Like a long string of pearls the mediaeval pilgrim’s journey was strung with sacred places that had to be visited — not unlike the modern tourist ticking off a list of historic sites not to be missed. The pilgrim road from Paris has now reached the River Loire. The numerous shrines ‘not to be missed’ lay along the river, east and west. But first there was Orléans itself. The town was a major stopping-place for pilgrims because it boasted two important relics, both described briefly in the 12th-century Pilgrim’s Guide. The lesser of the two was a chalice that had belonged to an early bishop of the town, St Euverte, about whom little is known except that a nearby abbey was dedicated to him.
But the second relic was an object of the deepest veneration, which the author insists all pilgrims ‘must visit’: this was a supposed fragment of the Holy Cross. It was the first of many such fragments that the mediaeval pilgrim would encounter on his travels. This particular fragment used to be displayed in the church that was built in its honour, the Church of Ste-Croix, now on the edge of the old town. Today only traces survive of the crypt of the early church, concealed beneath a grandiose Gothic-style cathedral — but with no trace of the Holy Cross. Scepticism may in the end have triumphed.
The main pilgrim road as we know it heads west from here, following the flow of the Rhône. Yet in the opposite direction, 20 miles upriver from Orléans, stands a place that had been a focus of pilgrimage several centuries before the cult of St James, and it was where a great many Santiago pilgrims would have made a respectful detour. This is the ancient abbey church of St-Benoit-sur-Loire, one of the most striking Romanesque churches in France. Approached from the west it looks like a massive stone box punched through with gaping holes. This is merely the porch: the church itself, and the former abbey to which it was attached, came into existence because it came to possess the body of St Benedict, founder of the Benedictine Order. And quite apart from the historical importance of the saint, it was the Benedictines who were prominent in promoting and aiding the pilgrimage movement throughout Europe. It would have been widely known that they were the pilgrims’ friend.
St Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547) was an Italian monk who founded the great abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy. Here he composed the Rule of St Benedict, a humane and perceptive handbook setting out how monks should lead their daily lives. Accordingly he is generally regarded as the father of western monasticism.
A century after St Benedict’s death, Monte Cassino was sacked by marauding Lombards. News of the abbey’s destruction reached the small monastery of Fleury, on the Loire. From here a party of monks set out for Italy in the brave hope of retrieving the body of the saint. On arrival they found that St Benedict’s grave had miraculously escaped destruction; so, in around the year 672, they brought the body back to their monastery in northern France. From this moment the abbey of Fleur acquired fame and wealth as a popular centre of pilgrimage, duly changing its name to the Abbey of St Benoit and acquiring a new abbey church whose west front is the massive porch which confronts travellers today as we approach from the direction of Orléans. The porch originally supported a belfry, and it is the oldest part of the church, dating from the 11th century.
Travellers and pilgrims waiting in the porch found themselves surrounded by a forest of stone columns whose capitals are carved with images that will be repeated again and again on the pilgrim roads through France and into Spain. They are sermons in stone, designed to match the doomsday sermons delivered every Sunday from the pulpit. There are familiar bible stories — among them the Annunciation and the Flight into Egypt — together with inevitable reminders of the perils of sexual temptation and sin, all embellished by lurid scenes from the Book of Revelations, inspired by those illuminated versions of St Beatus’s commentaries on the Apocalypse.
The size of the nave of the abbey church itself is an indication of just how many worshippers flocked here to venerate the relics of the founder of the Benedictine Order. Traditionally his remains would probably have been contained in some form of gold or silver reliquary, handsomely engraved and placed on the high altar during mass in full view of the congregation. Today those relics are kept down below in the labyrinthine crypt, encased within the massive central pillar. Something of the drama of the original display on the high altar has inevitably been lost in the process.
Forms of worship have inevitably changed over the centuries. The value of shrines and the relics they contained to Christians in mediaeval Europe needs to be understood in the context of the religious climate of the times. In the early Middle Ages in particular the prospect of eternal damnation was preached relentlessly by a church obsessed with the promise of the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement. The world as people knew it was believed to be coming to an end. The sculptors and painters who decorated the churches in which those hellfire sermons were delivered preached this dark prophecy just as vividly. For the simple illiterate peasants, who knew nothing of the world beyond the fields they tilled and the church they attended on Sundays, this vision of the future was all they were offered. They had no means of knowing otherwise. From the day they learnt to use their eyes and ears to the day they died, they were indoctrinated with the urgency of obtaining divine forgiveness for sins they probably had no idea they had committed. It was in the very fabric of human nature to be sinful, and that was it. Doom sounded like a gong in their ears all through life. There was only one way out: to seek forgiveness, remissio peccatorum. The surest way to obtain such forgiveness was by making contact with the saints, who alone could intercede with God on his or her behalf. And the surest way of getting God to listen was to go to them and ask.
The most powerful ingredient in mediaeval religious life lay in the cult of such relics. They were the essential go-betweens, and visiting the shrines where they were displayed was what pilgrimages were fundamentally all about. Even the great 13th-century theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas, who might be expected to have held a more rational view of such matters, was an unequivocal advocate. He wrote: ‘We ought to hold them in the deepest possible veneration as limbs of God, children and friends of God, and as intercessors on our behalf.’ (2)
Much of the power of holy relics lay in the fact that they were universally believed to perform miracles, as an apparently limitless number of worshippers were eager to testify. Nothing could enhance the prestige and popularity of a shrine more than a reputation for healing the sick, curing blindness or madness, or whatever human condition was associated with a particular saint. No one in mediaeval France would seriously have doubted that the relics of a saint could perform such miraculous feats. So closely was religious worship bound up with a belief in these miraculous powers that it even became a ruling by church authorities that no new church could be consecrated unless it was in possession of a holy relic of some description. Nor was it confined to the church. Monarchs and rulers also formed personal collections of relics. The Emperor Charlemagne early in the 9th century was among the first, having obtained them in quantity from Constantinople. The Byzantine capital, named after the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine I, became something of a marketplace for biblical relics, being relatively close to the Holy Land which was of course their principal source. The later Byzantine emperors also acquired hoards of them; and it was after the disgraceful sacking and looting of Constantinople by the 4th Crusade in 1204 that the flood-gates were truly opened, and many an adventurer masquerading as a crusader returned to Western Europe with sack-loads of stolen relics, most of them bogus.
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Genuine or make-believe, relics of the saints were enshrined in places it became obligatory for pilgrims to visit. Santiago de Compostela might be the distant goal, but almost every day there would be a shrine of some sort possessing relics to be revered.
But there was another aspect of this journey from shrine to shrine. Whether by chance or good planning it was often the case that a summer pilgrimage through France would find travellers reaching a shrine around the time of a saint’s day — with luck the very saint revered at this particular shrine. And these would turn into festive occasions. They might begin in a spirit of the deepest piety: there are accounts of crowds of pilgrims on the eve of a saint’s day keeping vigil all night in the church where the saint’s relics were displayed. And on the following morning a solemn mass for a packed congregation would be held. But then, duty done, the atmosphere would change. Secular life took over, and the saint’s day became a feast day. The pilgrimage became a party, with music and dancing, acrobats and jugglers performing their acts, hawkers and food vendors plying their trades. Musicians would mingle with the crowds in the square outside the church even while a service was still being conducted inside. There is an account of a saint’s day in Conques, in south-central France, when bawdy songs were sung so loudly outside the great abbey church that they drowned the words of the litany. Nor was there anything new about such behaviour: as early as the 4th century St Augustine wrote of religious occasions being accompanied by ‘licentious revels.’ (3)
What we see in these early descriptions of saints’ days is the beginning of our familiar carnivals, fairs and fiestas. Important church occasions were the focus of public celebration as much as ceremonial piety. The bucolic scenes of village celebrations immortalised in the paintings of Peter Brueghel in the 16th century owe their origin to those annual events when pilgrims, fellow-travellers, merchants and local folk, rogues and hangers-on, all came together to honour some long-dead saint for the good of their souls. Then, having done so, they would step aside from the drudgery of daily life for just a single day and cast caution to the wind. It was a day of collective catharsis.
The setting is often still there. If we stand by the great gaunt porch of St Benoit’s abbey church, it is not hard to recreate the scene as it might have been on a saint’s day all those centuries ago. On the stone pillars above the crowd are those apocalyptic images of hellfire and damnation from which pilgrims could never get away. Yet down below in the square we can imagine quite a different world: there is jollity, music and laughter, the singing of ribald songs, all washed down by gallons of sparkling Loire wine. And the party will go on deep into the night. Pilgrimages could be about enjoyment as well as piety.
Then in the morning pilgrims would make their way from St Benoit, perhaps a little worse for wear, along the high bank of the Loire towards Orléans, where a few days earlier they had venerated a supposed fragment of the Holy Cross in the church of Ste-Croix. Orléans was an important town, and we know that a considerable number of Santiago pilgrims came from here. Today a Renaissance mansion in a side street close to the river offers an insight into the mediaeval pilgrim’s world. It is called La Maison de la Coquille. The name has survived from an older building on the site, which was probably a pilgrims’ hospice, or simple inn, attached to a religious house close by. Coquille means ‘scallop shell’, and most pilgrim hospices came to be identified by this insignia as the universally recognised emblem of the Santiago pilgrimage.
How this came about is a complex tale. At least by the 12th century, scallop shells from the waters of the Atlantic near Santiago were being sold outside the newly built cathedral to pilgrims who would then proudly take them home as mementoes and as proof of having successfully completed the journey. Later the image of the coquille became a badge, often cast in metal and worn on a cord round the neck, or stitched onto clothing, so distinguishing pilgrims from other travellers who might have less honourable reasons for taking to the road. Later still the French genius for gastronomy led to the creation of a delicious dish of scallops cooked in wine, cream and cheese, for which they appropriately invoked the name of the apostle by calling the dish Coquille St-Jacques.
The Orléans hospice on the site of the Maison de la Coquille would have been one of many in this part of the town. A nearby street, which once led to the only bridge over the Loire, still bears the name Rue des Hôteliers. Here too stood a late-mediaeval pilgrims’ chapel, the Chapelle St-Jacques, which is largely remembered today as a place where Joan of Arc prayed after her successful siege of the city. This was a chapel attached to a pilgrims’ guild, known as a confrérie, or ‘confraternity’, which had been in existence since the 13th century.
Anyone could join a confraternity — men, women, priests — as long as they could provide proof that they had actually been to Santiago de Compostela. In the early days of the pilgrimage the word of the local priest would have been proof enough, perhaps supported by producing the scallop shell that the pilgrim had brought back with him. Then, from the 14th century, the canons of the cathedral in Santiago took to issuing a certificate to arrivals. These were beneficial to the returning pilgrim as proof, but they also served as good publicity for the city of Santiago, whose cathedral authorities were always keen to explore fresh avenues of fund-raising.
In France alone there were more than 200 confraternities of St James in virtually all the larger towns. Collectively their members formed a genuine society of pilgrims: they were a distinct and certainly rather special body, with their own customs, folklore, dress, songs and poems, and of course possessing the powerful bond of a shared experience — the fact that all of them had made that long journey on foot to Santiago and back. This achievement alone would have stood out in a small, tightly bound community in which few others had ever travelled further than the next market town.
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Few stretches of the pilgrim road have changed as dramatically as the section skirting the Loire. Within a few centuries after the heyday of the pilgrimage in the 12th century it was to become the ‘Royal Loire’, studded with spectacular châteaux which we marvel at today — Blois, Amboise, Villandry, Langeais, Saumur, as well as those close by at Azay-le-Rideau, Chenonceaux, Chinon, Loches, Chambord. The modern traveller following in the footsteps of the mediaeval pilgrim needs to be blind to these glories of Renaissance architecture and instead to go in search of more humble places.
Heading west along the river from Orléans we are almost immediately reminded that it was not only the large towns that possessed a community of former pilgrims. Cléry-St-André is scarcely more than a village today and can never have been any larger, yet we know from a notary’s document that as late as the early 17th century a pilgrims’ confraternity here boasted a membership of 32 men and one woman. (Who was she, one wonders?) Whether they had all been to Santiago is not recorded. What seems clear is that confréries such as this one continued to play a social role even in small communities over a period of many centuries. The local church here also offers a reminder that pilgrimages often overlapped one another. Cléry, on the road to Santiago, also attracted pilgrims to a shrine of its own. This was a statue of the Virgin that had been discovered in the 13th century by a local ploughman in a nearby thicket. The statue was held to be a miraculous arrival in their midst, and a cult grew up which persisted for centuries. Hence when the church was rebuilt in the 15th century by the French king Louis XI, he had it dedicated to the Virgin: and so strong was his attachment to the place that he instructed that he should be buried here. And yet his tomb rests in a chapel dedicated not to the Virgin but to St James.
From Cléry the road continues along the river southwest. Pilgrims passed through Blois, already a city of some substance in the Middle Ages; then onwards to the most important of the cities on the Loire, and one of the oldest and most revered places of pilgrimage in France. This was Tours.