Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  By far the most effective advertisements for a saint were his miracles. Contemporaries followed the posthumous doings of the saints with extreme interest and the news of miraculous happenings could be relied upon to spread without any active assistance from the clergy of the sanctuary. When, for example, a blind man was healed by St. Eutrope as he sat by the side of the road outside Saintes, ‘a deafening clamour arose and all the nearby villages resounded with the news. People rushed to the spot and young men clapped their hands in delight. The whole city of Saintes throbbed with excitement and everyone was increased in love of Christ and of his holy saint, Eutrope.’ On another occasion a pilgrim who had visited the shrine of St. Eutrope is described as going back home and inviting in all his neighbours to persuade them to go too. How far the news carried by word of mouth depended on the importance of the saint and the quality of the miracle. The canons of Laon who toured England in 1113 in search of funds for the rebuilding of their cathedral, returned with stories of the miracles of St. Swithin at Winchester and St. Edmund at Bury. News of the miracles at St.-Gilles-de-Provence is known to have penetrated as far as Denmark, and Poland.

  Although the most spectacular miracles needed no advertisement, the clergy of the greater sanctuaries did go to considerable lengths to publicize them by compiling collections of miracle stories known as libelli miraculorum. The habit of recording every marvellous event as it occurred dates back at least to the time of St. Augustine, who collected depositions from the pilgrims healed by St. Stephen at Hippo. These accounts were then included in Augustine’s sermons and circulated in neighbouring dioceses. In the west the classic miracle collection of the early middle ages was the celebrated account of the miracles of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus, which was written at the beginning of the fifth century. The extraordinary repetitiveness and lack of originality which characterize almost every mediaeval miracle collection, is in a large measure due to the fact that their authors were modelling themselves on Sulpicius Severus. The clergy of every major shrine conceived that they owed a duty to their patron saint to increase his glory by writing down his miracles. Geoffrey, prior of Canterbury, believed that God had brought misfortunes upon his head to punish him for his failure to record a miracle he had witnessed. The monk who wrote up the miracles of St. James at Reading pointed out that the servant who increased his talents found more favour with God than the one who buried them in the ground; ‘and in just the same way, we who by God’s gracious favour have seen the miracles worked by St. James … have a solemn duty to pass the knowledge of them on to posterity, that their faith may be strengthened and that God may be glorified.’

  Most collections of miracles were pure propaganda and few of them had the slightest literary merit. The rivalry between competing shrines found expression in aggressive assertions that this or that saint was more consistently effective than any other. The authors never fail to point out how many other celebrated shrines a pilgrim has visited in vain before he is restored to health at the shrine of St. Benedict, St. Foy, or St. Thomas as the case may be. ‘Why are you wasting your time here?’ a mysterious voice is alleged to have declared to a sick Englishman in St. Peter’s at Rome; ‘go back home to England and make your offering at the monastery of St. Egwin at Evesham, for there alone will you be healed.’ A lady of Luton apparently went blind after visiting St.-Gilles-de-Provence when she ought to have gone to St. Thomas of Canterbury. But it was above all the rivals of St. Thomas who excelled at this kind of competitive propaganda. The sudden rise of Canterbury as a major shrine eclipsed every other English pilgrimage. The literature put out by the older English shrines in the late twelfth century is therefore full of slighting references to the inability of St. Thomas to cure a pilgrim who later found his health at Durham, Bury St. Edmund’s, St. Frideswide’s, or Reading. The Reading author, who was much the most aggressive of this group, reports the following conversion between an apparition of St. James and a pilgrim in the choir of Canterbury cathedral:

  ‘What are you doing hanging about here?’

  ‘I am waiting to be healed by the merits of the blessed apostle Thomas.’

  ‘You will wait in vain. What you ought to do is go back to my abbey at Reading. There, and there alone, will you be healed.’ ‘I know nothing of Reading and I have never heard of your abbey. How do you think I can get there in my state of health?’

  This pilgrim was punished for her contumely but she was ultimately cured by the hand of St. James at Reading.

  The twelfth century saw the first attempts to influence the decisions of pilgrims by advertizing techniques which strike a surprisingly familiar note in modern ears. Much of the fame of Canterbury in the 1170s was due to skilful promotion by its monks, who sent abstracts of St. Thomas’s miracles to numerous prelates and religious houses in England and France. Other churches proclaimed the benefits of their pilgrimage in pamphlets, rhymes and jingles. The monks of the abbey of the Trinity at Fécamp composed a poem in French entitled ‘Why everyone ought to love and visit the holy church of Fécamp and hear the story of the Precious Blood.’ Jerusalem, it pointed out, was far away, ‘so remember that you are never far from Fécamp where the Lord has sent his Precious Blood for your benefit’. In the early years of the twelfth century when both St. Adalbert’s abbey in Rome and the church of Benevento claimed to possess the body of St. Bartholomew, the pamphlets issued by St. Adalbert’s abbey sang this untranslatable jingle:

  Roma tenet corpus, tu famam, tu modo tumbam;

  Roma tenet corpus, tu non nisi corporis umbram …

  Fraus male subvenit Benevento non benevenit,

  Ob detrimentum Benevento fit maleventum.’

