The canonists and theologians of the later middle ages fought hard against the more extreme versions of the doctrine of indulgences. But even if the orthodox view had been universally understood, which it was not, the widespread use of indulgences would still have had the inevitable consequence of transforming the spiritual life of many laymen into a sequence of elaborate rituals. The indulgences of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries almost certainly did make pilgrimages more popular. On the other hand, they invited the pilgrim to measure the worth of his pilgrimage by standards which were mathematical, not spiritual. At the end of the twelfth century we find Gerald of Wales in Rome attending 395 masses in the shortest possible time, in order to obtain a total of ninety-two years of indulgences; finding that he was only eight years short of a century, he enrolled himself in the confraternity of the Holy Spirit which offered an indulgence of one-seventh of the penance due for his sins. Yet Gerald of Wales was an intelligent man, though not perhaps a very spiritual one. How many simpler souls must have raced from church to church, guide-book in hand, in the hope of collecting even more than a century of remission.
Notes
1 ‘God has invented …’: Guibert, Gesta Dei per Francos, I. 1, p. 124.
2 ‘Taking us to be no pilgrims …’: Gesta Francorum, I. 4, p. 8.
Unarmed hangers-on: Raymond of Aguilers, Hist. Francorum, XVII, pp. 279–80 (first crusade). Annales Herbipolenses, MGH. SS. xvi. 3 (second crusade).
Jerusalem lost by sin: Jacques de Vitry, Hist. Hierosolymitana, LXXII, p. 1088.
‘Is there nothing …’: Dante, Paradiso, IV. 133–8, V. 16–84; cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, q. Ixxxviii, a. 1–2, vol. ix, pp. 234–5, 238–9.
Crosses: Robert the Monk, Hist. Hierosolymitana, I. 2, II. 3, RHC. Occ, iii. 729, 741; Guibert, Gesta Dei per Francos, II. 5, p. 140 (in 1096). Odo of Deuil, De Projections Lodovici VII, I, p. 22 (in 1146). H. Pflaum (ed.), ‘A strange crusaders’ song’, Speculum, x (1935), pp. 337–9. In general, Villey, pp. 119–21.
Vows enforced: CJC., Coll. Greg. IX, III. xxxiv. 7, vol. ii, cols. 591–3; Tardif (eel.), Coutumiers, vol. ii, pp. 64–6,214–15. Innocent III, Reg. V, 103, XVI. 35, PL. ccxiv. 1100, ccxvi. 830. On Frederic II’s vow. Hefele, vol. v, pp. 1411–27.
3 Bound by vow of another: CJC., Coll. Greg. IX, III. xxxiv. 6, vol. ii. cols. 590–1; see Villey, p. 126. William, Mirac. S. Thomae, II. 13, pp, 169–70.
Dispensations: CJC, Coll. Greg. IX, III. xxxiv. 2, 8, vol. ii, cols. 589, 593–4. On Thierry, J. Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, vol. ii, Nancy, 1748, p. 240. Paulus (2), vol. i, pp. 209–11; Villey, p. 251.
Commutation for money: Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. iv, pp. 6–7, 9, 133–4. Paulus (2), vol. ii, pp. 35–9. A. Gottlob, Kreuzablass und Almosenablass, Stuttgart, 1906, p. 308. On preachers of 1290 and 1308, The Register of John de Halton, bishop of Carlisle, ed. T. F. Tout, vol. i, London, 1906, p. 317.
4 Punishment for broken vows: MS. Gloucester cathedral 1, fols. I74vo– 175 (St. James).
‘On condition that …’: Mirac. B. Egidii, IX, MGH. SS. xii. 321.
Bargain with saint: Mirac. S. Martialis, VII, XXV, XLIV, pp. 417–18, 424, 431.
5 ‘Excused him from suffering …’: Henry of Ghent, Quodlibeta, XV. 14. Paris, 1518, p. 589.
Council at Rheims: in MC. xviii. 345–6. See Paulus (2), vol. i, pp. 99–119.
Crusading indulgence: Cone. Clermont in MC. xx. 816; Cone. Lateran in MC. xxii. 1067. H. Hagenmeyer (ed.), Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus dem Jahren 1088–1100, Innsbruck, 1900, pp. 396–7.
