In spite of the merits of physicians, soothsayers, and sorcerers, maladies sometimes resisted the best remedies, and the patient would then vow to go on a pilgrimage, ride, walk, or have himself carried there, and pray for his cure. He went to our Lady of Walsingham, for example, or to St. Thomas of Canterbury, whose medical powers were considered, beyond comparison, the best of all: “Optimus egrorum, medicus fit Thomas bonorum,” was the motto stamped on some of the pewter ampullæ, with miraculous water in them, which pilgrims brought back as a souvenir from Canterbury: “For good people that are sick, Thomas is the best of physicians.” And surely praying at his shrine, after an open-air journey on foot or horseback, was a better way of preserving one’s health than swallowing the black beetles and fat bats of John of Gaddesden, the court physician. {339}
Pilgrimages were incessant; they were made to fulfil a vow as in cases of illness or of great peril, or in expiation of sins. Confessors frequently gave the going on a pilgrimage as penance, and sometimes ordered that the traveller should go barefoot or in his shirt. “Commune penaunce,” says Chaucer’s parson in his great sermon, speaking of atonement which must be public, “commune,” because the sin has been public too, “is that prestes enjoynen men comunly in certeyn caas, as for to goon, peradventure, naked in pilgrimage or barfot,” that is to say, naked in their shirts. In accordance with a vow made during a tempest, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, walked ten miles barefoot on the frozen ground, to White Kirk, near North Berwick, and had, on his return, “to be born, rather than led by his servants.”463
Another motive for pilgrimages, and, more than any other, characteristic of the times, was to annoy the king. Thus in the fourteenth century English people flocked to the tomb of the selfish, narrow-minded and vengeful Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, of whom popular prejudice had made a saint.464 The crowd hastened through a spirit of opposition to Pontefract, where the rebel had been decapitated, by order of his relative, King Edward II, and the pilgrims became every year more numerous, to the great scandal of the sovereign and of the Archbishop of York. A letter of this prelate shows the uselessness of the {340} prohibitions: the idea of a semblance of persecution of believers devised by an archbishop only excited zeal and devotion; men hoped to please the martyr by allowing themselves to be slightly martyred. Thus, while awaiting a canonization that never came, though insisted upon by the next king, crowds collected near the tomb, so numerous and tumultuous that there happened “homicides and mortal wounds, . . . and that greater dangers yet and doubtless most imminent are to be feared.”465
All this began the very year after the execution of the “saint.” The official was enjoined to hinder these meetings by any means, and to disperse them until the Pope should pronounce. But the gatherings continued, and Henry of Lancaster wrote in 1327 to the Archbishop of York asking him to refer the matter to the Sovereign Pontiff, and “bear witness to the fame of the miracles which God works by our very dear lord and brother.”466 The same year the Commons took the question in hand and petitioned for the canonization of the same Thomas, which was scarcely parliamentary business.467 In 1338, a London pepperer had for sale a mazer bowl ornamented with an “image of St. Thomas of Lancester.”468 Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, who died in 1361, bequeathed money for pious men to make a variety of pilgrimages on his behalf, and he specially recommended that “a good man and true” should be {341} hired and charged to go to “Pountfreyt and to offer there, at the tomb of Thomas, late earl of Lancaster, 40s.”469
To make a saint of a rebel was the most energetic means of protesting against the king, and the people would not miss this opportunity under some of their sovereigns. Henry III, in 1266, had been obliged to forbid Simon de Montfort being considered as a saint, although Simon having died under excommunication, as was represented to the king by the bishops and barons, authors of the petitions comprised in the “Dictum de Kenilworth,”470 had little chance of ever being canonized. Latin hymns were nevertheless composed in his honour, as for a saint.471
The rebel was hardly dead than popular feeling, often unfavourable to him during his life, forthwith recognized in him nothing else than the hero who had fought against a tyrant, and, through sympathy for the man, or antipathy for the king, assigned therefore to him a place in heaven. The active revolt, rudely interrupted {342} by punishment, continued thus in the latent state, and every one came to see God Himself take the part of the oppressed, and proclaim the injustice of the ruler by working miracles at the tomb of his victim. The sovereign defended himself as he could; he dispersed the rabble and prohibited the miracles.
read an ironical distich written in France in the “Diacre Paris” days. Similarly disposed, Edward II, on October 2, 1323, wrote “to his faithful John de Stonore and John de Bousser,” ordering an inquiry which would be followed by graver measures. He recalled to them that “a little time ago Henry de Montfort and Henry de Wylynton, our enemies and rebels, on the advice of the royal Court, were drawn and hanged at Bristol, and it had been decided that their bodies should remain attached to the gibbet, so that others might abstain from similar crimes and misdeeds against us.” But on the contrary, the people made relics of these bloody and mutilated remains, and surrounded them with respect. Reginald de Montfort, William de Clyf, William Curteys, and John his brother, and some others, in order to render the king odious to the people, had organized false miracles at the gibbet where the corpses of these rebels were still hanging, which was nothing short of “idolatry.”
Severe measures were required in several places at the same time; while these bodies were venerated at Bristol, a mere image of Thomas of Lancaster, in the Cathedral of London, was attracting pilgrims and working miracles. In this same year, 1323, on June 28th, Edward II is found writing with great irritation to the Bishop of London:
“It has come to our ears—and it is very displeasing to us—that many among the people of God, confided to your charge, victims of a diabolical trickery, crowd round {343} a panel placed in your church of St. Paul’s, where are to be seen statues, sculptures, or images, and among others that of Thomas, late Earl of Lancaster, a rebel, our enemy. Silly visitors, without any authorization from the Roman Church, venerate and worship this image as a holy thing, and affirm that it there works miracles: this is a disgrace for the whole Church, a shame for us and for you, a manifest danger for the souls of the aforesaid people, and a dangerous example to others.”472
The bishop knows it, continues the king, and secretly encourages these practices without any other motive than that of profiting by the offerings, thus making “shameful gains. . . . By which,” adds Edward II, “we are deeply afflicted.” The usual prohibitions follow.473
These were occasional pilgrimages. Others were in favour for a much longer time owing to the reputation of the departed for sanctity, and not to political motives. For many years crowds came, as we have seen, to visit the tomb of Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole. Even in this, fashion ruled; some relics or tombs of hermits or of saints enjoyed for a period universal favour; then all of a sudden, through some great miracle, another saint rose to pre-eminence, and the others, by degrees, sank into obscurity.
Convents, which had neither relics nor bodies of illustrious saints to attract pilgrims, nor a marvellous thorn-tree like that of Glastonbury, would have sometimes a pious artist to fabricate an image fit to draw visitors; it would be inaugurated with solemnity, work miracles, it was hoped, and enjoy a more or less wide fame. Thomas of Burton, Abbot of Meaux, near Beverley, relates in the chronicle of his rich monastery, written by himself at the end of the fourteenth century, one of the most remarkable facts of this kind. Abbot Hugh of Leven, one of his {344} predecessors, had in the first half of the century ordered a new crucifix for the choir of the chapel: “And the artist never worked at any fine and important part, except on Fridays, fasting on bread and water. And he had all the time a naked man under his eyes, and he laboured to give to his crucifix the beauty of the model. By the means of this crucifix, the Almighty worked open miracles continually. It was then thought that if access to this crucifix were allowed to women, the common devotion would be increased and great advantages would result from it for our monastery. Upon which the Abbot of Citeaux, by our request, granted us leave to let men and honest women approach the said crucifix, provided, however, that the women did not enter the cloister, the dormitory, and other parts of the monastery. . . . But profiting by this license, to our misfortune, women began to come in increasing numbers to the said crucifix, while in them devotion is cool, and all they want is to see the church, and they increase our expenses by our having to receive them.”474
This naïve complaint is interesting from several points of view; it plainly shows what was done to bring such or such a sanctuary into favour with the pilgrims;475 in the present case the effort did not succeed, the prodigies do not seem to have long responded to the expectation, {345} and people came only from curiosity to visit the church and the fine crucifix of the monastery. From the artistic point of view the fact is still more important, for this is the most ancient example of sculpture from the nude living model to be found in mediæval England; and this anonymous sculptor ought to be remembered, which he is not, as one of the precursors of the Renaissance in his country.
Another attempt to make a chapel popular had been tried in the parochial church of Foston; but the Archbishop of York, William Grenefeld, was scandalized, and by a letter full of good sense put an end to the “great concourse of simple people who came to visit a certain image of the Holy Virgin recently placed in the church, as if this image had something more divine than any other images of the sort.”476
The fact was, as may be noticed even in our days, that, with or without the co-operation of the clergy, some statues had a far better reputation than others; wonders were expected of them, and they were worshipped accordingly; the same vicissitudes were observable for images as for relics and tombs of saints. This statue had healed sick people without number, and that one was known to have moved, to have made a sign, to have spoken a word. Pictures of miracles worked by statues constantly recur in manuscripts; one, for instance, is to be found in several English books of the fourteenth century.477 It shows how a poor painter, being busy colouring and gilding {346} a statue of the Virgin, with a most ugly devil under her feet, the Evil One, angry at such an unflattering portrait, came and broke the ladder on which the artist was standing; but as he was falling and about to be killed, the stone Virgin bent towards him, and extending her arm held him safe until help came.
Statues did not always act so graciously, but were guided by circumstances, as was seen in the church of St. Paul-extra-muros at Rome. A visitor, according to the relation of the learned Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford, had insulted the image of the saint, saying: “ ‘Why hast thou got a sword, I mean to have thy sword,’ and he was trying to take it out of the hands of the statue. But through God’s doing, the statue raised its sword on the impious man, and clove his head to the chin; and then death followed. This happened at the time when Eugene IV was Pope of Rome, and a witness of the scene reported it to me; this witness was a beadel of the said Pope, called Master Erasmus Fullar, a priest of the kingdom of Hungary.”478