Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The responsibility for this unedifying state of affairs rested largely with the papacy, but not entirely. The sanctuaries themselves were unscrupulous in extracting indulgences from the enfeebled popes of the schismatic period. Many otherwise reputable churches had no compunction in forging those which they could not obtain legitimately, and in magnifying those which they could. The Franciscans were believed to be the greatest offenders, but in fact the major secular cathedrals were just as aggressive. Cologne cathedral obtained a plenary indulgence ad instar Jubilaei in 1394 by playing one pope off against another. Others simply conferred plenary indulgences upon themselves, as Le Puy did in 1407. In 1420 the monks of Canterbury, after failing to obtain a Jubilee indulgence from Martin V, declared one of their own. The prior summoned four doctors of theology who pronounced this action to be legitimate, and the Jubilee was duly held, notwithstanding the fulminations of the pope.

  The activities of the ‘pardoners’, or itinerant salesmen of indulgences, are well-known from the portraits of Langland and Chaucer. They were the butt of satirists and reformers not only in England but wherever there was an appetite for indulgences. The problem was extremely serious in fifteenth-century Spain, where a prodigious number of indulgences was available as a result of the close alliance between the dynasty and the papacy. Everywhere the pardoners owed their success to the fact that they were always slightly in advance of official thinking on the subject of indulgences. They offered their clients on paper more than could be had at the great sanctuaries. As a result, people expected the same benefits from their pilgrimages and, after a decent interval, they usually got them. In 1312 the council of Vienne sternly condemned pardoners for pretending that their indulgences could release souls from purgatory; but within twenty years such indulgences were being offered at the Portiuncula chapel, and by the middle of the fifteenth century they were being granted by the popes. This argues a high degree of gullibility among uneducated people and a good many educated ones as well. Most of Europe accepted a forged version of the bull proclaiming the Roman Jubilee of 1350; learned canonists were deceived in spite of the extravagantly improbable terms in which it was couched. Nor is this surprising, in view of the faith placed in impressive-looking documents, and the inadequate grasp of diplomatic even amongst the highly literate. When Langland’s pardoner wished to convince an audience that a forged indulgence was genuine, he had only to produce ‘a bull with bishops seals’. When a group of Slav pilgrims arrived at the Franciscan church of Ancona on their way to the Portiuncula chapel, the friars tried to persuade them that there was as much indulgence to be had at Ancona as at Assisi. ‘Look at our letters of grant,’ they declared. The pilgrims saw and believed.

  The ready acceptance of indulgences totiens quoties is a case in point. These were indulgences which could be claimed as often as the penitent could perform the conditions, by entering the sanctuary once a day for example. The popes did not grant such indulgences, even under Boniface IX, but some fourteenth-century theologians favoured them. Nicholas of Lyra was one. Churches were not slow in offering them. In the middle of the fifteenth century the seven major altars of St. Peter’s in Rome boasted an indulgence totiens quoties. Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, preserved immediately inside the door of the basilica, was stated to be worth 1,400 years of remission as often as the pilgrim set eyes on them.

  In January 1418 the council of Constance decreed severe restrictions on the issue of indulgences, expressing the fear that ‘by their great numbers, they may be brought into discredit.’ But the damage had already been done. The chronicler of Paderborn, Gobelinus Persona, accused Boniface IX of bringing all indulgences into disrepute by granting them not only to great and ancient walled cities, but to small villages and monasteries of no importance. Gobelinus was deeply hostile to Boniface, but his words were echoed by others who looked on his cause with favour. The chronicler of Neuss, on the whole a supporter of Boniface, complained that plenary indulgences had been conceded to ‘towns that were not even walled, to monasteries and country churches…. Some people suspected that he was moved more by greed than by religious zeal.’ Yet it is clear that Boniface’s liberality was very popular with ordinary people, and the attempts of the council of Constance to repair the breach, merely served to widen still further the gulf between educated piety and popular enthusiasm. The failure of the reform movement inaugurated at Constance has often been put down to the indifference and obstructiveness of successive popes. This explanation may have been good enough for the council of Basle but it is not good enough for history. The truth is that the ritual purgation of sin was exactly what most uneducated people wanted. There is a hint of this in the reasons given by the monks of Canterbury for requesting a Jubilee indulgence in 1470. Many Englishmen, they told the pope, were too old or infirm to go to Rome or Santiago. Others could not afford the cost. Traditionally the Church had allowed them to gain a Jubilee indulgence at Canterbury, and it would be imprudent to end the tradition now. ‘Of all nations’, the monks alleged, ‘the English are the most attached to old habits and traditional devotions, and they will not easily be deprived of them without great uproar.’

