Part III Religious Wayfarers
54. A FRIAR ON A JOURNEY (CHAUCER’S “FRERE”).
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
Chapter I Wandering Preachers and Friars
While the inward consciousness of common wants and longings for better days spread everywhere, by means of that crowd of work-people whom we find in England ceaselessly on the move in spite of statutes, the guiding ideas were sown broadcast by another kind of roamer, the preachers. Sprung also from the people, they had studied; as we have seen it was not necessary to be rich in order to go through the course at Oxford; the villeins even sent their children there, and the Commons, of scant liberalism as we know, protested against this emancipation of another kind, this advancement by means of learning, “avancement par clergie.” Preventive measures, they thought, were indispensable to save “the honour” of the freemen of the realm, by which they meant privilege; ideas of honour have changed. But, even then, it was going too far, and the king, who had after all learnt a lesson in 1381, rebuked the Commons with a “le roi s’avisera” which was then, and is to-day, the form of royal refusal.384 These clerks knew what was the condition of the people; they knew the miseries of the poor, which were those of their father and mother and of themselves; the intellectual culture they had received enabled them to transform into precise conceptions the general aspirations of the tillers of the soil. The former are not less necessary than the latter to every important social movement; if both are indispensable to the making of the tool, handle and blade, it is these definite views which form the blade.
The roaming preachers knew how to sharpen it, and they were numerous. Those whom Wyclif sent to popularize his doctrines,385 his “simple priests,” or “poor priests,” did just what others had done before them; they imitated their forerunners, and no more confined themselves to expounding the difficult and not always democratic theories of their master than the mendicant friars, or monks, or secular priests, friends of the revolution, strictly kept to the precepts of the gospel. Their sympathies were with the people, and they showed it in their discourses. Wyclif contributed to the increase of these wanderers; his people came from the same stock as the others; if it was easy for him to find clerks ready to act as his missionaries, the reason was that many in the kingdom were already prepared for such a task, and only awaited their opportunity.386 The revolutionary leader John Ball was a secular priest, and so was the well-known Lollard, William Thorpe.
All, in fact, did the same kind of work. For different motives and with different aims, they led to the same results: the belief that the State, the Church, the Government, the Court, the rule of the masters, whether spiritual or temporal, were not what they should be, and that a change must come. Doubts and discontents always help each other; whoever strikes at the tree shakes the tree. Wyclif’s theory, “both before and after the rising, was that temporal lords had a right to their property, but that churchmen had no right to theirs.”387 His teachings helped, however, to spread doubts as to the legitimacy of both. Though it had nothing to do with Lollard tenets, the diffusion thereof was facilitated by the papal schism of 1378: another great tree that was shaken.
Men able to address a crowd scoured the country, drawing together the poor and attracting them by harangues filled with what people who suffer always like to hear. The statute passed just after the revolt clearly shows how much the influence of the wandering preachers was feared. Their dress even and manner of speech are described; these malcontents have an austere aspect, they go “from county to county, and from town to town in certain habits under dissimulation of great holiness.” They dispense of course with the ecclesiastical papers which regular preachers ought to carry; they are “without the licence of our Holy Father the Pope, or of the Ordinaries of the places, or other sufficient authority.” They make themselves heard, and their successors to this day have never ceased to follow suit, “not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets, fairs, and other open places where a great congregation of people is.” Their real subject is not dogma, but the social question; on their lips the religious sermon becomes a political harangue. “Which persons,” the statute says, “do also preach divers matters of slander, to engender discord and dissension betwixt divers estates of the said realm as well spiritual as temporal, in exciting of the people, to the great peril of all the realm.” They are cited to appear before the ecclesiastic authority, the ordinaries, but refuse to “obey to their summons and commandments.” Let the sheriffs and others of the king’s officers henceforth watch with care these wandering orators and send to prison those unable to show proper certificates.388
We may gain an idea of their speeches by recalling the celebrated harangue of the priest John Ball,389 the most stirring of these travelling orators. Certainly, in the Latin phrase of the “Chronicle of England,” his thoughts are given too solemn and too correct a form, but all that we know of the circumstances matches so well his undoubted purports, that his actual speech cannot have differed, in its trend at least, from what the chronicler has transmitted to us. The popular saying quoted before serves as his text, and he developes it in this manner:
“At the beginning we were all created equal; it is the tyranny of perverse men which has caused servitude to arise, in spite of God’s law; if God had willed that there should be serfs He would have said at the beginning of the world who should be serf and who should be lord.”390
55. “WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN.”
(The motto of John Ball’s speech illustrated from the MS. 2 B. vii. Fourteenth Century).
What made Ball powerful was that he found his best weapons in the Bible; quoting it he appealed to the good sentiments of the lowly, to their virtue, their reason; he showed that the Divine Word accorded with their interest; they would be “like the good father of a family who cultivates his field and plucks up the weeds.” The same ideas are attributed to him by almost all the chroniclers. Froissart uses to describe his doings almost the same words as the statute already quoted. He represents him when he found a congregation of people, especially on Sundays, after mass, preaching in the open air sermons similar to that in the “Chronicon Angliæ”: “This preest,” says Froissart, “used often tymes on the sondayes after masse, whanne the people were goynge out of the mynster, to go into the cloyster and preche, and made the people to assemble about hym, and wolde say thus: A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen.... What have we deserved or why shulde we be kept thus in servage? we be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we be, savynge by that they cause us to wyn and labour for that they dispende... They dwell in fayre houses, and we have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their estates.... Lette us go to the kyng, he is yonge, and shewn hym what servage we be in.... Thus Johan sayd on sondayes whan the people issued out of the churches in the vyllages... and so they wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and in the wayes as they went togyder, affermyng howe Johan Ball sayd trouthe.”391
So the enthusiastic multitude promised to make him archbishop and chancellor of that kingdom in which he dreamed there should be “equal liberty, equal rank, equal power” for all; but he was taken, drawn, hanged, beheaded, and quartered,392 and his dream remained a dream.
Meanwhile, politics apart, there might yet be found in the fourteenth century some of God’s elect who, alarmed by the crimes of the world and the state of sin in which men lived, left their cells or the paternal roof to go about among villages and towns and preach conversion. There remained some, but they were rare. Contrary to others, these did not speak of public affairs, but of eternal interests; they had not always received sacred orders; they acted as volunteers to the celestial army. Of this sort was the before mentioned Richard Rolle, of Hampole, whose life was partly that of a hermit, partly of a wandering preacher. He was neither monk, nor doctor, nor priest; when young, he had abandoned his father’s house to go and lead a contemplative life in solitude. There he meditated, prayed, and mortified himself; crowds came to his cell to listen to his exhortations; he had ecstatic trances; his friends took off his ragged cloak, mended it, and put it back on his shoulders without his perceiving it. He later left his retreat, and for a long time travelled over the north of England, becoming a wanderer, “changing place continually,” preaching to lead men to salvation. He finally settled at Hampole, where he ended his life in seclusion, writing incessantly, and edifying the neighbourhood by his devotion; he died the year of the great plague, 1349. Scarcely was he dead than his tomb attracted pilgrims, pious people brought offerings there, miracles were performed. In the nuns’ convent at Hampole, which drew from the vicinity of his tomb great honour and profit, an “Office of St. Richard, the hermit,” was composed, as we have seen, to be sung when he should be canonized. But the office of the old hermit and itinerant preacher has never had occasion to be sung down to the present day.393
The wandering preachers met with in the villages were not always Lollards sent by Wyclif, nor inspired men who, like Rolle of Hampole, held their mission from their conscience and from God; they were often members of an immense and powerful caste sub-divided into several orders, that of the mendicant friars. The two principal branches were the Dominicans, Preachers, or Black friars, and the Franciscans, Friars minor or Grey friars, both established in England in the thirteenth century,394 the “men of this [world] that most wide walken,” said Langland.395
The immortal satires of Chaucer should not blind us to the initial merit of these orders, nor cause us to see in the members thereof, at all times, nothing but impudent and idle vagabonds, at once impious, superstitious, and greedy—
“A Frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye;
Ful wel biloved, and famulier was he
With frankeleyns overal in his cuntre,
And eek with worthi wommen of the toun;
Ful sweetly herde he confessioun,
And plesaunt was his absolucioun.
He was an esy man to yeve penance,
Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance;
For unto a povre ordre for to geve
Is signe that a man is wel i-shreve.
He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,
And every ostiller or gay tapstere.”396
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
In Chaucer’s days, such friars were many, but some better ones could also be met; not only those, rare indeed in the fourteenth century, who continued the traditions of their founder, living among the poor, poor as they, and withal wise, devout, and compassionate: Chaucer’s friar was of a different sort; he avoided acquaintance with “a lazer or a beggere,” unwilling to deal “with such poraile.” But even among those who lived careless of the rule, some were at work whose thoughts, dangerous as they might be, were not so base, those friars namely who, when the moment came, could be confounded with the simple priests of their enemy Wyclif, and who were certainly comprised along with them in the statute of 1382. Certain it is that many friars, in their roaming career, preached in the market place, just like John Ball, the new doctrines of emancipation. Hence they alone among the clergy, at the hour of the great revolt, still preserved a certain popularity among the lowly; and the monastic chroniclers, their natural enemies, complacently paraded in their narratives this new grievance against these detested orders.397 Langland, who cursed the revolt, cursed also the friars for having a share of responsibility in it. Envy has whispered into their ears and said: study logic, law, and the hollow dreams of philosophers, and go from village to village proving that all property ought to be in common—the very teaching of John Ball:
“and proven hit by Seneca
That alle thyng under hevene · ouhte to beo in comune.”398
Always armed with good sense, Langland plainly declares that the author of these subversive theories lies; the Bible says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Formerly the life of the friars was exemplary, Charity dwelt among them; this was in the days of the great saint of Assisi, the friend of men, the friend of birds, the friend of all that had been created and could suffer.399
And, indeed, what a holy mission their founder had given them! Coarsely dressed, barefoot, getting only such food as was freely offered them, they were to go into the towns and visit the poorest, most densely populated and unhealthiest suburbs, to seek out the lost.
“And all the brothers,” said Francis, in his rule, “are to be clad in mean habits, and may blessedly mend them with sacks and other pieces; whom I admonish and exhort, that they do not despise or censure such men as they see clad in curious and gay garments and using delicate meats and drinks, but rather let every one judge and despise himself.” They must never quarrel, but be “meek, peacable, modest, mild and humble.... And they are not to ride unless some manifest necessity or infirmity oblige them. Whatsoever house they go into, they shall first say, ‘Peace be unto this house,’ and, according to the Gospel, it shall be lawful for them to eat of all meats that are set before them.” They must beg in order to get the necessaries of life, but they must receive them in kind, never in money. “The brothers shall not make anything their own, neither house nor place, nor any other thing; and they shall go confidently to beg alms like pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving our Lord in poverty and humility.”400
All the miseries, all the hideous blemishes of humanity, every kind of outcasts, the physical or moral lepers, were to have their sympathy; and the lower classes in return would love and venerate them, and grow morally better, owing to their word and example. Eccleston relates that a friar minor once put on his sandals without permission to go to matins. He dreamt afterwards that he was arrested by robbers, who cried out, “Kill him! Kill him!”
“But I am a friar minor,” said he, sure of being respected.
“Thou liest, for thou art not barefoot.”401
The first of their duties was to remain poor, in order to be able, having nothing to lose, fearlessly to use firm language to the rich and powerful of the world. When on his death-bed, in 1253, wise and courageous Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, a great friend of theirs, and because a friend of theirs, reminded them of their rule, appropriately quoting a line of Juvenal’s:
“Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.”
The friars were to be like the traveller without money, whose peace of mind is never disturbed by meeting robbers.402
St. Francis had not wished his friars to be men of learning and study; he was afraid especially of those subtle theological and metaphysical researches which uselessly absorbed the life of so many great clerics. Others enough, he thought, would devote themselves to such speculations; he wanted to fill a gap and in this line there was no gap. His rule was so strict that the famous Roger Bacon, who belonged to his order, had to apply to the pope to be permitted to use ink and parchment.403 What the saint desired was to send throughout the world an army of missionaries who would devote themselves materially and morally to the welfare, body and soul, of all the weary, the derelict, the dregs of humanity. Thus practised, with no room left for the pride of knowledge, disinterestedness was the more absolute, servitude the more voluntary, and the effect on the masses the greater. The subtlety of teachers was not necessary for the fulfilling of this task; and the striking example of the poverty of the consoler, heedless of his own troubles, was the best of consolations. Above all, the vanity of the apostle must be killed, the greatness of his merit must be apparent to God only. With a heart so purified he would necessarily have a sufficient comprehension of the problems of life and of the high moral aims accessible even to the lowest to be naturally eloquent; the study of the “Summæ,” in repute, was useless.
But too many dangers surrounded the sublime foundation, and the first was knowledge itself. “The Emperor Charles, Roland and Oliver,” once said the Saint, “and all the paladins and all strong men, have pursued the infidel in battle till death, and with great pains and labour have won their memorable victories. The holy martyrs died struggling for the faith of Christ. But in our days there are people who seek glory and honour among men simply by the narration of the deeds of heroes. In like manner there are some among you who take more pleasure in writing and preaching on the merits of the saints than in imitating their works.” This reply St. Francis made to a novice who wished to have a psalter. He humorously added, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate, and will say to your brother, ‘Brother, fetch me my breviary.’”404
The popularity of the friars had soon become immense,405 and it was found that they had monopolized in England everything that concerned religion.406 By a quite human contradiction—let Brutus be Cæsar—their poverty had invited riches, and their self-denial power; the hovels where they lodged at first had become sumptuous monasteries with chapels as large as cathedrals; the rich wanted to be buried there, in tombs chiselled with the latest refinements of the florid Gothic. Their apologists of the fifteenth century relate with admiration that in their fine library at London, for in spite of the rule they had a fine library, there was a tomb adorned with four cherubims;407 that their church, begun in 1306, was three hundred feet long, ninety-five wide, and sixty-four feet high, with the columns all of marble as well as the pavement. Kings and princes had enriched the building; some had given the altars, others the stalls; Edward III, “for the repose of the soul of the most illustrious Queen Isabella, buried in the choir” (who had ended her immoral life in the habit of the Santa Clara nuns), repaired the great middle window, blown down by the wind. In the same church was preserved the heart of Queen Eleanor, mother of Edward I. Relating that it was there, Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans and a contemporary, made thereupon a remark, which Walsingham, also a monk of St. Albans, gleefully reproduced in his “Historia Anglicana”: “Her body was buried in the monastery of Ambresbury, but her heart in London, in the church of the Minorites, who, like all friars of every order, claim for themselves something of the bodies of any powerful persons dying; after the manner of the dogs assembling round corpses, where each one greedily awaits his portion to devour.”408 Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had given for the same building twenty trees from his forest of Tunbridge. Rich merchants, the mayor, the aldermen, followed suit. The names of the donors were inscribed on the windows, and Langland was indignant, and recalled the precept, “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” We learn thus that the third window on the west had been given by Walter Mordon, “stoke-fyschmonger,” and Mayor of London. The second window on the south was due to John of Charlton, knight, and his wife, whose arms figured in it; the fourth to Walter de Gorst, fellmonger of London; the fifth to the Earl of Lancaster; the fourth on the west to “various collections, and thus it does not bear a name.” One of the donors is styled the special father and friend of the friars minor.
It could be but a delight for the Wyclifites to reproach the friars with all these mundane splendours; Wyclif revels in it:
“Freris bylden mony grete chirchis and costily waste housis, and cloystris as hit were castels, and that withoute nede.... Grete housis make not men holy, and onely by holynesse is God wel served.” Those convents are “Caymes Castelis.”409
57. PSALM SINGING. THE INTERIOR OF A FRIAR’S CHURCH.
(From the MS. Domit. A. xvii. in the British Museum.)
Interminable lists, too, of cardinals, bishops, and kings who have belonged to the order are drawn up, not forgetting even “certain persons of importance in the world,”—the very antithesis of their founder’s intent. Finally, they enumerate the dead who at the last moment assumed the habit of the friars: “Brother Sir Roger Bourne, knight, buried at Norwich in the friars’ habit, 1334.”410
The pride and riches of the Dominicans are just as great. The author of “Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,” towards the end of the fourteenth century, accurately describes one of their monasteries, the splendid columns to be seen there, the sculptures, paintings, and gildings that adorn the chapter house, so beautiful that it obviously reminds the author of the one at Westminster, or of the painted chamber, “la chambre peinte,” where at times Parliament sat:
“As a Parlement-hous · y-peynted aboute,”
the magnificent stained glass windows ornamented with the arms of the nobles or the mark of the merchants who have given them (“merkes of marchauntes”), and “lovely ladies,” their bronze figures lying on the slabs, “in many gay garmentes,” the imposing tombs of knights heightened with gold.411
The proportions are reversed; as great as the modesty required by the holy founder was now the pride. The faults Chaucer reproaches them with creep in among them; they become interested, greedy, coarse men of the world. The necessity for them to live among the laity had been one of their chief dangers; they were to save the laity, but were instead corrupted by it; they caught the plague that they were to cure. Before even the middle of the thirteenth century, one of them had had a revelation that “Demons celebrated every year a council against the order, and had found three means (to pervert it), that is, intercourse with women, the receiving of useless persons, and the handling of money.”412
Mendicity is now their trade, which some practice well, others better; miracles of self-denial were demanded of them, and behold, on the contrary, prodigies of selfishness. It is no longer religion, it is their order which must be promoted; they preach not on behalf of Christ, but on behalf of their convent; the reversal is complete. All borrow largely from the treasure of good works amassed by their first apostles and spend it madly. The respect of the multitude lessens, their renown for holiness declines; they cast into the other scale of the balance so many faults and disorders that it overweighs. And what remains henceforth? Superstition replaces devotion; some, in spite of the rule, have studied metaphysics and sciences, the trivium, the quadrivium413; for a larger number, however, it is not learning but a gross materialism that veils the superhuman ideal of Francis of Assisi. Contact with their habit is equivalent to a good deed; if the dress is assumed on the death-bed the demons will take flight. Numberless visions have revealed to them these articles of a new faith: “Thei techen lordis and namely ladies,” says Wyclif, “that if they dyen in Fraunceys habite, thei schul nevere cum in helle for vertu thereof.”414
And so it came to pass that, not only poets like Chaucer and Langland, not only reformers like Wyclif, but also the universities415 and the monks of the old-established orders, waged open war against the friars. To which the monks were moved partly, it is true, by jealousy, when they saw these newly created brotherhoods rising in importance, in numbers and in wealth, but partly, also, by the sight of undeniable abuses and worldliness. In such an authoritative work as the “English History,” written in St. Albans Abbey by Chaucer’s contemporary, Thomas Walsingham, the present state and behaviour of the friars is thus described: “The friars, unmindful of their profession, have even forgotten to what end their orders were instituted; for the holy men their law-givers desired them to be poor and free of all kind of temporal possessions, that they should not have anything which they might fear to lose on account of saying the truth. But now they are envious of possessors, approve the crimes of the great, induce the commonalty into error, and praise the sins of both; and with the intent of acquiring possessions, they who had renounced possessions, with the intent of gathering money, they who had sworn to persevere in poverty, call good evil and evil good, leading astray princes by adulation, the people by lies, and drawing both with themselves out of the straight path.” Walsingham adds that a familiar proverb in his time was, “He is a friar, therefore a liar.”416
58. SPRINKLING DINERS WITH HOLY WATER.
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
The sanctity of the institution and the unworthiness of many of its members caused it to be at once venerated and detested; however contemptible be the man, what if, after all, the keys of heaven were in his hand? Respect mingled with fear in the feeling for him. Thus poets laughed at the friars, popular story-tellers scouted them; distrust, doubt, contempt spread, extending from the lowly friar to the reverend bishop himself; churchmen were caricatured on the very stalls upon which they sat; Master Reynard was represented delivering a sermon while wearing episcopal insignia, and neither the miniaturist, charged with illuminating an imposing volume of Decretals, nor those who had entrusted him with the work, found anything improper in his satirising on the margin the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy, from bishops to monks or clerks. One of the latter is shown forgetting in the kitchen his sprinkler and bucket of holy water; then remembering what he has come for and going to sprinkle the masters at table, then returning to the kitchen maid.417 In the same ironical spirit the author of a popular song of the fourteenth century wrote:
“Preste ne monke ne yit chanoun,
Ne no man of religioun,
Gyfen hem so to devocioun
As done thes holy frers.
