Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Tu mater es misericordiae

  De lacu faecis et miseriae

  Theophilum reformans gratiae.

  The early collections of miracles of the Virgin, dating from the twelfth century, are so many variations on the same theme. A knight of ill-repute was saved on account of his devotion to the Virgin. A monk who used to slip out of his monastery at night was saved because he never passed an altar of the Virgin without saying ‘Ave Maria’. A loose-living nun found that her pregnancy was miraculously concealed from her superiors. Another nun, who died unconfessed, was saved because of her daily invocations of the Virgin. A monk learned in his sleep that he was already inscribed in the book of the elect because of the care with which he had painted the Virgin’s name in an illuminated manuscript. ‘By her intercession’, Caesarius of Heisterbach told his novice, ‘sinners are enlightened, the despairing are brought to confession, the apostate is reconciled, and the righteous comforted with revelations.’ The salvation of those who deserved to be damned is the theme of all Caesarius’s stories. ‘Wonderful indeed is the compassion of Our Lady’, says the novice after hearing of the salvation of an unworthy priest, rightly deprived of his benefice; ‘for thus she defends a feeble-minded priest who ought to have been deprived, and by her intervention he was able to keep his benefice.’

  The theme was capable of being simplified to the point of distorting the moral precepts of the Church. Jacques de Vitry illustrated his sermons on the power of the Virgin with the story of a gambler who was enabled to amass Croesian riches by regularly invoking her name. All pilgrimages appealed to a universal desire to wash away sin by a simple, ritual act, but none more so than pilgrimages to the Virgin. The popular view was reflected in the dying words of John, abbot of Belleville, to his attendants: ‘Only one thing do you need to know from me; he who would be saved need only honour the Virgin.’ This simple idea is very far from the profoundly spiritual concept of the Virgin’s role entertained by St. Bernard. Its appeal was to a more popular audience. The early Marial shrines were almost exclusively patronized by ordinary people and, although they were joined in the late middle ages by more august pilgrims, the shrines never lost their popular character.

  Outside the village of Essones, near Corbeil, there stood a ruined chapel dedicated to the Virgin. In the 1120s the villagers believed that they had seen mysterious candles burning there on Saturday nights. Subsequently, several peasants were miraculously cured of various ailments, and the fame of the miracles began to draw pilgrims from further afield. The abbey of St.-Denis, which owned the chapel, learned of these happenings and sent a group of monks to serve there. The incident, which is related by abbot Suger, is typical of the popular, and more or less spontaneous, origins of many Marial pilgrimages. Indeed the earliest of the hysterical mass-pilgrimages which are so characteristic of the fifteenth century occurred in connection with Marial sanctuaries of the twelfth. Chartres, Soissons, Beauvais, and Paris all received processions of peasants afflicted with ergotism during the severe epidemics of the early twelfth century. More remarkable still were the ‘building crusades’ which began in 1145, when thousands of Norman pilgrims arrived at the shrine of Notre-Dame de Chartres, intending to assist in the building of the western towers of the cathedral. For some months men and women volunteered to haul heavy wagons of stone up the steep slope on which Chartres is built, flagellating themselves as they did so, and singing hymns in honour of the Virgin. The crowds who pulled carts of building materials to the abbey of St.-Pierre-sur-Dives regarded it as a form of homage to the Virgin. As the building continued, services in her honour were continually held in the abbey, while in the yards outside the volunteers held services of their own, modelled on those in use at Chartres. As at Chartres, flagellation was an important part of the ritual. The phenomenon was repeated when Chartres cathedral was rebuilt after the disastrous fire of 1194. The ‘entire population’ of Pithiviers, in the Loire valley, made a collective pilgrimage to Chartres, dragging a wagon of corn as an offering. More corn came from the villages of Batilly, Chateau-Landon, and Bonneval. Some Breton villages dragged building stone over rough roads for two hundred miles to assist the rebuilding of the Virgin’s cathedral.