Early papal indulgences for pilgrims: Paulus (2), vol. i, p. 153 (Pavilly); Urban II, Reg. CLXXV, col. 447–9 (Angers).
6 Episcopal indulgences: Delehaye (2), vol. xliv, pp. 351–79. CJC., Coll. Greg. IX, V. xxxviii. 14, vol. ii, cols. 888–9 (Lateran council). DTC., vol. vii, cols. 1609–10 (Univ. Paris). Cone. Aquilea in MC. xxiii. 1119–20.
Collemaggio: Vita S. Petri Coelestini, XXX, An. Boll., xvi (1897), pp. 418–19; text of indulgence in Bartolus, Tractatus, p. clxxxii. Boniface VIII, Reg. 770, 815, 850, vol. i, pp. 257–61, 274–5, 286–7.
Portiuncula: general discussions in Sabatier’s introduction to Bartolus, op. cit., pp. xvii–xevi; Van Ortroy; Paulus (2), vol. ii, pp. 1–4, 319–20: Catholic historians have, on the whole, condemned the indulgence while the Calvinist Sabatier defended it. Arguments of thirteenth-century opponents cited by Peter John Olivi in his defence of the indulgence, written c. 1279, see Bartolus, op. cit., pp. lvii–lix. On the popularity of the pilgrimage, Wadding, An. 1295 (no. 12), vol. v, p. 337; Bartolus, op. cit., XLIV, p. 93.
7 Confession essential: Liber S. Jacobi, I. 17, pp. 144–5.
Extravagant claims for indulgences criticized: Simon of Cremona, De Indulgentiis, p. 86; cf. CJC., Coll. Clem. VI, V. vii. 1, vol. ii, cols. 1186–7. See Remy, pp. 9–10; Paulus (2), vol. ii, pp. 330–4, 340–2, 348–9.
8 Unconfessed pilgrims excluded: Miracles de Rocamadour, I. 5, pp. 79–82. Mirac. S. Michaelis, pp. 880–2. Alfonso X, Cantigas, CCXVII, vol. ii, PP. 303–4 (Villalcazar). Mirac. S. Martialis, VIE, p. 418.
Gerald of Wales: see his De Invectionibus, V. 12, vol. i, pp. 137–8.
CHAPTER X
THE GROWTH OF A CULT
Canonization
The first stage in the rise of a great pilgrimage was the recognition of a saint. In the modern Roman Catholic Church this is a formal process, conducted with deliberation and ceremony. But it was not always so. In the earliest years of the cult of the saints, during the persecutions of the later Roman empire, veneration was accorded only to martyrs. The fact of their martyrdom being fairly easily ascertainable, no formal process of ‘canonization’ was necessary. It was only in the course of the fourth century, after the last of the great persecutions, that the veneration began to extend to ‘confessors’, i.e. those who had witnessed the true faith in their lives but not in their deaths. The Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius was a landmark in this respect, for it showed how a holy man might achieve sanctity by the spiritual quality of his life. In time, however, the broader definition of sanctity created problems of its own, notably the problem of deciding whether the sanctity of the holy man was such as to warrant his public veneration by believers. What was needed was some kind of official procedure by which sanctity could be recognized.
No such procedure existed until the eleventh century, and even after that it was imperfectly respected. In its place, saints were usually recognized by spontaneous popular acclaim, assisted by the enthusiasm of the local clergy. It was an unreliable method at the best of times. Guibert of Nogent tells us at the beginning of the twelfth century that he had known many bogus popular ‘canonizations’ in his time, and mentions a striking example which had occurred in a small village near Beauvais in recent memory.
‘A young man of low birth, the squire of some knight I believe, died on Good Friday and was spontaneously venerated as a saint, simply because of the holy day on which he died. The peasants, looking for something novel, brought offerings and candles to his grave from the entire surrounding area. Then a tomb was erected on the site, and after that a chapel, while troops of pilgrims, all of them peasants with not a nobleman among them, arrived from the furthest confines of Brittany. The learned abbot and his holy monks observed all this and, won over by the gratifying flow of offerings, allowed themselves to be convinced by all manner of spurious miracles.’
Guibert is at pains to point out the popular character of this pilgrimage. The dead squire was of low birth and so were those who came to venerate him; men of good birth were conspicuously absent. The resistance of the monks was weakened by greed, and the reserves of the authorities swept away by popular enthusiasm.
