by Ian Mortimer
Most English saints’ remains may be considered “real” relics: they are actually what they purport to be. They are not pigs’ bones (to use Chaucer’s expression), nor are they the bones of a nondescript corpse sold on the ecclesiastical relic market. It is only to be expected that the body of St. Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, lies in his shrine in Lincoln Cathedral: he died in 1200. Even the Saxon saints’ bones have, in many cases, been carefully preserved in their churches down the centuries. However a few of the major pilgrimage destinations require more explanation. Why does Walsingham Priory have a reconstruction of the house of the Virgin Mary? The reason is that someone dreamed of it, and started to build it, and miraculously the stones were moved to this site. As the priory grew in importance, the relic of the Virgin’s milk was purchased by a benefactor, as was a famous image of her. You might say, therefore, that the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham has nothing to do with the actual Virgin Mary. But this is the second most visited place of pilgrimage in England—second only to Canterbury. How does one account for this?
In order to understand the power of such places you need to understand pilgrimages from a subjective point of view: scientific objectivity will not help you. Look at the effect on those who make the journey to Walsingham. Having traveled for days—perhaps weeks—all the way from their homes, the pilgrims come at last to the Slipper Chapel, about a mile and a half from the priory. It is the first stage in the culmination of a long journey. Here they take off their shoes, so they can walk the last mile and a half to the priory barefoot, in a penitential fashion. With their feet hurting but their anticipation heightened, they sing religious songs along the way. Then they come to the narrow pilgrims’ gate in the walls of the precinct. Inside, they enter a small chapel where, on making an offering, they are allowed to kiss a great bone, called the finger bone of St. Peter. They are then conducted in solemn silence to a thatched building where there are two wells, famed for their medicinal properties and for the rumor that they have the power to grant pilgrims whatever they truly desire. Having made such wishes, the pilgrims are led to the chapel of the Virgin. By this stage, they are in a state of religious ecstasy. They enter the chapel, one by one. At last they pass before the famed relic of the Holy Milk. That the milk itself is solid, and probably made of chalk, mixed with egg white, is unimportant to them.43 What matters is not whether the relic is genuine or not but the spirit of the pilgrimage itself—a demonstration of commitment and faith.
The Principal Pilgrim Destinations in England42
Place
Main Attraction
Beverley Minster
The shrine of St. John of Beverley, bishop of York
Bromholm Priory
The Holy Rood (a portion of the True Cross)
Bury St. Edmunds
The shrine of St. Edmund, king and martyr
Canterbury Cathedral
The shrines of St. Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and several other archbishop-saints, including St. Dunstan
Chester Abbey
The shrine of St. Werburgh, abbess
Chichester Cathedral
The shrine of St. Richard de Wyche, bishop of Chichester
Crowland Abbey
The shrine of St. Guthlac, hermit
Durham Cathedral
The shrine of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne
Ely Cathedral
The shrine of St. Etheldreda, queen and abbess
Glastonbury Abbey
The shrine of St. Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury and archbishop of Canterbury (although he is actually buried at Canterbury); King Arthur and Queen Guinevere (supposedly); this is also believed to be the first Christian church, said to be built by Joseph of Arimathea
Hailes Abbey
The Holy Blood
Hereford Cathedral
The shrine of St. Walter Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford
Lichfield Cathedral
The shrine of St. Chad, bishop of Mercia and Lindsey
Lincoln Cathedral
The shrines of St. Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, and St. Hugh of Lincoln, martyr
Norwich Cathedral
The shrine of St. William, martyr
Oxford Priory
The shrine of St. Frideswide, abbess of Oxford
Ripon Cathedral
The shrine of St. Wilfrid, bishop of Hexham
Rochester Cathedral
The shrines of St. William of Perth, pilgrim and martyr, and St. Paulinus, bishop of York and Rochester
Walsingham Priory
The replica of the house of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth, together with her image and some of her milk
Westminster Abbey
The shrine of St. Edward the Confessor, king of England
Winchester Cathedral
