Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  This obsession with the remission of sins can be discerned in all the more notable pilgrimages of the period. Robert the Pious, king of France, did a tour of nine shrines including some as far away as Toulouse and St.-Gilles shortly before his death in 1031. His biographer tells us that he hoped in this way to ‘evade the awful sentence of the day of judgement’. Robert, duke of Normandy, who was under strong suspicion of having murdered his brother, travelled barefoot to Jerusalem in 1035 ‘driven by the fear of God’. A contemporary who saw king Canute at St.-Omer on his way to Rome reported that he shed bitter tears and implored the pardon of the saints, beating his breast and heaving heavy sighs. The three (or perhaps four) pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, to Jerusalem were accompanied by exhibitions of repentance as spectacular as the crimes they were intended to efface. According to Radulph Glaber ‘the fear of Gehenna’ entered into him in the year 1000 on account of his slaughter of the Bretons at the battle of Conquereuil, and the murder of his wife can only have added to his feelings of guilt. His first journey to the Holy Land occurred about three years after this. On his last, which was accomplished at a great age in 1038–40, Fulk had himself dragged on his knees by a halter to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, while two servants followed behind flogging him with birches. ‘Accept, O Lord, the wretched Fulk,’ he cried from the steps of the basilica; ‘I have perjured myself before thee and fled from thy presence. Receive, O Christ, this my unworthy soul.’

  These pilgrims were as different as they could possibly have been from the Celtic wanderers of an earlier age. They had a particular destination in mind and, having spent a short time there, they returned home to resume their normal lives. Fulk Nerra and his contemporaries took it for granted that certain places were intrinsically holier than others and this, as we have seen, was very far from being the view of the Irish. The penitential pilgrim, according to an Anglo-Saxon writer of the tenth century, underwent ‘the most profound of penances’: ‘he throws away his weapons and wanders far and wide across the land, barefoot and never staying more than a night in one place…. He fasts and wakes and prays by day and by night. He cares not for his body and lets his hair and nails grow freely.’ A pilgrimage of this sort is in fact a development of the penalty of judicial exile which is so common in primitive legal systems. The offender became an outcast. In the words of the Penitential of St. Columban he was to be ‘like Cain a wanderer and a fugitive on the face of the earth, never to return to his native land.’ The destination of this penitent was immaterial. Indeed it was often laid down that in the case of particularly heinous offences the pilgrimage was to be perpetual. In 585 the council of Mâcon decreed that a bishop guilty of murder should pass the rest of his life in pilgrimage. In the Irish penitentials perpetual exile is ordained for incest, bestiality, the murder of clerics or close relatives, and various kinds of sacrilege. As late as c. 1000 some Irish canons collected at Worcester require that the murderer of a bishop’s servant be condemned to perpetual exile, while lesser offences are visited with pilgrimages of up to twenty years. Indeed it was still possible for a preacher in the middle of the twelfth century to speak of pilgrims at Santiago as being ‘sent into exile by their parish priests’.

  In no other period was it so much better to travel hopefully than to arrive. But these wanderings were not devoid of religious significance, and penitents were often reported to have been pardoned by the intercession of the saints. Gregory of Tours had observed in the sixth century that ‘by praying to the saints sinners can often obtain the remission of their sins and thus be saved from the torments of Hell…. Those who have fallen into grave sin should therefore pay special reverence to God’s saints.’ In some miracle stories of the period the saint signified that the penitent was pardoned by causing his chains to break asunder in front of the shrine. Typical of such stories is the tale of the priest Willichar, whose enemies were unable to imprison him because the fetters fell from his feet every time he invoked the name of St. Martin. Two criminals are reported to have been released from their chains by St. Nizier in the sixth century, and at the church of St. Victor in Marseilles a traveller saw with his own eyes the rows of broken fetters hanging before the altar. But no one shrine was the special destination of these pilgrims, and when the chains broke the place was usually fortuitous. They wandered from shrine to shrine as aimlessly as any Irish exile. The wanderings of one such outcast are described in a Norman text of the ninth century. He was a nobleman called Frotmund who, in 850, had murdered his father, a chaplain of the emperor Lothair. Together with a large company of others in a similar predicament, he first made his way to Rome and then proceeded to Jerusalem, then to the shrine of St. Cyprian at Carthage, and back to Rome. Divine pardon was not forthcoming in Rome, so he returned to Jerusalem by way of Mount Sinai, then back to Rome and across northern Italy and France, until his fetters broke in the church of St. Marcellin at Rédon.

