Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  At first, the authorities looked benevolently on the new pilgrimage. Urban VI granted it an indulgence in March 1384, and in the same month the archbishop of Magdeburg joined with his suffragans in commending it to the faithful on account of the ‘manifest miracles already famous in every part of Germany, which Our Lord Jesus Christ has worked through the real presence of his body in the holy sacrament.’ But in 1387 they were disturbed by the reports that large mobs of the poor, many of them hysterical, were gathering at Wilsnack, and within twenty years of the shrine’s abrupt beginnings, the Church was withdrawing its favour. The first to act was the archbishop of Prague, who had received reports of fraudulent miracles from pilgrims of his diocese. In 1405 he appointed a commission to consider the matter. Its members included John Hus, who had not yet fallen foul of the Church in Prague. On the basis of their report, a synod meeting in Prague in June 1405 condemned the pilgrimage and instructed the clergy of the diocese to preach against it at least once a month. This was followed, a year later, by a vehement pamphlet On the Blood of Christ, the work of Hus himself. In 1412, the archbishop of Magdeburg in turn ordered an investigation, from which he learned that the pilgrims were almost all ‘plebeian persons who cannot be trusted’; a hysterical atmosphere pervaded the place, with pilgrims crying ‘help my Holy Blood’, and free me Blood of Christ’; in so far as these pilgrims were venerating the drops of blood as well as the host, the commissioners reported, they were being led into heresy. These disturbing facts were presented to a synod in the summer of that year, and the pilgrimage was sharply condemned as the product of overripe imaginations and clerical avarice. There matters rested for forty years. No active steps were taken to suppress it, and in 1446 the local clergy successfully applied for a papal indulgence. It was unwise of them thus to reopen old wounds, for the then archbishop appointed another commission of enquiry which reported in much the same terms as their predecessors of 1412. By the skilful handling of crowds, fraudulent miracles were passing for real ones every day. An atmosphere of extreme religious excitement was engendered by forceful preaching and by lighting an enormous number of candles in the church. Several false indulgences were on display in the church, and pilgrims were shown a shelf-ful of fat volumes in which the miracles of the Holy Blood were said to be recorded. The whole affair, concluded the commissioners, was an open invitation to heretics to deny the real presence altogether. Support for these views came from a surprising quarter. Several citizens of Wilsnack complained that the general suspension of excommunications at pilgrimage centres had made the town a haven of bandits and usurers. This weighty dossier was submitted to a provincial synod which met in 1451 under the presidency of the papal legate Nicholas of Cusa. In June the legate issued a new bull, forbidding the display of blood-stained hosts and ordering the sanctuary at Wilsnack to be closed.

  How long the church of Wilsnack remained closed is not clear. Probably the pilgrimage never altogether ceased, though it undoubtedly suffered a decline. But in 1475 the archbishop of Magdeburg was abruptly reminded of its existence by another mass-pilgrimage, this time involving several thousand children aged between eight and twenty. The children came from the regions of Franconia, Meissen, and Hesse. They left without informing their parents, and without money. The town of Erfurt alone lost 324 children as well as several dozen from each of the suburban villages. Hettstadt lost 300, Eisleben 1,100. Another mass-pilgrimage of children occurred in 1487, when ‘an enormous concourse of boys, girls, and household servants of both sexes, all of them peasants and people of lowest class, flocked to the blood of Wilsnack inspired, it is believed, by a sort of giddy feeling (spiritu vertiginis).’ Rumour estimated their number at about 10,000, though there were probably much fewer than that. Thereafter, children’s pilgrimages occurred at regular intervals, despite vigorous attempts to frustrate them.

  ‘And men knew not the meaning of such a prodigy’, the Erfurt chronicler wrote. The children’s pilgrimages provoked controversy in all the towns they passed through. ‘Some said it was the Devil’s work, others that it was a wonderful miracle and praised God for it.’ The chronicler himself thought it resulted from an imbalance of the humours in their bodies, a view which many shared, including the author of a searing tract On the Pilgrimage of Foolish People to the Holy Blood in the Year 1475. ‘There are many who cannot in their natures stay quiet’, this writer explained; ‘this is due to a defect in their humours and the influence of the stars, or else perhaps to some work of the Devil.’ Noting that almost all the child-pilgrims were from poor homes, the writer suggested that the bad harvest of the previous year might have had something to do with it:

  ‘for the days are very long and empty of things to do and many are driven to pilgrimage for lack of bread to eat…. Having no bread, and being too poor to stay with friends or neighbours, they were ashamed to go begging near their own homes. And so they decided to go on this pilgrimage and beg in each town on the route, reckoning that it was better to beg in a strange district than from people they knew. And that is why there were so many young boys among them…. When curious onlookers asked them why they did it, they sought to explain themselves by saying that they were driven by an irresistible impulse.’