The shrine of St. Swithin, bishop of Winchester
Worcester Cathedral
The shrine of St. Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester
York Minster
The shrine of St. William, archbishop of York
Most great religious houses have substantial collections of relics, Canterbury Cathedral has several shrines besides that of St. Thomas Becket, including the bodies of three other archbishop-saints: St. Oda, St. Anselm, and St. Dunstan. Similar assortments of holy body parts are to be found in many lesser houses. Wimborne Minster, for example, is not one of the principal pilgrimage destinations, having
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Relics in the Church of Wimborne Minster44
A piece of the True Cross
Part of Christ’s robe
A large stone from the Holy Sepulchre
A piece of the altar upon which Christ was lifted up and offered by Simeon
Some hairs from Christ’s beard
A piece of the scourging pillar
A shoe of St. William
Part of the thigh of St. Agatha
Some bones from St. Catherine
Part of St. Mary the Egyptian
Part of Christ’s manger
A thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns
One of St. Philip’s teeth
Some blood from St. Thomas Becket
St. Francis’s hair shirt
* * *
no famous miracle-working saint’s corpse with which to draw the crowds. But nevertheless you may consider going there, if only to see “St. Francis’s hair shirt.” And the relics at Wimborne are mere dust compared to some dazzling artifacts preserved in overseas churches. What about going to see the sponge which was soaked with vinegar and lifted to Christ’s lips while he was on the cross? Or the finger with which St. Thomas touched the rib of the risen Christ? Or some of the earth from Calvary saturated with the holy blood? All these are kept together, in the church of Santa Croce, in Italy. The same church claims also to have a piece of manna—the food with which God fed the starving Israelites. Quite extraordinary. But such claims show the confidence of the church. Few pilgrims who make the journey to Santa Croce will even imagine asking the obvious question: why was this heavenly food not eaten at the time?
Literature and Storytelling
Shocking though it may appear to you, you have something in common with these people who believe in relics, fight tournaments, and hunt with falcons. Books. Many of them see literature as a satisfying and enjoyable way to spend time. Of course, they might not actually pick up a book themselves; lords and their families, together with members of their households, are accustomed to having books read to them as they sit in the hall or chamber of an evening.45 Nevertheless the music of a tale told well is as popular as any other form of minstrelsy and as enjoyable as literature in the modern world.
Leading this move towards the enjoyment of literature is the royal family. All the fourteenth-century kings and their spouses are keen on books. Among the many volumes in Edward II’s personal possession are a Latin history of the kings of England, a biography of St. Edward the Confessor in French, a Latin prayer book, and a “romance” in French.46 “Romance” is the term for all fiction; it
does not necessarily relate to a love story—although many romances do incorporate love stories. Edward’s consort, Queen Isabella, is an enthusiastic book collector. She has many volumes of religious devotion, including a spectacular apocalypse; a two-volume Bible in French; a book of sermons in French; two books of Hours of the Virgin; and various antiphonals, graduais, and missals for use in her chapel. She also owns an encyclopedia (Brunetto Latini’s Trésor, in French) and at least two history books: Brut (bound with the Trésor) and a book about the genealogy of the royal family. She also owns at least ten romances. Among them are The Deeds of Arthur (bound in white leather), Tristan and Isolda, Aimeric de Narbonne, Perceval and Gawain, and The Trojan War. 47
Ten romances suggests that Isabella is keen on reading. But this is not the full story. Not only does she borrow books from her friends, she takes books from the royal lending library. This contains at least 340 titles and is housed in the Tower of London.48 As a younger woman, she borrows romances for herself and titles such as The History of Normandy and Vegetius’s text on warfare for her sons. Edward III is not a bookish man but he can read and write and values books highly. Once, in 1335, he pays a hundred marks (£66 13s 4d) for a single volume. Various people give him presents of books throughout his life, and these are added to the royal library. A member of his household fetches one when the king calls for something to be read to him in his chamber.