  ‘Building crusades’ reflected the view that pilgrimages performed en masse were more meritorious than those performed alone. We find the pilgrim-builders forming themselves into sects, or ‘brotherhoods’, performing their penitential rituals in common, and solemnly expelling those members who showed signs of returning to their old ways. The same thought lies behind the processional pilgrimages of whole villages to a Marial shrine. The parish priest of Issigny, in the Bessin, was so impressed by the processions in honour of the Virgin at Bayeux that he organized a collective pilgrimage to Coutances from his own parish, in which the entire population, with one exception, took part. Coutances, he explained to his congregation, was ‘the dwelling of the Holy Ghost and the scene of many miracles. Their pilgrimage would therefore be the more acceptable to the Blessed Virgin if they accomplished it together, by a common vow.’ The one parishioner who refused to go was struck down for his presumption.

  After the end of the eleventh century, some Marial sanctuaries had relics of the Virgin. But the cult of the Virgin remained relatively independent of relics. They were certainly not considered essential, as they would have been in any other cult. Their place was taken by statues which eventually received the same veneration as relics, and worked miracles. Coutances cathedral had a miracle-working statue of the Virgin in wood, in addition to its relics of the Virgin’s body. Chartres cathedral possessed the tunic of the Virgin, but it also had a celebrated statue in the crypt which, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, entirely monopolized the attention of pilgrims. These statues were always painted, sometimes in bright colours, like the four figures of the Virgin in the extraordinary vision of the monk of Eynsham, recorded in 1196. But the most famous of all, including the one at Chartres, were painted, black. The black Virgin of Rocamadour is first mentioned in 1235, when it was trodden underfoot by an armed band of the abbey’s enemies. The black Virgin of Le Puy was brought back from Palestine in 1254 by Louis IX and immediately made the fortune of the city. Special indulgences were offered on the first feast-day, in May 1255, and several hundred were killed in the crush under the very eyes of the king. In the fourteenth century the floodgates were opened, and miraculous statues appeared in thousands of obscure churches. England and the Low Countries were particularly affected. Some achieved more than local fame, and in 1356, archbishop Fitzralph pointed out in a sermon ‘a certain danger from the veneration of images, which some frequently and wrongfully call by the name of those they are intended to represent, such as St. Mary of Lincoln, St. Mary of Walsingham, St. Mary of Leicester, and so forth.’ Particularly reprehensible were ‘the oblations which are offered to such images on account of the false and fabricated miracles wrought by their intercession.’

  Any event which abruptly drew attention to a statue might be the beginning of a cult. In the Flemish village of Beveren the parish priest had only to build a small oratory in 1330, and to light a lamp in front of a statue of the Virgin, and pilgrims began to arrive immediately. Miracles were recorded within weeks and episcopal indulgences followed. An old and faded statue at Antwerp was venerated as soon as it was repaired, repainted in bright colours, and removed to Brussels. Sometimes, as at Beveren, the parish priest deliberately provoked the cult; sometimes he was taken aback by the sudden rush of pilgrims to venerate a new statue. The vicar of Kernetby reported to his superiors in 1310 that ‘there have suddenly and unexpectedly arisen new offerings in the said church, in honour of God and the most glorious Virgin Mary, at a certain new image of the said Virgin there.’ Three years later, it was eclipsed by another miraculous statue in nearby Foston. There archbishop Greenfield had to put an end to the ‘great concourse of simple people who come to visit a certain image of the holy Virgin, newly placed in the church.’ The mere appearance of a roadside statue was o
ften enough to draw pilgrims. In an alcove in the wall of the Franciscan convent at Trier, there was a small statue of the Virgin which was alleged to have wept tears. For four months the street was impassable for the crowds, until the enthusiasm died away. A street statue in Heilbronn, which was believed to have spoken, had a longer life. The pilgrimage began in 1442 and was still prosperous sixty years later.

  All these obscure cults had in common the suddenness of their origins. Elaborate justificatory legends were composed afterwards to clothe them with a spurious antiquity. The great pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Boulogne began abruptly in 1211, but the absurd legend placing its origins in the seventh century only became current about two hundred years later. Similarly the legend of the Virgin’s miraculous intervention at the battle of Rozebeke (1382) grew up many years after the first pilgrims had visited the oratory on the site. The legend and miracles of Notre-Dame de l’Epine in Champagne, date from the seventeenth century.

