Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Such sentiments were common enough among the clergy of pilgrimage churches who constantly upheld the invocation of the saints as the only sure remedy for sickness. ‘Why waste your breath in calling for a mere human doctor’, a Merovingian bishop asked a dying nobleman, ‘when a celestial doctor is at hand, … the body of St. Andrew?’ By the time of Gregory of Tours the denigration of ‘human medicine’ had become a commonplace of hagiography. ‘Physicians’, explained a twelfth-century churchman, ‘are out to enrich themselves in any way they can; their promises are mere verbiage designed to augment your hope and their fees’; only by a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Donatian could one be certain of good health. The Liber Sancti Jacobi echoes these feelings. It is better to study the divine medicine by which Christ brought salvation to men than the pseudo-medicine of Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and their ilk. Whether the medical profession resented the success of its celestial rivals is not recorded. The doctors of Montpellier apparently regarded a miraculous statue of the Virgin there with some envy. The physicians of the prior of Chaalis, according to Guillaume de St.-Pathus, were dismayed to learn that their patient had been cured by the miraculous intervention of St. Louis, ‘for if this is indeed the case, we shall all be out of a job.’ As for the patients, there must have been many like Raoul le Cavetier of Fourmont, who made three pilgrimages to Noyon and paid a fortune to his doctors before concluding that ‘neither doctors nor pilgrimages were any use at all to his wounded leg.’

  Medicine and Religion

  In all the great miracle collections of the middle ages, miraculous cures account for an overwhelming majority of the stories, and it is clear that the desire to witness or experience a miracle was the principal motive for many pilgrimages. Pilgrims to St. Thomas were ‘not merely attracted by the miracles but, as it were, compelled by them’. The association of pilgrimage with the healing of the sick was so close that a youth of Warbleton is reported to have refused to go to Canterbury ‘for I am neither dumb nor lame, and my health is perfectly sound.’ ‘I am in excellent health’, protested another, ‘what need have I of St. Thomas?’ His father gave him a sound beating, but his was nevertheless the prevailing attitude among those unruly pilgrims who in Chaucer’s day still trekked to Canterbury

  The holy blisful martir for to seke

  That them hath holpen whan that they were sick.

  This was not only a reflection of the inadequacy of medical science. At the root of it was a powerful conviction that physical diseases had spiritual causes. Illness was brought on by sin, from which it followed that penitence at the shrine of a saint effaced not only the sin but the illness as well. Frequently enough, the malady had been deliberately inflicted by the saint as a punishment for sacrilege or for some other offensive behaviour. In the Latin west, the healing function of the saints was originally regarded as the natural corollary of their spiritual function. As early as the sixth century, diseases are inflicted in punishment for sin, and no sooner is the sin absolved but the symptoms pass away. Thus the sixth-century biographer of St. Hilary of Poitiers informs us that a woman who worked on the Lord’s Day received a withered hand which was healed at the moment of her absolution on the following Sunday. Similarly, a blind woman recovered her sight as soon as a bishop laid hands on her in blessing. King Clothaire, whose sins caused him great physical suffering, visited the tomb of St. Germain and applied the pallium of the saint to his bleeding wounds; as soon as he had confessed his sins aloud, the pain disappeared. This notion was already well-established when Gregory of Tours was writing at the end of the sixth century. In his works we discover that a man who violated the sanctuary of St. Julian’s basilica at Brioude was struck blind until the moment of his confession. A woman who had baked bread on the Lord’s Day went every month to beg forgiveness at the shrine of St. Martin, but her withered arm was not healed until after she had received absolution.

  The basic form of these punitive miracles did not greatly change through the centuries. It did, however, become broader in scope with the growing conviction that not only ‘punitive’ sickness but all sickness was caused by sin. After the fall of man, it was said, original sin had given Satan power over the bodies of men as well as their souls. Baptism might afford some protection against sickness, but only by remaining in a state of grace could a man preserve his health; as soon as he sinned the Devil was able to reclaim his body. ‘There is no doubt’, John Chrysostom had thought, ‘that sin is the first cause of bodily disease.’ The author of that most popular of hagiographical collections, the Golden Legend, believed that illness in unbaptized infants was due to original sin, and that children generally recovered after baptism.

