Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  In his absence, a pilgrim’s property was immune from all civil claims in a court of law. The service which he owed to his feudal lord was usually suspended during the pilgrimage, and in northern France, according to Beaumanoir, pilgrims were exempt from the obligation to take part in family vendettas. In effect, there was no legal remedy to be had against a bona fide pilgrim, so long as he returned home to face his adversaries within a reasonable time. Illegal remedies were a fortiori forbidden, and those who had recourse to them faced both civil and ecclesiastical sanctions. In the bull Quantum Praedecessores of December 1145, Eugenius III proclaimed that the wife and children, goods and chattels of every pilgrim or crusader were ‘placed under the protection of the Holy See and of all the prelates of the Church of God. By our apostolic authority we absolutely forbid anyone to disturb them until their return or death.’ Before the first crusade this principle had probably been honoured chiefly in the breach. But effective protection was essential if crusaders were to be recruited for the defence of the Holy Land, and by the end of the twelfth century, flagrant violations of a pilgrim’s rights never failed to arouse indignant protest. The invasion of Normandy by Philip Augustus of France while Richard Coeur-de-Lion was in the Holy Land was bitterly criticized, and some of Philip’s own vassals refused to follow him. When, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it seemed that the entire Angevin empire in France must shortly fall into the hands of the French king, loyal vassals of John were afraid that Philip would seize their lands. Some of them regarded a pilgrim’s privileges as the best guarantee of the rights of their heirs. This, at any rate, was the reason given by Archambert de Monluc when he joined the fourth crusade, appointing as trustees of his property a formidable list of ecclesiastical personages.

  Although few pilgrims went to the extremes recommended by the preacher of the sermon Veneranda Dies, most of them made some concession to the principle that a pilgrimage should be accomplished in poverty. Rich pilgrims often made generous donations to the poor before leaving. The cartularies of monasteries, from the eleventh century onwards, are full of deeds recording the gifts made by departing pilgrims and crusaders. A donor could have the best of both worlds by making his gift conditional on his not returning alive. Then, when he returned home, he could demand the usufruct of his property for the rest of his life, after which it would become the unencumbered possession of the Church. When Aimeric II, count of Fézensac, gave some windmills to the canons of Auch in 1088 as he was about to leave for the Holy Land, he insisted that ‘if I come back alive from Jerusalem, I can have them back until my death.’ If the knight never returned, the monks were often required to give a pension to his widow and sometimes even to his children. In fact, even if no such conditions were explicitly mentioned, they were almost certainly implied by both parties. When Leteric de Chatillon died in Palestine in 1100, the monks of La Charité allowed his widow half the revenues of his estates, although no such arrangement is found in the deed whereby Leteric had made the monks his heirs. Hughes de Lurcy, on returning from the Holy Land in the 1080s, claimed back his lands from the monks, promising to leave it to them on his death. Pilgrims probably adopted this roundabout procedure in order to ensure that their lands were safe in their absence. Some of them may also have borrowed the cost of the journey from the monks and left the lands with them as a pledge.

  The true pilgrim, urged the preacher of the sermon Venerenda Dies, ought before his departure to make amends to all those whom he has offended, and to ask the permission of his wife, his parish priest, and anyone else to whom he owed obligations. The most important of these, for a layman, was his feudal lord, whose consent would be necessary if the pilgrim wished to nominate his heir or safeguard the position of his wife. Even the kings of France, Louis VII in 1146 and Philip Augustus in 1190, sought formal permission to leave with the crusade from St. Denis, whose vassals they recognized themselves to be. A cleric was required to ask the permission of his superior before making a pilgrimage, and until the fourteenth century this obligation was enforced with vigour. The German annalist Lambert of Hersfeld recalled how he had set out for Jerusalem in 1058, immediately after his ordination, without asking his abbot:

  ‘I was afraid that since I had set out without his blessing, I might have given him offence. If he had died in my absence I would have remained forever unreconciled to him and would thus have committed a terrible sin in the eyes of God. But God’s favour was with me…. for I returned in safety, confessed my sin, and was received with kindness. I felt as if I had just escaped alive from the fires of Hell.’

  He was, in fact, only just in time, for the abbot became feverish that very evening and died a week later.