  The notion that a pilgrim had only to go to a particular shrine to be pardoned is scarcely found before the ninth century and did not command universal acceptance until the eleventh. At the very beginning of the ninth century we are told that St. Mestrille went to Tours in order to be pardoned for his sins. In the same period we find pilgrims commanded in visions to go to particular shrines. A ninth-century editor included in the works of Gregory of Tours the story of a penitent who was directed by a vision of Christ to the shrine of Moutiers-St.-Jean near Lyon. Another story in the same vein told of St. Peter and St. Paul appearing to a criminal on the road to Rome and directing him to the shrine of St. Bavo at Ghent.

  Bishops and confessors only now begin to impose specific pilgrimages on penitents. Rome was the usual destination. An Irish penitential written at the end of the ninth century suggests that parricides should be sent there to receive their penance from the pope in person. A certain Ratbert, who battered his mother to death in c. 870, was sent by the archbishop of Sens on two pilgrimages to Mont-St.-Michel and one to Rome. Such penances were still fairly uncommon a century later when the renowned confessor Abbo of Fleury sent Bernard, abbot of Beaulieu, to Jerusalem, and on learning that the roads east were blocked, to Rome and Monte Gargano instead. Bernard had confessed to having obtained his abbacy by simony, and Abbo’s biographer believed that the penance was ‘almost the first of its kind in France’.

  Thus arose the characteristic mediaeval belief in the automatic remission of sins by formal visits to particular shrines. The story of the criminal whose fetters burst asunder was gradually replaced by still more dramatic indications of divine forgiveness. Charlemagne, for instance, was stated in a legend of the eleventh century to have written out his sins on a sheet of paper, which was then wiped clean by the miraculous power of St. Gilles. This story, with its simple, literal approach, plainly struck a sympathetic chord in contemporary minds, for other pilgrims are alleged to have had similar experiences. A woman who visited Vézelay in the early twelfth century laid on the altar a scedula of her sins, which were immediately erased. The same happened to an Italian, whose sins were so vile that his bishop refused to absolve him, and sent him instead to Santiago with a written list of his enormities. ‘From this’, writes the author of the Miracles of St. James, ‘it is plain that whoever goes truly penitent to St. James and asks for his help with all his heart, will certainly have all his sins expunged.’ Writing at the beginning of the twelfth century, Hughes de Sainte-Marie saw this as the principal function of the saints. The Merovingian saints had healed the sick and punished iniquity; those of the twelfth century did so too, but they were also pastors, concerned above all with the moral welfare and eventual salvation of their flock. ‘Who can say how many souls have won God’s mercy by the merits of St. Benedict; how many men have been reformed, turned away from the vain prattle of the world, and subjected to the light yoke of Christ. For in so doing, St. Benedict revives the dead and heals the open wounds of sin.’

  Pilgrimages Imposed by the Law

  The responsibility for introducing the jud
icial pilgrimage into the civil law of Europe probably belongs to the Inquisition. The systematic juridical persecution of heresy, which began in southern France in the early years of the thirteenth century, left its mark on several aspects of mediaeval law. An organized system of tribunals, possessed of established rules and procedures, the Inquisition was active at one time or another in every country of Europe except England. For those who confessed to minor offences against the faith, pilgrimages were amongst the commonest penances which it imposed.

