Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Amongst external observances, pilgrimage remained by far the most important, but the shrines which pilgrims visited changed. Some of the traditional saints, St. Thomas of Canterbury for example, still drew crowds on their feast day or in Jubilee years, but there was no continuous cult as there had been in the twelfth century. The loyalty of the masses was transferred to an enormous number of minor shrines which commanded attention for a few weeks before relapsing into obscurity and being replaced by others. Fifteenth-century pilgrims were creatures of passing fads; they rarely needed to travel far to their destinations. ‘You tell me that your new saints have displaced the old ones’, Sacchetti had once protested; ‘what business have you to enshrine their relics and light candles in their honour, when images of the Blessed Virgin and Christ himself lie forgotten in darkened corners?’

  The ‘new saints’ of the late middle ages were often humble men who were acclaimed as saints by local people. Their cult was rarely recognized by the Church and did not generally extend beyond the immediate locality. Many of them were working class, like the multitude of peasant-saints venerated in parts of France. St. Zita of Lucca was one of the more celebrated examples. She was a serving maid who died in 1272 and became the object of a cult which continued for several centuries. Despite the popular origins of the cult, cardinals, archbishops, and secular magnates are known to have visited her tomb, and chapels were dedicated to her in many parts of Europe. But she was not canonized until 1696. The death of Henry of Bolzano, a labourer of Treviso, in 1315 was followed by a prolonged outburst of popular enthusiasm. Three notaries were appointed to record the miracles which occurred at his tomb in Treviso cathedral, and in 1381 his relics were even displayed in public on his feast day. He was never canonized.

  Parish priests of great saintliness were frequently the objects of these spontaneous and unauthorized cults. Margery Kempe used to weep at the grave of the vicar of St. Stephen’s, Norwich, ‘the good vicar, for whom God showed high mercy to his people’. In 1361 John de Grandison, bishop of Exeter heard (‘not without amazement and irritation, I assure you’), that Richard Boyle, parish priest of Whitestone, who had recently committed suicide, was being revered as a saint by his parishioners. Ordinary folk from the area were making pilgrimages to his tomb, and twelve miraculous cures had been reported. The veneration of parish priests was not always opposed by the authorities. In 1260 the bishop of Coutances built a magnificent chapel over the grave of Thomas Hélye, parish priest of Biville, who had died three years earlier. Although Hélye was never canonized, the shrine was visited by pilgrims until the nineteenth century. A similar fate befell John Schorne, parish priest of North Marston in Buckinghamshire, who died in 1314. His shrine, and a well which he had blessed, were visited throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were believed to cure ague. His cult, like that of Thomas Hélye, was never authorized by the Church, but it was so well established in 1478 that his remains were translated to the Lincoln chapel in St. George’s, Windsor.

  More common still was the veneration of miraculous statues. Most were statues of the Virgin, of the sort whose origins were pungently described by the Lollard author of the Lanterne of Light.

  ‘The painter maketh a live image forged with divers colours, till it seem in fools’ eyes as a lively creature. This is set in the church in a solemn place, fast bounden with bonds for it should not fall. Priests of the temple beguile the people with the foul sin of Balaam in their open preaching. They say that God’s power in working of his miracles loweth down in one image more than in another and therefore come and offer to this, for here is showed much virtue.’

  It was just such a statue which had drawn troops of women to the abbey of Meaux in the early fourteenth century, thus causing so much trouble to the monks. The artist, we are told, spent several months carving it and used a nude model. The spoils of the dissolution of the English monasteries included several much-venerated statues like the rood of Boxley which rolled its eyes, shed tears, and foamed at the mouth, and the Kent statue burned at Smithfield in 1538 which bowed to receive the prayers of pilgrims. The attitude of the authorities was highly equivocal. The abbot of Meaux was delighted by the arrival of pilgrims until he found that they were more trouble than they were worth. Bishops generally turned a blind eye to unauthorized images, and earnestly defended them against Lollards. Archbishop Warham assured Wolsey that Boxley was ‘so holy a place where so many miracles are showed’. The inaction of the bishops was really a reflection of their impotence, for a popular cult could survive any number of anathemas. In 1386 bishop John Buckingham of Lincoln ordered an enquiry into rumours he had heard of certain doings in Rippingdale. ‘Many of our subjects have made for themselves a certain pretended statue, vulgarly known as Jordan Cros, in the fields of Rippingdale. They have begun to adore it, and allege that miracles are occurring there. They preach, ring bells, and hold processions for the deception of the people and for their own gain. Indeed, laymen are said to be embezzling the offerings for their own use.’ But the bishop’s letter was not the end of the matter for, in 1392, the parishioners succeeded in getting the pope’s permission to build a chapel over the statue and to worship there with or without the bishop’s consent. The reason given was ‘the great number of miracles wrought there, and the multitudes who arrive with offerings from all over England.’

