Geoffrey Chaucer famously begins his Canterbury Tales as a group of people set out on pilgrimage from London to Canterbury to visit the blessed martyr’s shrine of Saint Thomas Becket: “They come, the holy blessed martyr there to seek / who gave his help to them when they were sick.” Among those travelers is the Wife of Bath who is an indefatigable pilgrim. The prologue lists her destinations: “She had been thrice to Jerusalem / had wandered over many a foreign stream / and she had been at Rome, and at Boulogne / Saint James of Compostella and Cologne . . .”
The urge to go to see the sites associated with the life of Christ in the Holy Land (our English word “saunter” comes from “a saint terre” to go to the Holy Land), or to visit the ascetics in the deserts of the Middle East, had been a staple of the period after the persecutions. By the Middle Ages vast numbers of people, both clerical and lay, trod the traditional pilgrimage roads to visit the tombs of the apostles in Rome or the shrine of Saint James at Compostela in Spain (still a favorite pilgrimage trip) or to venerate the Virgin of Chartres or the burial place of the Three Magi in Cologne’s cathedral. More modest destinations were available to everyone in Europe. Local pilgrimages were a staple of medieval society. Modern demographic studies have estimated that there were nearly fifteen hundred datable shrine locations in Western Europe around 1400, which does not even account for minor holy places which were the objects of visits.
The shrine of Saint James the Apostle at Compostela is interesting not only because it is still a favorite of pilgrims but also because of the origins of the cult. There is a ninth-century reference to relics of Saint James being transferred from Jerusalem to Spain. Through royal patronage the cult of the saint and his relics moved to Compostela where there was already a shrine to early martyrs. Because of the enormous popularity of the pilgrimage the iconography of the saint made him a fellow pilgrim with his pilgrim’s hat and a cockle shell, which was the badge of those who made the pilgrimage, just as the palm branch was the badge of those who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem (hence the surname Palmer).
Why did pilgrims travel? The reasons were various. Some were sent on pilgrimage as an act of penance, while others took to the pilgrimage road for the same reason but on their own initiative. Celtic monks went on perpetual pilgrimage (self-exile) as an ascetical practice. Others went in fulfillment of a vow to make a pilgrimage as a thanksgiving for a favor received through the intercession of a saint. Many went on pilgrimage for the same reason that people prayed to the saints in their own locales: to seek a favor or to pray for a cure from an illness. Chaucer mentions at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales that his pilgrims traveled both to thank and to petition for cures at the shrine of the martyr. Still others traveled as a penitential way of life or to visit a shrine in order to discern how they were to live in the future.
The popularity of pilgrimage has not diminished over the centuries. The contemporary mania for travel holidays still contains a significant element of the pilgrimage in it. Christians still travel to the Holy Land (the famous travel service of Thomas Cook & Sons began as a nineteenth-century service for those going to the Holy Land), to the shrines of Lourdes and Fatima, to Compostela or to Chartres on walking pilgrimages, and to the city of Rome. The vast throngs who visit Rome during the jubilee years are part of a tradition that goes back to the proclamation of the first Holy Year by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300.
Pilgrimage is so deeply embedded in the Christian imagination that it has become a metaphor for the Christian life itself. The metaphor is reflected in everything from John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegorical book The Pilgrim’s Progress to the Second Vatican Council’s adaptation of the metaphor “The Pilgrim People of God” as a description of the nature of the church itself. One can think of the medieval masterpiece, Dante’s Divinia Commedia, as a vast metaphorical description of the Christian life itself as a journey from sin (hell) through purification (purgatory) into union with God (paradise). Indeed, the poet himself reaches for the pilgrimage motif to describe the end of his journey, dazzled by the ranks of the saints, before he has had a momentary glimpse of the “still point of light” which stands for the vision of God: “And like a pilgrim resting in the church of his vow as he looks around and hopes some day to tell of it again / so, making my way through the living light / I carried my eyes through the ranks, up and down, and now looking around again . . .”
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