canterbury cathedral, where St. Thomas is seen climbing out of his shrine in order to appear to a sleeping monk (see plate II a).

  The very atmosphere of a pilgrimage church encouraged the impression of the saint’s physical presence. From the eighth century onwards relics were placed on the altar in the east end of the church, or else in a crypt designed for that purpose. At Santiago, Conques, St. Sernin of Toulouse, and St. Martin of Tours there were vast double aisles through which, on feast days, superb processions made their way towards the gilded shrine. The sense of the saint’s latent power was often fostered by the fact that his relics were contained in a statue. These statue-reliquaries originated in southern France in the tenth century. Stephen, bishop of Clermont ordered a statue of the Blessed Virgin in 946 to house some of her relics. Stephen was also the abbot of Conques in the Rouergue, whose monks had recently stolen the relics of St. Foy from Agen, and it seems likely that he commissioned the celebrated statue-reliquary which is still preserved there (see plate I). The Conques statue, which is of gold encrusted with precious stones, shows St. Foy seated on a throne stretching out hands which once held a model of the grid on which she had supposedly been martyred. It survives as a solitary reminder of the enormous number of such statues which were once venerated in southern France. At the synod of Rodez in 1013, Bernard of Angers, a stranger to the south, described how each church was represented by its clergy carrying the statue-reliquary of its patron saint beneath a splendid canopy: St. Armand of Rodez, St. Marius of Vabres, St. Sernin of Toulouse, a golden statue of the Virgin, and St. Foy herself were all carried processionally round the walls of the city before the opening of the council. ‘Hitherto’, Bernard wrote, ‘I have always believed that the veneration of images and paintings of the saints was improper, and to raise statues to them would have struck me as absurd. But this is not the belief of the inhabitants of these parts, where every church contains a statue of its patron made of gold, silver, or base metal, depending on the wealth of the church. And inside it they place the head or some other important relic of the saint … Jupiter or Mars might well have been venerated like this.’ The statue of St. Foy was a potent means of impressing the saint’s presence not only on pilgrims but on the population of the remotest valleys of the Auvergne. Whenever the possessions of the abbey were threatened or an epidemic ravaged the area, the statue was drawn through the valleys mounted on a horse and surrounded by young monks clashing cymbals and blowing ivory horns. The inhabitants of the villages would gather at the side of the road on these occasions, and in an atmosphere of extreme religious excitement repeated cries would signal the occurrence of new miraculous cures.

  These reliquaries, which so faithfully reflected the popular piety of the tenth and eleventh centuries, passed out of fashion in the twelfth. Few of them have survived. But at one time they were venerated not only in the Midi but throughout northern France and even in England. A gold statue-reliquary with one hand outstretched in blessing was made for the abbey of St. Martial of Limoges in 952. The famous black wooden statue of the Virgin at Chartres (the existing one is a copy of it) may have been modelled on that of Conques. A statue-reliquary was venerated at St. Bertin in the late eleventh century, and in England bishop Brithnod of Ely had four of them made for his cathedral out of gilded wood. Even after the pilgrimage churches had ceased to commission new statue-reliquaries, artistic representations of the saints continued to exercise a potent influence on the popular imagination. When Guibert of Nogent’s mother dreamed of the Blessed Virgin she dreamed of the Virgin of Chartres cathedral. Witbert, the blind peasant whose sight was restored by St. Foy, had a vision of her corresponding exactly to the statue-reliquary which can be seen today at Conques. Similarly when a young monk of Monte Cassino saw St. Michael taking away the soul of a dead brother, he saw him ‘exactly as he is usually depicted by painters’. Indeed, it seems possible that the special reputation which St. Foy acquired for healing the blind was due in part to the staring jewelled eyes of her statue at Conques.

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  The cult of relics brings into sharp relief the classic problem of the mediaeval Church. I
t has often been accused by enlightened historians of fostering popular superstition and resisting the intellectual development of the laity. Usually this has been attributed to the avarice of the clergy and indeed there are many mediaeval writers who could be found to support such a view. Nevertheless it overlooks the fact that the mediaeval Church not only did not but could not control and direct popular religion. In the broadest sense of the word, it did not have the educational resources to convey anything but the most elementary formulae to the people en masse. For the most part the parish clergy must be regarded as splinters from the same wood as their parishioners, sharing their misconceptions and their simplified view of life. In fact, in so far as one can trace the movement of ideas in the history of mediaeval piety it is often in the reverse direction. Popular religious practices continually influence the behaviour of the establishment. With a few eminent exceptions such as Guibert of Nogent, few churchmen were found who appreciated this fact, still less made a conscious effort to resist it. The following chapter will show how popular influences of the same sort determined the attitude of the Church to miracles.