The three great pilgrimages undertaken by western Christians in medieval (and indeed modern) times, were to The Holy Land, Rome and Compostela. The two most popular more locally, in England, were Canterbury and Our Lady of Walsingham, at least in the late Middle Ages; Glastonbury had been a very popular pilgrimage centre in the 9th and 10th centuries ("second only to Rome" according to Anya Seton, in Avalon) but then was gradually replaced by Canterbury.
The Holy Land
Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was always the ultimate pilgrimage, the stuff of dreams but also of nightmare tales bad enough to daunt most would-be pilgrims. Many of those who did make it there (or died in the attempt) in fact had the journey imposed on them, either as a penance from a priest for a sin such as murder, or as a penalty (tantamount to exile) imposed by a judge (or leige lord, on someone he wanted to see the back of); and we cannot help wondering how many shared the sentiments of a character in Patterson's medieval adventure novel The Jester "If this is the Holy Land, God can keep it!"
But many, probably most, went there enthusiatically of their own free will. Such a one was Margery Kempe (1371-1440), whose autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe, is a breath of medieval fresh air for us dreamers who spend too much of our time in a medieval fantasy world which never really existed. She is clever, she is stupid, she is a practical housewife who has had fourteen children, she is a mystical dreamer; and she is hysterical, always bursting into floods of tears. Unfortunately, her descriptive powers leave much to be desired: here is a very typical extract:
One day during our stay, my party planned to see the River Jordan, but they would not let me accompany them. [Such things are always happening to her. She is an extremely annoying woman, and it is, to say the least, a sexist society. JM] So I prayed to our Lord, asking that I could go with them. And he told me to go along with them whether or not they had invited me. I shall always remember that day; when we reached the River Jordan, it was so hot that I thought my feet would be scorched by the ground we stood upon.
And that's it! She tells us nothing! Nevertheless, it is the first autobiography in the English language and as a glimpse of life at the time and of conditions and attitudes on long pilgrimages, it is quite unique.
Rome
Rome was much easier to get to, and the pilgrim industry there was as important as today's tourist industry. (Dame Marjery Kempe, of course, was there.) According to Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim, in the year 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII declared a Jubilee Year (anyone visiting Rome would have a lifetime's sins remitted) up to 200,000 pilgrims arrived in the city every day and Rome was turned into a great hotel. (Pope Boniface VIII was the arch-enemy of Philip the Fair of France, and it was shortly after this that Philip organised his own Pope in Avignon, prior to ordering the dissolution of the Knights Templar - but that's another story.) This superbly illustrated book takes us on a tour of Rome as it would have appeared to a hypothetical pilgrim (a woman) and shows us all the many sites that remain unchanged, starting from the Lateran which functioned then much as the Vatican does now.
Santiago de Compostela
The reputed burial site in the north west of Spain of St James (though legends vary as to which St James, and how he or his remains came to be there). Again, Dame Margery was one of the millions of palmers (pilgrims) who made their way there over the years and came back wearing the scallop shell emblem that symbolised St James and this particular pilgrimage.
I would like here to recommend two modern books describing this pilgrimage, both of which I found quite perfect in their way. The first (and my personal favourite) is Shirley MacLaine's The Camino. She completed the month-long hike along the mountain trails without any special treatment whatsoever (quite the reverse, and she was on her own); she is a wonderful raconteuse and her recreation of the medieval atmosphere is stunning.
And then there is Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage, an autobiographical work which was his first major book to be published: written in the simple poetic style he has made his own, it is more than a book; it is a whole philosophy of life.
For a description of life in the Cathedral City of Compostela in the fourteenth century, though, I have never come across anything as vivid and convincing as that in Michael Jecks' The Templar's Penance. Highly recommended.
Canterbury
In the south east of England, Canterbury Cathedral was the scene of the martyrdom in 1170 of St Thomas à Becket, and subsequently "became one of the great tourist centres of Western Medieval Europe" (Paul Doherty in Corpse Candle). One contemporary (14th century) record of this is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which we see a group of pilgrims leave the Tabard Inn in Southwark (London) and head towards Canterbury, each telling a tale to pass the time on this long journey. For modern stories based on this, see the series by Paul Doherty in which each of Chaucer's characters tells another, darker, story, at night, before the pilgrims sleep. Several of these books are reviewed on this site; the first is An Ancient Evil: the Knight's Tale.
The best work on the actual death of Becket is T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, his verse drama masterpiece originally written for the Canterbury Festival - difficult but very worthwhile. It is also vividly described in the closing pages of Ken Follett's wonderful novel The Pillars of the Earth.
Our Lady of Walsingham
The site in Norfolk (East Anglia) of an appearance of the Virgin Mary, still revered today. There is a marvellous description of a pilgrimage there in Anya Seton's Katherine , Katherine Swynford (for those who have not read this classic) being the mistress and later third wife of John o' Gaunt. After she has visited the shrine at Walsingham, without receiving any apparent answer to her prayers, she is led by a stranger to the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, and we are given for good measure a memorable portrait of that wise and wonderful woman.
Dame Julian's own book, Revelations of Divine Love, is quite different from Dame Margery's autobiography, although they had a lot in common. Dame Julian was an anchoress, not a pilgrim, though one might well call her a pilgrim of the mind. In her book she describes a series of "shewings" (revelations), the main thrust of her work being that God is Good, God is Love, and above all that God is "homely" and that "all thing shall be well", despite sin and pain, which seem so overwhelming but are in the end transitory.
A Description of a Pilgrim
In A Gift Of Sanctuary, Candace Robb describes her hero's father, Sir Robert D'Arby, a man who has "endured years of real pilgrimage", including visits to the Holy Land, Rome and Compostela. He is old now, and sick, and is coming to the end of what turns out to be his final pilgrimage: to St David's, in Wales. "Sir Robert wore a long russet-coloured robe of coarse wool with a cross on the sleeve, and a large round hat with a broad brim turned up at the front to show his pilgrim badges, of which he was justly proud, particularly the scallop shell. Hanging from his neck was a pilgrim's scrip, a large knife, a flask for water and a rosary."
JM