This is what book ownership means for the aristocracy: hundreds of valuable secular manuscripts in English and French, and religious manuscripts in Latin being lent, borrowed, and read aloud. Joan, Lady Mortimer, has four romances with her at Wigmore in 1322. Thomas, duke of Gloucester (youngest son of Edward III), has forty-two religious books in his private chapel at Pleshey in 1397 and eighty-four other books elsewhere in the castle, including romances such as Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), Hector of Troy, The Romance of Lancelot, and The Deeds of Fulk Fitzwarin.49 Thomas’s wife is from the Bohun family, earls of Hereford, who are among the greatest patrons of book illustration of the whole century, so these are not just books which are good to listen to—many of them are wonderful to look at too. Many bishops are similarly surrounded by reading material. Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, has so many books in his library that you have to climb over stacks of them to get to his desk. It takes five carts to take them all away after his death in 1345.50
Literature is a means to delight the mind and embolden the spirit. It is therefore not surprising that it is available outside noblemen’s households. Pick up a book like the Auchinleck manuscript, written in the 1330s; it contains no fewer than forty-four texts in English for a well-educated Londoner to read to himself or to his wife, or for a well-educated wife to read to her husband. Flick through at random: you will come across a short account of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, then the story of Sir Degaré, The Seven Sages of Rome, Floris and Blancheflour (a romance), The Sayings of the Four Philosophers, The Battle Abbey Roll (a list of names of Norman knights who fought at Hastings), and the famous romance Guy of Warwick. Later you might read the short poem In Praise of Women, or the romance Arthur and Merlin, or Sir Tristrem (Tristan and Isolde), or Sir Orfeo (Orpheus and Eurydice). Perhaps historical tales are more to your liking? In which case you can turn to the life of Richard the Lionheart, or the life of King Alexander the Great. The whole book is a veritable library in one volume, with entertaining texts for all the family51
Although literature is something shared across the centuries, the way people actually read varies considerably. All medieval books are manuscripts—printed books do not arrive in England until the earliest imports in the 1460s—so it is worth paying the extra money for a really good, clean text which you can read clearly, whether it be in English or French. Because they are manuscripts, they all tend to be valuable, so they are not the sort of things you pick up lightly. Ladies may have reading parties in the gardens of aristocratic houses, being read to as they sit on the grass surrounded by flowers and trees. But reading otherwise takes place indoors. Communal readings may take place in the hall, but private readings to the lord and his family alone, or with invited guests in the lord’s solar chamber, are also common. Those doing the actual reading may well be hampered by the lack of light. Candles certainly put a strain on readers’ eyes. Because of this, some wealthy individuals have wooden-rimmed spectacles (invented by Italians in the late thirteenth century). The studious bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapledon, who dies in 1326, leaves a pair of spectacles in his will.
The result of all these difficulties with light, text, audience, valuable manuscripts, and spectacles is that reading is not something idly done. Literature has more of the character of a performance than a moment of quiet reflection. This is where the enjoyment of storytelling comes in. As only a twentieth of the rural population can read, literature is still a minority activity. Most storytelling is done by minstrels, or storytellers traveling with minstrels, who recite their stories from memory. Nor can you separate this oral tradition from written culture and say the two are different. Lords might listen to a story being read to them from a book, or they might equally listen to a minstrel in the hall recite a tale from memory. And just as some stories move from the written word to being performed from memory, so there are stories which begin as oral tales told at fairs and end up being written down. The stories of Robin Hood are a good example. If you wander around the forests of Yorkshire in the years leading up to 1318, you will meet people who appear to be of the Robin Hood fraternity. You may even meet an outlaw called John Little, who, in 1318, takes part in a robbery with members of the Coterel gang.52 You may even meet a real “Robin Hood”—real in the sense that several men of that name are living in and around the manor of Wakefield in the decade before 1318.53Probably none of these men will live up to your expectations of a bunch of expert archers, clad in green, led by a smiling hero with a highly refined social conscience. But within fifty years of the Coterel gang turning to crime, the deeds of Robin Hood and Little John are being celebrated up and down the country. The poet William Langland describes one of his characters in about 1377 as being able to recite rhymes about Robin Hood and the earl of Chester. Not until the next century will any Robin Hood stories be circulated in a written form. Thus literature and the oral tradition swap stories, to the benefit of both, and to the entertainment of the people who cannot necessarily afford books themselves.
