Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The Great St. Bernard hospice, which stood on the highest and bleakest pass of the Alps, received almost every English or French pilgrim bound for Rome. It was a younger institution than the Hospital of Jerusalem, but its origins are still far from clear. It owed its foundation to St. Bernard of Aosta, who flourished at a somewhat uncertain date, and who gave his name to both the hospice and the pass. It was certainly in existence by 1081, and within a century its buildings were already bursting out from its narrow site, crushed between two steep walls of rock.

  Still more obscure are the origins of the hospice of St. Christine, on the Somport pass over the Pyrenees. It opened its doors, according to a popular song, ‘not only to catholics, but to pagans, Jews and heretics, to the idle and the vain alike’. But its real importance was that it formed part of a remarkable chain of hospices which had sprung up in the space of a few decades along the roads to Santiago, both in Spain and in France. By the middle of the twelfth century there was scarcely a hospice on these roads which was not within a day’s journey of the next. Several of them, like the hospice of St. Christine and its great rival at Ronceval, founded by the bishop of Pamplona in 1132, were in the hands of Augustinian canons. Others were attached to Cluniac priories, like Leyre, Nájera, or Carrión de los Condes. A number of religious orders devoted themselves entirely to running hospices, the confraternity of Santo Spirito, for example, a twelfth-century foundation which had establishments at Montpellier and Rome. The Spanish military orders, like their opposite numbers in the middle east, devoted a great deal of their immense wealth to building hospices and repairing roads. Most active of all were the orders of Santo Sepolcro and Santiago, one of whose functions was declared to be ‘to offer shelter and food to travellers and poor people’. These hospices were not commercial enterprises, but that did not prevent them from indulging in an intense and often bitter rivalry. The hospices of Ronceval and St. Christine stood on the two principal passes over the Pyrenees, and each stridently proclaimed its own special advantages over the other. The prior of Villafranca complained to the abbot of Cluny in 1088 that a rival establishment had ‘usurped his rights over pilgrims’. In 1122 the monastery of Oboña in the Asturias secured a privilege forbidding anyone to ‘divert its pilgrims elsewhere’, though how effective this document was is not revealed.

  The variety of functions which hospices fulfilled is reflected in the thirteenth-century statutes of Aubrac in the Rouergue. Its principal purpose was declared to be the assistance of ‘all pilgrims passing this way towards Notre-Dame de Rocamadour, Santiago, Oviedo, St. Dominic of Estremadura, or any other sanctuaries, not least the sepulchre of Our Saviour at Jerusalem’. But it was also enjoined to ‘receive, welcome, and comfort the sick, the blind, the weak, the lame, the deaf, the dumb, and the starving’. The foundation of Aubrac in about 1100 was an act of thanksgiving. Its founder and first ‘commander’ was a Flemish nobleman who had narrowly escaped death in a snowstorm on his return from Santiago. The community lived under the Augustinian rule but its organization was peculiar to itself. There was a small body of priests, who sung the daily office and administered the sacraments. A force of monk-knights, not unlike the Templars, patrolled the roads of the Rouergue and protected pilgrims against bandits. Side by side with them lived brothers and nuns (described as ‘ladies of good birth’) who administered the hospice and its charitable activities. Finally, there were lay brothers, who worked in the fields and granges of the church. In the thirteenth century it acquired considerable wealth and extensive buildings though, like most churches of southern France, it fell upon hard times during the Hundred Years War. The Romanesque church, surrounded by the remnants of its buildings, can still be seen on the high windswept plain beside the Roman road from Lyon to Rodez.

  When the hospice of Aubrac was full, the statutes provided that alms were to be distributed at the gate. In 1523 it was reported that between 1,200 and 1,500 poor gathered every day to receive their pittance. This kind of outdoor relief was commonly practised by wealthy hospices. When the roads were crowded and every bed full, it might be as much as the pilgrim could get. At St.-Léonard de Noblat and at St.-Jean d’Angély, every pilgrim received his pittance at the church door, and at Santiago itself all offerings received at the high altar before terce each Sunday were given to lepers in the city.