  A pilgrim who left without making amends to those he had wronged could not possibly make a sincere confession, and without a sincere confession, it was generally agreed that his pilgrimage would be worthless. ‘In order that my devotion may be the more acceptable to God’, reflected Odo, duke of Burgundy, before joining the crusade in 1101, ‘I have decided that I should set out at peace with everybody.’ Accordingly he wished to make amends for the damage he had done, in a lifetime of violence, to the abbey of St.-Bénigne de Dijon. He begged forgiveness in the nave of their church for the trespasses he had committed against their lands and the insults he had heaped upon their heads. ‘And my promises of amendment and offers of compensation have been accepted by the monks of St.-Bénigne; they have pardoned and absolved me and have agreed to pray for me, that I may keep my promises and enjoy a safe journey to the Holy Land.’ Bertrand de Moncontour, who had seized some land belonging to the abbey of the Trinity of Vendôme, wished to go to the Holy Land in 1098 but ‘realized that the path of God would be closed to me while such a crime remained on my conscience,’ Aggrieved monks were not the only beneficiaries of these acts of last-minute repentance, though they were the main ones. The Santiago preacher had reminded his audience that they must make their peace with neighbours and friends, great or humble. The most spectacular exercise in this direction was the enquête launched by St. Louis in January 1247 before his departure with the crusade. Commissioners, most of them drawn from the mendicant orders, toured the provinces of Louis’s kingdom enquiring into wrongs alleged to have been done in his name. That this process of conscience-clearing was not confined to the king is shown by the behaviour of Louis’ biographer Joinville, who summoned his vassals and family before joining the expedition and told them ‘if I have wronged any of you, I shall now make amends to you one by one, as I have always done.’

  When his enemies had been placated and his creditors satisfied, the pilgrim sought out his parish priest or, occasionally, his bishop, and received a formal blessing. Texts of these blessings for travellers survive from the early eighth century, though they did not pass into general use until the eleventh. Blessing ceremonies reflected the growing feeling among pilgrims that they belonged to an ‘order’ of the Church, distinguished from other men by a uniform and by a solemn ritual of initiation. Mass departures to the Holy Land or Santiago were marked by public ceremonies in the cathedrals. But most pilgrims received their blessing privately from their parish priest, or else from a monk whose sanctity they respected. The hermit St. Godric of Finchale was said to have performed the ceremony regularly. Joinville, in 1248, sought out the Cistercian abbot of Cheminon on account of his saintly reputation, and then, after receiving his blessing, made his way on foot without shoes or coat to the embarkation point of the crusade at Marseilles.

  Pilgrims’ Dress

  Once initiated into the ‘order’ of pilgrims, he signified his attachment to a new way of life by wearing a uniform, as distinctive in its own way as the tonsure of a priest. ‘When the debts be thus paid and the meine is thus set in governance’, continued Richard Alkerton in 1406, ‘the pilgrim shall array himself. And then he oweth first to make himself be marked with a cross, as men be wont to do that shall pass to the Holy Land…. Afterwards the pilgrim shall have a staff, a sclavein, and a scrip.’
The staff, a tough wooden stick with a metal toe, was the most distinctive as well as the most useful part of the pilgrim’s attire. The ‘sclavein’ was a long, coarse tunic. The scrip was a soft pouch, usually made of leather, strapped to the pilgrim’s waist; in it he kept his food, mess-cans, and money. Such was the attire of every serious pilgrim after the end of the eleventh century. Much later, probably in the middle of the thirteenth century, pilgrims began to wear a great broad-brimmed hat, turned up at the front, and attached at the back to a long scarf which was wound round the body as far as the waist.

  The origin of this curious garb is not at all clear. The staff and pouch were used by the migrant monks of Egypt in the fourth century, but they were obvious and sensible accessories for any traveller on foot, not only for pilgrims and not only in the middle ages. The tunic, on the other hand, whose practical usefulness is not as readily apparent, seems to make its first appearance at the beginning of the twelfth century. Canute, setting out for Rome in 1027, ‘took up his scrip and staff as did all his companions’, but there is no mention of the tunic. St. Anselm, in 1097, ‘took his scrip and staff like a pilgrim’, but again, no tunic. Orderic Vitalis, writing in about 1135, said that he could remember a time when pilgrims were indistinguishable from other travellers, except by their unshaven faces. Indeed it is probably about this time that the normal clothing of the traveller took on a sudden rigidity and became peculiarly the garb of the spiritual traveller.