When the Normans conquered England they encountered spiritual traditions very different from their own, and they viewed with considerable suspicion some of the most popular saints of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Lanfranc was astonished and displeased to learn, on becoming archbishop of Canterbury, that Elphege, one of his predecessors, who had
been killed by the Danes in 1012, had been solemnly translated to the cathedral and was revered there as a martyr. ‘These English amongst whom we live’, he complained to the abbot of Bec, ‘have set up certain persons whom they revere as saints. At times, when I reflect upon the lives of these persns, … I entertain serious doubts as to their sanctity.’ Abbot Paul of St. Albans, who also found his predecessors venerated as saints, dismissed them as ‘boors and half-wits’, thus giving deep offence to his monks. When Warin, the second Norman abbot of Malmesbury, arrived at the abbey, his first act was to throw out the remains of St. Meindulf and other saints of doubtful worth.
Nominally, the power of authorizing a cult rested with the bishop. Laymen and local clergymen had been forbidden since the fifth century to set up shrines without his approval, but in the west it was several centuries before the bishops achieved even a limited measure of control. Before the eleventh century, the normal method of inaugurating the cult of a saint was by ‘elevation’, which involved disinterring his relics and placing them on an altar. In 688, eleven years after the death of St. Cuthbert, the monks of Lindisfarne opened his tomb and, finding the body uncorrupt, they resolved to ‘replace them in a new coffin in the same place but above the floor, where they could be more worthily venerated.’ Before doing this they consulted their bishop, and this seems to have been the usual practice. In the Frankish territories the bishop’s consent was made mandatory by the ecclesiastical legislators of the Carolingian period. How much care the bishop took to investigate the candidate’s claims to sanctity varied from place to place. When the bishop of Cambrai authorized the ‘elevation’ of St. Hadulph at Arras in the ninth century, he was satisfied with an assurance from the sacristan that miracles had occurred. Salomon bishop of Constance, on the other hand, asked for a copy of the life of St. Otmar before proceeding to his ‘elevation’ and, having duly found the life edifying, he summoned a synod to consider the matter.
When vested interests were involved, obtaining approval for a new cult might be a prolonged and complex business. In 918 St. Gerard founded the monastery of Brogne near Liège, and translated to it the relics of an obscure Spanish saint called Eugenius, which he had been given by the abbey of St.-Denis. On his way back to Brogne with the relics he stopped to ask the bishop of Liège for permission to perform a translation. This was readily granted. But when the relics were enshrined at Brogne the popularity of the new cult spread so rapidly that other churches of the locality became jealous. A number of priests complained to the bishop that it was wrong for an unknown saint to be venerated in this way. The bishop decided to intervene. At this point, the contemporary historian of Brogne alleges, the Lord struck him down with a fatal disease. The bishop, who had correctly divined the cause of his illness, summoned a diocesan synod at which a life of the saint was read and the cult approved.
Papal consent was rarely sought before the tenth century and was not considered to be essential until the end of the eleventh. The first papal canonization known to history was that of St. Udalric of Augsburg, whose cult was officially approved by John XV in 993 at an imposing ceremony in the Lateran palace. Even so, John’s consent was more or less a formality, no attempt being made to investigate the saint’s life in any detail. Popes and synods were usually satisfied with the acta of the saint, hastily compiled by the local bishop. The first sign of any significant papal enquiry is found in 1099 when Urban II was invited by the clergy of southern Italy to authorize the cult of St. Nicholas of Trani. Urban commissioned the archbishop of Trani to investigate the case and, after hearing the acta and miracles of St. Nicholas recited in council, the pope duly performed the canonization. When, shortly afterwards the abbot of Quimperlé asked Urban to canonize his predecessor as abbot, the pope replied that this would not be possible ‘unless witnesses can be found who will attest that they have seen his miracles with their own eyes.’ We should probably regard Urban II as the father of the modern process of canonization.