  Life in a pilgrims’ hospice was monotonous and comfortless, though most pilgrims were thankful to be there at all. Renart, in the popular twelfth-century fable, received eggs, cheese, bread and salted meat at a pilgrims’ hospice. This must have been one of the wealthier establishments, for in many hospices no food was served at all, and pilgrims were expected to see to their own wants. At Villamartín, a hospice maintained by the order of Santiago, pilgrims received two loaves of bread every day; only the poorest travellers were given a little wine and meat on three days a week. A more varied diet was to be had at the hospice of Pamplona cathedral, where pilgrims ate bread and a salad, with meat or vegetables according to the season. Beds, like food, were only provided in well-endowed establishments. Elsewhere, the inmates slept on straw-covered floors:

  Bedding ther is nothing faire,

  Many pilgrimez it doth apaire:

  Tabelez use thei non of to ete,

  But on the bare flore thei make ther sete.

  So sang an anonymous English pilgrim of the fourteenth century. Testators often left bedding to hospices where they had once passed a sleepless night; one of them, who died in 1297, left money to buy ‘one bed, equipped with a good bolster, one cushion, and one pillow, with two good linen sheets, and a blanket’. Where there were beds, they were usually dirty, and fleas were a common incident of life in a hospice or cheap inn. A curious French phrase-book, composed for English travellers at the end of the fourteenth century, deals with this subject in some detail. The wise traveller is recommended to send his servant ahead to enquire whether there ‘be no fleas, nor bugs, nor other vermin’; ‘no sir’, was the reply, ‘for please God you will be well and comfortably lodged here – except that we suffer much from rats and mice.’ There is a full section on how to converse with another traveller with whom you have just shared a bug-ridden bed: ‘William, undress and wash your legs and then dry them with a towel and rub them well on account of the fleas, that they may not leap on your legs. For there is a mass of them about in the dust under the rushes…. Ow, the fleas bite me so and do me great harm, for I have scratched my shoulders till the blood flows.’

  ‘Taverns’, remarked one pilgrim, ‘are for the rich, and for lovers of good wine.’ Life was certainly more comfortable in the inns and taverns, but it was far from luxurious, and well below the standard which even a modestly rich man of the late middle ages could expect in his own home. They were more likely to contain beds, but no one had a bed to himself. A room would contain several beds, each shared by two, three, or even four travellers. During the Roman Jubilee of 1350, pilgrims were paying thirteen pennies to share a bed with three other people. In England, observed the poet and diplomat Eustache Deschamps, ‘no one sleeps alone but two or three to a bed in a darkened room’; the fleas were bigger in an English tavern than in the habit of a monk of Cîteaux. Deschamps preferred the more refined manners of his own country, but the inns were scarcely better on the pilgrimage roads of France. They generally served better food than the hospices, but even this could not be relied upon. A Flemish draper who visited the Holy Land in 1518 took a poor view of the food and wine served in most of the inns of south-eastern France. At Montmélian ‘we were promised good wine but it was undrinkable and cost eight gros’; at St.-Michel de Maurienne ‘we were swindled at the dinner table’; ‘appalling fare’ was served at Lanslebourg; it was a relief to find a good meal at last at Novalese.

  On busy roads every house became an inn and rival hoteliers were ruthless in canvassing for customers. The innkeepers on the road to Santiago sent their boys out to the gates of the towns with instructions to kiss and embrace pilgrims as if they were long-lost friends,
and then lead them to the inn. Those of Santiago itself sent their servants with placards as far outside the city as Barbadella or Triacastellos. In 1205 the municipality of Toulouse had occasion to reprove those hoteliers who forced pilgrims to employ their services by taking the reins out of their hands or dragging them in by the lapels.

  Bitter disputes arose out of the attempt by innkeepers to claim the chattels of pilgrims who died in their houses. By custom they were certainly entitled to a share of the chattels, but what that share was was nowhere defined. One innkeeper confiscated a dead pilgrim’s money and the donkey on which his children were riding; St. James caused him to break his neck in a fall, and threatened to visit the same fate on all other ‘wicked innkeepers plying their trade on my road’.