  Pilgrimage without Travel

  During a tour of Ulster in the late 1260s, two Franciscan preachers were followed about from town to town by a mass of people ‘both for their sermons and for the indulgences which they dispensed’. One of them, on his way home, stayed with a householder and offered to sell him all the indulgences he had acquired for the amount he had spent in getting them and a pot of beer in addition. In this case both parties were simple peasants, but it was not always so. An Italian knight known to Bartolus of Assisi offered to buy the Portiuncula indulgence from a servant of his who had recently been there. ‘If you give the indulgence you gained at Assisi to my deceased brother, then I, as witness all these people here, will return to you the money you spent on the journey.’ If indulgences taught men to regard merit as a commodity, then it was, perhaps, natural for them to think of it as transferable.

  The belief that indulgences could release the dead from Purgatory was a corner-stone of late mediaeval piety, but its origins lay firmly in the past. For centuries, penitents who confessed on their deathbeds and who died without performing the penance, had been allowed to have it performed for them. This was usually done by distributing alms from their estate. The idea is found in the penitential literature of the ninth century and in the canon law collections of the eleventh. A synod meeting at Arras in 1025 expressed the opinion that penance was ‘just as efficacious for the dead as it was for the living’. The final development of the theory was, however, the work of the thirteenth century. It was actively canvassed in the early years of the century by the preachers of the crusade who taught, according to a jaundiced contemporary, that by virtue of a crusading indulgence, ‘evil men who died without confession or penance would be received into the Church.’ The schoolmen did not go so far, but Albert the Great and St. Bonaventure were agreed that penance could be remitted after death if the penitent had made a true confession. As Thomas Aquinas argued, a man could gain an indulgence in two ways, by fulfilling the conditions himself or, if this was impossible, by fulfilling them vicariously. The dead can only fulfil them vicariously.

  The concept of indulgences for the dead remained a somewhat academic one. It was left to the Franciscans of the Portiuncula to make practical use of it. Bartolus, the friar of Assisi who wrote up the miracles of the Portiuncula in about 1335, told a number of stories whose object was to impress the lesson on his readers. A Venetian priest was stricken with a fatal illness just as he was about to begin a pilgrimage to the Portiuncula. Summoning his closest friend to his bedside he gave him the money which he had saved for the journey and begged him to make the pilgrimage on his behalf. After the priest had died, the friend put off his departure for month after month until the priest appeared to him in a dream chiding him for his delays. The friend left immediately for Assisi and on his return the priest appeared again a
nd revealed that ‘at the very hour that you entered the chapel I was liberated from the penance of Purgatory.’ It is an altogether typical story. Bartolus is at pains to point out that it was at the Portiuncula and nowhere else that the dead could be released from Purgatory. A Sicilian woman who was preparing to leave for Santiago had a startling vision of her dead son, who addressed her in the following terms: ‘Dear mother, the pilgrimage which you are about to make is a fine and worthy act, but it will not do much for me. If you wish to liberate me from my sins you must go not only to Santiago but also to the church of S. Maria de Angelis at the Portiuncula. Only then shall I be released from Purgatory.’