One consequence of the new state of affairs was that canonizations no longer occurred on the spur of the moment. The canonization of Thomas Becket within three years of his death was regarded by some observers as excessively hasty, and so indeed, it was by comparison with other processes of canonization. Lengthy judicial formalities were already the rule at the end of the twelfth century. The cardinals appointed to examine the miracles of St. Edmund of Abingdon in 1247 pointedly remarked that few of the fathers of the Church would have been canonized if this procedure had always been applied. Indeed, after about 1300 relatively few canonizations were performed although the flow of applications to Rome continued unabated. The canonization of St. Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297) was applied for in 1300 by his father, Charles of Anjou. Seven years elapsed before the investigation even began, and the business then proceeded slowly with five proctors, twenty witnesses, and a crowd of clerks, notaries, and dignitaries. A favourable verdict was announced in May 1313, but the canonization did not finally occur until April 1317. No wonder that it was necessary for John XXII to explain patiently to the earl of Lancaster that the canonization of archbishop Winchelsea was not as simple a matter as he imagined. It had to be ‘debated in consistory by experienced persons from amongst the prelates, clergy, and people of England, attesting the archbishop’s saintly life and miracles’. Winchelsea was never canonized.
For all the care with which the popes considered canonizations it is unlikely that their deliberations were of great interest to ordinary pilgrims. Except, perhaps, in so far as canonizations and translations were the occasion for splendid ceremonies at the shrine. Becket and Louis IX, for example, were both canonized by the populace long before their veneration was officially authorized by the Church. Louis IX, indeed, was almost venerated in his lifetime. One of the pilgrims who visited the tomb at St.-Denis shortly after the king’s death, had this to say to the commissioners investigating his miracles: ‘It is my belief that Louis is a saint because of all the miracles that I have heard about and because of his worthy life. But most of all I believe it because everybody round here says that he is a saint and calls him St. Louis.’
Publicity
What considerations dictated a pilgrim’s choice of shrine is as much a mystery to us as it must have been to contemporaries. Sometimes the choice was determined by such factors as the pilgrim’s name or trade. Sometimes it was determined by lot. Reginald of Durham knew of several pilgrims who had decided on a visit to the shrine of St. Cuthbert after drawing lots between the various alternatives. One had named three candles after different saints and decided on the shrine whose candle burned out first; another had drawn twigs. According to William of Canterbury, this was a common practice in Wales and the west of England.
The ebb and flow of fashion was undoubtedly the most important factor. Notable events such as inventions of relics, canonizations, or translations served to draw attention in dramatic fashion to the existence of a saint and to provoke an outburst of popular enthusiasm which rarely lasted more than half a century. A minor cult might be forgotten within a few weeks. The tendency of the laity was always to visit the saint whose cult was the most recently established. St. Wulfstan of Worcester, who was canonized in 1203, is referred to shortly afterwards as ‘the new saint’. St. Thomas of Canterbury was the ‘new saint’ par excellence of the late twelfth century. His cult was established within a fortnight of his death and was propagated with exceptional skill by the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury. William of Canterbury, who was the author of a great deal of this propaganda, reflects that all saints have their period of miracle-working then they command the veneration of Christians; then they withdraw gracefully and leave miracle-working to saints of more recent creation, such as St. Thomas. The French pilgrim Hugh Brustins, who had been possessed by the devil, visited St.-Denis only to discover that that saint had ‘left to his colleague St. Thomas the business of curing the sick … in order that a new and relatively unknown martyr might make his name.’ It is often forgotten how sporadic was the
cult even of a great saint like St. Thomas. Canterbury was a shrine of European importance, probably the most prosperous in Christendom, for about ten years after Becket’s brutal death. But only a few years later a canon of St. Frideswide’s is found expressing the opinion that Canterbury is now old hat, and Caesarius of Heisterbach felt that St. Thomas was not as potent as most older martyrs. In the early thirteenth century pilgrims who used to go regularly to Canterbury are reported to be abandoning it in favour of the holy rood recently acquired by Bromholm priory. A renewed outburst of popular devotion to St. Thomas marked the translation of the relics to the choir of the new cathedral in 1220, but by the middle of the thirteenth century the great days of the pilgrimage were past. In the fourteenth century a miracle at the shrine was so unusual as to be the subject of a special letter of congratulation from the king. A Jubilee indulgence of 1370 served to bring large crowds to Canterbury, including the poet Chaucer, and other Jubilees were held in 1420 and 1470. But except on these famous occasions the cult of St. Thomas scarcely deserved the hostile attention which it received from the sixteenth-century reformers. The history of the Canterbury pilgrimage was in this respect very typical. Amongst its rivals only Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago were able to attract pilgrims throughout the mediaeval period.
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