For summe gyven ham to chyvalry,
Somme to riote and ribaudery;
Bot ffrers gyven ham to grete study,
And to grete prayers.”
Several stanzas follow which cannot be quoted.418
The people, therefore, fitfully saw in the friars their protectors and allies in case of revolt, while at other times they pursued them in the streets with stones, struck them and lacerated their garments: angels or else devils? they were not sure. “At the same time the preaching friars took to flight because they feared to be maltreated and ruined, because the commonalty bore with them very reluctantly, on account of their proud behaviour, for they did not behave as friars ought.”419
“Know ye,” says the king, “that we have understood, that some persons of our kingdom of England, by the instigation of the evil spirit,... do and daily strive to do harm and scandal to our beloved in Christ, the religious men, friars of the order of minors,... openly and secretly stirring up our people against them to destroy the houses of the said friars, tearing their habits from them, striking some, and ill-treating them, against our peace.”420
From another point of view, that of public safety, the Commons were indignant at the number of foreigners among the friars, whom they considered a permanent danger to the State. They requested “that all the alien friars, of whatever habit they might be, should void the realm before the Feast of St. Michael, and if they remained beyond the said feast they should be held as out of the common law,” that is, outlawed.421
The friars kept their assurance, they were blessed in the days of their good deeds; now they speak loud and make themselves feared; to the Pope alone they are amenable; they carry their heads high, their power is independent, they have become a church within the Church. Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere; his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. He lays down his staff and wallet and begins to talk; his language is that of the people, the whole parish is present; he busies himself with their eternal welfare, and also with their earthly interests, for lay life is familiar to him, and he can give appropriate advice. But his teaching is sometimes suspicious. “These false prophets,” says not Wyclif, but the Council of Saltzburg in 1386, “by their sermons full of fables often lead astray the souls of their hearers”; they make game of the authority of the parish priests.422
To stop their progress proved impossible. The tide rose and swept away the embankments; the excellent had become the worst, corruptio optimi pessima, and the old adage was verified to the letter. In spite of grievances, protests, derisive songs and stories, they were met everywhere, in the hut and in the castle, begging from the rich and knocking also at the door of the poor. They sat at the board of the noble, who treated them with consideration; with him they played the part of the fashionable man of religion; they interested, they pleased. Wyclif shows them creeping into familiarity with the great, liking “to speke bifore lordis and sitte at tho mete with hom,... also to be confessoures of lordis and ladyes.”423 Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” is equally severe on “frere Flaterere.” In a Wyclifite treatise of the same period we read, “Thei geten hem worldly offis in lordis courtis, and summe to ben conseilours and reuleris of werris, and also to ben chamberleyns to lordes and ladies.”424
Courting popularity among all people, they were different men and acted differently in the villages where they made their rounds; to their wallet they added store of thread, needles, ointments, with which they traded:
“Thei becomen pedleris, berynge knyves, pursis, pynnys and girdlis and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris for wymmen, and therto smale gentil hondis (dogs), to gete love of hem.”425
They were more and more the subject of song and cause of mirth, but they did not mind, being the better advertised thereby:
“Thai wandren here and there,
And dele with dyvers marcerye,
Right as thai pedlers were.
Thai dele with purses, pynnes, and knyves,
With gyrdles, gloves, for whenches and wyves.”426
The anonymous author, a contemporary of Chaucer, adds:
“I was a frere ful many a day,
Therefor the sothe I wate (know).
But when I sawe that thair lyvyng
Acordyd not to thair preching,
Of I cast my frer clothing,
And wyghtly went my gate” (my way).427
Between the scepticism of the century and blind credulity, superstition flourished. The friars pretended they could sell the merits of their order at retail. They were so numerous and prayed so devoutly, that they had a surplus of piyers in store. Why not distribute this superfluous wealth to men of faith and good will? They did so, for cash of course; it was an exchange of wealth; like will to like. The friars went about the country discounting these invisible riches, and selling to pious souls, under the name of letters of fraternity, drafts upon heaven. What is the use of these parchments? they were asked. They give a share in the merits of the whole order of St. Francis.—What are they good for? Wyclif was asked. “Bi siche resouns thinken many men that thes lettris mai do good for to covere mostard pottis.”428
Discredited as they were at the end of the century, the friars had not, however, lost all hold over the people. Henry IV usurped the throne, and soon found that he must reckon with the friars. A good many among them were indignant at his enterprise, and some preached here and there, during the first years of his reign, that Richard II was still living and was the true king, and this was one more case, and a very important one, of political ideas vulgarised by wayfarers throughout the country. Henry IV sent them to gaol. One who was brought before him reproached him violently for the deposition of Richard: “But I have not usurped the crown, I have been elected,” said the king.—“The election is null if the legitimate king is living; if he is dead he is dead by thy means; if he was killed by thee, thou canst have any title to the throne.”—“By my head,” cried the prince, “I will have thine cut off!”
The accused were advised to throw themselves on the king’s mercy; they refused, and requested to be regularly tried by a jury. Neither in the city nor in Holborn could any one be found to sit on that jury; inhabitants of Highgate and Islington had to be fetched for the purpose. These men declared the friars guilty; the poor wretches were drawn to Tyburn, hanged, then beheaded, and their heads were placed on London Bridge (1402). The convent was permitted to gather their remains, and bury them in holy ground. The Islington and Highgate jurors came weeping to the Franciscans to implore their pardon for a verdict of which they repented.
For several years, in spite of these punishments, friars continued to preach about the country in favour of Richard II, maintaining that he still lived, although Henry IV had taken care to have a public exhibition in London of the corpse of his assassinated predecessor.429
In the fifteenth century the reputation of the friars only grew worse. The abuses of which they were the living personification were among those which best served to draw later adherents to Luther. If there remained in their ranks men who knew how to die, like that unfortunate friar Forest, who was hung alive by chains above a wood fire and slowly roasted, while Bishop Latimer, himself to be burnt later, addressed the dying man “with pious exhortations” to repentance,430 the mass of them remained the object of universal contempt. This was one of the few points on which it sometimes happened that Catholics and Protestants agreed. Sir Thomas More, beheaded for the Catholic faith, spoke of the friars in the same strain as his adversary Tyndal, strangled for the Protestant faith. In his eyes they were but dangerous vagabonds. He relates, in his “Utopia,” the dispute between a friar and a fool, on the question of pauperism. “‘You will never,’ said the friar, ‘get rid of beggars, unless you also make an edict against us friars.’ ‘Well,’ said the fool, ‘it is already made, the cardinal passed a very good law against you when he decreed that all vagabonds should be seized and made to work, for you are the greatest vagabonds that can be.’ When this was said, and all eyes being turned on the cardinal, they saw he did not disown it; every one, not unwillingly, began to smile, except the friar.”431
A class, as historians have observed, which no longer justifies its privileges by its services, is in imminent danger; if it reforms in time, it may be saved; if it does not, it is doomed. In England, the friars were doomed. But nothing is ever entirely lost, and while, for centuries, Chaucer’s merriment made people merry at the expense of the begging orders, it is only fair, before parting with them, to recall such an unprejudiced testimony as that of Bacon, in his essay “Of Love”: “There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
Chapter II The Pardoners
“Indulgence” was at first simply a commutation of penance. The punishments inflicted for sins were of long duration; fasting and mortification had to be carried on for months and years. The faithful were permitted to transform these interminable chastisements into shorter expiation. Thus a clerk might exchange a year of penance against three hundred lashes, reciting a psalm at each hundred.432 Tables of such exchanges were drawn up by competent prelates. The learned and autocratic Theodore, born at Tarsus, Cilicia, an encyclopædic mind and a strong disciplinarian, archbishop of Canterbury from 669 to 690, who left on the British church a permanent mark, had published a tariff allowing people to be excused of a month’s penance on bread and water if they sang instead twelve hundred psalms with bended knees; for a year’s penance the singing was increased, and each course of psalter singing was accompanied with three hundred strokes in the palm of the hand (palmatæ). But it was possible to compensate a year’s penance and escape at the same time the psalms, fasts and strokes by paying a hundred shillings in alms.433 In another such table, drawn up in the ninth century by Halitgarius, bishop of Cambrai, is found this additional facility, that if the sinner, sentenced to a month’s penance on bread and water, chooses rather the singing of psalms he may be allowed not to kneel while he sings, but then instead of twelve hundred he will have to sing fifteen hundred and eighty psalms. He may in the same manner be excused of more than one month, up to twelve, in which last case, if he chooses not to kneel, he will have to sing no less than twenty thousand one hundred and sixty psalms.434
Laymen, who had their choice, frequently preferred a payment in money, the rich having to pay more than the poor, and the sums thus obtained were usually well employed. We have seen them serve for the support of roads and bridges; they were also applied in reconstructing churches, in helping the sick of a hospital, and in covering the expenses of numerous public enterprises. The entirety of punishments was taken off by a plenary indulgence; thus the French pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, granted one to all those who, through pure devotion and not to acquire booty or glory, should go to Jerusalem to fight the infidel; and this was the first crusade.
Little by little the idea of an actual commutation vanished, and was replaced by a different system, known as the theory of the “Treasury.” It had indeed become obvious as the use of indulgences spread, and they were more and more easily gained, that they could no longer be justified as offering to the sinner only his choice between several sorts of even penances. They were something else. A short, well selected prayer, a small gift in money, would now exempt devout people from the greatest penalties and from numberless years of a possible purgatory; the one could scarcely be considered as the equivalent of the other; how was the equilibrium established between the two scales? The answer was that the deficiency was made up by the application to the sinner of merits, not indeed his own, but of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, of which there was an inexhaustible “treasury,” the dispensation of which rested with the Pope and the clergy.
This theory was acted upon long before being put forth in express words; it does not appear to have been more than vaguely alluded to before the fourteenth century, when Pope Clement VI, the “Doctor Doctorum,” gave a perfectly clear definition and exposition of the “treasury” system. In a bull of the year 1350, he explains that the merits of Christ are infinite, and those of the Virgin and the saints, superabundant. This excess of unemployed merit has been constituted into a treasury, “not one that is deposited in a strong room, or concealed in a field, but which is to be usefully distributed to the faithful, through the blessed Peter, keeper of heaven’s gate, and his successors.” However largely employed, there ought to be “no fear of an absorption or a diminution of this treasury, first on account of the infinite merits of Christ, as has been said before, then because the more numerous are the people reclaimed through the use of its contents, the more it is augmented by the addition of their merits.”435 The treasury had therefore no chance of ever being found empty, since the more was drawn from it the more it grew. Such is in all its simplicity the theory of the “treasury,” which has ever since been maintained, with no change in the theory but much in the practice.
With so much to distribute among the faithful, the Church had recourse, for insuring its repartition, to certain people who went about, supplied with official letters, and who offered to good Christians a particle of the heavenly wealth placed at the disposal of the successors of Peter. They expected in return some portion of the earthly riches their hearers might be possessed of, and which could be applied to more tangible uses than the “treasury.” The men entrusted with this mission were called sometimes questors, on account of what they asked, and sometimes pardoners, on account of what they gave.436
Many a man lives in our remembrance owing to his portrait. If his image had not been preserved by an artist of genius his memory would have been abolished. Who would remember, but for her tomb at Lucca, lovely Ilaria del Carretto? Many among us would not suspect that the long vanished pardoner ever existed if the master-painter, Chaucer, had not drawn, from life, his unlovely portrait. “Lordyngs,” says the one in the “Canterbury Tales”:
“Lordyngs, quod he, in chirches whan I preche,
I peyne me to have an hauteyn speche,
And ryng it out, as lowd as doth a belle,
For I can al by rote which that I telle.
My teeme is alway oon, and ever was;
Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”
In the pulpit he leans to the right, to the left, he gesticulates, wanders in his talk; his arms move as much as his tongue; it is a wonder to see and hear him:
“I stonde lik a clerk in my pulpit,
And whan the lewed people is doun i-set,
I preche so as ye have herd before,
And telle hem an hondred japes more.
Than peyne I me to strecche forth my necke
And est and west upon the people I bekke,
As doth a dowfe (pigeon), syttyng on a berne;
Myn hondes and my tonge goon so yerne,
That it is joye to se my businesse.
I preche no thyng but of coveityse.
Therefor my teem is yit, and ever was,
Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”
The description may seem to-day improbable and exaggerated, but it is not. A verifying from authentic sources and a search for documents only shows once more Chaucer’s marvellous exactness; not a trait in his picture that may not be justified by letters from papal or episcopal chanceries.
These quæstores, or quæstiarii, as they were officially called, were, says Boniface IX, speaking at the very time that the poet wrote his tales, sometimes secular clerics and sometimes friars, most of them extremely impudent. They dispensed with ecclesiastic licences, and went from place to place delivering speeches, showing their relics and selling their pardons. It was a lucrative trade and the competition was great; the success of authorized pardoners had caused a crowd of self-appointed ones to issue from the school or the priory, or from mere nothingness, greedy, with glittering eyes, as in the “Canterbury Tales”: “suche glaryng eyghen hadde he as an hare”; true vagabonds, infesters of the highroads, who having, as they thought, nothing to fear, boldly carried on their impostor’s traffic. They overawed their listeners, spoke loud, and unbound upon earth without scruple all that might be bound in heaven. Much profit arose therefrom; Chaucer’s pardoner got a hundred marks a year, which was easy enough for him, since, having received no authority from any one, to no one did he render any accounts, but kept all the gains for himself. In his measured language the Pope tells us as much as the poet, and it seems as though he would duplicate, line by line, the portrait drawn by the story-teller, his contemporary.
First, says the pontifical letter, these pardoners swear that they were sent by the Court of Rome. “Certain religious, who even belong to one or the other of the mendicant orders, and some secular clerks, even endowed with privileged benefices, affirm that they are sent by us or by the legates or the nuncios of the apostolic see, and that they have received a mission to treat of certain affairs,... to receive money for us and the Roman Church, and they go about the country under these pretexts.”
From Rome also comes Chaucer’s personage; he moves about the country, and in exchange for his pardons tirelessly asks for goods and money, which certainly will not go to Rome:
“a gentil pardoner...
That streyt was comen from the court of Rome...
His walet lay byforn him in his lappe,
Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.”
“What! trowe ye, whiles that I may preche
And wynne gold and silver for I teche,
That I wil lyve in povert wilfully?
For I wol preche and begge in sondry londes,
I wil not do no labour with myn hondes...
I wol noon of thapostles counterfete,
I wol have money, wolle, chese, and whete.”
“Thus,” continues the Pope, “they proclaim to the faithful and simple people (“the lewed people,” says Chaucer’s man) the real or pretended authorizations which they have received; and irreverently abusing those which are real, in pursuit of infamous and hateful gain, they carry further their impudence by mendaciously attributing to themselves false and pretended authorizations of this kind.”
What does the poet say? That the charlatan has ever fine things to show, that he knows how to dazzle the simple, that he has his bag full of parchments with awe-inspiring seals, maybe genuine, maybe not;437 that the people look on and admire, and the parson gets angry but holds his tongue:
“First I pronounce whennes that I come,
And thanne my bulles schewe I alle and some;
Oure liege lordes seal upon my patent
That schewe I first, my body to warent,
That no man be so hardy, prest ne clerk,
Me to destourbe of Cristes holy werk.
And after that than tel I forth my tales.
Bulles of popes and of cardynales,
Of patriarkes, and of bisshops, I schewe,
And in Latyn speke I wordes fewe
To savore with my predicacioun,
And for to stere men to devocioun.”
As for that “turpem et infamem quæstum” branded by the Pontiff, it is the ever-recurring burden of the unholy discourse:
“Now good men, God foryeve yow your trespas,
And ware yow fro the synne of avarice.
Myn holy pardoun may you alle warice (redeem),
So that ye offren noblis or starlinges,
Or elles silver spones, broches, or rynges.
Bowith your hedes under this holy bulle.”
60. READING IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL OF A FABRICATED PAPAL BULL, A.D. 1399.
(From the MS. Harl. 1319.)
The effect of solemn parchments and large seals displayed from the pulpit rarely failed upon the crowd, and in some circumstances of more importance than the retail selling of the merits of saints in heaven, recourse was had to such exhibitions. When Henry of Lancaster came to turn his cousin Richard II out of the English throne, the first thing he did, according to Créton, was to have a pretended papal bull, granting a plenary indulgence, read from the pulpit of Canterbury cathedral and commented by Archbishop Arundel (whose brother, the earl, King Richard had caused to be summarily executed). As Créton was not present when this scene, which he describes only on hearsay, took place, the speech he gives is the more interesting, for it may be considered an average speech, such a one as was usual and likely to have been pronounced on the occasion.
“My good people,” the Archbishop is supposed to have said, “hearken all of you here: you well know how the king most wrongfully and without reason has banished your lord Henry; I have therefore obtained of the holy father who is our patron, that those who shall forthwith bring aid this day, shall every one of them have remission of all sins whereby from the hour of their baptism they have been defiled. Behold the sealed bull that the Pope of renowned Rome hath sent me, my good friends, in behalf of you all. Agree then to help him to subdue his enemies, and you shall for this be placed after death with those who are in Paradise.”
“Then,” continues the narrator, describing the effect of the speech, “might you have beheld young and old, the feeble and the strong, make a clamour, and regarding neither right or wrong, stir themselves up with one accord, thinking that what was told them was true, for such as they have little sense or knowledge. The archbishop invented this device...”438
The burst of eloquence of Chaucer’s pardoner is a caricature, but not an unrecognizable one, of the grave discourses of this sort.
The Pope has still more to say: “For some insignificant sum of money, they extend the veil of a lying absolution not over penitents, but over men of a hardened conscience who persist in their iniquity, remitting, to use their own words, horrible crimes without there having been any contrition nor fulfilment of any of the prescribed forms.” It almost seems as if the Pope himself had listened in disguise, on the road to Canterbury, to Chaucer’s man saying:
“I yow assoile by myn heyh power,
If ye woln offre, as clene and eek as cler
As ye were born.
I rede that oure hoste schal bygynne,
For he is most envoliped in synne.