  This was almost certainly due to the fact that at the end of the eleventh century the Church began to bless the pilgrim’s clothes and sanctify them as the uniform of his order. A special order of ceremony for pilgrims, as opposed to ordinary travellers, was now coming into existence. This usually took the form of blessing the pilgrim’s pouch and mantle and presenting him with his staff from the altar. The ceremony has its origin in the blessing conferred on knights departing with the first crusade, and it is referred to in 1099 as a ‘novel rite’. Behind the ‘novel rite’ is the pronounced tendency of the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to stimulate lay piety by assigning to laymen certain defined spiritual functions. Those who fulfilled these functions were clothed with a special, almost ecclesiastical, status; they enjoyed spiritual privileges and ultimately secular ones as well. Hence the religious ceremony which now almost invariably accompanied the dubbing of a knight. Indeed, the ritual presentation of the pilgrim’s staff bears a striking resemblance both to the dubbing of a knight and to the ordination of a priest. To the more austere pilgrim, the act of putting on his travelling clothes might have the same significance as taking the monastic habit. One such pilgrim was Rayner Pisani, an Italian merchant who experienced a sudden conversion during a business visit to Tyre in about 1140. Rayner took his pilgrim’s tunic under his arm to the Golgotha chapel in Jerusalem and, in full view of an astonished crowd, removed all his old clothes and gave them to beggars. He then placed his tunic on the altar and asked the priest serving the chapel to invest him with it. This the priest did, and Rayner passed the remaining twenty years of his life as a hermit in Palestine.

  In the course of time the Church invested the pilgrim’s uniform with a rich and elaborate symbolism. Already in c. 1125 the author of the sermon Veneranda Dies is found explaining that the pilgrim’s pouch is the symbol of almsgiving, because it is too small to hold much money and the pilgrim who wears it must therefore depend on charity. The pilgrim’s staff is used for driving off wolves and dogs, who symbolize the snares of the Devil; the staff is the pilgrim’s third leg, and three is the number of the Trinity; the staff therefore stands for the conflict of the Holy Trinity with the forces of evil, etc. This kind of imagery became very popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and it provided the theme for most of the sermons delivered to congregations of pilgrims before their departure. To Franco Sacchetti, the pilgrim’s tunic stood for the humanity of Christ. The staff recalled the wood of the Cross in which lay the pilgrim’s hope of salvation. Perhaps the most involved as well as the most popular of these allegories was the work of Thomas of London, a Dominican who taught in France and who wrote, in c. 1430, an Instructorium Peregrinorum. Here the staff, pouch, and tunic stand for faith, hope and charity, respectively, for reasons which are pursued as far as scholastic subtlety will permit. These arid academic exercises make dull reading today, but at the close of the middle ages they were much enjoyed.

  On his way home, the pilgrim usually wore a badge or token showing where he had been. The best known and probably the earliest of these souvenirs was the palm of Jericho which pilgrims customarily brought back from Jerusalem. It is the origin of the English word ‘palmer’. Like so many of the rituals associated with the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, this seems to have had its origin in the eleventh century. The palms, which were collected in the plain between Jericho and the Jordan, were regarded as a symbol of regeneration, of the victory of faith over sin. Peter Damian refers to the picking of palm leaves as ‘customary’ in c. 1050, and the soldiers of the first crusade all travelled en masse to the Jordan in July 1099 to baptize themselves in the river and collect their palms. William of Tyre, writing in c. 1180, remarks that the palm of Jericho was ‘the formal sign that the pilgrim’s vow has been fulfilled’. And so it remained throughout the middle ages, though later generations did not have to travel as far as the Jordan for their palms. After the twelfth century palm-vendors carried on a thriving trade in the market of the ‘Rue des Herbes’ in Jerusalem and stalls piled high with palms could be seen beneath the walls of the Tower of David.

  Equally famous were the cockle shells worn by pilgrims returning from Santiago. The preacher of the sermon Veneranda Dies ascribed to them much the same symbolic significance as the palm of Jericho. ‘In the sea near Santiago there are certain fish with two shells, one on either side of their body…. These shells the pilgrims of St. James gather up and sew onto their caps, carrying them home in triumph to their own people.’ In Santiago, as in Jerusalem, enterprising tradesmen soon began to collect the shells themselves and by c. 1120, pilgrims had already given up the long trek to the sea and begun to buy their shells in the animated market which was held every day outside the north door of the cathedral.