  Gregory of Tours had spoken of illness as an ‘incursio diaboli’, an invasion of the body by the Devil, and it is clear that many people entertained the most literal notions as to how this came about. Gregory himself had described how the Devil could be vomited up with one’s bile. Peter the Deacon, the historian of the abbey of Monte Cassino, claimed to have seen a devil fleeing from the mouth of an epileptic recently cured by St. Benedict. When Guibert of Nogent’s cousin was gravely ill, the arm of St. Arnoul was brought to his sick-bed, with results which Guibert described in the following terms:

  ‘When the arm of the blessed martyr was laid upon him, the sickness shifted its ground and settled in another part of the body. Then the virulence was put to flight again and the holy arm pressed hard against it. The whole force of the disease ran up and down his face and limbs and finally flowed into the region of his throat and shoulders, the skin being a little raised like a mouse. Then gathering into a ball it vanished without pain.’

  Similarly, infection could be explained as the physical transfer of a devil out of one body and into another.

  The diabolic theory of sickness seemed particularly plausible to contemporaries in the case of mental illness. ‘Possession by the Devil’ was the usual synonym for any kind of delirium. The expression seemed natural to Bede, who tells us, for example, that at Bardney abbey in the late seventh century

  ‘there came a guest who used very often to be troubled in the night without any warning by an unclean spirit…. When he lay down on his bed he was suddenly possessed by the Devil and began to gnash his teeth and foam at the mouth, while his limbs were twisted by convulsive writhings…. A great crowd tried vainly to hold the man down while the priest pronounced an exorcism and did all that he could to sooth the wretched creature. Then the abbess suddenly remembered the soil from the shrine of St. Cuthbert and ordered a servant to go and fetch the casket in which it was kept. No sooner was it brought … but the demoniac was suddenly silent and laid his head down as if in relaxed sleep, while his limbs became quiet and composed.’

  The thirteenth-century Miracles of St. Wulfstan contains a remarkable account of the methods used, to exorcize demons from delirious pilgrims at Worcester. From this it appears that a madwoman, dragged screaming to Worcester, was repeatedly struck blows, and a potter who suddenly lost his mind was bound to the altar and passers-by invited to scourge him with sticks. The basis of this treatment was that the patient’s body became uncomfortable for the devil who was presumed to be inhabiting it. One boy who recovered his sanity at Worcester actually saw the devil departing, shaking his fist at the shrine as he did so. Other shrines are known to have been more gentle in their methods, but their attitude was broadly similar. An Italian madwoman at St.-Gilles was taken into the crypt, where passages were read from the Gospels and the names of Jesus, Mary, and St. Gilles solemnly invoked; no devil, it was alleged in defence of this procedure, could survive in the house of God or bear to hear such holy names pronounced.

  The conviction that sin was the origin of sickness does much to account for the confidence with which some men relied on healing saints. It explains also the unconcealed hostility with which the Church at various times regarded the medical profession, which attempted to cure the bodily symptoms while ignoring the spiritual origins of the patient’s complaint. For this r
eason the Lateran council of 1215 forbade physicians to visit a patient for the second time unless a priest had seen him beforehand. ‘Since bodily ailments usually spring from sin’, the fathers of the council added, ‘we decree hereby, and strictly enjoin, that all doctors … shall warn their patients that they stand in need of a spiritual physician, not a physical one.’ This injunction was frequently repeated by diocesan synods. Indeed, a synod meeting in Paris in 1429 went so far as to forbid physicians to give any treatment at all to patients who were in a state of mortal sin. Public preachers constantly returned to this theme. Jacques de Vitry urged his audiences that their only hope of good health was to look to the salvation of their souls, to which the instructions of doctors were positively deleterious. ‘God says keep vigils; the doctors say go to sleep. God says fast; the doctors say eat. God says mortify your flesh; the doctors say be comfortable.’ The fifteenth-century preacher Olivier Maillard could think of no words harsh enough to describe those physicians who would not call the priest until it was clear that the patient was dying: ‘of what use is such treatment; take care in future that you recommend spiritual remedies to your patient before applying physical ones.’ For the same reasons the Church made several attempts to prevent Jews from practising medicine for, the root cause of sickness being sin, the ministrations of a heathen could not possibly be effective. The council of Béziers (1246) excommunicated all Christians who allowed themselves to be treated by a Jew, and similar prohibitions were uttered wherever Jews practised medicine. In Spain, where the tradition of Jewish medicine was strong, decrees to this effect were issued at regular intervals, but equally regularly ignored.