  The discomfort of the Church in the face of unauthorized popular shrines was the symptom of a deeper malaise. Ever since the thirteenth century there had been a tendency on the part of many educated churchmen to withdraw from the more popular forms of piety. The outspoken views of non-conformists like St. Bernard gradually became the orthodoxy of a generation of scholastics and canon lawyers which had little else in common with the great abbot of Clairvaux. The change of heart coincided with the climax of that long process of spiritual centralization which had begun with the papacy’s claim to a monopoly in the canonization of saints. A substantial and influential body of churchmen began to look with profound suspicion on extreme symptoms of popular devotion. This they did partly because they felt, as Guibert of Nogent had done, that popular religion was vitiated by superstition and ignorance; and partly because they disliked spiritual exercises which by-passed the sacramental function of the Church and offended its claims to spiritual authority. Their attitude was crystallized in the prolonged crisis in the Franciscan order in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The tendencies within the order to depart from the spirit of St. Francis’ Testament, with its strict prohibition of the possession of property, were officially encouraged. The minority of Franciscans who wished to abide by it were deliberately prevented from doing so, while the fraticelli who asserted the doctrine that Christ had lived in absolute poverty and that the order should do likewise, were persecuted as heretics. In so far as the late mediaeval Church had a ‘policy’ towards popular religion, it was summed up in a marked distaste for ‘enthusiasm’ when it occurred outside the framework of ecclesiastical institutions. The origin of this ‘policy’ should perhaps be sought in the bull Quo Elongati of 1230, in which Gregory IX declared the Testament of St. Francis to be invalid.

  The ‘policy’ was, of course, neither formally proclaimed nor consistently followed. The encyclopaedic works of Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris (d. 1429), are full of contradictions and conflicts between the thinker who felt that popular superstitions were theologically unsound, and the indulgent pastor who took the traditional line that they were better than nothing. Gerson was completely opposed to the practice of mass-flagellation, and the Church’s opinions on this subject are a microcosm of its attitude to popular religion in general. Flagellation became a common spiritual practice in the western Church in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Peter Damian gave it an elaborate theological justification, arguing that it was the supreme manifestation of humility and love of God, a perfect imitation of the sufferings of Christ himself. Flagellation was still practised in private in the late middle ages, particularly
by the Carthusians. In the thirteenth century, however, the Church was first confronted with flagellation practised, not privately by individual ascetics, but by thousands of laymen in the main squares of Italian cities. That which had been acceptable as an act of personal piety, was condemned when it became an expression of hysterical enthusiasm. The change of heart is epitomized in the behaviour of Clement VI, who himself instituted flagellant processions in Avignon in 1349, in the hope of warding off the Black Death. But the arrival of an unofficial band of wandering flagellants in the city began to sow doubts in his mind, doubts which were reinforced by the arguments of a deputation of masters of the University of Paris. The deputation dwelt on the popular nature of the flagellant movement. Not only were the flagellants uneducated laymen, indocti, ignari, rudes, but they were a sect, purporting to offer an independent route to salvation, flouting the spiritual authority of the Church. In October 1349 Clement declared the flagellants to be heretics, and ordered the suppression of their processions throughout Europe.

  The mood of critical suspicion was not confined to mass movements. Visions and revelations, which had played so important a part in the spiritual life of an earlier age, were now subjected to increasingly hostile scrutiny. Those of St. Bridget of Sweden were critically examined for heretical leanings by a commission of the council of Constance. In England, the visions of Margery Kempe brought upon her accusations of Lollardy. She was three times arrested after experiencing trances in public, and although her beliefs were found to be orthodox, the distaste of the clergy for her particular brand of enthusiasm was not one whit abated. ‘We know well that she knows the articles of the faith’, the canons of York minster stated, ‘but we will not suffer her to dwell amongst us, for the people hath great faith in her dalliance, and peradventure she might pervert some of them.’

  The harshest strictures were reserved for the cult of the saints, and the miracles associated with them. As well as inveighing against clerical avarice in terms not unlike those used by St. Bernard, John Wyclif condemned the cult of saints as such. He denied that miracles were the proof of holiness, or that canonizations were a good guide to sanctity. He abhorred the multitude of festivals. ‘Some men trowen truly that all such saints profit not men unless they make them love Christ. So if men would better love Christ without such feasts, it were better for them to do without such saints.’ Wyclif’s Lollard admirers were almost unanimous in their objections to pilgrimage. The cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury was the object of particularly venomous criticism. Several Lollards had occasion at their trials to inveigh against Becket himself, and one of them told the bishop of Norwich that the martyr was a false traitor and a cowardly knave who had been killed at the cathedral door while attempting to flee, and was even then suffering in Hell. Pamphlets against the cult of St. Thomas were still being written in the sixteenth century, when the pilgrimage to Canterbury was ridiculously unimportant.