  Aachen, Walsingham, and Boulogne long retained their place among the great sanctuaries of Europe, but most Marial pilgrimages were short-lived. They sprang up without warning, burned bright for a while, and then quite suddenly ended. Many of them left no literary or architectural monument to their existence. At the beginning of the sixteenth century John of Trittenheim recorded a few that had sprung up in the previous century in the diocese of Wurzburg, none of which would be known but for his strange rambling works. In the wine-growing town of Deitelbach a man was injured in a brawl and healed by a statue of the Virgin in the parish church. There had been many such miracles in the diocese in recent years and the authorities were hostile. The pilgrimage quickly ended. The parish church of Tynbach was the object of a great Marial pilgrimage for a few brief weeks. No one wrote down the miracles and now they were forgotten ‘but the church, which was built from the offerings of the faithful, remains as a testimony to what happened there.’ There had been great Marial pilgrimages in Wurzburg itself at one time, but now both miracles and pilgrims had ceased.

  The crowds who crammed into these small oratories and parish churches contained no noblemen, no bishops or deacons. They consisted entirely, as John of Trittenheim admitted, of the ‘simple people of Christ’. He attributed this, as we have seen, to the arrogance of the learned and the simple devotion of the poor. But his other explanation is probably closer to the truth. Peasants and artisans could not afford to go on distant pilgrimages and they were ashamed to beg, so they honoured the only saint whose shrine was always nearby. Thus it was that the populus simplex et rusticanus was devoted to the Virgin above all saints. In England, where educated opinion of the early sixteenth century turned sharply against pilgrimages, the sanctuaries of the Virgin were the only ones which did not share in the general decline. Our Lady of Walsingham, with £260 per annum on the eve of the dissolution, was the only church which still drew a substantial income from offerings. In the two days that the dissolution commissioners passed in the priory, nearly seven pounds was offered. St. Anne’s Well at Buxton, the commissioners reported, was as much visited, as ever on account of the ‘fond trust that the people did put in these images’. As for the image of Our Lady of Cardigan, it was ‘used for a great pilgrimage to this present day’.

  Political Saints

  Nowhere was the tendency of the populace towards the spontaneous veneration of heroes more pronounced than in the case of political saints. In an age which attached incalculable importance to miracles as an indication of God’s will, it was perhaps to be expected that miracle-working would be harnessed to political causes. Writing to the bishop of Metz in March 1081, Gregory VII pointed to the miracles of the saints as an argument for the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal power. ‘Where among all the emperors and kings can a man be found to compare with St. Martin, St. Anthony, or St. Benedict, not to speak of the apostles and martyrs? What emperor or king has raised the dead, cured the leprous, or opened the eyes of the blind?’ Eighty-four years later, on Christmas Day 1165, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa answered Gregory’s question by having Charlemagne ‘canonized’ at Aachen in the presence of the anti-pope Paschal III, thus giving formal recognition to a popular cult of long standing.

  Political saints were found in every country, though more, perhaps, in England than anywhere else. There they included Edmund king and martyr, Elphege archbishop of Canterbury, Edward the Confessor, Thomas Becket, Simon de Montfort, Thomas of Lancaster, Edward III, Richard Scrope archbishop of York, and Henry VI. Some of these men lived lives of exceptional piety by the standards of their day. But with the exception of Edward the Confessor, they all died by violence, and it was almost certainly the circumstances of their deaths rather than the manner of their lives that earned them the veneration of the faithful. For the equation of violent death with martyrdom and sanctity there were many continental parallels. Canute II king of Denmark was murdered in 1086 and buried where he lay. His death was followed by several years of famine and epidemic, during which the dead king was frequently reported to have worked miracles and appeared in visions. In about 1100 the legates of king Eric persuaded the pope to declare him a saint.