  The pilgrimage of the Portiuncula did not for long enjoy the monopoly which Bartolus claimed for it. In the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem St. Bridget of Sweden received a revelation informing her that her devotions had released many souls from Purgatory. Five years later, in 1377, a German pilgrim in Rome found a plaque in the church of St. Lawrence promising the release of a soul from Purgatory for every year of Wednesdays that a visitor passed in the church. By the middle of the fifteenth century nearly every church in Rome offered an indulgence for the souls in Purgatory.

  The confidence which laymen reposed in indulgences for the dead is reflected in their wills. Already in 1269, William de Beauchamp died leaving two hundred marks to his younger son Walter to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre on his behalf. An examination of the enormous number of surviving mediaeval wills proved in London suggests, however, that wills like this one did not become common until the middle of the fourteenth century. Some testators were highly specific in their instructions to pilgrims, who were expected to perform the pilgrimage in a manner befitting the status of the testator. In his will, drawn up in 1415, Thomas, earl of Arundel, left a substantial sum for the expenses of his pilgrim and instructed him to travel ‘in the same way as I would have travelled, had I done the pilgrimage myself.’ Thomas Poulton, who died in 1433, left the sum of £20 ‘for a clergyman of good repute, chosen by my executors, to travel in my name to Rome and there to remain for two years continuously doing the stations regularly, visiting all the holy shrines and relics, and celebrating masses in those places on my behalf. And before his departure, my executors shall exact an oath from him that during those two years he shall pursue no other occupation.’ In an age in which testamentary conditions were imperfectly enforced, there was no guarantee that the pilgrimage would actually be performed. The testator could only rely on the conscience of his heirs. One George Fryng, citizen of London, instructed his widow to go to Santiago on his behalf, but her second husband refused to let her go, and she was obliged to seek a dispensation from the pope. Many obligations must have remained unfulfilled for years, some for ever. A Lincolnshire knight who died in 1389 left money to ‘Roger my grandson to make a voyage against the Infidel to which I am bound in the sum of two hundred marks by the will of my grandfather.’ These examples have been drawn exclusively from England because of the extraordinary wealth of surviving English wills, but there is no reason to suppose that they are untypical. Where continental wills survive, they follow a very similar pattern. The wills of wealthy Parisian lawyers enrolled in the parlement of Paris frequently contain directions to pilgrims. In the Testamentarbuch of the imperial free city of Pressburg (1427–1529), almost every will has a provision for sending a pilgrim to Rome.

  The laity accepted the efficacy of indulgences for the dead for many years before the popes granted them in formal terms. No genuine letter of indulgence promised the release of souls from Purgatory until the middle of the fifteenth century. The earliest known example dates only from 1457, when Calixtus III offered the release of a soul to every one who contributed two hundred maravedis to the crusade against the Moors. Shortly afterwards, the same pope issued indulgences for the dead to the cathedral of Tarragona and the Franciscan order. In 1476 Sixtus IV granted an important indulgence to Saintes cathedral, which recited that:

  ‘It is our desire to use the Church’s treasury of merit to assist those souls in Purgatory who would have gained this indulgence had they been alive. We therefore concede that parents, friends, or any others may secure the release of souls from the fires of Purgatory by donating a sum, to be assessed by the canons, for the repair of Saintes cathedral.’

  Thus the authorities accorded formal recognition to a belief which had been universal among the laity for more than a century.