  The Inquisition of Languedoc classified pilgrimages as ‘major’, ‘minor’, or ‘overseas’ (i.e. to the Holy Land). The nineteen minor pilgrimages were all in France, while the four major ones were Canterbury, Santiago, Cologne, and Rome. Depending on the gravity of his offence, the penitent might be sent to any number of these shrines or even to all of them. It was nevertheless regarded as one of the lighter penances and was commonly used when large numbers of people were suspected of heresy without there being any definite evidence against any of them. When the inquisitors visited the small towns of Gourdon and Montcuq in 1241, most of those brought before them were sentenced to one major pilgrimage and a host of minor ones. Ninety-eight people were sent to Santiago via Le Puy and St.-Gilles; thirty-eight citizens of Gourdon were obliged to visit Canterbury by way of St.-Léonard de Noblat, St. Martial of Limoges, and St.-Denis. By comparison, Bernard Gui, inquisitor of Toulouse, who dealt with more serious cases and was in any case reckoned a hard judge, made much more severe use of pilgrimage as a penance. In his surviving book of sentences, which covers the years 1308–22, only sixteen out of 636 offences were considered so venal as to merit a mere pilgrimage. Even these sixteen had to undergo long journeys on foot. Three offenders who had unwittingly attended a Waldensian meeting in their childhood were directed to visit seventeen ‘minor’ sanctuaries as far apart as Vienne and Bordeaux.

  Civil courts had occasionally ordered malefactors to make distant pilgrimages in the twelfth century. Not very often, however. It was not until the middle of the thirteenth century that they came into general use. Most early examples are found in the ecclesiastical principalities of the Low Countries where, at first, they were reserved for offences against the Church. They were rapidly adopted by criminal lawyers as a convenient, easily enforced penalty which brought about the temporary disappearance of the offender without the expense of imprisoning him. In Liège the Paix aux Clercs, a code of ecclesiastical law issued in 1207, ordains that assaults inside churches shall be punished with pilgrimages. Two months later, a code of civil law was published which specified pilgrimage as the penalty for all assaults resulting in mutilation. By 1328, when the next major legal code of Liège appeared, pilgrimage had become an all-purpose penalty for violent crimes. A similar process can be traced in almost every city of the Low Countries, and by the fourteenth century it was firmly established in France and Italy as well. Only in England did the secular courts ignore it.

  Pilgrimages of this sort were little more than the traditional penalty of banishment renamed. City-states have almost invariably banished serious disturbers of the peace, and in Flanders, for example, this tradition had an uninterrupted history going back well beyond the eleventh century. Pilgrimage and banishment were almost interchangeable terms. Hence the practice of the kings of France of periodically commuting short banishments to even shorter pilgrimages; thus did Philip VI allow the town of Douai in 1346 to commute all banishments of less than five years. The religious element in these journeys was usually small, a fact which became apparent in the later middle ages when Arab hostility sometimes made it impossible to visit Jerusalem. On settling his quarrel with the count of Namur in 1402, Robert de Roux promised to go to the Holy Land or, if that proved impossible, to Cyprus. Indeed it was to Cyprus, a place of little spiritual importance, that the most heinous offenders were sent. There they were required to stay for a specified number of years. It was very rare for the judges to require from the offender any display of religious enthusiasm. Perhaps it was a reflection of the ecclesiastical character of the government of Liège that criminals sent from thence to Rome were required to mount the steps of the Lateran basilica on their knees and to remain kneeling for the duration of five masses. Other cities did not think it worth including such details in their statutes.

  Pilgrimage, like banishment, was a particularly suitable punishment for those enormities which threatened the tight-knit urban communities of the late middle ages. Thomas Aquinas regarded it as the obvious penalty for a grave breach of public order. Murder and wounding, riot and affray, conspiracies of various sorts all carried the penalty of exile. At Liège in the fourteenth century any person who committed an assault that caused bleeding but broke no bones, who sheltered some one involved in a vendetta, or who obstructed the course of justice, was liable to be despatched to Rocamadour, a distance of some six hundred miles. Arson, the most terrifying crime that a mediaeval townsman could commit, was punished by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Santiago as early as 1186, when Frederick Barbarossa issued a constitution to this effect. Arson was punished at Namur in the late middle ages with a visit to Cyprus, and it is probable that the same practice prevailed in other cities of the Low Countries. Cyprus too was the destination of twenty-five citizens of Nieuport who had been amongst the crowd which in 1235 lynched the ambassadors of the neighbouring town of Furnes. In 1483 insulting a town councillor of Namur was added to the list of offences which were held to merit a pilgrimage to Rocamadour. Indeed by this time pilgrimage had become a convenient and flexible penalty for all those whose continued presence in a small community was felt to be a nuisance. Henri le Kien, a painter of Tournai who was sent to Rocamadour in 1428, was accused of no crime at all except that he ‘made a habit of insulting and criticizing other people … and thus caused great dissensions and troubles’; it was resolved that the unfortunate artist was ‘never to return to the city unless the citizens gather together in their guilds and districts to re-admit him.’