Come forth, sire ost, and offer first anoon,
And thou schalt kisse the reliquis everichoon,
Ye for a grote; unbocle anone thi purse.”439
Boccaccio, in one of the tales which he represents himself as telling under the name of Dioneo, pictures, he too, an ecclesiastic of great resemblance, moral and physical, to Chaucer’s man. He was called Frà Cipolla, and was accustomed to visit Certaldo, Boccaccio’s village on the hill top, still very much now as it was then, with the writer’s house conspicuous in the main street. “This Frà Cipolla was little of person, red-haired (Chaucer’s pardoner had “heer as yelwe as wex”) and merry of countenance, the jolliest rascal in the world, and to boot, for all he was no scholar, he was so fine a talker and so ready of wit that those who knew him not would not only have esteemed him a great rhetorician, but had avouched him to be Tully himself, or maybe, Quintilian; and he was gossip, or friend, or well-wisher, to well-nigh every one in the country.” If his hearers gave him a little money or corn or anything, he would show them the most wonderful relics; and besides they would enjoy the special protection of the patron saint of his order, St. Anthony: “Gentlemen and ladies, it is, as you know, your usance to send every year to the poor of our lord Baron St. Anthony of your corn and of your oats, this little and that much, according to his means and his devoutness, to the intent that the blessed St. Anthony may keep watch over your beeves and asses and swine and sheep; and, beside this, you use to pay, especially such of you as are inscribed into our company, that small due which is payable once a year.”440
Such people had few scruples and knew how to profit by those of others. They released their customers from all possible vows, and remitted any penance, for money; they were a living encouragement to sin, making it so easy to atone for. The more prohibitions, obstacles, or penances were imposed, the more their affairs prospered; they passed their lives undoing what the real clergy did, the richer for it, and the clergy the poorer. The Pope again tells us: “For a small compensation they remit vows of chastity, of abstinence, of pilgrimage beyond the sea to Sts. Peter and Paul of Rome, or to St. James of Compostela, and any other vows.” They allow heretics to re-enter the bosom of the Church, illegitimate children to receive the sacred orders, they remove excommunications and interdicts; in short, as their power comes from themselves alone, they see no reason to restrain it and they use it to the full and without stint. Lastly, they affirm that “it is in the name of the apostolic chamber that they take all this money, and yet they are never known to give an account of it to any one: ‘Horret et merito indignatur animus talia reminisci.’”441
They went yet further; they had formed regular associations for systematically speculating on public credulity; thus Boniface IX orders in 1390, that bishops should make an inquiry into everything that concerns these “religious or secular clerics, their people, their accomplices, and their associations”; that they should imprison them without other form of law, “de plano ac sine strepitu et figura judicii”; should make them render accounts, confiscate their receipts, and if their papers be not in order hold them under good keeping, and refer the matter to the sovereign pontiff.
There were indeed authorized pardoners who paid the produce of their receipts into the treasury of the Roman Court. The learned Richard d’Angerville, otherwise de Bury, Bishop of Durham, called by Petrarch, whom he had met at Avignon in 1330, “vir ardentis ingenii,” speaks, in a circular of December 8, 1340, of apostolic or diocesan letters, subject to a rigorous visa, with which the regular pardoners had to be furnished.442 But many did without them, and the bishop notices one by one the same abuses as the Pope and as Chaucer. “Strong complaints have come to our ears that the questors of this kind, not without great and rash boldness, of their own authority, and to the great danger of the souls who are confided to us, openly setting at nought our jurisdiction, distribute indulgences to the people, dispense with the execution of vows, absolve the perjured, homicides, usurers, and other sinners who confess to them; and, for a little money paid, grant remission for ill-atoned crimes, and are given to a multitude of other abuses.” Henceforward all curates, vicars and chaplains must refuse to admit these pardoners to preach or to bestow indulgences, whether in the churches or anywhere else, “if they be not provided with letters or a special licence” from the bishop himself. And this was a most proper injunction, for with these bulls brought from far-off lands, adorned with unknown seals “of popes and of cardynales, of patriarkes and of bisshops,” it was easy to make people believe that all was in order. Meanwhile let all those who are now wandering round the country be stripped of what they have taken, and let “the money and any other articles collected by them or on their behalf,” be seized: the common people not being always possessed of actual cash, Chaucer’s pardoner contented himself with “silver spones, broches, or rynges.” One more allusion is to be noticed in this text to those associations of pardoners which must have been so harmful.
They employed, in fact, inferior agents; the general credulity and the widespread wish to get rid of religious trammels which men had imposed on themselves, in the shape of vows or otherwise, or which had been imposed on them on account of their sins, were a mine for the perverse band, the veins of which they carefully worked. By means of these subordinate representatives of their fanciful power, they easily extended the field of their operations, and the complicated threads of their webs covered the whole kingdom, sometimes too strong to be broken, sometimes too fine to be perceived.
Occasionally, too, the bad example came from very high quarters; all had not the Bishop of Durham’s virtue. Walsingham relates with indignation the behaviour of a cardinal who made a stay in England when the marriage between Richard II and the emperor’s sister, Anne of Bohemia, was being negotiated. For money this prelate, just like the common pardoners, removed excommunications, dispensed people of pilgrimages to St. Peter, St. James, or Jerusalem, and had the sum that would have been spent on the journey duly computed and given to him;443 and it is much to be regretted from every point of view that the curious tariff of the expenses of a journey thus estimated has not come down to us.
The list of the misdeeds of pardoners was in truth enormous, and it is found even larger on exploring the authentic ecclesiastical documents than in the work of Chaucer himself. Thus in a bull of Pope Urban V, dated 1369, mention is made of practices apparently untried by the otherwise experienced “gentil pardoner of Rouncival.” These doings were customary with those employed by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem in England. Helped by the connivance of the “very priors” of the order, they pretended to be “privileged” and exempted from the formality of showing apostolic letters before they were allowed to proceed with their preachings and to offer to the people their “negotia quæstuaria.” The parish rectors and curates naturally enough objected to such pretensions, but their complaints were ill received, and the pardoners, to get rid of them, sued them before some distant authority for contempt of their cloth and privileges. While the suit was being determined they remained free to act as they liked. Sometimes they were so lucky as to secure sentence against the priest who had tried to do his duty, and even succeeded in having him excommunicated: which could of course but be a cause of great merriment among the unholy tribe.
“Very often, also,” adds Pope Urban, “when they mean to hurt a rector or his curate, they go to his church on some feast-day, especially at such time as the people are accustomed to come and make their offerings. They begin then to make their own collections or to read the name of their brotherhood or fraternity, and continue until such an hour as it is not possible to celebrate mass conveniently that day. Thus they manage perversely to deprive these rectors and vicars of the offerings which accrue to them at such masses.” They have, on the other hand, Divine service performed “in polluted or interdicted places, and there also bury the dead; they use, as helps to their trade, simple and almost illiterate subordinates, who spread errors and fables among people as ignorant as themselves.”
Such abuses and many others, constantly pointed out by councils, popes, and bishops, moved the University of Oxford to recommend, in the year 1414, the entire suppression of pardoners, as being men of loose life and lying speeches, spending their profits “with the prodigal son,” remitting to sinners their sins as well as their penances, encouraging vice by the ease of their absolutions, and drawing the souls of uneducated people “to Tartarus.” But this request was not listened to, and pardoners continued to prosper for the moment.444
At the same time that they sold indulgences, the pardoners showed relics. They had been on pilgrimage and had brought back pieces of bone and fragments of all kinds, of holy origin, they said. But although the credulous were not lacking among the multitude, the disabused among the better sort were numerous and they scoffed without mercy. The pardoners of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and in the sixteenth century of Heywood and Lyndsay,445 exhibited the most unexpected trophies. The Chaucerian one, who possessed a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat is surpassed by Frate Cipolla, who had brought back much better from Jerusalem. “I will, as an especial favour, show you,” said he, “a very holy and goodly relic, which I myself brought aforetime from the Holy Lands beyond seas, and that is one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber, whenas he came to announce to her in Nazareth!”446 The feather, which was from the tail of a parrot, through some joke played upon him was replaced in the holy man’s box by a few coals; when he perceived the metamorphosis he showed no embarrassment, but began the narrative of his long voyages, and explained how, instead of the feather, the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled would be seen in his coffer. He had received them from “My Lord Blamemenot Anitpleaseyou,” the worthy patriarch of Jerusalem, who also showed him “a finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and sound as ever it was,... and one of the nails of the cherubim,... divers rays of the star that appeared to the three Wise Men in the East, and a vial of the sweat of St. Michael whenas he fought with the devil”; he possessed also “somewhat of the sound of the bells of Solomon’s Temple in a vial.”
Poets’ jests; but less exaggerated than might be thought. Was there not shown to the pilgrims at Exeter a bit “of the candle which the angel of the Lord lit in Christ’s tomb”? This was one of the relics brought together in the venerable cathedral by Athelstan, “the most glorious and victorious king,” who had sent emissaries at great expense on to the Continent to gather these precious spoils. The list of their treasure-troves, which has been preserved in a missal of the eleventh century, comprises also a little of “the bush in which the Lord spoke to Moses,” and a lot of other curiosities.447 Some of the Virgin’s milk was, as all know, venerated at Walsingham and in various other places.
Matthew Paris relates that, in his time, the friar preachers gave to Henry III a piece of white marble on which there was the trace of a human foot; nothing less, according to the testimony of the inhabitants of the Holy Land, than the mark of one of the Saviour’s feet, left by Him as a souvenir to His apostles after His Ascension. “Our lord the king had this marble placed in the church of Westminster, to which he had already lately offered some of the blood of Christ.”448
In the fourteenth century kings continued to set the example to the common people, and to collect relics of undemonstrable authenticity. In the accounts of the expenses of Edward III, in the thirty-sixth year of his reign, a hundred shillings are put down for a messenger who had brought him a vest of St. Peter’s.449 In France, at the same period, King Charles V “le sage” had one day the curiosity to visit the cupboard at the Sainte Chapelle, where the relics of the passion were kept. He found there a phial with a Latin and Greek inscription indicating that it contained some of the blood of Jesus Christ. “Then,” relates Christine de Pisan, “that wise king, because some doctors have said that, on the day that our Lord rose, nothing was left on earth of His worthy body that was not all returned into Him, would hereupon know and inquire by learned men, natural philosophers, and theologians, whether it could be true that upon earth there were some of the real pure blood of Jesus Christ. Examination was made by the said learned men assembled about this matter; the said phial was seen and visited with great reverence and solemnity of lights, in which when it was hung or lowered could be clearly seen the fluid of the red blood flow as freshly as though it had been shed but three or four days since: which thing is no small marvel, considering the passion was so long ago. And these things I know for certain by the relation of my father who was present at that examination, as philosophic officer and counsellor of the said prince.”
After this examination made by great “solemnity of lights,” the doctors declared themselves for the authenticity of the miracle;450 which was not in reality more surprising than that at the cathedral at Naples, where the blood of the patron saint of the town may still be seen to liquify several times a year, and for several days each time.
In every country of Europe the pardoners enjoyed, not to say endured, the same reputation and acted in the same manner. Be it France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, they were found living, so long as there remained any, as Chaucer’s pardoner did. In France, Rabelais has the cheaters cheated by his beloved Panurge. The clever vaurien used to place his penny in their plate so skilfully that it seemed to be a silver piece: for which he made bold to take change, leaving only a farthing. “‘And I did the same,’ said he, ‘in all the churches where we have been.’—‘Yea, but,’ said I, ’you... are a thief, and commit sacrilege.’—‘True,’ said he, ’as it seems to you; but it does not seem so to me. For the pardoners give it me as a gift when they say, in offering me the relics to kiss: Centuplum accipies—that is, that for one penny I take a hundred; for accipies is spoken by them according to the manner of the Hebrews, who use the future tense instead of the imperative, as you have in the book, Diliges Dominum, id est, dilige.’”451
Pardoners, of course, never appear on the boards of the old French theatre, but to be derided:
“Pardoner: I mean to show you the comb of the cock that crowed at Pilate’s, and half a plank of Noah’s great ark.... Look, gentlemen, here is a feather of one of the seraphs near God. Don’t think it is a joke; here it is for you to see.
“Triacleur: Gogsblood! ’tis the quill from a goose he has eaten at his dinner!” and so on.452
The same in Spain. Lazarillo de Tormes, the page of many masters, happens, at one time, to be in the service of a pardoner: the very same individual Chaucer had described two hundred years before. He, too, knows how to use Latin when profitable: “Hee woulde alwayes bee informed before he came, which were learned and which not. When he came to those which he understood were learned, he woulde be sure never to speake worde of Latin, for feare of stumbling: but used in suche places a gentle kind of Castilian Spanish, his tong alwayes at libertie. And contrariwise whensoever hee was informed of the reverend Domines (I meane such as are made priestes more for money than for learning and good behaviour), to hear him speake amongs suche men you would saye it were St. Thomas: for hee woulde then two houres together talke Latin, at lest which seemed to bee, though it was not.”453 A trick which, as is well known, Sganarelle, many years after, did not disdain to use when put upon his last shifts as the “Médecin malgré lui.”
Pardoners lived merrily; certain it is that after a busy day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins they had pardoned, of excommunications they had removed, of penalties they had remitted—themselves mere vagabonds threatened with the jail or gallows—the knowledge of their impunity, the strangeness of their existence, the triumphant success of the mad harangues in which they attributed to themselves the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell with uncontrollable merriment. Their heads were filled with anecdotes, sacred or profane; native coarseness and assumed devotion, the real and the artificial man, jostled each other to the sound of jugs and vessels clattering on the table. See in the margin of an old psalter the lean figure of Master Reynard454: a crozier between his paws, a mitre on his head, he is preaching a sermon to the wondering crowd of ducks and geese of the poultry yard. The gesture is full of unction, but the eye shaded by the tawny hair has a cruel glitter, which ought to give warning of the peroration. But no, the poultry yard clucks devoutly and fears nothing; woe to the ducks when the mitre has fallen: “And Thou, Lord, shalt laugh at them,” says the psalmist on the same page.
A singular knowledge of the human heart those individuals must have had, going through such strange experiences day by day. Never were more unworthy beings supposedly clothed with greater supernatural powers. The deformed monster squatting on the apse of the cathedral laughs and grimaces hideously on his airy pedestal. And up to the clouds rise the fretted spires; the chiselled pinnacles detach themselves like lace upon the sky; the saints pray their eternal prayer under the porch; the bells send forth their peals into space, and souls are seized with a thrill, with that mysterious awe caused by the sublime. The monster laughs; hearts believe themselves purified, but he has seen their ugly sores, a sinister hand will touch them and prevent their cure; the edge of the roof reaches the clouds; but his look goes through the dormer window, he detects a cracking beam, worm-eaten boards giving way, and a host of obscure creatures slowly pursuing under the wooden shafts their secular labour of destruction: he laughs and grimaces hideously.
On the tavern bench the pardoner is still seated. There come Chaucer, the knight, the squire, the friar, the host—old acquaintances. We are by ourselves, no one need be afraid to speak, the foaming ale renders hearts expansive; and the unseen coils of that tortuous soul unfold to view, he gives the summary of a whole life, the theory of his existence, the key to his secrets. What matters his frankness? he knows that it cannot hurt him; time and again has the bishop brought his practices to light, but the crowd always troops around him. And who knows if his companions—who knows if his more enlightened companions, to whom he shows the concealed springs of the automaton—will, to-morrow, believe it lifeless? their memory, their reason will tell them so, yet still their heart will doubt. If custom is the half of belief, theirs is well-rooted; how much more that of the multitude! And the pardoner himself, do you suppose that he always sees clearly what he is, do you think that his scepticism is absolute? he for whom nothing is holy, whose very existence is a perpetual mockery of sacred things, he also has his hours of doubt and terror, he trembles before that formidable power which he said he held in his hands, and of which he has made a toy; he does not possess it, but others may, and he stands aghast; the monster looks upon himself and is afraid.
Very easy it was to lead the popular belief into the channel of the marvellous. Decrees had been deemed necessary to prevent the conjuring up of spectres or ghosts in those long watches passed with the dead; disobedience was attempted, people believed they succeeded. In presence of the horrible a strange reaction of the heart would take place, a wind of madness passed predisposing men to see and believe anything, a nervous and demoniacal merriment seized upon all, and dances and lascivious games were started. Dancing went on in the cemeteries during the solemn vigils of religious feasts, there was dancing also during the watch for the dead. The Council of London, in 1342, prohibited “the superstitious customs which cause prayer to be neglected, and unlawful and indecent meetings” held in such places.455 The Council of York, in 1367, also forbade “those guilty games and follies, and all those perverse customs... which transform a house of tears and prayers, into a house of laughing and excess.” The palmers’ gild of Ludlow allowed its members to go to night-watches of the dead, provided that they abstained from raising apparitions and from indecent games.456 As to professional sorcerers, the belief in them was so profound that they were sent to the stake, as happened to Petronilla of Meath, convicted of having manufactured powders with “spiders and black worms like scorpions, mingling with them a certain herb called milfoil, and other detestable herbs and worms.”457 She had also made such incantations that “the faces of certain women seemed horned like the heads of goats”; therefore she had her due punishment and “was burnt before an immense multitude of people with all the accustomed ceremonial.” Such facts explain the existence of the pardoner.
Let us add that the search for the philosopher’s stone was the constant occupation of many renowned doctors; every one had not that clear good sense, good humour and penetrating spirit which permitted Chaucer to smilingly unravel before us the mysteries of the alchemist, shaking the alembics and retorts, and in the odd-shaped apparatus which frightened the imagination, showing not the newly created ingot of pure metal, but the mixture prepared beforehand by the impostor.458 Not a plant or a stone without supernatural virtues; the vain beliefs inherited from the ancients had been rejuvenated and expanded. People thirsted for such pretended learning. Gower thinks he does well to insert in a love poem all he believes he knows on the constitution of the world and the virtues of things;459 even with professionally learned men the mass of fabulous statements fills volumes. Bartholomew the Englishman, whose work is an encyclopædia of scientific knowledge in the thirteenth century, is positive that the diamond destroys the effect of venom and of magic incantations, and that it reveals its wearer’s fear; that the topaz prevents sudden death, etc.460
A pleasure it is, and like a whiff of fresh air when emerging from a damp cellar, to remember that in an age not totally exempt from these weaknesses no one condemned them with more eloquence than our Molière: “Without speaking of other things,” said he, “I have never been able to conceive how even the smallest peculiarities of the fortune of the least man could be found written in the skies. What relation, what intercourse, what correspondence can there be between us and worlds separated from our earth by so frightful a distance? and whence can this fine science have come to men? What god has revealed it? or what experience can have shaped it from the observation of that great number of stars which have not been seen twice in the same arrangement?”
61. A PARDONER (CHAUCER’S PARDONER).
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
Trouble and eloquence lost; there will always be a Timocles to observe with a wise air: “I am incredulous enough as to a great many things, but for astrology, there is nothing more certain and more constant than the success of the horoscopes which it draws.”461
So vanished into smoke the tempests which Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif raised against the hypocritical pardoners of their day. They lingered on till the sixteenth century, and then were entirely suppressed in the twenty-first session of the œcumenical council of Trent, July 16, 1562, Pius IV being Pope. It is stated in the ninth chapter of the “Decree of Reform,” published in that session, that since “no further hope can be entertained of amending the questors of alms” (eleemosynarum quæstores), otherwise pardoners, “the use of them and their name are entirely abolished henceforth in all Christendom:”462 the first of old-time wayfarers to entirely disappear.