  As soon as it was agreed that the dead could perform pilgrimages by proxy, it was a short step to holding that the living could do so too. Vicarious pilgrimages were not unknown in the twelfth century if the would-be pilgrim was prevented from going himself. Ralph the clerk was too ill to go to Canterbury; he sent his candle by messenger, and recovered as soon as it was lit in the cathedral. The wife of a Norwich baker was unable to walk for the swellings on her feet; her husband visited the shrine of St. William on her behalf. A cloistered nun who could not leave her nunnery sent her son to Canterbury to give thanks for a miraculous cure. Pure vicarious pilgrimages, by those who could have gone themselves but preferred not to, had to wait for a later, less demanding age. In the fifteenth century the idea seems to have been accepted without protest. This was due partly to the fact that crusaders had been sending substitutes to fulfil their vows for two hundred years; and partly, no doubt, to the influence of the judicial pilgrimage, which by now was almost invariably commuted to a fine. Vicarious pilgrimages were never entirely respectable. Soon after their marriage, William Cressewyc of London and his wife Alice vowed to go to Rome, but they deferred the performance of the vow until old age, and then sent a man to do it for them. Nevertheless they still felt uneasy about this vicarious road to salvation, for in 1391 they applied to a papal nuncio for absolution. No such reservations ever troubled Isabel of Bavaria, queen of France (d. 1435). She sent a pilgrim with a fifteen-pound candle to Notre-Dame du Blanc-Mesnil, instructing him to pray there for fifteen days, burning a pound of wax per day. The queen, who was disgustingly obese, was forever worried about her health. She was particularly devoted to St. Eutrope, the healer of dropsy, and to the celebrated medical saints like St. Lazarus, and Cosmas and Damian. One of her chaplains was sent to Larchamp, another to Moutiers-au-Perche, a third to Avallon. Her accounts are full of entries recording payments made to professional pilgrims or members of her household despatched to shrines throughout France.

  In spite of the demand, the institution of the professional pilgrim was slow to make its appearance. Several English testators of the fourteenth century envisaged the possibility that no pilgrim would be available, and made alternative dispositions of their wealth. This was probably because most vicarious pilgrims thought it necessary that the proxy should be of the same rank as themselves. Many wills require the pilgrim to be ‘of honest condition’, i.e. well-born. When John, duke of Brittany, was prevented by the diplomatic crisis of 1420 from fulfilling a vow of pilgrimage, he sent a man to the Holy Land on his behalf, stipulating that he was to be ‘homme notable et suffisant’; a hundred gold écus were allowed for his expenses, and a hundred gold florins for his offering. In Scandinavia, it is true, professional pilgrims were quite common, and many contracts for their services survive. At the Baltic port of Lübeck there was always a crowd of professionals willing to go to the Holy Land for sums ranging from twenty to a hundred marks. Further south, however, so many bona fide pilgrims passed regularly to and from the great sanctuaries that it was easy enough to find a man who was minded to go anyway. Most vicarious pilgrimages were informal arrangements like that of the bishop of Lincoln, who gave Margery Kempe twenty-six shillings and eightpence as she was leaving for Palestine, ‘to buy her clothes with and to pray for him’.

  Such indifference to the element of personal hardship inevitably devalued the very idea of pilgrimage, and invited the appearance of alternatives which were emotionally more rewarding. Mass-flagellation, for example, was not simply another pious exercise, but specifically an alternative to
pilgrimage. Flagellant preachers of 1349 contrasted the ‘natural’ penance of the flagellants with the ‘artificial’ Roman Jubilee declared for 1350. In a sermon preached before the pope at Avignon, the sternly orthodox Jean du Fayt made the same point. The flagellants, he argued, imagined that they would gain the same indulgence from their processions as those who attended the Jubilee. This was no doubt one of the arguments which led Clement VI to condemn them as heretics. There was a great deal of truth in the bitter observation of John of Trittenheim that educated men had abandoned the cult of the saints for abstruse mystical devotions. There was a vogue for mystical alternatives to pilgrimage, inspired by allegorical writings which likened the whole of human life to a pilgrimage. One of the earliest and most influential of these is a lengthy treatise in French, written in 1330–1, called the Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine. The title gives ample indication of the contents. Its author was Guillaume de Deguileville, a Cistercian of the abbey of Chaalis. The Pèlerinage is the record of a dream in which the author undertakes a pilgrimage to the celestial Jerusalem. Dame Grace blesses him and offers him the scarf of faith and the stave of hope. On the road he is attacked by the deadly sins in the shape of wild beasts. Heresy, voluptuousness, and idleness lie in wait to attack and rob him. He is shipwrecked in the sea of worldliness and is near to drowning when he succeeds in saving himself by climbing onto the raft of the Cistercian order.