  Other voices were added to the chorus of disapproval. An Augustinian of Erfurt pointed out the theological unsoundness of the pilgrimage, and somewhat futilely reminded the pilgrims that the journey would avail them nothing if they had not made a true confession and obtained the permission of their bishop. In July 1479, Marcus Spickendorff, ratmeister of Halle, recorded in his diary that he had heard an edifying sermon on the wickedness of going to Wilsnack. But no amount of thundering from pulpits succeeded in reducing the popularity of the pilgrimage until the village became Protestant in 1552. In that year the miraculous hosts were publicly consigned to the flames by the formidable evangelical preacher Joachim Ellefeld.

  In fact, pilgrimages of children were by no means as uncommon as the preachers and pamphleteers suggested. The pilgrims who volunteered to build the church of St.-Pierre-sur-Dives in 1145 included a large number of children. The children’s crusade of 1212 was a still more extraordinary outburst of this kind. A child called Stephen from the village of Cloies, near Vendôme, collected an army of children from central and northern France and announced his intention of marching to recapture the Holy Land. They embarked at Marseilles in several large ships. Two ship-loads were drowned in a storm off Sardinia, and the masters of the five remaining ships sold their passengers into slavery in north Africa. Another army of children was assembled simultaneously in Germany by a child called Nicholas. They penetrated as far as Genoa but failed to persuade the Genoese to transport them to the Holy Land, whereupon the ‘army’ broke up in disorder. Many of the children died of starvation on the roads of northern Italy while trying to return to their homes. Almost as interesting as the phenomenon itself was the reaction of contemporaries, who were far from unanimous in condemning it.

  ‘Many people’, one wrote, ‘believed that the children should be taken seriously, and not laughed at. They believed that it was the work of God and a sign of pure devotion. They gave them food and money and everything they needed. But there were others, including most of the clergy, whose view was saner. They thought the enterprise useless and doomed to failure, and they denounced it. The populace, however, ignored them and shouted them down, saying that it was only their avarice which had turned them against the holy expedition, and not their sense of justice or love of truth.’

  Only when the ‘crusade’ had ended in disaster did they come to agree with the clergy. An angry mob demanded the arrest of Nicholas’s father, who had apparently encouraged the boy out of vainglory. He was seized and hanged.

  The same violent disagreements surrounded children’s pilgrimages whenever they occurred. The abbey of Mont-St.-Michel attracted the largest and most dramatic mass-pilgrimages of children. At Pentecost in 1333 ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ was seen on the top of the spire of the abbey church. Large ban
ds of children began to arrive almost immediately, and the continuous procession did not end until the first week in July. All were from poor, peasant families. They called themselves pastoureaux, a significant name, recalling the strange agrarian revolt of 1320, which had announced itself as having been called into existence by the Virgin to exterminate the Jews and deliver the Holy Land from the infidel. The children of 1333 had come from north-western France, most of them from Normandy and Brittany, but thereafter they came from further afield. In 1393 several hundred children aged between eleven and fifteen gathered at Montpellier, intending to march to Mont-St.-Michel. Another crowd of children left Millau in the summer of 1441 carrying a banner of St. Michael before them. The pilgrimage of children to Mont-St.-Michel was now common enough in southern France to merit a diatribe from the bishop of St. Papoul. In April 1442 he alleged that they were motivated by restlessness, impatience of hard labour, and a reprehensible desire to escape from the poverty of their homes; in future such journeys were to be forbidden on pain of excommunication.