62. A PILGRIMAGE TOWN, ROCAMADOUR, IN GUYENNE.
(Present state.)
Chapter III Pilgrims and Pilgrimages
I
In spite of the merits of physicians, soothsayers, and sorcerers, maladies sometimes resisted the best remedies, and the patient would then vow to go on a pilgrimage, ride, walk, or have himself carried there, and pray for his cure. He went to our Lady of Walsingham, for example, or to St. Thomas of Canterbury, whose medical powers were considered, beyond comparison, the best of all: “Optimus egrorum, medicus fit Thomas bonorum,” was the motto stamped on some of the pewter ampullæ, with miraculous water in them, which pilgrims brought back as a souvenir from Canterbury: “For good people that are sick, Thomas is the best of physicians.” And surely praying at his shrine, after an open-air journey on foot or horseback, was a better way of preserving one’s health than swallowing the black beetles and fat bats of John of Gaddesden, the court physician.
Pilgrimages were incessant; they were made to fulfil a vow as in cases of illness or of great peril, or in expiation of sins. Confessors frequently gave the going on a pilgrimage as penance, and sometimes ordered that the traveller should go barefoot or in his shirt. “Commune penaunce,” says Chaucer’s parson in his great sermon, speaking of atonement which must be public, “commune,” because the sin has been public too, “is that prestes enjoynen men comunly in certeyn caas, as for to goon, peradventure, naked in pilgrimage or barfot,” that is to say, naked in their shirts. In accordance with a vow made during a tempest, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, walked ten miles barefoot on the frozen ground, to White Kirk, near North Berwick, and had, on his return, “to be born, rather than led by his servants.”463
Another motive for pilgrimages, and, more than any other, characteristic of the times, was to annoy the king. Thus in the fourteenth century English people flocked to the tomb of the selfish, narrow-minded and vengeful Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, of whom popular prejudice had made a saint.464 The crowd hastened through a spirit of opposition to Pontefract, where the rebel had been decapitated, by order of his relative, King Edward II, and the pilgrims became every year more numerous, to the great scandal of the sovereign and of the Archbishop of York. A letter of this prelate shows the uselessness of the prohibitions: the idea of a semblance of persecution of believers devised by an archbishop only excited zeal and devotion; men hoped to please the martyr by allowing themselves to be slightly martyred. Thus, while awaiting a canonization that never came, though insisted upon by the next king, crowds collected near the tomb, so numerous and tumultuous that there happened “homicides and mortal wounds,... and that greater dangers yet and doubtless most imminent are to be feared.”465
All this began the very year after the execution of the “saint.” The official was enjoined to hinder these meetings by any means, and to disperse them until the Pope should pronounce. But the gatherings continued, and Henry of Lancaster wrote in 1327 to the Archbishop of York asking him to refer the matter to the Sovereign Pontiff, and “bear witness to the fame of the miracles which God works by our very dear lord and brother.”466 The same year the Commons took the question in hand and petitioned for the canonization of the same Thomas, which was scarcely parliamentary business.467 In 1338, a London pepperer had for sale a mazer bowl ornamented with an “image of St. Thomas of Lancester.”468 Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, who died in 1361, bequeathed money for pious men to make a variety of pilgrimages on his behalf, and he specially recommended that “a good man and true” should be hired and charged to go to “Pountfreyt and to offer there, at the tomb of Thomas, late earl of Lancaster, 40s.”469
To make a saint of a rebel was the most energetic means of protesting against the king, and the people would not miss this opportunity under some of their sovereigns. Henry III, in 1266, had been obliged to forbid Simon de Montfort being considered as a saint, although Simon having died under excommunication, as was represented to the king by the bishops and barons, authors of the petitions comprised in the “Dictum de Kenilworth,”470 had little chance of ever being canonized. Latin hymns were nevertheless composed in his honour, as for a saint.471
The rebel was hardly dead than popular feeling, often unfavourable to him during his life, forthwith recognized in him nothing else than the hero who had fought against a tyrant, and, through sympathy for the man, or antipathy for the king, assigned therefore to him a place in heaven. The active revolt, rudely interrupted by punishment, continued thus in the latent state, and every one came to see God Himself take the part of the oppressed, and proclaim the injustice of the ruler by working miracles at the tomb of his victim. The sovereign defended himself as he could; he dispersed the rabble and prohibited the miracles.
De par le Roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu,
read an ironical distich written in France in the “Diacre Paris” days. Similarly disposed, Edward II, on October 2, 1323, wrote “to his faithful John de Stonore and John de Bousser,” ordering an inquiry which would be followed by graver measures. He recalled to them that “a little time ago Henry de Montfort and Henry de Wylynton, our enemies and rebels, on the advice of the royal Court, were drawn and hanged at Bristol, and it had been decided that their bodies should remain attached to the gibbet, so that others might abstain from similar crimes and misdeeds against us.” But on the contrary, the people made relics of these bloody and mutilated remains, and surrounded them with respect. Reginald de Montfort, William de Clyf, William Curteys, and John his brother, and some others, in order to render the king odious to the people, had organized false miracles at the gibbet where the corpses of these rebels were still hanging, which was nothing short of “idolatry.”
Severe measures were required in several places at the same time; while these bodies were venerated at Bristol, a mere image of Thomas of Lancaster, in the Cathedral of London, was attracting pilgrims and working miracles. In this same year, 1323, on June 28th, Edward II is found writing with great irritation to the Bishop of London:
“It has come to our ears—and it is very displeasing to us—that many among the people of God, confided to your charge, victims of a diabolical trickery, crowd round a panel placed in your church of St. Paul’s, where are to be seen statues, sculptures, or images, and among others that of Thomas, late Earl of Lancaster, a rebel, our enemy. Silly visitors, without any authorization from the Roman Church, venerate and worship this image as a holy thing, and affirm that it there works miracles: this is a disgrace for the whole Church, a shame for us and for you, a manifest danger for the souls of the aforesaid people, and a dangerous example to others.”472
The bishop knows it, continues the king, and secretly encourages these practices without any other motive than that of profiting by the offerings, thus making “shameful gains.... By which,” adds Edward II, “we are deeply afflicted.” The usual prohibitions follow.473
These were occasional pilgrimages. Others were in favour for a much longer time owing to the reputation of the departed for sanctity, and not to political motives. For many years crowds came, as we have seen, to visit the tomb of Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole. Even in this, fashion ruled; some relics or tombs of hermits or of saints enjoyed for a period universal favour; then all of a sudden, through some great miracle, another saint rose to pre-eminence, and the others, by degrees, sank into obscurity.
Convents, which had neither relics nor bodies of illustrious saints to attract pilgrims, nor a marvellous thorn-tree like that of Glastonbury, would have sometimes a pious artist to fabricate an image fit to draw visitors; it would be inaugurated with solemnity, work miracles, it was hoped, and enjoy a more or less wide fame. Thomas of Burton, Abbot of Meaux, near Beverley, relates in the chronicle of his rich monastery, written by himself at the end of the fourteenth century, one of the most remarkable facts of this kind. Abbot Hugh of Leven, one of his predecessors, had in the first half of the century ordered a new crucifix for the choir of the chapel: “And the artist never worked at any fine and important part, except on Fridays, fasting on bread and water. And he had all the time a naked man under his eyes, and he laboured to give to his crucifix the beauty of the model. By the means of this crucifix, the Almighty worked open miracles continually. It was then thought that if access to this crucifix were allowed to women, the common devotion would be increased and great advantages would result from it for our monastery. Upon which the Abbot of Citeaux, by our request, granted us leave to let men and honest women approach the said crucifix, provided, however, that the women did not enter the cloister, the dormitory, and other parts of the monastery.... But profiting by this license, to our misfortune, women began to come in increasing numbers to the said crucifix, while in them devotion is cool, and all they want is to see the church, and they increase our expenses by our having to receive them.”474
This naïve complaint is interesting from several points of view; it plainly shows what was done to bring such or such a sanctuary into favour with the pilgrims;475 in the present case the effort did not succeed, the prodigies do not seem to have long responded to the expectation, and people came only from curiosity to visit the church and the fine crucifix of the monastery. From the artistic point of view the fact is still more important, for this is the most ancient example of sculpture from the nude living model to be found in mediæval England; and this anonymous sculptor ought to be remembered, which he is not, as one of the precursors of the Renaissance in his country.
Another attempt to make a chapel popular had been tried in the parochial church of Foston; but the Archbishop of York, William Grenefeld, was scandalized, and by a letter full of good sense put an end to the “great concourse of simple people who came to visit a certain image of the Holy Virgin recently placed in the church, as if this image had something more divine than any other images of the sort.”476
The fact was, as may be noticed even in our days, that, with or without the co-operation of the clergy, some statues had a far better reputation than others; wonders were expected of them, and they were worshipped accordingly; the same vicissitudes were observable for images as for relics and tombs of saints. This statue had healed sick people without number, and that one was known to have moved, to have made a sign, to have spoken a word. Pictures of miracles worked by statues constantly recur in manuscripts; one, for instance, is to be found in several English books of the fourteenth century.477 It shows how a poor painter, being busy colouring and gilding a statue of the Virgin, with a most ugly devil under her feet, the Evil One, angry at such an unflattering portrait, came and broke the ladder on which the artist was standing; but as he was falling and about to be killed, the stone Virgin bent towards him, and extending her arm held him safe until help came.
Statues did not always act so graciously, but were guided by circumstances, as was seen in the church of St. Paul-extra-muros at Rome. A visitor, according to the relation of the learned Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford, had insulted the image of the saint, saying: “‘Why hast thou got a sword, I mean to have thy sword,’ and he was trying to take it out of the hands of the statue. But through God’s doing, the statue raised its sword on the impious man, and clove his head to the chin; and then death followed. This happened at the time when Eugene IV was Pope of Rome, and a witness of the scene reported it to me; this witness was a beadel of the said Pope, called Master Erasmus Fullar, a priest of the kingdom of Hungary.”478
II
Apart from pilgrimages, in fashion but for a time, English people usually went to Durham to visit the tomb of the holy Confessor Cuthbert, and the place where was kept his ever-victorious banner; to the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in Westminster; to St. Albans, St. Edmund’s Bury, St. David’s, on account of the saints after whom these towns are named; to Chichester, to worship the body of St. Richard the Bishop; to Glastonbury, with its holy thorn-tree, and its church founded by St. Joseph of Arimathea; to Waltham, where a cross of black marble had been miraculously found in the time of King Knut. Lincoln, York, Peterborough, Hayles with its Holy Blood, Winchester (for St. Swithin, who, among other merits, had had that of being a bridge builder), Holywell, Beverley with its St. John, and a number of other places,479 shrines and miraculous and wishing wells had also attractions for the pilgrim; but none could stand comparison with Walsingham and Canterbury.
At Walsingham there were a church and a chapel, now destroyed, the latter with a miraculous bejewelled statue of the Virgin, and some of her milk, the chapel being exactly similar, it was said, to the Santa Casa of Loretto, which was a wonder in itself, for the English copy had been built in the eleventh century, long before the Casa was heard of. Owing to innumerable gifts the place was resplendent with gold and precious stones. Visiting Cologne and the famous shrine of the wise men of the East, Roger Ascham writes: “The three kings be not so rich, I believe, as was the Lady of Walsingham.”480 People came in crowds; many among the British kings came too;481 the road leading to Walsingham was called the palmers’ way, and chapels were built along its line. The town was full of inns, hospitals, and religious buildings, as was usually the case with the more famous of these places.
The milk and the image, as most of the pilgrimage statues, were destroyed at the Reformation, some of the wooden ones being burnt like the heretics, or with them, at Smithfield, as happened when Friar Forest died at the stake.482 The gold and silver ones were turned to more practical uses. “I have pullyd down,” Dr. London, one of the Visitors of religious houses, writes to Thomas Cromwell, “the image of our Lady at Caversham, wherunto wasse great pilgremage. The image ys platyd over with sylver, and I have putte yt in a cheste fast lackyd (locked) and naylyd uppe, and by the next bardge that commyth from Redyng to London yt shall be browght to your Lordeschippe. I have also pullyd down the place she stode in with all other ceremonyes, as lights, schrds (shrouds), crowchys (crosses), and imagies of wex hangyng about the chapel, and have defacyed the same thorowly in exchuyng of any farther resortt thedyr.... At Caversham ys a propre lodginge wher the chanon lay, with a fayer garden and an orchard mete to be bestowed upon som frynde of your lordeschip’s in thees parties.”483
In especially large numbers people hired horses at Southwark, with relays at Rochester, and set out for St. Thomas of Canterbury. This was the highroad to the continent; a regular service of hired horses had been established along it. Twelvepence was paid from Southwark to Rochester, twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury, sixpence from Canterbury to Dover. The horses were branded in a prominent manner, so that unscrupulous travellers should not be tempted to quit the road and appropriate their steeds.484 The sanctuary of St. Thomas had, indeed, a world-wide reputation.
We can scarcely realize now the thrill of horror that went throughout Christendom, as far as the Levant, as far as Iceland, when the news came that Archbishop Thomas Becket,485 Legate of the Pope, former chancellor of England, had been massacred in his cathedral of Canterbury by four knights of Henry II, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 1170, his brain and blood splashing the pavement. Everything combined to increase the enormity of the crime; the holiness of the place, which should have afforded sanctuary, even to a murderer, the rank of the victim in the hierarchy of the Church, the dying man’s brave and pious words, the presence of the cross born at his side by his assistant, Edward Grim, himself severely wounded, and, above all, the fame and character of the prelate, an archbishop Turpin of real life, who, like the companion of Roland, and while already engaged in holy orders, had proved a plucky military leader, unimpeachable, moreover, from the moral point of view, and fearless throughout his life. Like the Archbishop of Reims of the “Song of Roland,” whose brain had flowed down his face,486 he had died at the hands of barbarians, who had not, however, the excuse of being infidels.
Rarely did a single act cause such universal indignation. Public opinion proclaimed Thomas a saint even before the Pope could take action, which he did, however, with a promptitude rare in such cases, canonization being proclaimed in February, 1173. The body was scarcely buried in the crypt of the cathedral,487 than pilgrims came to it, their numbers ceaselessly increasing. The life of the archbishop was the subject of numberless miniatures,488 sculptures,489 painted windows. Some of the latter, dating back to the thirteenth century, still remain at Canterbury, Sens, Chartres, and other places. Matthew Paris wrote and illuminated with his own hand, Walsingham tells us, a biography of the archbishop; churches dedicated to him multiplied in England and out of England: “On the heights of Fourvières,” wrote Dean Stanley, “overlooking the city of Lyons, is a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Four years before his death, it is said, he was walking on the terraced bank of the river underneath, and being asked to whom the chapel should be dedicated, he replied, ‘To the next martyr,’ on which his companion remarked, ‘Perhaps, then, to you.’”490
The prophecy was fulfilled. Entirely renovated, and forming now part of the pilgrimage church at Fourvières, such a chapel still exists, still dedicated to St. Thomas; it has been allotted to the fraternity of “Notre Dame de Compassion” for their exercises, which consist chiefly in praying for the conversion of England. On the threshold are engraved four riming Latin lines: “Happy the place, happy the church where Thomas’s memory survives; happy the land which gave birth to the prelate, happy that which received him, an exile.”491
Churches dedicated to him were especially numerous in Normandy, from which his family came, a chapel at Caen bearing the grim name of “Saint Thomas l’Abattu” (the stricken down). His life was told in verse and prose, in Latin, French, Icelandic, the most noteworthy of those lives being that in French verse by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, as remarkable for its literary as for its historical value, the author, a contemporary, having taken as much pains to ascertain the truth as would the most conscientious of the historians of to-day.492 He had begun writing two years after the event, and had remodelled several times his poem because new documents, of which several are versified into his text, or new facts had come to his knowledge. He established himself at “Chantorbire,” where every man, every stone had been a witness, and he appealed, in order to learn the truth, to the friends, the servants, the sister of Saint Thomas. His work was thereby delayed, but he preferred that:
A Chantorbire alai; la vérité oï;
Des amis saint Thoma la vérité cuilli,
Et de cels ki l’aveient dès l’enfance servi,
D’oster et de remettre le travail en suffri.
Proud of the trouble he had taken, he was proud also of the good French he spoke, far better, of course, than that of ordinary Anglo-Norman writers: “My language is good, for I was born in France.” He thereupon submits to the custom, not yet quite obsolete, of abusing those who write on the same subject. Don’t forget, he says to his readers in the first lines of his poem, that “all physicians are not good healers; and it is not all clerks who know how to well sing and well read.... Some claim to be the best, and are in reality the worst.” He, however, claims to be the best; and though his boast may incline us to be the more critical, yet we must needs grant that it is not groundless, considering his accuracy, the excellence of his French, the lifelike vividness of his scenes and dialogues, the interest of the views and sentiments, at times very liberal, expressed by him: “God loves the humble and the poor, who live by their work, whose every day is a hard one... and who lead clean lives; God will exalt them.”
To the mass of pilgrims who from the earliest moment had begun to visit Canterbury, Garnier, “standing by the tomb, a number of times read his sermon about Saint Thomas the martyr and his passion. And they heard nothing but truth absolute.”493
Great and small, by land and by sea, from every part of Christendom, “men of foreign countries, of a variety of languages,” says Garnier, flocked henceforth to the place in such numbers, that the road, followed by pilgrims from the West of England, or by foreigners from abroad, landing at Southampton, to reach Canterbury by way of Winchester, was, and is still, called “The Pilgrims’ Way.”494
Kings and emperors came with the rest; first of all, the cause of the tragedy, Henry II, who, to avoid excommunication, after a first penance at Avranches, in the course of which he had promised to go on a pilgrimage, at the Pope’s choice, to Rome, Jerusalem, or St. James’s, appeared for a severer test at the shrine of his dead enemy, on July 12, 1174. Walking the streets barefoot, dressed in haircloth and a woollen shirt, looking a “mendif” (beggar), having fasted for days on bread and water, the bells in the minster tolling a funeral knell, he kissed the pavement of the cathedral at the place where Thomas had fallen. Led, then, to the crypt, the proud Plantagenet, the ruler of England and of half of France, conqueror of Ireland, suzerain of Scotland, was flogged on his bare shoulders by the prelates present, beginning with Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London:
“Li evesques de Lundres tint el puing le balai.”
Thus, “beaten and punished,” he spent the night, on the cold pavement, “in psalms and orisons,” before the tomb, and gave to the sister of the saint a mill, well worth ten marks of revenue—
“Bien valt dis mars par an la rente qu’ele en a.”495
Henry’s rival and suzerain, the King of France, the former crusader, brave, pious and inefficient Louis VII, came shortly after; a prodigious and unparalleled event, the first time a king of France had ever set foot on British soil. Feeling that for him death was near, and having had, although three times married, only one son, he decided in 1179 to have the young prince crowned at once, but before the ceremony, Philip, aged fourteen, while boar hunting, lost his way in the forest of Compiègne, and, separated from his companions, endured for days such hardships before a charcoal-burner found him and led him out of the maze that his life was despaired of. The king, in his anguish, had at night a vision of St. Thomas Becket, whom he had well known, promising life for his son if he himself went to Canterbury as a pilgrim. Louis’s advisers recommended not to risk a journey which would place him at the mercy of his enemy, the Plantagenet king. But again, and yet again, St. Thomas appeared at night, now threatening disaster. Louis started then with a brilliant retinue, and no untoward event marred the journey. Henry II, on the contrary, very meek now when his former chancellor was in question, came to meet the French monarch at Dover; both went together to Canterbury; Louis remained two days in prayer, and offered the monks a gold cup and a magnificent gem shown henceforth to pilgrims as the “regale of France.” By a special charter he granted them, besides, one hundred casks of wine to be taken yearly for ever, at vintage time, from his cellars of Poissy-sur-Seine.
