Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

In the Middle Ages, the Holy Land, as well as sites in Europe and around Britain became popular sites for pilgrimage. It was believed that praying at shrines or in front of holy relics could absolve you of your sins, cure your illnesses, or help you on the way to heaven. Why was pilgrimage so important in the Middle Ages? To find out, Rob Weinberg went to Canterbury Christ Church University to speak to Dr. Sheila Sweetinburgh.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, here's another episode in our History Hits series, How and Why History. It's simple. We just go to some of the world's best academics and we just get them to give us a overview, a big overview of an important historical event. In this edition, we're finding out the hows and whys of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. You're gonna love it. If you like it, search How and Why History wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe rate us, and leave comments and all that sort of stuff. There's a new episode every Tuesday and Friday, and coming this Friday we're looking at how World War II shaped the modern world. Useful. Important. And if you like this one, there's 30 episodes to enjoy if you subscribe to History Hit TV.

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In the meantime, let's join the pilgrims on their way. Here, when she looked upon the inn made sacred by the Virgin, and the stool where the ox knew his owner, and the ass his master's crib, she protested in my hearing that she could behold, with the eyes of faith the infant Lord wrapped in swaddling clothes and crying in the manger. The wise men worshipping him, the stars shining overhead, the Virgin Mother, the attentive foster father, the shepherds coming by night to

see the word that had come to pass. An account of St. Paula of Rome making a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Land, as well as sites in Europe and around Britain, became popular for pilgrimage. It was believed that praying at shrines or in front of holy relics could absolve you of your sins or help you on the way to heaven. Others went to shrines hoping to be cured from an illness they were suffering from. By far the most popular shrine in England for pilgrimage was the tomb of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral, a journey immortalised in the words of Geoffrey Chaucer. Of England they to Canterbury went, the holy blessed martyr there to seek, who helped them when they lay so ill and weak. But why was pilgrimage so important in the Middle Ages?

To find out, History Hits Rob Weinberg went to Canterbury to speak to Dr Sheila Sweetenberg. This is How and Why History. Dr Sheila Sweetenberg, thank you for joining us. Why did medieval people go on pilgrimage? Well, in many ways, the answer to that would be different for probably every pilgrim one spoke to. By the same token, we can get some sort of broad ideas. And to be honest, you coming to Canterbury is probably very auspicious because in a sense celebrating Beckett 2020 this year pilgrimage is sort of very much back on the agenda. Well as far as we can tell from sort of

medieval pilgrims probably a lot of them were coming to fulfill a vow. So they'd either made a vow because they'd been on board ship and they'd been through a horrendous storm and they sort of said, you know, if I get through this storm, I will go on pilgrimage to St. Scyth or St. Thomas or whatever. And therefore, they needed to hold themselves to that vow. I mean, you could get yourself out of that. But by the the same token one presumes that most people actually did undertake a pilgrimage under those circumstances. You of course might go on pilgrimage in the hope of a cure. Sick pilgrims were certainly part of that whole pilgrimage movement in the medieval period or you might want a blessing from the saint and the best place to do that would obviously be

where his or her relics were in their shrine. Presumably also people actually like to go to new places. You know that idea that medieval people never left home is a total nonsense. You might also be expected to do it as a penance. Bishop Hammo of Rochester was probably the bishop who maybe have used this most. Certainly his register has a considerable number of entries where people have been told to go on pilgrimage because of the sin they have committed. By and large he stuck to places within England but he did actually send one person off to Compostela. You might also do it on somebody else's behalf. So you get references in wills to people saying that I bequeath a ring to Our Lady of Walsingham and I am providing you know a penny a day for somebody to take it to Walsingham so in that

sense I suppose that sometimes was a family member as far as one can tell, usually the wife or one of the children or a friend or a neighbour, but there do appear to be sometimes, should we say, professional pilgrims who indeed could be hired to indeed take such gifts to a particular shrine somewhere else. It's possible also that it enhanced your status when you came back. The fact you know you'd been abroad, that you'd seen these far-off sites and that you had actually undertaken this spiritual journey. That idea of pilgrimage both as a sort of physical journey to a particular place, so a sort of a spatial movement, but also pilgrimage has still got that,

had that idea of time. So in a sense, you know, your pilgrimage through life, that you would become a better person through that act of pilgrimage. So you could also, in some ways actually, you didn't actually need to go, you could think about it and therefore do it in your mind's eye. So in a sense, that gave other ways. And then I suppose on sort of a more mundane level, presumably people did it and did a bit of trading at the same time. There were indulgences that you could collect, but with no records to say that people just went for the indulgences. Yes, people