  The disease spread to Germany and the Low Countries in 1457. The circumstances were identical, except that the children came from the towns, and not from the depressed countryside. Several thousand of them, in groups up to eight hundred strong, began to arrive at Mont-St.-Michel after Pentecost, singing hymns in honour of the archangel. More than a thousand were counted passing through Wissemburg alone in the week after Christmas. Some were only nine years old. Again they were enthusiastically applauded by ordinary people and fed and lodged in the towns on the route. Again the clergy and the civil authorities tried in vain to prevent them. Denis the Carthusian wrote an angry pamphlet (now lost) On the Processions of Young Boys to Mont-St.-Michel. The town council of Regensburg tried to send them before the ecclesiastical courts and treated them to a sermon showing that the Christian faith ‘in no way required of its devotees a pilgrimage to Mont-St.-Michel’. But their protests fell on deaf ears. In the following year more armies of children gathered in northern Germany and the Rhineland announcing that they had received ‘certain revelations’, instructing them to venerate the shrine of St. Michael, this time at Monte Gargano.

  Why the cult of St. Michael should have appealed so strongly to children is far from clear, but it does seem that social factors were more important than spiritual ones. So much was apparent to contemporaries, who are all agreed that the children came from the poorest classes. ‘They were but the children of poor folk’, a citizen of Wissemburg reported, ‘though there were a small number of noble ones among them.’

  The disturbing possibilities of the situation became fully apparent in the summer of 1476, when the small village of Nicklashausen in the territory of Wurzburg became the scene of a popular Marial pilgrimage with overtones of social revolution. In the church of Nicklashausen there was a statue of the Virgin which was credited with miraculous powers. It had attracted, a thin trickle of pilgrims for more than a century. Here, in the middle of Lent 1476, a young shepherd called Hans Böhm began to preach with astonishing eloquence before ever-growing audiences. His theme, a familiar one, was repentance. He called on all his hearers to go in their multitudes to venerate the statue, in order to appease the wrath of God on the sins of mankind. The Virgin had promised him that those who obeyed his call would have a plenary indulgence and those who died there would immediately ascend to heaven.

  It was exactly a year after the great mass-pilgrimage to Wilsnack. In south Germany the harvests had been poor, and in the territory of the prince-bishops of Wurzburg, crushing taxation added to the burdens of the poor and provoked considerable social unrest. An atmosphere of intense religious excitement was heightened by the preaching of the Roman Jubilee indulgence, which had begun a few weeks earlier. The response to Böhm’s call was unexpectedly dramatic. From the towns of the Rhineland and Thuringia, which had supplied most of the pilgrims to Mont-St.-Michel in 1457, from Saxony, whence pilgrims had rushed to Wilsnack the year before, there came many thousands of repentant poor. Others arrived from Bavaria and Swabia, then facing the threat of severe famine. It was estimated, no doubt with much exaggeration, that 40,000, or even 70,000 people could be seen encamped in the fields outside Nicklashausen every morning. The offerings of gold and silver coins, clothing, and wax, were prodigious. Böhm’s preaching began conventionally enough. He called on his audience to abandon their effeminate clothing and to renounce swearing and gaming, much as Barnardino of Siena had urged half a century before. But Böhm did not leave matters there. He went on to preach against the loose-living and avarice of the clergy, a topical subject in the prince-bishopric of Wurzburg. From this he proceeded to a full-blooded egalitarianism. ‘Bishops, princes, counts and knights should be allowed to possess as much as ordinary folk and no more. There will come a time when even they will have to work for their living.’ Böhm finally urged his followers to withhold all payments of taxes, tithes, and rents, and summoned them to meet at Nicklashausen on an appointed day to overthrow the civil and religious authorities. ‘Truly’, John of Trittenheim remarked, ‘the common people are always chasing after novelties, and trying to shake off the yoke of their masters.’

  The pilgrimage, which had begun in March, came to an abrupt end in July. On the eve of the day appointed for the great meeting, Böhm was seized by a party of horsemen in the service of the bishop, and was later burned for heresy. His followers were dispersed with cannon. Further pilgrimages were forbidden by the secular authorities throughout Germany, and an interdict was laid on the village of Nicklashausen. Early in 1477, the church was razed to the ground on the orders of the archbishop of Mainz. The political consequences of Böhm’s pilgrimage were obvious enough. The religious consequence was to intensify still further the profound suspicion of spontaneous popular movements in the minds of the educated establishment. Even John of Trittenheim, who was no friend of that establishment, was constrained to admit that ‘simple unlettered folk are very easily taken in, and are inclined to believe in false miracles without proof. We know this from our experience of the pilgrimages of recent times…. It was the cause of the events at Nicklashausen.’