He returned to find his son on the way to recovery; and, having had him crowned, died within a year. The son, one of whose first acts was to confirm his father’s hundred casks’ charter, was that famous Philip August whose victory at Bouvines, in 1214, settled the fate of France and made it certain that she would be a great nation.496
It became henceforth a sort of tradition for British kings to make this pilgrimage. Back from Palestine and his Austrian prison, Richard Cœur-de-Lion went, on his return, to Canterbury out of gratitude for his recovered freedom. When king in his turn, his brother, John, went too; so did Henry III, Edward I, and nearly all English monarchs; so did the French king, John the Good, when a prisoner in England497; so did, in December 1400, Manuel II, Palæologus, emperor of Constantinople498; so did, in 1416, Emperor Sigismund, grandson of the blind King Jean de Luxembourg, who had been killed at Crécy, himself then the dominant figure in Europe, a quick-witted and, for the time, liberal-minded sovereign, who, present one day in the Paris Parliament, when justice was being rendered, and seeing a plebeian about to lose his suit simply because he was a plebeian, rose from his seat, and, to the wonder of the assembly, touching him with his sword, made him a knight. A remarkable man was that Canterbury pilgrim, as a man as well as an emperor.
Accompanied by another emperor, Charles V, King Henry VIII came too, but having changed his mind later about a great many matters, he ordered every shrine to be destroyed, showing especial vindictiveness towards all that recalled Thomas Becket. If alive, he thought, the archbishop would have probably been, just as the recently beheaded More and Fisher, opposed to the new dogma of the royal supremacy: most probably, indeed. No mercy should therefore be shown to his bones and to that shrine, where Henry must have seen in former days a silver image of his own father bequeathed to be placed as near the tomb as it could possibly be. The monument was razed with particular care, and the long venerated bones scattered. Having appointed himself Head of the Church, Henry considered that he was free to undo what another Head of the Church, a Pope of long ago, had done, and, if it so pleased him, to un-canonize a saint. While, therefore, allowing many other British saints to remain on the calendar, he issued in 1539 “certain injunctions,” in which, after having informed his priests that if they continued to marry he would send them to jail, he reviewed the life of Becket, showed to his own satisfaction that he was no saint, but rather “a rebel and a traitor to his prince,” that “he gave opprobious names to the gentlemen which then counselled him to leave his stubornness,” that a scuffle ensued with these “gentlemen,” and so “in the throng Becket was slain.”
The King, therefore, commands English people to cease calling the most famous of all the saints they had a saint, “and that his images, and pictures, through the whole realm... be plucked down... to the intent his grace’s loving subjects shall be no longer blindly lead and abused to commit idolatry”; if they persist, they will go to jail, “at his grace’s pleasure.”499 In the same way had they been recommended shortly before not to call this one, or that one, of their loving sovereign’s daughters legitimate, so long as he himself chose to call them bastards; there was a gradation in the penalties, and in the case of the daughters it was death.
Equally inimical dispositions were shown during the next reign by Archbishop Cranmer towards his predecessor, and one of the articles of his “Visitation to be had within the diocese of Canterbury” had for its object to ascertain “whether they have put out of their church books this word Papa and the name and service of Thomas Becket.”500
Times had changed. But,
“Whan that Aprille, with his showres swoote,”
had long before, in the year 1388, caused spring flowers to bloom, matters were different, and, as all know who can read English,
“from every schires end
Of England, to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seeke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.”
III
In those holy journeys, as in Chaucer’s book, all ranks of society were mingled together. The majority of these pilgrims were sincere and in good faith; they had made a vow and came to fulfil it. With such dispositions, the knight who found a pilgrim like himself upon the road would not be inclined to keep haughtily aloof; besides, if the distances were great between class and class at this period, familiarity was still greater. The distance has indeed diminished at the present day, and familiarity also, as though in compensation. The noble felt himself sufficiently raised above the common people not to be afraid of using a kind of jovial intimacy with them on occasion; at the present time, when superiority of rank is of less importance, many are more attentive and take care not to overstep a limit which is not now so patent as before.
Arrived at the end of the journey, all prayed; prayed with fervour in the humblest posture. The soul was filled with religious emotion when from the end of the majestic alley formed by the great pillars of the church, through the coloured twilight of the nave, the heart divined, rather than the eye saw, the mysterious object of veneration for which such a distance had been traversed at the cost of such fatigue. Though the practical man galloping up to bargain with the saint for the favour of God, though the emissary sent to make offering in the name of his master might keep a dry and clear eye, tears coursed down the cheeks of the poor and simple in heart; he tasted fully of the pious emotion he had come to seek, the peace of heaven descended into his bosom, and he went away consoled.
Such was the happy lot of humble devout souls. Pilgrims, however, were undoubtedly a very mixed race; no reader of Chaucer needs to be reminded that the talk on the way was not limited to edifying subjects, and that pilgrims themselves, even allowing the greater number to have been sincere, were not all of them vessels of election. Some went like gypsies to a fair and tried to gather money by begging; some went for the pleasures of the journey and the merriments of the road; so that reformers and satirists, paying more attention to the abuse than to the less visible good that came along with it, began to raise a cry which grew louder and louder until, at the time of the Reformation, it was something like a storm. Whom did Langland see on Palmers’ way, near Walsingham? Those same false hermits we have already met by the highroads and at the corner of bridges, and in what objectionable company!
“Eremytes on an hep · with hokede staves,
Wenten to Walsyngham · and hure (their) wenches after:
Grete lobies and longe · that loth were to swynke,
Clothede hem in copis · to be knowe fro othere,
And made hem-selve eremytes · hure eise to have.”501
Wyclif denounced pilgrimages most persistently, so much so that, when later some of his followers had to renounce their heresies, belief in the usefulness and sanctity of pilgrimages was one of the articles they had to subscribe. Thus, in his vow of abjuration, the Lollard William Dynet of Nottingham, on December 1, 1395, swears in these words: “Fro this day forthwarde I shall worshipe ymages, with praying and offering unto hem, in the worschepe of the seintes that they be made after; and also I shal nevermore despyse pylgremage.”502
But other Lollards refused to recant. Questioned by Archbishop Arundel the irreconcilable enemy of his sect, William Thorpe confesses in 1407 having preached against that passion “to seek and visit the bones or images... of this saint and of that,” so uncontrollable that, “ofttimes divers men and women of these runners thus madly hither and thither into pilgrimage, borrow hereto other men’s goods (yea, and sometimes they steal men’s goods hereto), and they pay them never again.”503
For “divers men and women” those journeys being chiefly pleasure trips, nothing, Thorpe continues, is forgotten that may make them more pleasurable, “and finding out one pilgrimage, they will ordain beforehand to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs; and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the king came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels.”
Chaucer’s pilgrims had not, perhaps, quite so magnificent a record, and when they crossed Dartford or Rochester did not outnoise the king himself; they had, in any case, no women singers; but their miller was provided with a sonorous bagpipe:
“A baggepype wel coude he blowe and sowne,
And ther-with-al he broghte us out of towne.”
Their monk’s bridle was heard jingling “as loude as dooth the chapel-belle”; they talked boisterously, wrangled, and made merry,
“For trewely, confort ne mirthe is noon
To ryde by the weye doumb as a stoon,”
and dogs, of course, did not remain “doumb” for them any more than for the king.
One more objection of Thorpe’s to those journeys was that, “if these men and women be a month out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be, a half-year after, great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars.” Chaucer’s pilgrims were certainly, in their way, and no one nowadays objects, great “tale-tellers.”
Archbishop Arundel, who seems at times to be the one interrogated (but we must not forget that we have only Thorpe’s version, unrevised by the other party), makes a more picturesque than telling answer: “Lewd losell! thou seest not far enough in this matter! for thou considerest not the great travail of pilgrims.... I say to thee that it is right well done, that pilgrims have with them both singers and also pipers: that when one of them that goeth barefoot striketh his toe upon a stone, and hurteth him sore and maketh him to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow begin then a song or else take out of his bosom a bagpipe to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow.”
Lay writers of a reforming mind objected to pilgrimages, not so much on account of the worship of images, but because they thought these travels an encouragement to laziness and idle living. We know the opinion of Langland. The same views are expressed by an author of a quite different turn of mind, the one who wrote the “Roman de Renart,” and who has a special chapter to inform us “of the pilgrimage of Reynard and how he went to Rome.” Reynard cannot but consider that he has greatly and many a time sinned, and feeling some anxiety about his misdeeds, goes to a hermit and confesses himself. Such are the faults he has to declare that the holy man does not dare absolve him, but advises him to go to Rome and ask the absolution of the Pope. Reynard accordingly “takes his scrip and burdon [that is, his wallet and staff, as did all pilgrims], and begins to move on, and takes his way; he looks quite like a pilgrim, his scrip fits his neck beautifully.” But travelling alone is not pleasant; he meets Belin the Sheep, and persuades him to come with him, and a little farther “Bernart the arch-priest,” a donkey, who was eating thistles in a ditch; he also secures this new companion.
As night is coming, the three, finding themselves near the house of Primaut the Wolf, enter without ceremony and make themselves at home, while the owner of the place is away. They find there “salted meat, cheese, and eggs... and good ale. Belin drinks so much that he loses his head, and then begins to sing, and the arch-priest to organ-bray, and Master Reynard sings in falsetto.” But their merriment is soon at an end. The alarm has been given; Ysengrin, Hersent, and a number of other wolves, relations, friends, compeers of Primaut, who all of them owe grudges to Reynard, come round and besiege the pilgrims. They escape with great difficulty. Ill-pleased with these grievous adventures, they agree not to go to Rome at all, and Reynard, to whom, rather against likelihood, the author here lends his own thoughts, winds up the enterprise with a speech: “‘My lords,’ says he, ‘by my head, this wandering is loathsome and tiring. There is in the world many a good man that has never been to Rome; such an one has come back from the Seven Saints who is worse than he ever was. I mean to take my way home, and I shall live by my labour and seek honest earnings; I shall be charitable to poor people.’ Then they cried, ‘Be it so, be it so,’ and they betook themselves homewards,” converts to better lives, for a time.504
The same mode of reasoning was used later on, at the time of the Renaissance, by no less a man than Erasmus, who has described in his most satirical vein the vanities of pilgrims and pilgrimages. He supposes a meeting of two friends, Menedemus and Ogygyus, the latter just back from Compostela, and, what is more interesting for us, from Walsingham, “the most holy name in all England.... The towne is almost susteynyd by the resort of pylgrymes.” The faithful believer Ogygyus goes on describing the wonders of the place, the gold and silver and precious stones offered to the miraculous statue of our Lady, the marvels worked at the holy wells, the miracle of the knight towards whom the portal of the church stretched out, the beautiful relics, and especially the crystal phial containing the Virgin’s milk. “Whan ye sexten sawe us, he dyd runne to the aultre, and put apon hym his surplese and his stole about his nekke, knelyd downe relygyously and worshipyd it, and streghtforthe dyd offre the mylke to us to kysse.” The same ceremony with surplice and kneeling, though it has disappeared at Walsingham with the phial itself, may still be seen elsewhere any day, in Milan, for example, at the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo.
Ogygyus and his friends make their offerings, not without remarking that some unscrupulous visitors, by a clever trick, pick money out of the plate instead of leaving in it any of their own: a trick which, as we have seen, was used by Panurge on a certain day when he was somewhat “escorné et taciturne” for lack of pence.
Erasmus ends his dialogue in the same strain as the author of “Reynard”:
“I have enough to do,” says sceptical Menedemus, “with my statyons of Rome.
“Ogygyus. Of Rome, that dyd never see Rome?
“Menedemus. I wyll tell you, thus I go my statyons at home. I go in to the parler, and I se unto the chast lyvynge of my doughters; agayne frome thense I go in to my shope, I beholde what my servauntes, bothe men and women, be doynge. From thense into the kytchyn, lokynge abowt, if ther nede any of my cownsell; frome thense hyther and thyther, observynge howe my chylderne be occupyed, what my wyffe dothe, beynge carefull that every thynge be in ordre: these be statyons of Rome.
“Ogygyus. But these thynges saynt James wold dow for yow.
“Menedemus. That I shuld se unto these thynges holy Scripture commaundethe; that I shuld commyt the charge to sayntes I dyd rede yt never commaunded.”505
Thus far Menedemus, whose task in life seems to have consisted in seeing to it that others fulfilled theirs. The friend of Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, took the opposite view, and wrote a dialogue in defence of images, relics, and pilgrimages, but in vain.506 The time of the Reformation had come; doubt was becoming general, and from peasant to baron all the people assimilated arguments like those of Latimer:
“What thinke ye of these images that are had more then their felowes in reputation? that are gone unto with such labour and werines of the body, frequented with such our cost, sought out and visited with such confidence? what say ye by these images, that are so famous, so noble, so noted, beying of them so many and so divers in England. Do you thinke that this preferryng of picture to picture, image to image, is the right use, and not rather the abuse of images?”507
These times were yet to be. In the Middle Ages pilgrims came to offer their prayers, and also money, each one according to his means. When the king, in his perpetual goings and comings, turned aside to visit a revered shrine, he usually gave seven shillings, as shown by the ordinances of Edward II for his household.508
Before going away the pilgrims, who had admired, besides the shrine and its jewels, the stained glass of the church, the monumental curiosities of the place and sometimes its fortifications,509 bought, just as now, medals or signs as remembrances of their journey.510 The author of the supplement to the “Canterbury Tales” at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shows the pilgrims purchasing in the town various sorts of sygnys or brochis, so that people who saw them might know where they had been:
“Then, as manere and custom is, signes there they boughte,
Ffor men of contre shulde know whom they hadde [s]oughte.”511
They were of lead or pewter, and perforated to be more easily sewn on the breast or cap, like those sold at the present day at St. Anne d’Auray in Brittany, but larger. At Canterbury they represented St. Thomas, or were in the shape of an ampulla or tiny flask, containing water from the miraculous well; at St. James’s they represented shells; at Amiens the head of St. John the Baptist: “Ecce signum faciei beati Johannis Baptiste”; at Rome the holy sudary, called the vernicle;512 at Rocamadour the Holy Virgin.513 The right of selling these signs was a source of profit, and it sometimes belonged exclusively to a convent or to a private family. At Rocamadour this right had been conceded in return, it seems, for military services, to the De Valon family, lords of Thegra.514 They and the Bishop of Tulle appointed a deputy to superintend the sale, and the product was divided by halves between them and the bishop. Such were the benefits derived from these sales that clandestine manufactories of pewter medals were established by the inhabitants, who sold numbers of them, to the great detriment of the authorized shop and in defiance of ever-recurring prohibitions. Once, however, in 1425, free sale was allowed to all the people of the place; the country had been reduced to such poverty that the bishop renounced his privilege for two years, out of charity and for the benefit of his flock.
Pilgrims when going home were careful to wear prominently sewn on their garments these testimonials of their holy travels. In the above-quoted dialogue of Erasmus, the sceptical Menedemus wonders at the appearance of his friend: “I pray you, what araye is this that you be in; me thynke that you be clothyd with cockle schelles, and be laden on every side with bruches of lead and tynne. And you be pretely garnyshed with wrethes of strawe, and your arme is full of snakes eggs,” thus uncivilly designating the beads of his chaplet. The French king Louis XI, of grim memory, was never without some such pewter medals and brooches, and wore them on his hat. “And truly,” writes his contemporary, Claude de Seyssel, “his devotion seemed more superstitious than religious. For to whatever image or church of God and the saints or of Our Lady that he heard the people were devoted, or where miracles were worked, he went there to make offerings, or sent a man there expressly. He had, besides, his hat quite full of images, mostly of lead or pewter, which he kissed on all occasions when any good or bad news arrived, or that his fancy prompted him; casting himself upon his knees so suddenly at times, in whatever place he might be, that he seemed more like one wounded in his understanding than a rational man.”515
Professional pilgrims outshone in this respect all the others. For, beside the occasional pilgrim who came to make an offering to such or such a shrine in accomplishment of a vow and afterwards returned to take up again the course of his ordinary life, there was the pilgrim by calling or by penance (for such a life-long penance was sometimes inflicted), whose whole existence was spent travelling from one sanctuary to another, always on the road, and always begging. With the professional pardoner, the professional palmer, back from many countries, adorned with many tokens, the witness of many wonders, the hero of many adventures, was the most curious type of the religious wayfaring race, with hardly any equivalent in our days. Like the pardoner and the friar, the palmer could not but have a great experience of men and things; he had seen much, and he invented more. He too had to edify the multitude to whom he held out his hand for alms, and the fine stories, in which he rarely missed giving himself a part to play, were his livelihood; failing this, his daily bread failed too. By dint of repeating his tales, he came to almost believing them, then quite; and his voice henceforth took that accent of certitude which alone begets conviction in audiences. Besides, he came from so far that he might indeed have seen marvels; around us, of course, life flows on without prodigies, almost without events in its flat monotony; but it is common knowledge that in distant parts things are quite different. And the best proof is that none of those who have undertaken the journey comes back disappointed, quite the contrary; the pleasure of believing them is moreover innocent enough, why should we deprive ourselves of an enjoyment exhilarating for the mind and good for the soul?
Clever people, poets, men of the world, deprived themselves of this pleasure, and made up for the loss by laughing at pilgrims and story-telling travellers. So did Chaucer, as we have already seen, who held up to ridicule in his “House of Fame,” shipmen and pilgrims, with their bags “brimful of lies.” To the same effect but in graver mood, Langland wrote in his “Visions”:
“Pylgrimis and palmers · plyghten hem to-gederes,
To seche saint Iame · and seyntys of rome,
Wenten forth in hure (their) way · with meny un-wyse tales,
And haven leve to lye · al hure lyf-tyme.”516
The crowd felt otherwise; they listened, laughed perhaps sometimes, but more often recollected themselves and remained attentive. The pilgrim was so interesting! he was a play in himself, a living story, he had on his feet the dust of Rome and of Jerusalem, and brought news of the “worshippers” of Mahomet. He was a picture too, with his bag hung at his side, not for lies, but for provisions, and his staff, at the top of which was a knob and sometimes a piece of metal with an appropriate motto like the device on a bronze ring found at Hitchin, a cross with these words, “Hæc in tute dirigat iter” (“May this safely guide thee on thy way”).517 The staff had at the other end an iron point, like an alpenstock of the present day; as may be seen in numerous drawings in mediæval manuscripts.
(From the MS. 17 C. xxxviii.)