PLEASURABLE PROSE
History books are popular in the fourteenth century—especially those written with their prospective audiences in mind. First and arguably foremost of such works is the chronicle composed towards the end of the century by Jean Froissart, a Hainaulter who spends much of his life in England. He knows Edward III and Queen Philippa personally, and he writes poems as well as history (all in French). His great chronicle is written to celebrate the extraordinary deeds of English and French knights. No other writer summons up the flavor and romance of chivalric deeds quite as well. Another entertaining writer is Jean le Bel, Froissart’s compatriot and inspiration, whose work details the early part of the reign of Edward III. Similar compelling knightly histories are to be found in books by Sir Thomas Gray, who writes a chronicle while imprisoned in Scotland in the 1350s; by Robert of Avesbury who writes about the deeds of Edward III; and by an anonymous herald, who writes about the Black Prince.
Most popular of all the available history books is the Brut. This racy chronicle, first written in French in about 1300 and translated into English towards the end of the century, is a history of Britain from its legendary origins to the fourteenth century. It incorporates a great deal of romance literature. For example, a large portion of the book consists of stories of Merlin and King Arthur. But actual events start to creep into this wonder-filled narrative with the coming of St. Augustine in 597; by 1300 the book has assumed the form of a series of tales of recent history, reported reasonably faithfully and written in an informative but entertaining fashion. It becomes so popular that several of t
hose who get hold of copies start keeping them up to date, effectively writing their own chronicles. Hence the book spawns a whole new tradition of history writing. Hundreds of manuscript copies of this work are in private libraries by the end of the century, in the original French, in English, and even a few in Latin. Only one historical work is anywhere near as popular: the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, a monk of Chester, whose multivolume history of the world appeals to the laity as well as to the clergy, especially after John Trevisa translates it into English in 1387.
There is one other form of nonfiction which is also read for pleasure. Travel writing is a narrow genre which has great fascination for people as they sit around their fires of an evening. If you should join them you might be surprised to realize that it is not the late thirteenth-century journey of Marco Polo being related—manuscripts of his travels are relatively slow to reach England—but that of Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville is supposedly an Englishman from St. Albans, whose travel book is circulated in French in the second half of the century. Like Polo, he also claims to have visited the Far East, but really his knowledge comes from other writers and his own imagination. Or, rather, the imagination of the man who dreamt him up, for “Sir John Mandeville” is the literary creation of a French cleric, who invents the character and fleshes out his travels with details from older Arabic works. His relationship with his readers is like that between a saint’s relics and the pilgrims who venerate them. The real value is not a matter of objective truth. When esquires and knights hear how they may find their way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, to Babylon, Egypt, Tartary Persia, and ultimately China and India, they are drawn in. They imagine that they too can visit these wonderful places and see these fantastic riches. They picture four thousand barons drawn up in the presence of the great khan. They wince at hearing how, in the market of Cairo, men and women are traded like beasts. They shudder on hearing that, when a man dies on the island of Rybothe, the custom is for his son to decapitate his body and for priests to chop his corpse up into small pieces to feed to wild birds. Such tales are really romances; they play upon the willing suspension of disbelief as much as any tale of King Arthur. But they are important for the same reason that Arthur’s tales are important. They are inspirational as well as enjoyable. Columbus will one day acknowledge his debt to Sir John Mandeville. And within a hundred years of Mandeville’s travels being translated into English, an English ship will land on the shores of North America. The captain, John Cabot, will announce he has found the land of Mandeville’s “great khan.”