  Mediaeval innkeepers were not much loved. The author of the sermon Veneranda Dies could scarcely find words to describe them. There was no crime that they did not commit. They displayed fine wines and served cheap ones. Their fish was bad and their meat putrid. Their candles did not burn. Their beds were filthy. They gave change in bad coin. Their inns were often brothels and always dens of drunkenness. The preacher believed that they were responsible for the exaggerated and theologically unsound miracle stories which circulated amongst pilgrims. ‘Truly, Judas lives in every one of them.’ What was more, these vices were found not only amongst the innkeepers of Santiago but at Rome, St.-Léonard de Noblat, Le Puy, Vézelay, Tours, St.-Jean d’Angély, Mont-St.-Michel, Benevento, and Bari. Everywhere, in fact, that a few pence could be made out of gullible pilgrims. When the judgement day arrived, the saints concerned would come forward and say ‘these, O Lord, are the ones who defrauded our pilgrims and practised on them all manner of iniquitous crimes.’

  Cost

  Inns, at least, were relatively cheap. A bed in fourteenth-century England generally cost a penny a head, which was less than the price of a simple dinner. Although guests complained frequently of extortionate rates, their protests were more often directed at the cost of meals and the pilferings of servants. Chaucer’s parson, in reproving those who encouraged the misdeeds of their subordinates did not forget ‘thilke that holden hostelries’, who ‘sustenen the theft of their hostilers’. The hire of a horse, to name but one expense, cost more than bed and board combined: twenty-four pence to ride from Southwark to Canterbury in Chaucer’s time. Many pilgrims recorded their expenses on the route, sometimes in great detail. But it is almost impossible to draw general conclusions from their experiences. Prices varied from year to year, and some pilgrims travelled in greater comfort than others. In France, where there were a large number of free hospices, travel was cheaper than it was in Germany. Rome was not accounted an expensive place, but during a Jubilee the price of a bed more than doubled and bread sold for a penny an ounce.

  The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was notoriously the most expensive of all. ‘Good intentions, stout heart, ready tongue, and fat purse’ were needed, according to Gréffin Affagart, who knew from experience. He reckoned the cost at two hundred ducats. Santo Brasca agreed; every pilgrim ‘should carry two purses, one right full of patience, and the other containing two hundred Venetian ducats’, one hundred and fifty for normal expenses and fifty for emergencies. ‘And for this reason’, advised Affagart, ‘I would recommend every pilgrim to choose his destination according to his pocket.’ The most revealing statement of accounts which survives is that of Giorgio Gucci, one of the companions of Frescobaldi in 1384. Theirs was a relatively expensive expedition, consisting of six pilgrims with six servants. They travelled by ship to Alexandria and thence overland to Mount Sinai, Jerusalem and Damascus. They finally took ship at Beirut and arrived in Venice ten months after their departure. All this came to an average of one hundred and fifty gold ducats a head, or three hundred gold ducats for each man and his servant. It was made up as follows:

  Fares from Venice to Alexandria and from Beirut to Venice

  96 ducats each

  Fees to officials, guides, and interpreters; authorized tolls on roads and in churches

  25 ducats each

  Illicit tolls and bribes to powerful officials to prevent them from confiscating baggage or interrupting their progress with red tape, ‘which expenses the populace over there call “mangerie”, that is, robbery’

  4½ ducats each

  Hire of asses, mules and camels, and of boats on the Nile between Alexandria and Cairo

  10 ducats each

  Food and supplies, wine, travelling clothes, and tent

  10 ducats each

  Utensils, saddlery, weapons, cutlery, candles and torches, inns and miscellaneous expenses

  4½ ducats each

  The large sums expended on fees, bribes, and tolls are recorded in every travel diary of the period unless the traveller took the Venetian package tour, in which case the burden fell on the unfortunate shipowner. Thomas Swynburne, the English castellan of Guines, who followed exactly the same route as Frescobaldi eight years later, spent even more on bribes, including a gratuity of three ducats to the chief cameleer ‘that he might behave himself’, and three ducats to the customs official who overlooked his barrel of wine.