The whole race of wanderers was, however, as we know, looked at askance by the king’s officers; these goings and comings disquieted the sheriff. We have already met labourers who, weary of their lord, left him under pretext of distant pilgrimages, and laid down without scruple the pilgrim’s staff at the door of a new master who would pay them better. False pilgrims were not less numerous than false pardoners and false hermits; they were condemned to repose, under pain of imprisonment, by the same statutes as the beggars and wandering workmen. Henceforward, orders Richard II in 1388, they too must have permits with a special seal affixed by certain worthy men.518 Those without a permit should be forthwith arrested, unless infirm and incapable of work, for their good faith is then evident, and it is not for the love of vagabondage that they painfully go and visit “optimum ægrorum medicum,” Saint Thomas. Even greater severity was shown when it was a matter of crossing the sea; would-be pilgrims must be furnished with regular passports; and the law applied to “all manner of people, as well clerks as other,” under pain of confiscation of all their goods. The exceptions made by the king show besides that it is wanderers of doubtful status and motives whom he has in view, for there are dispensations for the “lords and other great persons of the realm,” for the “true and notable merchants,” and lastly, for the “king’s soldiers.”519
This passport or “licence,” this “special leave of the king,” could only be available at certain ports, namely, London, Sandwich, Dover, Southampton, Plymouth, Dartmouth, Bristol, Yarmouth, Boston, Kingston-upon-Hull, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the ports of the coast facing Ireland. Heavy penalties were laid on all port wardens, inspectors, ship captains, etc., who were neglectful, or so bold as to show favour to roamers. In the year 1389, the king restrained pilgrims from embarking anywhere else than at Dover or Plymouth. To put to sea elsewhere, an “especial licence from the king himself” was necessary.520 A number of such licences, as will be seen further, are still in existence.
IV
But the attraction of distant pilgrimages was great,521 especially the three without equal: Rome, Jerusalem, and St. James’s of Galicia, held so sacred that, while most of the vows taken by the benefactors of the great bridge at Avignon could be remitted on account of their gifts to this useful structure, exception was made if the question was of a pilgrimage to be performed to one of those three places.522 With or without letters men crossed the Channel, for which they paid sixpence, or if they had a horse, two shillings.523 They arrived at Calais, stopping there some time in a “Maison-Dieu,” or hospital, which had been built and endowed by pious souls with revenues “for the sustenance of the pilgrims and other poor folks repairing to the said town to rest and refresh them.”524
Setting out again, they went to Boulogne to pray to a miraculous virgin, whose hand still exists enclosed in a reliquary. The statue itself was thrown into a well by the Protestants in 1567, replaced on the altar in 1630, pulled down again at the Revolution and burnt, but one of the faithful saved the hand, which the church of Notre Dame preserves to this day. Chaucer’s travelled gossip, the Wife of Bath, had among other pilgrimages, made this one to Boulogne.525 People also went to Amiens to venerate the head, or rather one of the heads, of St. John the Baptist.526 Great was their wonder when, continuing their journey, they fell in with another at Constantinople. Perhaps, let us hope, they were content with remarking as “Mandeville” does: Which is the true one? “I wot nere, but God knowethe; but in what wyse than men worschipen it, the blessed seynt John holt him a-payd.”527 Then also people went to the shrine of the three kings at Cologne, to Paris where innumerable relics were kept, to Chartres, where, besides a famous statue of the Virgin, was shown the tunic she wore on the day of the Annunciation (preserved in the cathedral since 861),528 to Vezelay, Tours, Le Puy, and to many other places in France, among which the celebrated and to the present day most frequented church of Our Lady of Rocamadour in Guyenne. The fame of this pilgrimage among Englishmen is attested by Langland, when he advises people belonging to the religious orders to cease pilgrimage-making, and rather practice virtue at home:
“Right so, if thow be religious · renne thou never ferther
To Rome ne to Rochemadore.”529
It was a shrine of great renown. Roland, according to a legend, went there before starting for the ill-fated expedition in which he met his death, and a large piece of rusted iron is still shown in the old church as part of the famous Durandal. Henry II of England came there, too, as a pilgrim, as did many other illustrious travellers, Simon de Montfort among them.530 The place was fortified; it had a part to play in the Hundred Years’ War, and Froissart has told us “howe Sir Robert Carrol and Sir John Chandos... toke Guaches, Rochemador, and diuers other townes, the which wer newly turned frenche.”531
64. FORTIFIED ENTRANCE TO THE SANCTUARIES OF ROCAMADOUR.
(Restored.)
Then there were Spanish pilgrimages, and especially the world-famous one at Compostela, where English travellers went in large numbers, most of them direct by sea, though some preferred the lengthy, picturesque land road, dotted with famous shrines good for the soul, and where all sorts of adventures might be expected.532 Licences authorizing the owners and the captain of such or such a ship to carry to St. James’s a fixed number of pilgrims fill pages in Rymer’s “Fœdera.” They were granted pursuant to the before-mentioned statute of Richard II, and are all drawn after one or two models, the text in Latin, with the name of the ship in French, like the one here translated, of the year 1394:
“The king, to all and each of his Admirals, etc., greeting.
“Know you that we have given licence to Oto Chambernoun, William Gilbert, and Richard Gilbert, to receive and embark in the harbour of Dartmouth a hundred pilgrims in a certain ship belonging to the same Oto, William, and Richard, called la Charité de Paynton, of which Peter Cok is captain; and to take them to Saint James’s, there to fulfil their vows, and from thence to bring them back to England, freely and without hindrance, notwithstanding any ordinances to the contrary.”533
A few provisos are added, the keeping of which the pilgrims should swear to before leaving England; they must upon their oath bind themselves to do nothing contrary to the obedience and fealty they owe the king; they must not take out of the realm gold or silver in money or bullion beyond what is necessary to their journey, and they must not, it is sometimes added, reveal the secrets of the kingdom.
During the following century these licences became innumerable, or maybe they have been preserved in larger numbers. They show that, in fact, fleets loaded with English pilgrims plied towards St. James’s. We find that “Le Petre de Darthmouth” is allowed to carry sixty pilgrims; “La Marie de Southampton,” a hundred; “La Sainte Marie de Blakney,” sixty; “Le Garlond de Crowemere,” sixty; “La Trinité de Wells,” forty; “Le Thomas de Saltash,” sixty; and so on. Numbers usually vary from thirty to one hundred.534
65. TRAVELLING BY SEA IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
(From the MS. Harl. 1319.)
It must not be thought that these ships, carrying as much as a hundred passengers besides their crew on this rather long journey, were great, well-appointed vessels. They very much resembled the pilgrim-ships of the present day, which carry every year to Jeddah, on the Red Sea, crowds of Arabs on their way to Mecca. The travellers were huddled together in most uncomfortable fashion, and had ample opportunities to do penance and offer their sufferings to the saint. This is no surmise, for one of those English pilgrims duly allowed to go to Galicia, provided they did not reveal the secrets of the realm, has rimed an account of his experiences, so we know what they were. Do not think of laughing, says he, when you go by sea to St. James’s; there is sea-sickness; the sailors push you about under pretext that you hinder the working of the ship; the smell is not pleasant:
“Men may leve alle gamys
That saylen to Seynt Jamys!
Ffor many a man hit gramys (vexes)
When they begin to sayle.
Ffor when they have take the see,
At Sandwych or at Wynchylsee,
At Bristow, or where that hit bee,
Theyr hertes begyn to fayle.”
The mocking remarks of the seamen are painful to bear. Says the captain:
“Some ar lyke to cowgh and grone
Or hit be full mydnyght;”
and then turning to his men:
“‘Hale the bowelyne! now, vere the shete!
Cooke, make redy anoon our mete,
Our pylgryms have no lust to ete,
I pray God yeve hem rest!’
‘Go to the helm! what, howe! no nere?
Steward, felow! A pot of bere!’—
‘Ye shalle have sir, with good chere,
Anon alle of the best.’”
Sick pilgrims could not eat, and were jeered at, they found the time long; some, with a book on their knees, tried to read, but then they felt as if their head would burst:
“Som layde theyr bookys on theyr kne,
And rad so long they myght nat se;—
‘Allas! myne hede wolle cleve on thre!’”
When at their worst, comes a facetious sailor to bawl out in their ears: Cheer up, in a moment we shall be in a storm!
“Then cometh oone and seyth: ‘Be mery;
Ye shall have a storme or a pery’ (a squall)
Thys mene whyle the pylgryms ly
And have theyr bowlys (basins) fast theym by,
And cry after hot malvesy.”
In short, they were very unhappy, and as the narrator said at first, little inclined to games and laughter.535
Votive offerings plentifully adorned venerated sanctuaries; if, by striking a wax statuette while making appropriate incantations an enemy might do you great harm, on the other hand, by placing your image in the chapel of a saint, great favours might be gained for you, especially in cases of sickness.536 Thus were to be seen prisoners’ irons, warriors’ swords, cripples’ crutches, jewels and precious stones, sculpted or painted images representing devotees or actual miracles performed for them, tablets and offerings of all sorts.537 At Rocamadour tresses of women’s hair were shown as a threat as well as an admonition. “They were,” relates the knight of La Tour Landry, those of “ladies and gentille women that had be[en] wasshe in wyne, and in other thinges for to make the here of colour otherwise thanne God made it, the whiche ladies and gentille women that aught (owned) the tresses were comynge thedirward on pilgrimage, but they may never have powere to come withinne the chirche dore unto the tyme that thei hadde cutte of the tresses of her here,”538 which, says he, were still there in his day.
66. THE SOUTHERN ENTRANCE TO SAINT JAMES OF COMPOSTELA.
Twelfth Century.
Another story to the same effect is told by Miélot, who reports how a very fair lady, who had led an ill life, lost her sight as a punishment, through the will of Heaven. She went on a pilgrimage to Rocamadour, prayed to the Virgin, and was healed, but could not, however, enter the sanctuaries. She then confessed on the spot to a priest, who, “looking at her fair face,” said: “Dear friend, I well know that with these fair tresses of your hair you have done great hurt to those to whom you have shown them. I decide that they must be cut off in honour of God and of our Lady.” This was done; “the tresses were cut, and the priest had them carried inside the church on a pole, on which were placed the tresses of women who would be saved.” Then the lady was able to enter the church, and she praised the Virgin. But as she was going away she could not help thinking “of her fair hair that she had left,” and she exclaimed: “Holy Mary, my heart is sorrowful for my hair that I leave you, and I cannot well make up my mind to it.” She had scarcely spoken when the tresses were at once restored to her “as fair as they were before;” but the blindness came back too, and blind she remained for ever, which is a good example, “ung bel exemplaire,” for ladies that “seek false pleasures in their fine waists and faces.”539
Indulgences were an immense attraction; they had been freely granted on a large scale to every important shrine, and popular imagination still further magnified them. The pilgrim from Rome, back in his village, exaggerated as willingly their amount as that of the marvels which he had seen, or thought he had seen. One such pilgrim, an Englishman of the fourteenth century, dazzled by his recollections, has rimed his impressions of a journey taken by him to Italy. As a poet he does not rank high, but he does not pretend to, and his only aim is to supply precise figures and definite information. His strong narrow devotion allowed him to pay attention to nothing except thousands of bodies of martyrs that he never tires of enumerating. By thousands also are reckoned the years of indulgence which he flashes in the eyes of his stay-at-home countrymen:
“Gif men wuste (knew), grete and smale,
The pardoun that is at grete Rome,
Thei wolde tellen in heore dome (in their opinion),
Hit were no neod to mon in cristiante
To passe in to the holy lond over the see
To Jerusalem, ne to Kateryne.”540
His readers will have first a brief and simplified history of Rome; it is a city to which came long ago the Duchess of Troy with her two sons, Romulus and Romulon, who afterwards founded the town. The duchess thus seems to have chosen to settle in a city which did not yet exist, but Rome is a land of wonders. It was pagan, until Peter and Paul (and then the very facts inject their eloquence into our traveller’s lines):
“Hit hedde i-bought,
With gold ne selver, ne with no goode,
Bot with heore flesch and with heore blode.”
The enumeration of the churches thereupon begins, and for each of them are invariably told the amount of indulgences attached to it and of relics kept there. The benefits are proportioned to the merits; thus when a man sees the vernicle, that is, the holy sudary which received the image of the Saviour, he gets three thousand years of pardon if he dwells in Rome, nine thousand if he comes from a neighbouring country,
“And thou that passest over the see,
Twelve thousend yer is graunted to the.”
When you enter Sts. Vitus and Modestus, the third of your sins are remitted. Then, you descend into the catacombs:
“But thou most take candel liht,
Elles thou gost merk (dark) as niht,
For under the eorthe most thou wende,
Thou maight not see bifore ne bihynde,
For thider fledde mony men
For drede of deth to saven hem,
And suffrede peynes harde and sore,
In hevene to dwelle for ever more.”
The bodies of martyrs are countless;541 four thousand of them at Saint Prudence, thirteen hundred at Saint Prassede, seven thousand at Sts. Vitus and Modestus. From time to time a famous name brings up an historic glimpse, such as the account of the foundation of Rome, or an abridged life of Constantine; at first a pagan and a leper,
“In Mahoun was al his thouht.”
But according to our author’s information, he was converted and cured by Pope Sylvester. The church of St. Mary the Round formerly bore another name:
“Agrippa dude hit make
For Sibyl and Neptanes sake....
He gaf hit name Panteon.”
He placed there a magnificent golden idol sitting, of a peculiar form:
“Hit looked forth as a cat,
He called it Neptan.”
This idol had a cap or cover of brass which was one day blown off by the wind, and carried to the church of St. Peter. Then Pope Boniface asked the Emperor Julian to give him the Pantheon, to which that prince consented; and one year, on November 1st, the hatless cat having been removed, the sovereign pontiff consecrated the building, and baptized it St. Mary the Round.
As for relics, there are few objects mentioned in Holy Writ which have not been recovered, and may not be venerated at Rome.542 The table of the Last Supper is there, as well as Aaron’s rod, fragments of the multiplied loaves and fishes, hay from the stall at Bethlehem, a swaddling-cloth of the infant Jesus, and several other things, some of which are strange enough. Part of these relics are still in the same churches, for instance, at Santa Maria Maggiore,543 “Seinte Marie the Maiour,” the portrait of the Virgin painted by St. Luke. This is not, however, according to our pilgrim, a picture really made by St. Luke; he was going to do it, and had prepared his colours, when he suddenly found the portrait before him, finished by the hands of angels:
“Seint Luik while he lived in londe,
Wolde have peynted hit with his honde,
And whon he hedde ordeyned so
Alle colours that schulde ther to,
He fond an ymage al a-pert,
Non such ther was middelert,
Mad with angel hond and not with his
As men in Rome witnesseth this.”544
More complete and conscientious in his descriptions, an educated Englishman of the following century, a voracious reader, and active writer, of books, no other than the chronicler and theologian, John Capgrave, prior of King’s Lynn, having gone to Rome on a pilgrimage, about the year 1450, composed, on his return, a “Solace of Pilgrimes,” wanting to imitate, he said, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Jerome, Marco Polo, and him whom he considered as his compatriot, the then unmasked Mandeville, who, all of them, having travelled, wrote of their journeys: “Also there was a man of Venys whech they called Marcus Paulus; he laboured all the Soudane’s londe and descryved on to us the nature of the cuntre, the condiciones of the men and the stately aray of the great Cane (khan) houshold. Eke Jon Maundevyle Knyth of Yngland, aftir his laboure, made a book ful solacious on to his nacyoun. After all these grete cryeris of many wonderfull thingis I wyl folow with a smal pypyng of such straunge sitis (sights) as I have seyn and swech straunge thingis as I have herd.”545
This justice must be rendered him that, while his book is full of “straunge thingis,” he never adds any of his own invention; when he says, this I have seen, it can, if not afterwards destroyed, still be seen to-day; when he copies an inscription, his copy, as can be easily verified, is accurate. But, fond of books, he believed in them; who ever failed to believe in what he loved? The “Mirabilia Romæ” are the guide of this guide-book maker;546 so that to the enumeration of the holy places with their relics and indulgences, and his description of the ancient, now vanished, church of St. Peter, and all the famous sanctuaries of the papal city, he adds the wonders of fabulous Rome, with the temple on Capitol hill, and in it, “a mervelous craft, that of every region of the world stood an ymage made all of tre and in his hand a lytil belle; as often as ony of these regiones was in purpos to rebelle a geyn the grete mageste of Rome, a non this ymage that was assigned to that regioun schulde knylle his bell.” This device, so celebrated in the middle ages, was due to that great enchanter “Virgil,” the magic of whose lines had been appreciated for different motives in Roman days.
The attractions of Rome were, for the pilgrim, without peer in Italy, but other cities could almost rival it; Venice especially was full of wonders, and was admired and visited accordingly, witness, for example, the travelling notes of a troop of French pilgrims in the year 1395. In this “most excellent, noble, great and fine town all seated in the sea,” may be seen, they aver, the arm of “our Lord St. George,” the burdon (staff) of St. Nicholas, one of the water-pots of Cana, one ear of St. Paul, some of the “roasted flesh of St. Lawrence turned to powder,” three of the stones thrown at St. Stephen, the body of St. Mark, “which is a very fine and noble thing.” There is, besides, “in the Maison-Dieu of Venice one of the molar teeth of a giant that was called Goliath, which giant David killed, and know you that this tooth is more than half a foot long and weighs twelve pounds.”547
Thus did returning travellers relate their recollections, to the delighted wonderment of their countrymen. The wish to set out in their turn was awakened in them, and those who remained in their village associated themselves to the pious journey by their prayers and some small gift of money. All along his road the pilgrim found similar dispositions; to receive and help him was to share in his merits, and thus it was that people in the humblest ranks, assisted from place to place,548 could accomplish distant pilgrimages. The rules of several gilds provided for the case of a member setting out to fulfil a vow. In order to participate in his good work, all the “bretheren and sisteren” accompanied him out of the town, and on bidding him farewell offered him their gift. They watched their friend go off with his deliberate step, beginning a journey across many countries, to last many months, sometimes several years. They returned to the town, and the elders, who knew the world, no doubt told what strange things their friend was like to see in those distant lands, and what subjects for edification he would meet with on his way.
The gild of the Resurrection at Lincoln, founded in 1374, had among its rules, “If any brother or sister wishes to make pilgrimage to Rome, St. James of Galicia, or the Holy Land, he shall forewarn the gild; and all the bretheren and sisteren shall go with him to the city gate, and each shall give him a half-penny at least.” The same rule was observed by the Fullers’ gild of Lincoln, founded in 1297; the pilgrim going to Rome was accompanied as far as Queen’s Cross, outside the town, if he left on a Sunday or a feast-day; and if he could let them know of his return, and it were not a working day, all went to meet him at the same place and accompanied him to the monastery. The tailors of the same city also gave a half-penny to him among them who was going to Rome or St. James, and a penny to him who went to the Holy Land. The ordinances of the Gild of the Virgin, founded at Hull in 1357, had: “If any brother or sister of the gild wishes, at any time, to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then, in order that all the gild may share in his pilgrimage, he shall be fully released from his yearly payment until his return.”