obviously picked them up as well, but there's nothing that we can actually prove that that was the prime reason for going. What were the main sites that pilgrims went to? If we're thinking internationally, the three big ones are St. James de Compostela, St. Peter's in Rome and also the Holy Land, so Jerusalem. And of course, once you got to Jerusalem, you've got a number of different sites that you would do. So in a sense, it's not quite the sort of the equivalent of the medieval package deal but that sort of thing so you know you've got a number of places to go to and you might also if you got to the Holy Land you might also possibly go down to Egypt as well so to speak. That was the biggest by far but the other two were extremely important. Places like St Thomas of Canterbury could be seen as international in so much as

you've definitely got pilgrims coming from mainland continent. And we have a life of St. Thomas that was actually produced in Iceland. So in the sense that he's an international cult, in that sense, that people are coming to Canterbury from that point of view. But if you think geographically where Canterbury is, in terms of distance, somebody coming from Scotland to Canterbury is actually travelling an awful lot further than somebody coming from northern France or the Low Countries to Canterbury. So St Thomas is international,

but in many ways he's important nationally. Then you get national stroke regional. So you might have Our Lady of Walsingham, who was very popular in the sort of later Middle Ages. The cult of Our Lady, I suppose, really picked up from the sort of 13th Ages. The cult of Our Lady I suppose really picked up from the sort of 13th century onwards. I mean you've got a lot of cult sites relating to Our Lady but Walsingham is the premier one. And then you've got others at a more local level whether we're thinking about very local Thomas of Dover, who was a monk who was killed when the French came over and attacked Dover Priory. He was at an altar and they murdered him there. So in a sense, he becomes a sort of locally important saint. And you've got those sort of

locally important saints across the country. Presumably with a local saint people wouldn't have to travel that far. What kind of people went on these international pilgrimages? Were they by definition people that had to have money from ruling classes, gentry or did ordinary people go as well? The problem is we have far more evidence of members of the aristocracy going on pilgrimage than we do of ordinary people. Some of the most useful evidence comes from inquisitions post-mortem. So in other words, in terms of the records, people are interested in an event. And because people have been on pilgrimage,

that in a sense is an event that sticks in people's minds. So they can sort of relate ages and other events to that. So a biolage again, more of those are going to be members of the nobility. But by the same token, it does mean that you actually do come further down the sort of the social scale. So we do have evidence that, yes, what we might call artisans, yeoman farmers, those sort of people, may indeed also have gone on these international pilgrimages. In some ways, presumably that was an even bigger sacrifice on their part because if they're away, somebody's got to run their business while they're away.

But by the same token, they certainly seem to have done so. You mentioned people going on pilgrimage for cure. There are accounts of people being cured of St Vitus dance or sacred fire. What kind of illnesses were they? And is there truth in the fact that people were actually cured when they came on pilgrimage? Yes, the miracle stories indicate that people believed they had been cured. Whether this was the case, whether it was a long-term cure, or whether in a sense it was very, very short-lived,

that's much more difficult to know. And possibly just because you've been on pilgrimage and you've moved away from your home. That in itself may have meant that conditions changed and you may indeed therefore have been cured. So it's difficult to know and that idea of faith is difficult to understand, possibly in a 21st century context. But from their point of view, if they believed they'd been cured, then in a sense they had been cured. One is going to take it on their terms. One of the things is, in terms of St Vitus, it's quite tricky to work out what that really is because as far as we can tell that streptococcus infection doesn't really seem to come into being in a great

way until sort of later and it's very much a disease of children. And children are not the people that are going to be going on pilgrimage. So St. Vitus' dance seems to be sort of more linked to maniacal sort of dancing that took place around his statue on his feast day. And it seems to be particularly important in the sort of Germanic and Latvian cultures. So that one is actually quite tricky. It does sort of relate to the condition in so much as what you get is sort of rapid uncoordinated sort of jerky sort of movements of the face, the hands and the feet but quite whether it was really related in terms of people being cured at that point is more tricky. Now, your sacred fire is a bit easier to work on

because that is more often called holy fire or St Anthony's fire, and that's ergot poisoning. Now, ergot poisoning is not exclusively on rye, but was most commonly on rye. You could have it in two forms. You either be sort of convulsive, where you sort of have these sort of seizures, or more likely to be sort of gangrenous.

So you get these really horrible blisters on your feet or your hands, and eventually part of your hand will actually die. And it was thought that the monks of the Order of St Anthony were actually quite good at treating ergot poisoning. Now, in part, of course, if you actually think that, again, if you remove the person from the area where maybe you've had a very damp harvest and therefore there's a lot of ergot actually in the grain which is then going to be turned into your bread and you move them into another area then in a sense yes i'm sure the monks were helping in terms of the symptoms

but by the same token you're actually meaning that the person has got a much better chance of improving anyway. So it's a really interesting one. So it looks like, yes there were sort of outbreaks in the 12th century in particular areas of France, but my hunch is that if you actually looked at the weather conditions of those years, I bet any money those were particularly damp years in which case it was just a very high percentage of ergot that actually got into the rye. What role did holy relics play in pilgrim sites? They were very important.

They provided a means whereby, usually either your religious house or your church or whatever, had a cult centre. I mean, every altar had to have at least one relic to be consecrated. So in a sense, they're all over. Relics were important. They were a tangible conduit between the pilgrim and the saint. conduit between the pilgrim and the saint. So they were seen as actually providing miracles almost of their own right and they're showing that the host place where the relic is is important in its own right. So say somewhere like Peterborough which had the arm of St Oswald. As a result of the monks being able to show the arm of St. Oswald

to King Stephen, he gave the Abbey considerable gifts in exchange. So relics were important from that point of view. And they also showed that person was a saint. Because if you actually took the relics up, so you translated the relics, and say the body had been in the tomb for a couple of hundred years, if it was uncorrupted, then that meant that the saint was indeed a saint. So it was a way of actually guaranteeing that you actually had the saint's relics. And you could also translate them. So say at Canterbury, so the relics of St Thomas were moved from the tomb in the crypt up to the great shrine in 1220 and it gives you another feast day

and you could therefore say St Thomas being killed in December, not a good time for pilgrims. Translation on the 7th of July, summer months, much better time for pilgrims. So these relics were really important for both pilgrims going to them and for the sort of host institution that had them as well. What kind of economic benefits were there for sites that hosted pilgrims. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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You might bring a jewel or a piece of clothing, you know, a luxurious piece of clothing. So in a sense, the offerings at the shrine were of an economic benefit to that host church. Also, people brought candles. Well, if you think of the amount of wax that must have been burnt in these churches, the fact that you've got people bringing wax was actually, today, that might sound like a very sort of unauspicious sort of gift but actually it would have been really really important so the church itself would gain from that but if you're thinking about the sort of the community around then just as today pilgrims need to stay somewhere so you have a whole host of inns that indeed grow up in that community now some of those inns will be actually built by the actual

monastic house if this is where your cult site is so again example i know we're going back to canterbury but this is in sense this is where are. The Priory at Canterbury actually built a number of pilgrim inns around the main entrance to the Cathedral precincts, so therefore you've got places for pilgrims to stay there. The city itself, it had its own inn and St. Augustine's Abbey, it also had not as many pilgrim inns but it had one or two pilgrim inns in Canterbury and then you had entrepreneurs in a sense who had their own inns as well and you've got them both within the walls of Canterbury but because the gates of Canterbury would be shut at night, pilgrims might not actually make it into Canterbury. So you had pilgrim inns on the roads leading into

Canterbury as well. So you've got a whole host of inns. My favourite is the Cornish Chuff, which was sited on the road out towards London. And if you think that Thomas Beckett's badge was a chuff, you can understand exactly why somebody decided that that was an ideal name for their inn. You've also got to provide your pilgrims with food and drink. So the, shall we say, the victualing industries did well out of these things. Where they had slight problems at times was that somewhere like St. Thomas, coming back to this again, being an international shrine, it had even though pilgrims were coming on an annual basis, there were particular years when even more pilgrims came and And these were the jubilee

years. So if you're thinking that Thomas was murdered in 1170, his relics were translated in 1220. So you've got a 50-year gap. That then becomes an opportunity to have greater sort of celebrations and then 50 years thereafter you have the Jubilees. And in 1370 the number of pilgrims were so great coming to Canterbury that price of food just went through the roof and they actually had a shortage of food and this was a real problem. So the following jubilee in 1420, the two bailiffs of Canterbury decided that they would pre-empt this problem. So they insisted that all the inhabitants of Canterbury would agree to put up pilgrims and also that they would ensure that there was sufficient food within the city to accommodate these massive pilgrims that came. They felt they were so successful that they congratulated themselves in a chronicle to say that what a splendid job they'd

done of it. What kind of numbers are you talking about in terms of people who are coming? The problem is we don't actually know. They've said that 100,000 came, but that's a round number. One way of thinking about this is actually thinking about how much was actually given at the shrine in terms of offerings. If we're working on a penny a person, I mean, and that's obviously a very, very rough amount, then you would have thought that for somebody like St Thomas, the peak would be something like 1220, sort of the translation.

the peak would be something like 1220, sort of the translation, in terms of the percentage of population who were coming to Canterbury. But there's another peak in 1350. So, of course, just after the Black Death. And if you sort of compare the amount of money that's coming in at that particular year, and if, again, we're working on this a penny a person, then actually the percentage of the population that came to Canterbury in 1350 was higher than at any other time, which I think is really interesting on the grounds that so often

it is said that by the later Middle Ages, pilgrimage is sort of really, really dropping off. Well, to a degree it is said that by the later Middle Ages, pilgrimage is sort of really, really dropping off. Well, to a degree it is, but if you've got some real crisis like that, people were still coming. So from that point of view, people were responding to crisis by going on pilgrimage. How did someone who'd been on pilgrimage display the fact that they'd been on pilgrimage? How did someone who'd been on pilgrimage display the fact that they'd been on pilgrimage? Pilgrim badges are very important. As far as we can tell, pretty well any cult site would have at least one badge.

What's really interesting is that some of the greatest, should we say, collections of pilgrim badges that archaeologists have found are in London, in the Thames. So whether that means that pilgrims having got their souvenir badge once they've been to the shrine, then once they got back to the Thames, chucked it in the Thames as some sort of votive offering, Well, it's a possibility, but the evidence is very tricky to sort of actually see. But they were obviously a very, very popular thing to have. In terms of actual evidence of badge makers, we don't have a lot of that. But again, we do have a little bit. And again, I'm coming back to Canterbury. I've got a lot of that, but again, we do have a little bit. And again, I'm coming back to Canterbury. I've got a couple of wills from a father and son,

and they are from right at the end of the 15th century and going into the 16th century. So again, when your cult should have been really tailing off and the father is leaving to the son his moulds so that he presumably can make these, little lead figures or whatever to then sell to the pilgrims. So your badge was really important and you could, of course, we could display it either on your hat or on your jerkin or whatever it was. So, yeah, I mean, just as today people collect badges, the similar sort of thing was going on there.

What were the risks people faced going on pilgrimage and how did they protect themselves? You should, as a pilgrim, because you have your staff and your purse, be readily identifiable. And therefore, of course, you should be under God's protection. Unfortunately, robber bands didn't always quite see it in the same light, where they might instead see these pilgrims as sort of easy pickings. So should we say robbery was probably one of the biggest problems one faced, particularly if one was going through forest or other sort of wasteland,

you know, up on high moors or whatever. Other dangers that you might face would be being lost at sea. So shipwreck, drowning was probably a real, real problem. Also, you might fleeced by people on the journey. Innkeepers might charge you extortionate fees, whether it would be for where you were actually stay, the bed, or the quality of the food they gave you. So there were a number of different ways that you could encounter dangers. So one way of overcoming that was to move in groups. Now, that might not mean that you would be moving in groups all the time. You know, you might actually spend some of the time as an individual pilgrim so that

you could enhance your spiritual experience along the way. So you might sort of gather at places before you went through woodland. So it looks like some churches sort of became gathering places from that point of view and then off you would go. You might also gather at bridging points because again you might want to sort of go as a group whether you were actually crossing a very rickety bridge or you were using the you know the ferry or whatever it was so working as a group was good another thing would be to actually avoid forest areas if at all possible so you'd find a route that did that and probably also you might try and go on pilgrimage in the summer months rather than going on the winter months when your trackways will be particularly muddy, there will

be less people about, just generally it will be more difficult to get around. So different routeways and different times of year would make a difference. Finally, how was pilgrimage affected by Henry VIII shutting down the monasteries and shrines? Henry VIII, he was particularly concerned about certain saints. So he was dead against Thomas of Canterbury against Thomas of Canterbury because he felt that Thomas epitomised the idea of that conflict between church and state, where Thomas, from Henry's point of view, had seemed to initially come out on top. And Henry VIII very much saw himself as finishing off the job that Henry II had started. So he was very concerned to totally obliterate Thomas's shrine completely. So the idea of saints was maybe not current throughout the whole country, but had its legacy from the Lollards of the late 14th century onwards, they saw it as the church seeking to make money from people who should really be at home doing

charity in their own community. So Henry could in a sense tap in to such ideas that were in a sense coming through some of the humanist ideas of that again of that early 16th century so by obliterating the shrines Henry was intending to take away the places the relics that were important for people, which meant that certain people hid the relics. So we have evidence of the shrine of St. Augustine being, well it's being said to have been removed from St. Augustine and taken to a local church sort of outside Canterbury. What happened to it after that we've absolutely no idea at all. So somebody obviously wanted to protect that. More recently the fact that St Ainsworth's

body or relics appear to have been hidden in the church at Folkestone at the Reformation. So certain relics did escape Henry's and more importantly in some ways Thomas Cromwell's desire to obliterate such ideas and obviously there have been relics on continental Europe as well. So Henry, at least for a time, destroyed those cults. But from a sense of a modern perspective, should we say some of them have come back into being. Whether we're talking about Thomas More's head at St Dunstan's Church just outside Canterbury, St Ainsworth's relics now at Folkestone,

the fact that the Roman Catholic Church in Canterbury has got a bit of finger, I think, of St. Thomas. So it would be anathema to people like Henry that these things are back again. It's interesting that the interest in relics has in a sense returned in terms of modern society Dr. Sheila Swedenberg, thank you very much for joining us

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