  After Becket, none of the English political saints was canonized, nor was their cult in any way sanctioned by the Church. Indeed in some cases, the cult is only known from the vigorous denunciations and prohibitions of the authorities. Whereas popular devotion sufficed to make a saint in the ninth century, or even in the twelfth, it was clearly inadequate by the fourteenth. In the cases of Thomas of Lancaster and Edward II the pope repeatedly refused even to appoint a commission of inquiry, although pressed to do so by powerful interests. The extent of the change can be measured by comparing two political saints separated by a gulf of seven centuries. St. Leger, bishop of Autun, was blinded and beheaded by his opponents in 679 after becoming involved in a civil war between two rival claimants to the throne. Yet this most political of saints was the object of a liturgical cult of continuing importance throughout the middle ages. In Guibert of Nogent’s time he was renowned for curing fevers. The canonization of Becket in 1173 suggests that it was still possible for equally unattractive persons to achieve sanctity by a refined version of this process in the twelfth century. The story of Thomas of Lancaster shows that it was no longer possible in the fourteenth, even with the energetic support of the king.

  In the civil wars of Edward II’s reign, both sides were inclined to venerate their dead leaders as saints. Thomas, earl of Lancaster, was accounted a saint after his execution in March 1322. Pilgrims visited his tomb at Pontefract daily until the king’s envoys, sent to investigate, placed an armed guard on it. Early in the following year, two of the guards were killed by a mob of politically motivated pilgrims from Kent, and in June, reports reached the king’s ears that images of the earl were being venerated at St. Paul’s in London. In 1327 the political situation changed. Most of Thomas’s enemies met violent ends. In parliament the earl’s cause triumphed, and the commons pressed for his canonization. Nothing came of it, but the popular cult continued unabated. In the fifteenth century a hagiographical life appeared. His hat and belt, preserved at Pontefract, cured minor ailments until the Reformation. Thomas’s antagonist, Edward II, enjoyed a similar apotheosis after his defeat and murder. His body was carried to Gloucester abbey and enclosed in a superb alabaster tomb. The cult received official encouragement in the reign of Richard II, who was often threatened with the fate of his great grandfather and may have hoped to silence such threats by procuring Edward’s canonization. Urban VI and Boniface IX were plied with bribes, and a list of Edward’s miracles was despatched to Rome for their perusal. But no decision had been made by 1399, when Richard’s own deposition and murder made the whole affair an irrelevance.

  These pilgrimages, although political, were in no sense official. They arose spontaneously and largely amongst the common people. After the death of Simon de Montfort on the battlefield of Evesham, miracles were quick to manifest themselves and the pilgrims they drew were mostly po
or men from areas such as London, which had supported de Montfort in his lifetime. Within a year of his death the Dictum of Kenilworth forbade anyone to venerate him as a saint or give any credence to ‘these vain and fatuous miracles attributed to him by certain persons’. As for the cult of Edward II, the streets of Gloucester could scarcely contain the ‘enormous concourse of plebs’ come to see his shrine. Within six years the offerings had yielded enough to pay for the rebuilding of a transept of the abbey church. It is tempting to see in this a religious manifestation of those early murmurings of social discontent which made themselves heard in the late middle ages, but the evidence does not permit it. What it does reflect is the tendency of ignorant people to look for a golden age in the past, and a hero in any prominent figure who met a sudden and violent end.

  Mass-Pilgrimages

  The first pitched battle between the ecclesiastical authorities and a major, but unauthorized, popular pilgrimage ended in a complete defeat for the authorities. It occurred at Wilsnack, a small town near Wittenberg in Saxony. In August 1383 the parish church was burned to the ground. In the rubble, the parish priest alleged, three consecrated hosts had been found, unharmed, but marked with drops of blood. The news spread, and the ruins of the church became a great pilgrimage centre almost immediately. Within two years, a fine new oratory stood on the spot, and by the early years of the fifteenth century it was a sanctuary of international repute. Margery Kempe, who walked there in 1433, knew it as a place of ‘great worship and reverence, and sought from many a country’.