Some gilds kept open house for pilgrims, always with the same object of having a part thereby in the merits of the traveller. Thus the gild-merchant of Coventry, founded in 1340, maintained “a common lodging-house of thirteen beds,” to receive poor travellers who cross the country going on pilgrimage or from any other pious motive. This hostelry was managed by a governor, aided by a woman who washed the feet of the guests and took care of them. The annual expenditure on this foundation was ten pounds sterling.549
When one of the king’s servants had a pilgrimage to make, the prince, in consideration of his motive, willingly authorized him to depart, and even helped him with money. Edward III gave to William Clerk, one of his messengers, one pound six shillings and eightpence, to help him in his expenses during the pilgrimage undertaken by him to Jerusalem and Mount Sinai.550 If the man were of great importance, and especially if he intended to fight the unbelievers, public prayers were offered for his journey, his “triumphal fighting,” and his safe return, as was done when Henry of Lancaster, cousin to Edward III, went “to the parts beyond sea with certain great and noble men of this realm” to attack the enemies of the cross, in this case, the pagans of Prussia. The prayers were prescribed for Sundays and fête days, when there would be “the greatest multitude of people in the churches.”551
All this in spite of the fourteenth century’s not being, as we have seen, an age of deep and true devotion. The Popes lived at Avignon, their prestige was declining, particularly in England; even bishops showed at times scant respect for the Roman Court. Nowhere can be found, not even in Wyclif, more daring accusations and more scandalous anecdotes concerning the Pope than in the chronicle written by Thomas of Burton, Abbot of Meaux, near Beverley. He even speaks with a tinge of irony of indulgences. As a special favour to the faithful who died during a pilgrimage to Rome, Clement VI “ordered the angels of Paradise,” writes the abbot, “to lead their souls straight to the gates of heaven without making them pass through purgatory.” The same Pope granted what the pilgrim of the “Stacions” seems to have ignored, that those who looked upon the holy sudary should return to the state they were in before baptism. Lastly, “he confirmed all the indulgences granted by two hundred sovereign pontiffs his predecessors, which are innumerable.”552 Clement was, indeed, the two hundredth.
At the period when monastic chroniclers did not scruple to record anecdotes on the Roman Court like those in Thomas of Burton’s, general devotion was not merely lessened, it was disorganized, unbalanced. The chroniclers show, indeed, that excesses of impiety coexisted with excesses of fervour; the false pardoner, retailer of the merits of the saints, fell in upon the highway with the bleeding flagellant.553 The papacy might show commendable good sense by its condemnations of both;554 its decrees did not suffice to restore the equilibrium of men’s minds, and the bounds of reason were continually being passed; in ardent piety as in impious revolt men went to the verge of madness. The account of the repulsive sacrileges committed in York Cathedral by the partisans of the Bishop of Durham seems unbelievable, yet the facts cannot be doubted, being reported by the archbishop himself.555 Faith weakened or went astray; men became at once sceptical and intolerant. It was not in them the modern, serenely cold and imperturbable scepticism, but a violent movement of the entire being, impelled to burn what it adores. The man acts by fits; he doubts his doubt, his burst of laughter dazes him; he has had his revel and his orgy, and when the white light of morning comes he will be the prey of despair, shed tears, be racked with anguish, proclaim his conversion and vow maybe to go on a pilgrimage. Walsingham sees one of the causes of the peasants’ revolt in the incredulity of the barons: “Some among them believe, it is said, that there is no God, they deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the end of the beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.”556
Such incredulity did not exclude superstitious practices. To go straight forward was the privilege of the happy few; the many, instead of opening the gates of heaven with their own hands, imagined they could have it done by that of others; they had Paradise gained for them by the neighbouring monastery, as they had their lands tilled for them by their tenants; eternal welfare had become a matter of commerce and could be bought with the letters of fraternity of the mendicant friars and the lying indulgences of false pardoners. Men lived at their ease, and when the sad hour came, made pious donations in their wills, as if they could, according to the strong words of the French historian, Claude de Seyssel, “corrupt and win over by gifts God and the saints, whom we ought to appease by good works and by penitence for our sins.”557 Very instructive reading is that of the last wills and testaments of the rich lords of the fourteenth century. Pages are filled with devotional bequests; gifts are left to shrines, convents, chapels, and hermits; testators who had abstained from going in their lifetime, made pilgrimages by proxy after their death, paying the proxy. The same Humphrey Bohun who sent “a good man and true” to the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster, also ordered that after his demise a priest should be sent to Jerusalem, “chiefly,” said he, “for my lady mother, and for my lord father, and for ourselves,” with the obligation to say masses at all the chapels which he might meet on his way.558 Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, ordered by her will, that five men-at-arms should fight in her name in case there should be a “comune vyage,” otherwise a crusade, within seven years following her death. They would receive one hundred marks each, and the merit of their fights would accrue to their employer, and not to themselves, their own recompense being of this world, and consisting in the hundred marks.559
V
Most difficult and holiest of all, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem remained, in spite of so many indulgences attached by the Popes to the churches in Rome, the one without peer, as well as it was the oldest established; it dated back, indeed, from, at least, the days of Constantine. Settled in Palestine during the fourth century, St. Jerome writes to Paulinus: “From all the world people are flocking here. The whole of mankind fills the city.”560
This is confirmed by his friend the enthusiastic Paula, in whose veins flowed the ardent blood of the Scipios and the Gracchi, and who trying to persuade her beloved Marcella, a rich and pious Roman matron, to join them there, tells her that all the greatest and best, those from Gaul, those from Britain, “divisus ab orbe nostro Britannus” (for she, too, knows those classics whom Jerome constantly quotes), without speaking of the Persians, the Armenians, and all the East, are to be met in the Holy Land: “A variety of languages, but one only religion.” There are “so many places of prayer that one cannot visit them all in one day.” And such places! “What sentences, what words would be appropriate to tell you of the cave of our Saviour? and of that stable where, as a babe, He cried: a spot to be honoured rather by silence than by inadequate words. Where are the vast porticoes, the gilt canopies?... In this poor earthly place the Maker of heaven was born; here He was wrapped in swadling clothes, here seen by the shepherds, here revealed by a star, here adored by the Magi.” Come, Oh come! “Will not the moment arrive when a breathless traveller shall announce to us that our Marcella has reached Palestine... Will not the day come when we can visit together the Saviour’s grotto, weep at His tomb, kiss the wood of the cross, and be raised in our minds with the rising Lord on the Mount of Olives?”561
But even then, thoughtful, level-headed St. Jerome feared that enthusiasm might be carried too far, and everyday duties neglected for the excitement of the Palestine journey. It was, of course, in itself a pious and laudable thing, if one could properly do so, to come and venerate “the places where the feet of our Lord had stood, and the almost recent traces left of His nativity and His passion.” But this should not be considered a Christian’s chief duty: “Do not think that something is lacking in your faith because you have not seen Jerusalem. I do not consider myself any better because I live here.” To lead a good life is the chief thing: “What is praiseworthy is not to have been at Jerusalem, but to have lived righteously there.... The places where the cross was and the Resurrection occurred, benefit those who bear their cross and who, with Christ, rise again every day.... The palace of heaven is just as accessible from Britain as from Jerusalem.” To thousands who have never seen the holy city “the gate of paradise is wide open.... A grand thing it is to be a Christian, not to seem one.”562
The movement, however, once started never stopped. On the contrary, it gathered strength; hospices for pilgrims going to Jerusalem dotted the roads leading to their usual places of embarkation (chiefly Marseilles and Venice), several being built at the principal crossings of the Alps, the Great and the Little Saint Bernard, the St. Gothard, Mount Cenis, etc. A “Confrérie des Pélerins de la Terre Sainte” had been founded in Paris for them by Louis, first Duke of Bourbon, who, greatly interested, like his grand father Saint Louis, in the freeing of the Holy Sepulchre, and bearing for a time the empty title of King of Thessalonica, had been chosen as leader of one of those numerous crusades that never took place.563
During a period of two hundred years pilgrimages to Jerusalem had had, indeed, for their object a conquest and not simply an inspection of the holy places. All nations had taken part, from the first of those prodigious attempts, the crusades, in 1096, to the last one in 1270, in which St. Louis died before the walls of Tunis, while his companion, young Edward of England, loth to give up, had sworn not to go home without having struck a blow at the Saracens in Holy Land, and returned as King Edward I, wounded, but having occupied Acre and kept his word.
The crusade, after those great expeditions, eight in number, continued to be talked about as much as ever; mere talk, it is true, in most cases. In the midst of their wars the kings of France and of England berated each other for being the only hindrance to the departure of the Christians, for neither would go, leaving his rival behind, free to act in his absence. Philip VI of Valois and Edward III both protest that, but for the other, they would go and fight the Saracen. “It is the fault of the English,” writes Philip, “that the holy journey beyond sea has been hindered.” It is the doing of the King of France, solemnly proclaims Edward III to the world, which has turned him from the “sancto passagio transmarino.”564
The utmost that was usually attempted,565 now consisted in small, ineffectual expeditions, so ill-conceived at times as to cause the wonderment and even the merriment of the infidel: such as the Franco-Anglo-Genoese crusade of 1390, with Louis, third Duke of Bourbon, as commander-in-chief, and which, on the recommendation of the Genoese, who suffered more than any from the inroads of the Barbaresques, went to lay siege, of all places, to the city of Mahdia, the “Aufrike” of Froissart,566 on the east coast of Tunisia. The French were apparently the most numerous, but, says Froissart, “Also the Duke of Lancastre had a bastarde sonne called Henry of Lancastre: he had devocion to go in the same voyage, and he provided him of good knightes and squiers of Englande that accompanyed him in that voyage.” The comte de Foix had also, ready at hand, a “bastarde sonne” of his own, whom he sent with a large retinue. The English prince was not, however, the future Henry IV, who was no bastard, but his half-brother, John Beaufort, who being an adulterine son well answered to the description. Henry had intended to go, hence Froissart’s mistake, but he went instead to fight the pagans in Prussia and Lithuania, and, being fond of pilgrimages and shrines, performed, as a pilgrim, the journeys to Rome and Jerusalem, before he assumed the crown and had, in spite of his religious dispositions, his cousin Richard assassinated.
The start from Genoa for the new Tunisian expedition was splendid to see; so the starts usually were: “Great pleasure it was,” says Froissart, “to beholde their departynge, and to se their standardes, getornes (banners) and penons, wavynge in the wynde, shynynge against the sonne, and to here the trompettes and claryons sowning in the ayre with other mynstrelsy,” so that the whole sea rang with the music.567
The Saracens were dumbfounded at this visit: what had they done, and what could be the object? That the Genoese had grudges against them was natural enough; but what ailed the others? Ready for the stoutest defence of their walled Mahdia, they were, however, curious to ascertain the reason, and they sent one of their number, who spoke Italian, to explain “howe we have in nothynge trespassed them; of a trouthe, afore this tyme, there hath been warre bytwene us and the Genovoys,” but that does not concern Christians from “farre countreys.” The Genoese “are our neighbours, they take of us and we of them; we have been auncyente enemyes and shall be, excepte whan treuce is betwene us.” But why are the others interfering?
The leaders of the army agreed that a reply should be sent; they held council, twelve of them, “in the duke of Burbons tent,” and gave an answer to the effect that the reason why they made this war “was bycause the Sonne of God, called Jesu Chryst... by their lyne and generacyon, was put to deth and crucyfyed,” and also because the Saracens did not believe in baptism, nor “in the Virgyn Mary, Mother to Jhesu Cryst....”
“At this aunswere the Sarazyns dyd nothinge but laugh and sayd howe that aunswere was nothynge reasonable, for it was the Jewes that put Chryst to dethe and not they. Thus the siege still endured.”568
The usual ally of the infidel did not fail him: sickness, fevers, and epidemics worked havoc among the besiegers, who had, of all months, selected July for their attempt. They tried to storm the city, but were repulsed with great loss, and after some eight weeks of fruitless labour, brilliant combats, and many deaths, accepted a patched-up treaty granting the Genoese some slight advantage; raised the siege, and returned home, with probably less “trompettes and claryons sowning in the ayre” than when they had started.
The acceptance of a discussion with the infidel during this abortive crusade was characteristic of the time. More prone than before to examine inherited beliefs, a good many men were found in the fourteenth century to question the very principle of the crusade. We crush the infidel, why not convert him? Is it not wiser, more reasonable, and even more conformable to the religion of Christ? Were the apostles whom He sent to us Gentiles covered with armour and provided with swords? Reflections like these occur in the works, not only of reforming minds like Wyclif or Langland,569 but of pious well-meaning conservative thinkers like Gower, who says in his “Confessio Amantis”:
“To sleen and fighten they us bidde
Hem whom they shuld, as the boke saith,
Converten unto Cristes feith.
But herof have I great merveile
How they wol bidde me traveile;
A Saracen if I slee shall,
I slee the soule forth withall,
And that was never Cristes lore.”
Failing crusades, then, just as before those great military undertakings had begun, small troops of pilgrims, privately formed, started on the road to Jerusalem, still in their eyes, in spite of all St. Jerome might have said, the best road to heaven. They were, however, many of them, inspired by mixed motives, for this was also the road to adventure, and there, again, were very apparent the chivalric and restless instincts of the period.
A good number of such caravans came from England; the English were already, and had been even before, and continue to this day, great travellers. They were to be met everywhere, and their knowledge of French stood them in good stead in most of the countries they went through. This was, as “Mandeville” states, the common language of the upper classes everywhere;570 it was also that spoken in the East by the European, the “Frank.” Trevisa, finding that the English were forgetting that language, deplores it; how will they do if they go abroad? “That is harme for hem and they schulle passe the see and travaille in straunge landes and in many other places.”571 They tried to acquire notions of it before setting out on their travels, and employed competent persons to compose manuals of conversation for them to learn, in the words of the author of one such work, an Englishman of the fourteenth century, “how to speak and pronounce well, and to write correctly sweet French, which is the finest and most graceful language, the noblest to speak of any in the world after Latin of the schools, and is better prized and loved than any other by all men; for God made it so sweet and lovable chiefly to His own praise and honour. And therefore it may well compare with the language of the angels in heaven, on account of its great sweetness and beauty.” So spoke this teacher of what he had to teach.572
The English went much abroad; every author who draws their portrait lays stress on their taste for moving about, and their love of distant travel; the moon is considered, in consequence, as their planet. According to Gower, the moon’s influence is the cause why they visit so many far-off countries:
“Bot what man under his [i.e., the moon’s] pouer
Is bore, he schall his place change
And seche manye londes strange;
And as of this condicion
The Mones disposicion
Upon the lond of Alemaigne
Is set, and ek upon Bretaigne,
Which nou is cleped Engelond,
For thei travaile in every lond.”573
Wyclif places them under the patronage of the same planet, but draws different conclusions therefrom;574 Ralph Higden the chronicler expresses himself in these terms, most of which seem prophetic, they have proved so exact: “That people are curious enough that they may know and tell the wonders that they have seen; they cultivate other regions, and succeed still better in distant countries than in their own,... wherefore it is that they are spread so wide through the earth, considering every other land that they inhabit as their own country. They are a race able for every industry.”575
A number of those adventure seekers were established in Italy, where they had become condottieri, and went fighting up and down the peninsula according to the will of whomsoever paid them. Such were John Hawkwood, whose tomb still adorns the cathedral at Florence,576 William Gold, and several others. Fierce folk they were, with ardent passions, ready sometimes, as in Homeric days, to do and sacrifice as much to recover a fugitive girl as to take a town. One letter of William Gold may give an idea of the temper of these bellicose wanderers. On August 9, 1378, he wrote to Louis Gonzaga, lord of Mantua, concerning the girl Jeannette, of France:
“... Let her be detained at my suit, for if you should have a thousand golden florins spent for her, I will pay them without delay; for if I should have to follow her to Avignon I will obtain this woman. Now, my lord, should I be asking a trifle contrary to law, yet ought you not to cross me in this, for some day I shall do more for you than a thousand united French women could effect; and if there be need of me in a matter of greater import, you shall have for the asking a thousand spears at my back. Therefore, in conclusion, again and again, I entreat that this Janet may be put in a safe place unknown to anybody, and there kept until I send some servant of mine for her with a letter from myself, for I would do more for you in greater matters. And I pray you, thwart me not about putting her in a safe place, for you alone, and no one else are lord in Mantua.
“The Camp under Verona, August 9, 1378.
“P.S.—I beseech by all means that [the] said Janet may not quit Mantua, but be in safe custody, and so you will have obliged me for ever.”
No less determined as a warrior than as a lover, and accustomed, as it seems, in both cases, to put people to flight, William Gold was made a citizen of Venice in recognition of his services on April 27, 1380, and in July of the same year received from the Doge Andrea Contarini a pension of 500 gold ducats for life.577
Thinking less of the Jeannettes to be met on the way, troops of pilgrims sailed from England, beginning their long journey towards the Holy Land, usually provided with letters from their sovereign, to serve both as passports and as recommendations in case of need. The tenor of these documents, written in French or in Latin, was usually similar to that of the following letter granted by Edward III in 1354 to one who, it is true, was more of a fighter than a pilgrim: “Know all men that the noble Jean le Meingre, knight, otherwise Bussigand [Boucicaut], our prisoner, is about to set forth, duly licensed by us, with twelve knights to St. James, and thence to march against the enemies of Christ in the Holy Land; and that we have taken him and his twelve companions, their servants, horses, and harnesses under our protection and safe conduct.”578
Such travellers were well received by the French King of Cyprus, of the famous Lusignan family; they brought him news of the outer world, with them came variety and hope; they also were sometimes able to actually assist him in his difficulties, which were ceaseless, and the king showed his pleasure in his letters. Thus James I of Lusignan, “King of Jerusalem and Cyprus,” writes from Nicosia, in 1393, to Richard II, that a knight has no need of a personal recommendation to be welcome in the island; his subjects always are. It was for him an honour and delight to be visited by “your noble relative the lord Henry Percy.”579 In the same manner the troop of French pilgrims, to which belonged the lord of Anglure, was welcomed in Cyprus, by the same king, in 1396. They reached the island on their way home, after a fearful storm, in which they nearly lost their lives.580 As soon as James heard of their having landed he sent to them provisions in plenty: a hundred chickens, twenty sheep, two oxen, much good red wine and good white bread. Then he asked them to his Court, where they were delightfully entertained by him, by the queen, and their four sons and five daughters. Being himself a great huntsman, James asked them to go hunting with him, a pleasant offer after so many trials, and one not to be refused.
Combats, hunts, storms, encounters of all sorts, in a word, adventure, were thus associated with the idea of the voyage, the holiness of which sometimes disappeared in the midst of so many profane incidents. Well may one wonder whether Saint James was the real attraction, for a De Werchin, Seneschal de Hainaut, who, about to start on a pilgrimage to the shrine of this saint, in 1402, would make it publicly known that, “in the name of God, of our Lord St. George, and of his own lady,” he would accept during his whole journey the friendly combat of arms with any knight for whom he should not have to turn from his road more than 20 leagues. He announced his itinerary beforehand, so that any one might make ready.581
The strange man, Jean de Bourgogne by name, who chose to sign his book of travels “Jean de Mandeville,”582 gives somewhat similar reasons to explain why he undertook his journey to the East in 1322 through perilous seas and countries—or rather, according to modern discoveries—through the books of his library. He started, or, anyhow, he studied and wrote, partly, says he, to sanctify himself, partly to know the world and its wonders, and to be able to speak of them; for many persons, he observes, are much pleased with hearing the marvels of distant regions described. The reason he publishes his impressions is, first, because numbers of people like stories of the Holy Land, and find great consolation and comfort in them; and, secondly, to make a guide, in order that small companies or caravans, like that of Boucicaut and others, may profit by his knowledge.