  Venetian shipowners generally charged half fares to the poor, but even this amounted to thirty ducats, a sum which was well beyond the means of most ‘poor pilgrims’. One problem was that the pilgrim had to carry the entire cost of the journey with him in cash. Thus a pilgrim who lodged at the monastery of St. Etienne de Caen in the late eleventh century was found to have on him the enormous sum of thirty-three livres, which made him a tempting prey for bandits and pick-pockets. Frescobaldi arrived in Alexandria in 1384 with six hundred gold ducats, a truly prodigious sum, which he had hidden in the false bottom of his trunk for fear that the Arabs might confiscate it. At this primitive stage in the history of international banking, even a well-to-do pilgrim might run out of money or lose his purse to a thief, and find himself utterly dependent on the charity of others. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells the story of a young girl whose father took her to Jerusalem at the end of the twelfth century. The father died at Tyre, and his manservant absconded with all his money, leaving the girl to subsist by beggary until at length a wealthy German pilgrim was persuaded to pay for her passage home.

  Gerald of Wales ran out of money in Rome in 1203, leaving all his bills unpaid. He attempted to flee, but his creditors pursued him to Bologna, where they demanded payment. No one in Bologna would lend him money unless he could find a local inhabitant to guarantee that he would repay the lender’s agent in England. But guarantors were reluctant to step forward. Only a few weeks earlier a number of Spanish students and priests in Bologna had been imprisoned after they had kindly offered security for a compatriot, who had then defaulted. Still followed by his creditors, Gerald continued north until they were finally induced to accept a promissory note drawn on merchants at the Troyes fair. The following year, when Gerald returned to Rome, he called at Troyes and bought bills of exchange worth twenty gold marks of Modena from merchants of Bologna. Even then, he had difficulty in changing them at Faenza. With the development of a more sophisticated banking system in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the life of the wealthier traveller became easier. Hoteliers often acted as bankers. Those of Toulouse, for example, would lend money, transfer it to the traveller’s next stopping place, guarantee debts, or accept bills of exchange. Italian pilgrims used bills of exchange even on quite short journeys. A group of Milanese in Rome for the Jubilee of 1390 had brought with them bills of exchange for five hundred florins.

  The variety of currencies and rates of exchange was another pitfall for the unwary. Hoteliers would change coin willingly, but it was well known that they gave an unfavourable rate. In 1350 the innkeepers of Rome were offering only forty shillings for a gold florin. When Denis Possot tried to change four hundred French écus in a hostelry in Venice, he was furious to receive only 350 gold ducats and forty marks for them. William Wey noted in 1458 that ‘at Sienna a bolyner of Rome ys worth but
fyve katerynes and an halfe, and the same bolynar ys worth at Rome, six katerynes.’ The account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem begins with a lengthy list of exchange rates, but it was wisest, Wey thought, to bring with one a supply of coins of Tours, Candi, and Modena, as well as the ubiquitous Venetian coins which came nearest to being the international currency of the Mediterranean.

  A pilgrim who intended to visit Jerusalem in the style that befitted his station, might expect to pay at least a year’s income. How did he raise this money? If he was a landowner, he might sell his land to a monastery, as the soldiers of the first crusade, according to Guibert of Nogent, sold their fields, vineyards and chattels to buy armour and horses. If the land was worth more than the cost of the journey, he might give it to a monastery in return for alms to meet his expenses; in this way William Arnold parted with extensive lands to the abbey of Conques in the late eleventh century, and received a contribution of one hundred shillings towards the expenses of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Many ‘sales’ of this sort were in fact mere assignments of land as security for a loan. Monasteries readily lent money to crusaders and often to ordinary pilgrims as well. Guy I, count of Limoges, paid for his expensive pilgrimage to the Holy Land in c. 1000, by borrowing 15,000 shillings from the abbey of St. Martial. The canons of Auch cathedral paid for the pilgrimage of Raymond Aimeric II de Montesquieu in 1180. Monasteries, of course, were not the only source of loans. Thibault de Marly borrowed 140 livres from his lord before setting out for the Holy Land in 1173. A document of 1172 records that Josbert de Précigny, a Christian usurer of Tours, lent thirty livres to a pilgrim to go to the Holy Land; but Josbert died before the loan was repaid, and his heirs remitted the debt on condition that the pilgrim paid twelve pennies a year for the repose of his soul. Before his departure on the crusade with Louis IX, Joinville mortgaged his property to the moneylenders of Metz, leaving himself with only a thousand livres of unencumbered income, scarcely enough for the maintenance of his widowed mother. ‘I was reluctant’, he explained, ‘to pay my way by pillage.’