  With the growing popularity of public preaching in the later middle ages, the advertisement of pilgrimages became an elaborate and expensive business. Both mendicant orders offered their services as preachers of indulgences, and individual preachers enjoyed European reputations for their persuasiveness. When the church of St. Lambert at Liège received an indulgence from Eugenius IV in 1443, they employed two Franciscans to preach it in the town, and two Dominicans to compose pamphlets for distribution further afield. The accounts of Lyon cathedral in the early sixteenth century show that the canons paid ten sous to the Augustinian who preached their indulgence, five sous to the town crier who advertized his sermons, and twenty sous to the sacristan for the cost of his dinners.

  Attractive packaging was an essential element in the saint’s appeal. Pilgrims expected to be received by a magnificent and costly reliquary, and those who were not sometimes put their disgust on record. Shortly after the translation of some new relics to the German monastery of Prüm in the mid-ninth century,

  ‘a certain woman arrived with a wagon full of food and drink and precious things which she proposed to offer to God and to the holy martyrs. But, seeing that the saint’s tomb did not glitter with gold and silver, she uttered a contemptuous guffaw, as is the wont of foolish and irreligious minds. Then, rushing back home, she bade her friends retrace their steps saying “you won’t find anything holy in that place.”’

  This lady’s attitude was as familiar to the twelfth century as it was to the ninth. Superb reliquaries and sumptuously decorated sanctuaries were not only subtle indications of the power of the saint but they testified to the devotion and the generosity of past pilgrims and invited offerings from present ones. Preachers of the later mediaeval period pointed out this lesson most explicitly. ‘Look at all these gold and silver reliquaries, these chalices and jewels, rich tapestries and vestments’, intoned the fourteenth-century preacher at the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat; ‘all these costly and holy things were presented by pious persons.’ A grey friar of Canterbury preaching at Herne in 1535 declared that he knew of people who had travelled two hundred miles to see the shrine of St. Thomas ‘and when they … see the goodly jewels that be there, how they think in their hearts “I would to God and that good saint that I were able to offer such a gift.”’

  From the fourth
century onwards a dazzling display of wealth was to be found in every pilgrimage church of any importance. In the lifetime of the emperor Constantine the Holy Sepulchre was adorned with ‘gifts of indescribable beauty including gold, silver, and precious stones’; a traveller of the sixth century found the Sepulchre completely invisible beneath a carpet of jewellery. Golden ornaments and silk wall-hangings decorated the relatively minor shrine of St. Felix of Nola in the fourth century. ‘Truly’, observed John Chrysostom, ‘the sanctuaries of the saints are more lavishly decorated than the palaces of kings.’ After the eighth century the western Church allowed reliquaries to be put on permanent display on the altar, instead of being ‘elevated’ only on special feast days. From this moment onwards, sanctuaries became ever more ornate and expensive. When Suger became abbot of St.-Denis in 1122 his first act was to order new reliquaries for his church. In his time St.-Denis employed an atélier of goldsmiths and jewellers which made the abbey for a brief while the artistic centre of Europe. The arm of St. James was enclosed in a reliquary of crystal mounted in gold. The panels of the sarcophagus of St. Denis himself contained forty-two marks of gold studded with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, and pearls. Suger bought the entire stock of every jeweller he encountered and even removed the rings from his fingers to add to the magnificence of his patron’s shrine. Suger was justly proud of this splendid array. He was surprised and offended when pope Paschal II, visiting St.-Denis in May 1107, showed no interest in it, but humbly prostrated himself before the relics themselves. In Suger’s mind a superb reliquary was a material symbol of the spiritual grandeur of the saint whose relics it contained. In devoting a substantial proportion of his revenues to the decoration of the sanctuary, Suger was in no way untypical of the wealthy churchmen of his day. The tomb of St. Thomas of Canterbury, completed at enormous expense in c. 1220, astonished even seasoned travellers. A Venetian diplomat who saw it at the beginning of the sixteenth century reported that is ‘surpassed all belief’;

  ‘Notwithstanding its great size it is entirely covered with plates of pure gold. But the gold is scarcely visible beneath a profusion of gems, including sapphires, diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Everywhere that the eye turns something even more beautiful appears. The beauty of the materials is enhanced by the astonishing skill of human hands. Exquisite designs have been carved all over it and immense gems worked delicately into the patterns. Finest of all is a ruby, no larger than a man’s thumbnail, which is set into the altar at the right hand side, and which … I believe, was the gift of the King (Louis VII) of France.’