His ideas as to the road to be followed are not unreasonable. Thus, “to go the direct way” from England to Palestine, he advises the following itinerary: France, Burgundy, Lombardy, Venice, Famagusta in Cyprus, Jaffa, Jerusalem. Very often people went to Jerusalem by way of Egypt. It was a tradition of long standing that the greater part of the difficulties concerning the Holy Land had their root in Egypt; many tombs of saints also attracted the pilgrims there, so that crusaders, or mere pilgrims, often took that road to Jerusalem. “Mandeville” says he himself followed this itinerary. In 1422 Gilbert de Lannoy wrote, “at the behest of King Henry of England, heir and Regent of France,” that is, Henry V, a description in French of the places through which a crusade might be led against the infidels, for this prince, like his predecessors, continued dreaming of a crusade. Lannoy, a practical soldier and diplomat, who speaks only of what he has seen, gives a detailed account of all towns, stating which are protected by walls, towers and ditches; he notices the Venetians’ warehouses for cotton at Acre, and the presence at Beirut of a great number of Christian merchants, Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, and others. He carefully mentions what sorts of provisions in wood, water, etc., may be found in each part of the country, in what plains an army can be easily arrayed, in what ports a fleet shall be safe. He pays the greatest attention to Egypt, and describes its several cities: “Item. There is Cairo, the chief town of Egypt, on the river Nile which comes from Paradise.”583 But the crusade, in anticipation of which he wrote, never took place, and the next military expedition to reach Syria through Egypt was destined to be a French one, headed by that extraordinary pilgrim, Bonaparte.
Besides his account of a journey to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Central Asia, and China, “Mandeville” gives a description of a number of countries peopled by imaginary monsters. This fantastic part of his work, where he anticipated no less famous a traveller than Gulliver himself, did not diminish its success, quite the contrary; it was translated into several languages, and above three hundred MSS. of it now remain. But we, less confiding than our fathers, are loth to accept the excuse he gives as a guarantee of, at least, his good faith: “Things that are long past away from sight fall into oblivion, and the memory of man cannot all retain and comprehend.”584
Many books, beginning with that of Lannoy, came after his, more practical, less fantastic, and, of course, less famous.585 While the renewal of the crusades became less and less probable, the number of individual pilgrimages was on the increase. The word of the priest which could no longer uproot and set on the move entire nations, still detached here and there little groups of pious men or adventure seekers, who went to visit the holy places under favour of the Saracen’s tolerant and practical spirit. For the mass of them no longer set out to fight the infidel, but to ask his permission to see Jerusalem, which was the more readily granted that it had to be paid for.
From the fourteenth century onwards, a regular service of transports existed at Venice for the use of pilgrims: “It is the rule,” says a traveller of the fourteenth century, “that the Venetians send every year five galleys to the Holy Land. They all reach Beirut, which is the port for Damascus in Syria; thence two of them bring the pilgrims to Jaffa, which is the port for Jerusalem.”586
Many particulars about this service of transports, the purchases to make before starting, and the provisions to take, are found in a book written in the following century by William Wey, Fellow of Eton College, an experienced pilgrim with a passion for such journeys. He recommended that the price of the passage be carefully settled before starting, and that a bed with its pillows, sheets, etc., be procured. This was bought at Venice, near St. Mark’s, and cost three ducats; after the journey the whole could be sold back to the vendor for a ducat and a half: “Also when ye com to Venyse ye schal by a bedde by seynt Markys cherche; ye schal have a fedyr bedde, a matres, too pylwys, too peyre schetis and a qwylt, and ye schal pay iij dokettis; and when ye com ayen, bryng the same bedde to the man that ye bowt hit of and ye schal have a doket and halfe ayen, thow hyt be broke and worne.”587 Such settled customs and fixed prices show better than anything else the frequency of the intercourse.
William Wey is as obliging for his traveller as are modern guide-book makers; he devises mnemonics of names to remember, a vocabulary of the Greek words most important to know, and ready-made questions which our manuals still repeat in more correct language:
| “Good morrow. | Calomare. |
| Welcome. | Calosertys. |
| Tel me the way. | Dixiximo strata. |
| Gyff me that. | Doys me tutt. |
| Woman, haue ye goyd wyne? | Geneca esse calocrasse? |
| Howe moche? | Posso?” |
He does not omit a sentence which must have been, and still is, of especially frequent use: “I understond the not—Apopon kystys.” Wey also gives a table of the rate of exchange for moneys from England to Venice, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Syria; and a programme for the employment of time, as now very parsimoniously distributed; he only allows “thirteen or fourteen days” to see everything and start back again, specifying what should be seen each day. Lastly, he gives a complete list of the towns to be traversed, with the distance from one to the other, a map of the Holy Land with all the remarkable places duly inscribed thereon,588 a considerable catalogue of the indulgences to be gained, and full details as to what is sacred or curious in Palestine, or on the way thither, not forgetting the dogs at Rhodes, who keep watch at night outside the castle, know perfectly how to distinguish a Turk from a Christian, and who, if one of their number “sleeps instead of taking his watch at night outside the castle, kill him themselves,”589 so great is their detestation of a slacker.
Wey foresaw all the disagreeables to which the boorishness of the captain of the galley might subject you; he recommends engaging a berth in the highest part of the boat, “for in the lawyst [stage] under hyt is ryght smolderyng hote and stynkynge.”590 You must not pay more than forty ducats from Venice to Jaffa, food included, and should stipulate that the captain stop at certain ports to take in fresh provisions. He is bound to give you hot meat at dinner and supper, good wine, pure water, and biscuit; but it is well besides to take provisions for private use, for even at the captain’s table there is great risk of having bad bread and wine. “For thow ye schal be at the tabyl wyth yowre patrone, notwythstondynge, ye schal oft tyme have nede to yowre vytelys, bred, chese, eggys, frute, and bakyn, wyne, and other, to make yowre collasyun; for sum tyme ye schal have febyl bred, wyne and stynkyng water, meny tymes ye schal be ful fayne to ete of yowre owne.” It would even be prudent to take some poultry: “Also by yow a cage for half a dozen of hennys or chekyn to have with yow in the galey;” half a bushel of seed to feed them must not be forgotten, nor what you will want to fry your own bacon and drink your wine: “Also take with you a lytyl cawdren and fryyng pan, dysches, platerrys, sawserys of tre (wood), cuppys of glas, a grater for brede and such nessaryes.” You must also have remedies, “confortatyvys, laxatyvys, restoratyvys,” saffron, pepper, spices.591
On arrival at a port it is well to leap ashore one of the first, in order to get served before others, and not to have the leavings; this counsel of practical selfishness often recurs. On land heed must be taken as to the fruits: “beware of dyverse frutys, for they be not acordyng to youre complexioun, and they gender a blody fluxe (dysentery), and yf an Englyschman have that sykenes hyt ys a marvel and scape hyt but he dye thereof.”
Once in Palestine, one must be careful about robbers; beware of Saracens coming to talk familiarly with you: “Also take goyd hede of yowre knyves and other smal thynges that ye ber apon yow, for the Sarsenes wyl go talkyng wyth yow and make goyd chere, but they wyl stele fro yow that ye have and they may.” At Jaffa you must bestir yourself and be quick, in order to have the best donkey, “Also when ye schal take yowre asse at port Jaffe, be not to longe behynde yowre felowys; for and ye com by tyme ye may chese the beste mule, other asse, for ye schal pay no more fore the best then for the worst. And ye must yeve youre asman curtesy a grot.”592 This last recommendation shows the high antiquity of “pourboires,” one of the best preserved of mediæval traditions. At last the caravan leaves the seaside and proceeds towards the Holy City; and then it is prudent not to straggle too far from your companions for fear of evildoers.
Worthy of notice is the fact that these visits to the Holy Land were in great part performed on donkeys; knights themselves did not disdain mounting these modest animals: “At this said inn did we dismount from our asses,” says the narrator of the travels of the lord of Anglure, who, as we have seen, visited Jerusalem at the end of the fourteenth century; which tends to show that if there was, as there still is, some danger of attacks by robbers, it was not very serious. If there had been any chance of real fight knights would hardly have ventured getting into it on donkey-back. In fact, many of those reports of travels in the Holy Land give the impression of mere tourists’ excursions, and what comes out most clearly from them is the before-mentioned spirit of tolerance, coupled with the spirit of profit, displayed by the Saracen. He did not forbid the entry into Palestine of all these pilgrims, who often came as spies and enemies, and he let their troops do very much as they liked, provided they did not forget to pay.593 The companions of the lord of Anglure, and half a century later of William Wey, go where they will; returning when it is convenient, and making plans of excursions beforehand as they would do at present. They admire the beauty of the “muscas” or mosques, the quaint appearance of the vaulted streets with light coming from apertures at the top of the vault, and with shops for Saracen merchants on both sides, in other words, the bazaar; they are led by and receive explanations from their “drugemens;” at certain places they meet officers entrusted with the permit of the “Soudan,” as to all affairs concerning foreigners: these officers are called “consulles.” They find European merchants established and doing much trade in the ports of the infidel; they have, in fact, nothing to fear seriously but local wars (about which they were pretty sure to get timely information), or possibly calamitous encounters at sea. William Wey and his companions learn with much uneasiness on their return that a Turkish fleet with dubious purpose is ready to quit Constantinople, but happily they do not meet it.
A comparison between the experiences of both troops of pilgrims, the French and the English, is instructive, precisely because they are, in so many cases, similar. The lord of Anglure594 had no trouble in reaching Jerusalem, being provided with the proper authorization: “Shortly after, we started thence on foot, and with the license of the lieutenant of the Sultan we entered the holy city of Jerusalem at the hour of vespers, and were all received and lodged in the hospital where it is customary now for pilgrims to stay.” Having bought tents, they travel by land without difficulty from Palestine to Egypt, crossing the desert, noticing the places where Moses performed his miracles, visiting Cairo, which deeply impresses them by its beauty, its greatness, its gardens and monuments, and the immense number of Saracens living there. They go partly by water, partly on camels, observing on their way “two great black-feathered ostriches trotting along,” to the places where St. Anthony had lived with his “porcellet,” and where churches and abbeys prosper under the rule of the unmeddling Saracen. They navigate the Nile, a large river which “comes from Paradise,” and where “live several serpents called cokatrices,” otherwise crocodiles, of which they see one “very great and hideous” that dived into the water when they came near. There only they have a rather narrow escape, being attacked in their boat by “Arab robbers,” and some of their troop are wounded with arrows, but none is killed.
Needless to say that, if Rome was full of relics, there was no want of them in Jerusalem. All the places named in the Gospel, and some others, had been identified with precision: “Item, continuing to go up towards this mountain on the right hand side, there is a house where the sweet Virgin Mary learnt at school.” Near the church of the Holy Sepulchre is a large square “with two big stones on the one of which our Lord used to sit when He preached to His disciples, and our Lady sat opposite on the other.” The place is shown “where St. John the Evangelist sang mass every day in the presence of our Lady after the Ascension of our Lord.” You may see, too, the spot where was roasted the paschal lamb; “even here was warmed the water with which our Lord washed the feet of His apostles.” There is also a cave or well “where King Herod had the Innocents thrown, out of spite.” At Bethlehem is a church of St. Nicholas, “in which place the sweet Virgin Mary hid herself to draw her milk from her worthy breasts when she would fly to Egypt. In this same church is a marble column against which she leaned when she drew her worthy milk, and this pillar continues moist since the time she leaned against it, and when it is wiped, at once it sweats again; and in all places where her worthy milk fell, the earth is still soft and white and has the appearance of curded milk, and whoever likes takes of it, out of devotion.”—Hence the milk at Walsingham?
In Egypt, too, the wonders are numerous, but many are of a different order. Besides the churches and hermitages there are the “granaries of Pharaoh,” namely the pyramids, which seem to the lord of Anglure and his companions “the most marvellous thing they had yet seen in all their travels.” They are cut “in the shape of a fine diamond,” but inside they are full of animals, who stink horribly. Mandeville, who had seen them some years before, gives them the same origin, and utterly discards the belief that they might have been tombs of high personages. He mentions the hieroglyphics, about the only thing in all his book that he does not try to explain; he also has a word for the grim inhabitants of the pyramids: “Thei ben alle fulle of serpentes. And aboven the gernerers with outen ben many scriptures of dyverse languages. And sum men seyn that they ben sepultures of grete Lordes, that weren somtyme; but that is not trewe; for all the comoun rymour and speche is of alle the peple there, bothe far and nere, that thei ben the garneres of Joseph. And so fynden thei in here scriptures and in here cronycles. On that other partie, yif thei werein sepultures, thei scholden not ben voyd with inne. For yee may well knowe that tombes and sepultures ne ben not made of suche gretnesse ne of suche highnesse. Wherfore it is not to beleve that thei ben tombes or sepultures.”595 This powerful mode of reasoning did not, however, convince such sceptics as Mariette and Maspéro.
Besides the pyramids, the companions of the Lord of Anglure notice and greatly praise the houses with their terraces, the mosques and their “fine lamps,” these same ornamented glass lamps which, after having been admired by our pilgrims in 1395 when they were fresh and new, can be seen now without going so far, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Egyptian animals, too, are noted by our travellers as being very striking; besides the crocodiles there are the long-necked giraffes, so tall that “they could well take their provender on the highest lances that it is the custom now to use,” and then the elephants. A very strange beast an elephant: “It could never bend to the ground to get its food on account of its great height, but it has in its snout something like a bowel, put at the further end of its snout,” and this bowel “hangs down almost to the ground,” and with it the beast “takes its food and carries it to its mouth.” He uses it also to drink, and “when he blows air through it the noise is greater than that of any buccina,” and the sound “is terrible to those unaccustomed.”
At last the time came when our pilgrims had seen everything, and they had to wend their way homewards. Twice did William Wey undertake the great journey, happy to have seen, fain to see again. When he came back to England for the last time he bequeathed to a chapel, built on the model of the Holy Sepulchre, the souvenirs which he had brought back, that is to say, a stone from Calvary, another from the Sepulchre itself, one from Mount Tabor, one from the place where the cross stood, and other relics. As for the French troop of pilgrims who had left Anglure-sur-Aube on July 16, 1395, they came back in the following year, complete in their numbers but for Simon de Sarrebruck, who had died of fever in Cyprus during the journey home, and lies interred in a church there. “And on Thursday, the twenty-second day of June, and the day before the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, in the year of grace of our Lord, 1396, we found ourselves again dining in Anglure.”
67. A PILGRIM’S “SIGN,” OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM.
(Original in the British Museum.)
68. A BLIND BEGGAR CHEATED OF HIS DRINK BY HIS BOY.
(From MS. 10 E. IV.)
Conclusion
We have followed the race of roamers in many places: on the road, at the hostelry, in woods, in taverns, in churches; we have seen them exercising a host of different trades, a motley crew, minstrels, buffoons, quacks, messengers, pedlars, pilgrims, wandering preachers, beggars, friars, vagabonds of all sorts, labourers broken loose from the soil, pardoners, knights in search of adventure. We have accompanied them here and there over the highroads of England, and followed them to Rome itself, and the Holy Land; there we shall leave them. To the wandering class also belong the representatives of many other professions, such as scribes, tinkers, cobblers, masons, showers of animals or bearwards, like those whom Villard de Honnecourt visited one day in order to draw “al vif,” a lion. But the more important members are those above described.
The current of life represented by the multiplicity of these wayfarers is powerful; notice has been taken of the great though not very apparent part they played in the State. The labourer breaks the bonds which for centuries have attached him to the manor, and henceforward means to be the master of his own person and of his service, to hire himself by the day if he chooses, and for a salary corresponding to the rise in prices and to the demand there may be for his work. The reform is an inevitable one, which will be realized by degrees, in spite of the laws and of the will of the authorities. There is none more important, and its how and wherefore are to be studied not only in the castle, but on the road and by-ways, in the brushwood, where armed bands meet together during church service, and on those unfrequented paths where the false pilgrim throws down his staff to take up his tools and look for work out of the reach of his hereditary master. These people promote by their example and success the emancipation which the wandering preachers justify in their discourses, showing it to be not simply desirable, but rightful.
The great questions of the age, social and religious, move towards their solution, partly on the road, through the influence of the wanderers, a direct influence from the sincere ones, indirect from the others. Begging friars go from door to door, pardoners grow rich, pilgrims live by alms and by the recital of their adventures, always on the way, always at work. What is this work? By constantly addressing the crowd, they in the end make themselves known for what they are, and cause their listeners to pass sentence upon them; by disabusing them they render reform inevitable. Thereby, too, will the rust and superstition of the middle ages drop away, and another step be made towards modern civilization.
Each of these strange types has, moreover, the advantage of showing, very apparent in his own person, some characteristic side of the tastes, the beliefs, and the aspirations of his time. Each of those groups corresponds to a need, an eccentricity, a vice, or a merit of the nation; through them we may examine, as it were, and reconstitute piecemeal the souls of the men of long ago, and have those men stand before us, mind and body, complete, just as the nature of the soil may be guessed from the flora of a country.
The general impression is that the English people then underwent one of those profound transformations which present themselves to the historian’s view like the turning of a highway. Coming out from gorges and mountains the road suddenly leads to an opening, and the rich, sunny, fertile plain is perceived in the distance. It has not yet been reached, many hardships are still to be endured; it will disappear again from sight at intervals, but the traveller has seen it, and knows at least in what direction to tread in order to attain it. During the age which was then beginning the emancipated peasant was to enrich himself in spite of fierce wars especially deadly for the nobility, and the Commons were to be possessed of an instrument of control over the royal power, which would be used, according to the period, more or less well, but which is the best one invented up to our day. The Parliament sitting at Westminster now is in its essential elements identical with the one that, under the Plantagenets, drew up the statutes of the kingdom. In the fourteenth century, despite ultra severe judgments from some thinkers of fame (an age, says Stubbs, “of heartless selfishness and moral degradation”), mankind did not recede, witness the host of truly modern ideas which gained a hold on the mass of the people; among the upper classes under the influence of higher education and wider intercourse with foreign countries, which weakened the notion of the immutability of custom; among the lower classes through the effects of abuses long experienced by men who, though patient, were no weaklings; ideas made popular and rendered practical by the wayfarers, illiterate workmen, single-hearted preachers. All those mad freaks, all the extravagance of the religious spirit, those incessant revolts and follies which have been noticed, were sure to cause a reaction, and a longing for something nearer that reign of reason which mankind, though less remote from the goal, still continues to look for in the far distance.
On a number of questions, whether as the promoter or the object of reform, as working man or as pardoner, whether an unconscious instrument or not, wanderers will always have much to teach whoever will question them. For good or evil it may be said that they acted in mediæval history as “microbes,” a numerous, scarcely visible, but powerful host. They will perhaps reveal the secret of almost incomprehensible transformations, which might have seemed to necessitate a total overturn, like the one that took place in France at the end of the eighteenth century, a new or rather a first contrat social. England, for many reasons, has not required this; one among those reasons is the action of the roamers which, exerting itself on a population temperamentally steadier than many others, more persistently resolute, and less constantly troubled by wars on its territory, united the people and, thanks to that union which made it strong, allowed it to snatch in time the necessary concessions. And as, however, the calmest changes cannot take place without some disturbance, as also among the English there have been, in the course of centuries, more than one bloody fray, the nomad may perhaps end by answering his interrogator in the words of a common proverb of certain, yet unhackneyed wisdom, which should prevent pessimism and lack of hope: “Le bois tortu fait le feu droit”—Crooked log maketh straight fire.