  Some afflictions were particularly liable to be regarded as divine punishments. Leprosy, for example, was often regarded as the punishment for fornication. Gonorrhoea was invariably diagnosed as ‘leprosy’, and the fact that it is usually acquired through sexual intercourse could only reinforce in contemporary minds the connection between sin and disease. Odo of Beaumont, whose symptoms are described in some detail in the Miracles of St. Thomas, had contracted gonorrhoea by frequenting brothels, as a result of which he was segregated as a leper. The same fate had befallen a debauched Norman knight whom abbot Samson once met at Bury St. Edmunds. In India, leprosy is still regarded as a divine chastisement, even though the distinction between leprosy and venereal disease is now well-known.

  Female fertility was taken to be the gift of God, from which it followed that barrenness was a sign of God’s displeasure. Particularly common were cases in which women who married within the prohibited degrees of affinity, or committed adultery, were unable to conceive. In 1063 we hear of a Norman couple who travelled to Rome ‘on account of their sterility’. At the end of the eleventh century a landowner presented two estates to the abbey of Conques, in the hope of an heir. Thereafter, such donations became fairly common, and in some cases, the connection between sin and barrenness was heavily underlined. A Frenchman who visited Santiago in 1108 to pray for the birth of a son, ‘as is customary’, found his request refused on account of the gravity of his sins; not until he ‘wept, cried out, and prayed with all his heart’ did he have his way. No class was immune from the curse of barrenness and its occurrence, especially among princes, tended to provoke dramatic displays of penitence. When Wladislaw Hermann, king of Poland, was unable to beget an heir in 1085, he underwent a rigorous programme of fasts, vigils, and prayers, and lavishly distributed alms to the poor. Finally, on the advice of a French missionary bishop, he sent an embassy to the shrine of St. Gilles in Provence, bearing numerous gifts, including a small golden model of a baby boy. His son, the future Boleslaw III, was born shortly afterwards.

  Miraculous Medicine

  On the feast days of the saints the crowds of the sick and the dying filled the great basilicas. Around the shrine they lay in makeshift beds or wrapped themselves in blankets, surrounded by a host of relatives and well-wishers, the wealthier among them attended by their own physicians and servants. Many of them waited for weeks and even months as the clergy of the basilica fulfilled their daily rounds of offices and ceremonies. Some dramatically recovered and the miracle was proclaimed amid scenes of hysterical rejoicing; others died within sight of the shrine.

  The rituals for the treatment of the sick differed from century to century and from church to church. Pilgrims were not normally permitted to touch the relics themselves. Public exhibitions of relics were rare and imposing ceremonies, while private views were enjoyed only by the great or the exceptionally persuasive. In 1088 a woman with withered hands asked to be allowed to touch the body of St. Gilles ‘asserting that if this was done she would undoubtedly be cured, for so much had been revealed to her in a dream the night before’. Her request was granted, but in terms which show that this was an unusual favour, to be explained only by the possibility that her dream was of divine origin. Most pilgrims never saw the relics of the saint who had healed them.

  Instead they applied to their bodies objects such as dust, stones, or scraps of paper which had been in contact with the saint or his shrine. Eating or drinking such substances was believed to be particularly effective, perhaps because it underlined the similarities between human and celestial medicine. In the time of Gregory of Tours sick men ate wax from the candles which burned before the shrine and some even ate the charred wicks. During an epidemic of dysentery in the Loire valley at the end of the sixth century, many of the sick drank water containing dust from the tomb of St. Martin, while others drank the water used to wash down the sarcophagus before Easter. Both methods, according to Gregory, were equally effective. Sick men drank water in which a splinter of the True Cross had been immersed or chewed the length of silk in which it had been wrapped. Gregory himself had been cured of an inflammation of the eyes by drinking wine poured into a footstep of St. Benigne preserved in the ground at Dijon.

  The dipping of relics in water or wine remained the commonest method of healing practised in the pilgrimage churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was a convenient way of parcelling out the miraculous power of the relics among large numbers of people. At the end of the eleventh century a crowd estimated at several thousand gathered at Chateau-Gordon during an epidemic to receive jars of the wine that had been used to wash down the tomb of St. Benedict. ‘Experience has repeatedly proved’, explained Raoul Tortaire, ‘that whenever a sick person washes any part of the shrine with wine or water and then drinks it with faith, he will immediately recover.’ At Norwich cathedral, pilgrims drank water mixed with scrapings of cement from the tomb of St. William. At Reading abbey the hand of St. James was dipped in water, phials of which were sent off to cure the sick in their own homes. After swallowing it, they would usually vomit violently, suffer a high fever for several hours, and then suddenly recover. Much the same effects are recorded at Canterbury, where ‘water of St. Thomas’ was one of the most celebrated medicines of the twelfth century. This consisted of the blood of St. Thomas, wiped up from the floor of Canterbury cathedral after his murder and diluted in a large cistern of water, thus ensuring, says Becket’s biographer, both that there was plenty available and that it would not be too repulsive to drink. The water was continually diluted as demand for it rose, and one of the monks of Christ Church priory was charged with the task of preparing it and pouring it into little ampullae for the use of the sick. A London priest was cured by this concoction within a week of Becket’s death. Not only was it drunk by the sick and smeared on the eyelids of the blind, but cases were reported in which it was used for the magical detection of thieves and even for extinguishing fires. A small ampulla worn around the neck became the badge of a Canterbury pilgrim. Parallels with eucharistic piety obviously suggest themselves and Benedict of Peterborough did not hesitate to draw them: ‘just as St. Thomas in his lifetime sought to achieve the same perfection as the Son of Man, so, after his death, he was honoured in the same fashion, by the partaking of his blood.’

  There are some indications that sensitive persons
found this practice repellent. This was one reason why the blood of St. Thomas was so heavily diluted. A sick monk of Mont-St.-Michel refused a draught of the wine which had washed the skull of St. Aubert, ‘preferring to die than drink wine swilled in the head of a corpse’. It may be that growing sensitivity on this point explains the fact that these macabre beverages passed out of fashion after the twelfth century.

  Any genuine cures which occurred at the shrines of the saints evidently occurred in spite of such methods rather than because of them. In most cases the sick no doubt owed their recovery to the strength of their constitutions, and the symptoms disappeared in the natural way. Since they frequently remained at the shrine until they recovered or died, sometimes indeed for several months at a time, it would be surprising if there were not many ‘cures’ of this kind. Such factors as a change of diet or climate may well have assisted the natural recovery of these pertinacious pilgrims. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the clergy, although relying principally on the celestial medicine of their patron saints, were not above practising terrestrial medicine as well. Many pilgrimage centres had excellent medical libraries which included parts of the Hippocratic corpus and the works of Galen. Canterbury cathedral priory had an enormous library of medical books, with which William, one of the authors of the Miracles of St. Thomas, seems to have been familiar. Bury St. Edmunds too had a substantial collection. Among the French abbeys where book-medicine thrived were Cluny and St. Martial of Limoges, both of them major pilgrimage churches. The practice of medicine by monks was quite common, though the Church made periodic attempts to discourage it. Thus, the celebrated Baldwin, physician to Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror, was first a monk of St.-Denis and then abbot of Bury St. Edmunds. William of Malmesbury tells us that one of the monks of his abbey, a certain Gregory, was a very famous physician in his day, and would occasionally give consultations to pilgrims at the shrine of St. Aldhelm.