  Before the end of the twelfth century real cockle shells had been replaced by small lead badges in the shape of a shell, whose sale was strictly regulated by the archbishop of Santiago. Lead badges had by now been adopted by almost every major sanctuary. Most of them consisted of a simple disc with a roughly moulded representation of the patron saint of the sanctuary. Canterbury, for example, had a badge showing the mitred head of St. Thomas between two erect swords. The badge of Mont-St.-Michel showed St. Michael with his standard and shield weighing souls at the last judgement. The Virgin, as protectress of all pilgrims, appears on many badges, for instance the emblem of a minor sanctuary of St. Catherine in Lorraine, which shows two pilgrims with staffs, protected by the mantle of the Virgin. Others depicted well-known miracles of the saint. St. Leonard, protector of prisoners, is shown on his badge listening to the prayer of a chained captive. The miraculous survival of a man wrongly condemned to be hanged is commemorated in the emblem of St. Eutrope of Saintes. The horse miraculously shod by St. Eloy was depicted on the badges sold to pilgrims at Noyon in the thirteenth century. Much-travelled pilgrims would cover the brims of their hats with badges until their heads were bowed beneath the weight of lead. Langland’s pilgrim had

  An hundreth of ampulles on his hatt seten,

  Signes of Synay and shelles of Galice

  And many a cruche on his cloke and keyes of Rome

  And the vernicle bifore; for men shulde knowe

  And se bi his signes whom he soughte had.

  Louis XI of France, who was well-known for his simple but intense piety, assiduously visited almost every notable French shrine of his day. His hat, according to one of his enemies, was ‘brim-full of images, mostly of lead and pewter, which he kissed whenever good or bad news arrived or whenever the fancy t
ook him.’

  Pilgrims’ badges were much prized, not only as souvenirs, but as magic charms. A badge of Rocamadour was said to have cured a pilgrim’s ailing son. Miraculous powers were often attributed to coquilles-Saint-Jacques, one of which was alleged in c. 1120 to have healed an Apulian knight suffering from diphtheria. Badges were also used to prove that the wearer was entitled, as a pilgrim, to exemption from tolls and taxes. Some courts of law accepted them as evidence that the wearer’s property was immune from distraint for debt. The wearing of a cross was certainly prima facie evidence that the wearer was entitled to a crusader’s privileges. All these factors ensured that the demand for badges far outstripped the supply, and the sale of emblems to pilgrims was an extremely profitable business. The Valon family made their fortune in the fourteenth century by buying the monopoly of the sale and manufacture of badges at Rocamadour. They were obliged to give a large slice of their profits to the bishop of Tulle, and this appears to have been the usual arrangement. The archbishop of Santiago took a percentage from licensed badge-sellers after 1200 and it was for many years a major source of revenue. Unlicensed sellers, however, sold at least as many badges as licensed ones, and not only to genuine pilgrims. The archbishops of Santiago often complained that copies of their badges were being sold throughout France and northern Spain. Indeed, in 1228 this nefarious trade was being carried on by no less a man than the neighbouring bishop of Lugo.

  Travel Overland

  A long journey in the middle ages was not a thing to be lightly undertaken. The great sanctuaries were separated by hundreds of miles of unmade, ill-marked roads, many of them running through unpopulated tracts of Europe infested with bandits. ‘O Lord, heavenly father’, ran a blessing commonly conferred on pilgrims in the twelfth century, ‘let the angels watch over thy servants N.N. that they may reach their destination in safety,… that no enemy may attack them on the road, nor evil overcome them. Protect them from the perils of fast rivers, thieves, or wild beasts.’ The outbreak of a war could interrupt the flow of pilgrims to an important sanctuary or even choke it altogether. Thus the disordered state of central Italy brought about the serious decline of the Roman pilgrimage in the tenth century and again in the thirteenth. The Hundred Years War ruined the abbey of St.-Gilles and many other shrines of southern France, and significantly affected the prosperity of Santiago itself. In the fifteenth century a sudden Arab or Turkish descent on Rhodes might prevent all travel to the Holy Land for a year.