  When Henry VIII dissolved the cathedral priory, the jewels and precious metals from this tomb filled twenty-six carts. In England, none of these fine works of mediaeval jewellery survived the Reformation. In France almost all were destroyed in the revolution. Today we must go to Germany or Spain, to Cologne, Marburg, Oviedo, or León, to receive even a faint impression of the treasures which confronted a pilgrim at St.-Denis in the time of Suger.

  Contemporaries differed as to the morality of spending such large sums on the decoration of churches. Guibert of Nogent correctly divined that magnificent tombs were an appeal to popular piety at the expense of more genuine spiritual feelings, and the reaction of Paschal II on being shown the sanctuary of St.-Denis tends to bear this out. St. Bernard stated the classic case against them when he delivered his celebrated invective against the excessive splendour of the Benedictine churches.

  ‘Look at their churches, glistening with gold while the poor are starving and naked outside…. Their object is to excite the devotion of the vulgar masses who are incapable of truly spiritual feelings…. But what kind of devotion do they produce? They do not bring men to prayer but tempt them into making offerings. Thus is wealth squandered on creating more wealth and money spent on attracting more money…. Here the saints are displayed for veneration enclosed in the exquisite workmanship of teams of goldsmiths. Ordinary people think them that much more holy if they are plastered with precious stones; they crowd forward to kiss them and make offerings to them. But what are they really venerating? Not the spiritual beauty of God’s saints but the mundane prettiness of their shrines.’

  St. Bernard’s strictures were a little unjust. It should be remembered that every rich church had to keep a reserve of liquid wealth in case of a sudden disaster, and in a non-money economy this could only be done by hoarding precious stones and metals. Hence the fact that many a fine example of the goldsmith’s art was melted down within a few years of being made; this was part of its purpose. When abbot Mayeul of Cluny was captured by the Arabs in 972, his monks paid a ransom of a thousand pounds of silver by melting down ornaments from the church. The abbey of Malmesbury, when asked to pay tribute at short notice to William Rufus, stripped the silver and gold from twelve Gospels, eight crucifixes, and eight reliquaries. Reading abbey settled its accounts with Richard I by removing the gold leaf from its most famous relic, the hand of St. James. All these raids on the reserves would have been made good out of surplus income when the opportunity arose.

  But the insatiable appetite of wealthy churches for precious reliquaries was more than just a prudent financial precaution. It arose out of a deeply engrained habit of mind which found it hard to imagine spiritual grandeur without material wealth. Because the saints were poor in their lifetimes, argued Theofrid, abbot of Epternach (d. 1110), they are entitled to untold riches when they are in Paradise; with untold riches, therefore, they should be honoured on earth. Splendid apparel and costly jewellery were part of the popular image of the saints triumphant. St. Cuthbert, for example, appeared to a youth of Coupland dressed in full pontificals shining with gold and glistening with precious stones. Indeed, contemporaries imagined Christ himself in this way, until in the thirteenth century Franciscan preachers impressed upon their hearers the image of a God who was at the same time poor and human. The English anchorite Christina of Markyate, who died in about 1160, dreamed of Christ as ‘a man of indescribable beauty wearing a golden crown thickly encrusted with precious stones which seemed beyond the skill of any human craftsman. Hanging over his face, one on either side, were two bands delicate and shining, and on top of the gems small pearls could be seen shining like drops of dew.’ The material glory which clothed the risen Christ was reflected by his saints. In this respect abbot Suger and the monks of Cluny were closer to the mainstream of Christian sentiment than St. Bernard.

  The saint’s sanctuary served above all as a reminder of the miracles attributed to him. Written accounts of these miracles were always available on request. A Burgundian nobleman at Mont-St.-Michel is found asking for a list of St. Michael’s miracles, ‘and on reading the account which was shown to him he conceived a high opinion of the holiness of the place.’ In 1319, when the monks of Canterbury were actively pressing for the canonization of Robert Winchelsea, a description of his miracles was hung in front of the tomb. In many sanctuaries murals, sculptures, and tapestries illustrated the life and miracles of the saint. At St.-Benoit-sur-Loire, for example, the miracles of St. Benedict, drawn from the Dialogues of pope Gregory, are sculpted on the capitals of the church. At Canterbury, those of St. Thomas can be seen in the stained glass windows of the Trinity Chapel, exactly as they are described by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury. How many long-faded murals must once have decorated the great sanctuaries of England and France, offering to the sick and infirm the distant hope of a miraculous end to their sufferings.