  Mediaeval lawyers did not make the same rigid distinction between civil and criminal law as their modern counterparts. The victim of a violent crime, or the victim’s heir, was held to be the prosecutor and the sentence inflicted on the malefactor was at least partly for the victim’s satisfaction. The honour of the injured party was satisfied by the banishment of his assailant. This is an attitude as old as the penitential pilgrimage itself. One of the oldest Irish penitentials, the Penitential of Finnian, prescribes that a cleric found guilty of murder shall pass ten years in exile, after which ‘he shall be received into his own country and make satisfaction to the friends of him whom he slew and compensate his father and mother, if they are still alive…. But if he does not fulfil this obligation he shall never be allowed back.’ This outlook did not disappear, even in the more formal circumstances of thirteenth-century law. Thus in Frederick Barbarossa’s constitutions of 1186, men banished for crimes of violence are not to return until they have compensated the victim or his family. Grave crimes might be settled by private agreement, the courts intervening only to ensure that the agreement was kept. In 1434, for instance, a certain Gerard de Rostimont of Namur was obliged to make peace with the relatives of a man whom he had killed in a brawl, the condition being that he should go immediately to Cyprus. A document of 1333 in the town archives of St.-Omcr records the return of a clerk called William Bondulf from a pilgrimage to St. Andrew’s in Scotland. He showed his testimonials to the judge to prove that he had been, and paid twelve livres for the repose of his victim’s soul. Then the victim’s heir, who was present in court, publicly acquitted him of all further responsibility. Indeed at Liège the victim’s claim was considered quite separately from that of the state, and in cases of assault in churches the evil-doer might be required to go twice to Santiago, once to the profit of the Church and once to that of the victim.

  From the state’s point of view these arrangements had the advantage of settling a potential vendetta. Indeed, most of the earliest judicial pilgrimages are
the result of timely agreements designed to avoid family feuds. In 1264 the four murderers of Godfrey and Jaquemon de Clermont, two brothers of a wealthy Flemish family, agreed to depart to the Holy Land until the victims’ relatives allowed them to return. Pilgrimages were often imposed by arbitrators in private quarrels. Beaumanoir records the case of a villager who killed another’s horse under him, and repenting of his rashness, promised to submit his quarrel to the arbitration of three other villagers. These decided that he should go barefoot to Boulogne, Santiago, and St.-Gilles, before finally exiling himself to the Holy Land for three years. According to Beaumanoir the sentence was considered excessive and it was never executed. But when two families of Dieppe submitted a blood-feud to the archbishop of Rouen in 1264, he sent the head of one of them to St.-Gilles and Santiago, observing that in this way ‘the honour and peace of mind of the aggrieved parties will be saved.’

  The judicial pilgrimage was more fearsome in theory than it was in practice, for the sinner could usually be released from his penance by paying a fee to the state or damages to the injured party. The Inquisition scarcely ever allowed its victims to escape their penances in this way. According to the inquisitor Bernard Gui, only the old and the infirm were permitted to make a money payment in lieu of a pilgrimage, and even then the cost was high – fifty livres for the old, a hundred for the infirm. By contrast, the civil courts allowed criminals to buy their way out of the journey for quite small sums. Nothing more clearly illustrates the slender spiritual basis of these pilgrimages than the lists of tariffs in which the price of evading each pilgrimage was advertized. Here is one such list, which was in use at Oudenarde in the fourteenth century: