pilgrimage, medieval

In the Middle Ages, the great centres of Christian pilgrimage were Jerusalem, Rome, the tomb of St James of Compostela in Spain, and the shrine of St Thomas à Becket in Canterbury, England. Pilgrimages had been common since the 2nd century and, as a result of the growing frequency and numbers of pilgrimages, the monasteries established numerous hospices to cater for the traffic of pilgrims, the religious orders of knighthood, and the Crusades.

Motives Some people went on pilgrimage because they were concerned about the afterlife, and hoped by good deeds to reduce the time they would spend in purgatory after they died. Others went to worship at the shrine of a saint, or to venerate holy relics kept in a cathedral. Some hoped to be healed or made fertile, others wanted to atone for their sins (for instance, a knight who had killed many people in battle); sometimes, the courts ordered a guilty person to go on pilgrimage as punishment. Many people in the Middle Ages tried to go on at least one pilgrimage in their lives, because they thought it was their religious duty. Others, most notably John Mandeville, the reputed author of a 14th-century pilgrim's travel manual for the Holy Land, simply went sightseeing.

Shrines The three major centres of pilgrimage in medieval England were Canterbury Cathedral, Kent; Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; and Walsingham, Norfolk. Canterbury Cathedral contained the tomb of St Thomas à Becket, murdered there in 1170 by four knights of Henry II. Bury St Edmunds housed the shrine of St Edmund, who was murdered by the Danes in 870. A statue of the Virgin and Child, known as ‘Our Lady of Walsingham’, marked the place where the Virgin was believed to have appeared before the lady of the manor of Walsingham in 1061; the shrine was later incorporated into an Augustinian monastery. Other sites included the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, which was visited by Richard II in 1387; Reading Cathedral, where there was a reputed fragment of the Cross of Christ and the hand of St James; and Norwich, where there was a shrine to William, a boy who was said to have been murdered by the Jews. Easter pilgrimages to Walsingham were revived in 1921.

Pilgrims The most famous medieval pilgrims are those described in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), who entertained each other with stories as they rode. However, Langland's Piers Plowman also includes a description of a medieval pilgrim, with a strip of cloth wound round his walking staff, a bag and a bowl hanging from his belt, and, pinned to his coat, souvenirs from the shrines he had visited - tiny ampulae of holy oil from Canterbury, shells from Compostela, and cross-keys from Rome. Travel in the Middle Ages involved both hardship and danger, and the first travel guides were written for medieval pilgrims.