  Wyclif’s views, important as they are as a foretaste of things to come, are less interesting than the opinions of churchmen who accepted the structure of the late mediaeval Church. The council of Constance unequivocally condemned the opinion of John Wyclif, but many of the most prominent reformers at Constance themselves believed that the cult of the saints ought to be restricted. The canonization of St. Bridget in 1391 provoked some sharp criticism, not only because her revelations were suspect, but because it was felt that there were too many saints and that their veneration occupied too important a place in the religious life of the age. Henry of Langenstein asked ‘whether it were right to canonize her, given the great multitude of saints already venerated. Is it seemly to proclaim new saints to be celebrated with greater solemnity than the apostles themselves?’ Nor was Henry’s an isolated voice. Jean Gerson repeated his words with approval. Pierre d’Ailly laid before the council a programme of reforms which included the demands ‘that images and pictures in churches be not permitted to multiply so, that new shrines be forbidden, and that so many new saints be not canonized.’ In the sermons of Nicholas of Clamanges, these sentiments became part of a general assault on all external observances. ‘It is vain to preach to the outer man’, he urged, ‘if Christ does not resound within him.’

  On miracles, the views of the heretical Wyclif can scarcely be distinguished from those of the orthodox Gerson. The Carthusians, Gerson pointed out, were renowned for their sanctity but they performed no miracles. Indeed, miracles were generally reported only at shrines where the sanctity of the person venerated was in doubt. No one doubted the sanctity of St. Jerome or Gregory the Great, and no miracles were attributed to them. However, none of these sentiments had the slightest effect on popular practice. Both before and after the council of Constance, conscientious prelates laboured in vain to prevent ordinary people from proclaiming miracles. The problems of Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln (1280–99), are altogether typical of those of a late mediaeval bishop of a large diocese. In April 1296 he closed down the private chapel of Edmund, earl of Cornwall, at Hambledon. It had only recently been constructed, it was not officially consecrated, and now it was the scene of ‘various superstitious practices and vain inventions, … rash assertions of miracles not authorized by the Church’. Two years later bishop Sutton had to deal with more unproven miracles and an eager throng of pilgrims at Great Crawley. Problems constantly arose in connection with holy trees, magic wells, and the like. The bishop has heard that the vicar of Linslade is encouraging the cult of a well in his parish by spreading stories of miraculous cures; the usual prohibitions follow. Bishop Grandison of Exeter, another reforming prelate, did not mince his words on such occasions. ‘I find these miracles hard to believe and impossible to prove’, he wrote in 1340; ‘I fear that the people have given themselves over to idolatry and strayed from the path of the true catholic faith, … deluded by insane and untrue visions, inspired by the Devil and his agents, and deceived by false superstitions. It is our experience that they are frequently led on by cupidity as well.’ His commissory was to visit the offending villages and stamp out the cults, if need be with excommunication and anathema.

  Nicholas of Clamanges was satisfied that no age had witnessed so few miracles as his own, and that saints, like Peter and Paul, who used to corruscate in wonders, no longer did so. But he was speaking of ‘genuine’ miracles, i.e. those recognized by the Church. They had indeed dwindled almost to nothing, but the unrecognized sort were probably commoner in the fifteenth century than ever before. The attempt to reform popular religion was a failure. Its true effect, as John of Trittenheim pointed out in 1513, was merely to widen the gulf between the minority of highly educated clergy and most ordinary Christians. John himself believed strongly in miracles, and held that more men had been saved by reading about them than by listening to a thousand philosophical discourses. He hated the learned of his own day for separating themselves from the people, and accused them of turning instead to mysticism, writing poetry, and sexual indulgence. Only the simple and the poor still believed in miracles, and practised the traditional religion of the Church.

  It was an exaggeration, as the author’s own career amply demonstrated. But fundamentally John of Trittenheim’s diagnosis was correct. The Church in the fifteenth century was a very much more rigid institution than it had been in the twelfth. It was no longer capable of absorbing overpowering spiritual movements, and those movements therefore occurred outside the framework of the Church. As a cause of the Reformation, this was a fact of greater importance than the abuses which are often supposed to have discredited the late mediaeval Church.

  The Cult of the Virgin

  The story of Theophilus is amongst the most attractive and expressive mediaeval legends. Theophilus was the steward of a bishop in Cilicia, and he was anxious to succeed his master on the episcopal throne. With the assistance of a Jewish sorcerer, he arranged to sell his soul to the Devil. The contract was drawn up and signed by both parties in the presence of witnesses, and from that moment Theophilus succeeded in all that he attem
pted. But his enjoyment was marred by pangs of remorse, and he began to think of ways in which he could rescind the contract. After he had passed several nights in prayer, the Blessed Virgin dramatically intervened, wresting the parchment from the hands of Satan and restoring it to Theophilus. It is, of course, the ancestor of the Faust legend. Like many legends of the Virgin, the origins of this story are Greek and it does not appear in the Latin Church until the ninth century. Nevertheless, if the number of editions, translations, and surviving manuscripts is any guide it was by far the most popular legend of the Virgin known to the middle ages. The reason for its extraordinary appeal is not far to seek. The story of Theophilus’s compact with the Devil accorded exactly with current notions about the personality and power of evil. At the same time it offered, in the veneration of the Virgin, a guarantee of protection from evil. This was the function of the Virgin in the religious literature of the middle ages. She intervened to save those whom justice, human or divine, had condemned. She offered an escape from the rigorous teaching of the Church on the subject of damnation and punishment. Thus it was that already in the late eleventh century, the office of the Virgin sung in churches hailed her as the ‘mother of mercy, who took pity on Theophilus and saved him from the trough of sin and misery’: