Bordeaux was the capital and chief port of this extensive region of France, which belonged to England at that time, known as Aquitaine. In fact one of the principal attractions for Santiago pilgrims as they reached Bordeaux was a particularly well equipped hospice dedicated to the apostle in the English version of his name, St James, rather than the customary French St Jacques. The Hôpital St James was an English endowment, the main donor being the English king Henry II in the year 1181. Henry’s marriage to Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, had brought this region under the English crown. Pilgrims arriving here from England must have felt they were coming home.
The Pilgrim’s Guide has surprisingly little to say about Bordeaux beyond the observation that the region is ‘excellent in wine and abundant in fish’, with which any modern traveller would be happy to agree. By now the Guide is beginning to give off a clear message to pilgrims, to the effect that the good times are by and large over, at least until they get deep into Spain. But then the likely author of this section of the guide, Aimery Picaud, was fiercely parochial about his native Poitou and the larger region of Aquitaine of which it formed a part, to the extent of finding it grudgingly hard to write anything good about people unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. It is just as well that most mediaeval pilgrims were illiterate, or at this stage of their journey they would certainly not be looking forward to what lay in store for them in the days ahead. Their immediate prospect was to tackle the Landes.
Today the Landes is a national forest, one of the largest in Europe, composed mostly of Maritime Pine. But in Aimery Picaud’s day most of it was swamp, and about as inhospitable as a landscape could be. We know that he did this journey himself, once if not twice; so his description of the Landes is unlikely to have been entirely coloured by prejudice. For Picaud this was a desolate region deprived of all good things. ‘Here there is neither bread, wine, meat, fish, or springs with fresh water.’ He manages to offer a few words of praise in passing: the flat, sandy landscape of the Landes at least yielded good honey, millet and wild boar. On the other hand, he goes on, if you should chance to cross it in summer, make sure to guard your face carefully from the ‘enormous flies that greatly abound there’, called locally ‘wasps or horseflies.’ Worse still, if you fail to watch your step you can easily sink up to your knees in the wet sand that is widespread throughout the area.
Today nobody is spared the wasps and horseflies, though the knee-deep swamps of the Landes have long been drained. But we know Picaud was not exaggerating. The modern traveller keen to savour what life was really like here in earlier times would do well to take time off in Bordeaux to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. Here there are romanticised paintings dating from the early-19th century, not long before the swamps were finally drained; and they show local shepherds coping deftly with the swampy terrain by going about their work on immensely tall stilts like well-practised circus clowns.
The old pilgrim road slices through the centre of the Landes from north to south, now flanked mostly by pine and oak-forest, with the occasional clearing where geese bred for foie gras wander around in the company of pigs whose distant ancestors Picaud described. A few survivors of the mediaeval pilgrimage remain, dwarfed by the trees. At Cayac stand the remains of a priory and ancient hospice reminiscent of the one straddling the road at Pons. Here and there on the route beyond Cayac the occasional mediaeval chapel still lines the old road, long battered by sea-winds; then an ancient stone preaching cross rises up by the roadside, and another former priory church huddled among trees; then on to Belin where a burial mound is traditionally believed to contain the bodies of Charlemagne’s warriors killed alongside Roland near Roncesvalles. Belin possesses one further claim to historical fame: it was the birthplace of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the heiress whose marriage to King Henry II of England in 1152, as we have seen earlier, was very soon to bring this entire region into the possession of the English crown, where it remained for the next three centuries.
Finally the vast forest comes to an end, and the landscape softens and opens out into fertile meadows. Across the River Adour and the traveller is now in Gascony — about which the Pilgrim’s Guide has suddenly a great deal to say. At first Aimery Picaud seems to have had a good experience of Gascony — ‘rich in white bread and fine red wine, and covered by woods and fields, streams and healthy springs.’ But then he encounters the local people, and the tone changes. He finds the Gascons loquacious, given to mockery, libidinous, drunk, prodigal in their eating habits and ill-dressed. He acknowledges, however, that they are ‘well-trained in combat and generous in the hospitality they provide for the poor.’