  Notes

  1 Nomadic missions: Delaruelle et al., pp. 636–56. On Bernardino in Rome, Infessura, Diario della citta di Roma, ed. O. Tommasini, Fonti, Rome, 1890, p. 25. On Orihuela, M-M. Gorce, Saint Vincent Ferrier 1350–1419, Paris, 1924, pp. 174–6.

  2 Datini: I. Origo, The merchant of Prato, London, 1957, pp. 306–7, 311–19.

  Spiritual revival: in general, Delaruelle et al., pp. 605–7, 688–90, 828–9, 872–4, 878. On mass observances, P. de Félice, Foules en délire, extases collectives. Essai sur quelques formes inférieures de la mystique, Paris, 1947. On flagellants, see Disciplinati (MW).

  Priests never possessed: quoted in Delaruelle et al., p. 872.

  3 Sacchetti: Ibid., p. 789.

  Working-class saints: on peasant saints, G-A. Prevost, L’Église et les campagnes an moyen age, Paris, 1892, pp. 272–80 (an idealized picture). On St. Zita, Aa. Ss. April, vol. iii, pp. 497–8, 508; Dante, Inferno, XXI. 38. On Henry of Bolzano, Aa. Ss. June, vol. ii, pp. 375, 391.

  Parish priests venerated: Book of Margery Kempe, I. 60, p. 147, Grandison, Reg., pp. 1232–4. Aa. Ss. Oct., vol. viii, pp. 596–606 (Hélye). Victoria history of the county of Buckingham, vol. i, London, 1905, pp. 288–9 (Schorne).

  4 Statues: Lanterne of Light, XII, p. 84. Burton, Chron. Mon. Melsa, vol. iii, pp. 35–6. On Boxley, Letters and papers, vol. iii (1), p. 284 (no. 754); G. Baskerville, English monks and the suppression of the monasteries, London, 1937, p. 22. On statue burned in 1538, Letters and papers, vol. xiii (1), p. 120 (no. 348). On the Rippingdale statue, Owen, p. 141.

  5 Franciscans: on this complicated subject, see D. L. Douie, The nature and effect of the heresy of the fraticelli, Manchester, 1932.

  Gerson: See Delaruelle et al., pp. 855–7.

  Flagellation: on early flagellation, J. Leclercq, ‘La flagellazione volontaria nella tradizione spirituale dell’ o
ccidente’, in Disciplinati, pp. 73–83. On Avignon incident of 1349, Cohn, pp. 140–1; Delaruelle (1), pp. 122–5; argument of Jean du Fayt, leader of the Parisian deputation, in A. Coville’s notice in Histoire littéraire de la France, vol. xxxvii, Paris, 1938, pp. 403–4.

  6 Revelations: Gerson’s views in De distinctione verarum revelationum ac falsis, ed. Glorieux, vol. iii, pp. 36–56. On Bridget’s revelations, Hefele, vol. vii, pp. 184–5. Book of Margery Kempe, I. 46–55, pp. 111–37, esp. I. 52, p. 125.

  ‘Some men trowen…’: Select English works of John Wyclif ed. T. Arnold, vol. i, Oxford, 1869, pp. 329–30 (attributed). For Wyclif’s views on pilgrimages, see Sermones, III. 1, 22, vol. ii, pp. 1, 164–5; De Potestate papae, XII, ed. J. Loserth, London, 1907, p. 329; De Ecclesia, II, XIX, pp. 44–5, 465.

  7 Lollards: J. A. F. Thomson, The later Lollards, 1414–1320, pp. 28, 33, 34, 41, 44, 47, 56, 62, 69, 70, 78, 81, 104, 113, 126, 160, 184. For sixteenth-century pamphlets against St. Thomas, see list of proscribed, books (1531) in F. J. Furnivall, Political, religious, and love poems, EETS., O. S., xv, London, 1866, p. 62; Wright (ed.), Letters, p. 6. On the official campaign against Becket’s reputation in the 1530s, Elton, pp. 197, 257n1.