As the journey towards Santiago progresses the Pilgrim’s Guide becomes as much a 12th-century social document as it is a guide-book. And if the chapter on the people and places along the route, as well as several chapters following, are indeed the work of Aimery Picaud, then we find ourselves building up a character-portrait of this cantankerous, pleasure-loving monk from Parthenay-le-Vieux whose abbey church we so recently visited in his native Poitou. The strength and appeal of his Guide lies in the way we are drawn into envisaging him as being like a modern traveller venturing abroad for the first time and being taken aback by how different people’s habits can be. Hence his extremely mixed feelings about the behaviour of the Gascons: Seated around the fire, he tells us, they have a practice of eating without a table and drinking from a single cup. In fact they eat and drink excessively, he goes on. Furthermore they wear rather poor clothes and lie down shamelessly on a rotten straw mattress, servants, master and the mistress all together.
The eating and sleeping habits of the Gascons were probably the least of a pilgrim’s concerns on the road towards the Pyrenees. This was a stretch renowned for being particularly dangerous, doubtless due to the greater concentration of travellers making their way towards Spain across the few mountain passes. For all the papal threats of excommunication, bands of robbers were everywhere, some of them canny enough to pose as pilgrims with the appropriate clothing. Travellers making the long journey to Santiago were especially vulnerable since they were likely to be carrying most of their worldly possessions with them, such as they were. There is even a record of a blind pilgrim travelling on horseback who was robbed of his money and his horse, to be found later wandering helplessly by the roadside.
The journey could be hazardous enough even without the threat of robbery, as Picaud’s account of the Landes swamps makes all too clear. But at the same time, the idea of a hazardous journey was not entirely unwelcome. Whatever the personal motive might be, the pilgrimage was supposed to be a spiritual journey — an expression of penance and a quest for the remission of a person’s sins. It was a path to salvation, and to the mediaeval mind this was not a path that was ever intended to be rose-scented. On the contrary, it was supposed to be stony. Mortification of the flesh was regarded as a passport to heaven. One of the attractions of the journey was that it was arduous and demanding: in the eyes of the mediaeval church, physical hardship was a necessary and healing aspect of that journey. In the early centuries of the pilgrimage at least, the long trek to Santiago was certainly not supposed to be a pleasure trip.
Parallel to the celebration of physical hardship lay the cult of poverty. Avarice was a cardinal sin in mediaeval church teaching, and to hoard money was the act of a miser, or so ordinary people were told. Congregations were reminded in sermons of the teaching of Christ that it was ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ (The fact that churches and religious institutions frequently behaved otherwise was conveniently overlooked.) The personification of this poverty cult, early in the 13th century, was St Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226), and it would have surprised none of his followers that St Francis chose to include Santiago among his numerous barefoot travels. There could have been no more influential a role-model: the most celebrated pauper of the day became the most celebrated pilgrim of the day. By his own exalted example, and by his preaching of the virtue of poverty, St Francis greatly broadened the appeal of the pilgrimage — ironically as much among the rich as among the poor. Furthermore the Franciscan order, founded by the saint, proceeded to contribute to the pilgrimage movement, adding further to the support already given by other religious orders, in particular the Benedictines and Augustinians, and later the Cistercians.
The Pilgrim Guide’s suspicions of the Gascons grow darker the further the author travels from his beloved Aquitaine, and ventures deeper into what he considers to be ‘barbarous’ country in the approaches to the Pyrenees. How much his account of events derives from first-hand experience is impossible to tell, but there comes a point in his account when he feels it imperative to offer the severest warning to all pilgrims travelling this road. The place is the riverside village of Sorde, then a popular stopping-point for pilgrims on account of its important Benedictine abbey, today in a semi-ruined state draped in ivy (perhaps held together by ivy), but dramatically situated by the water’s edge, with a long, curving weir stretching away towards the far bank.
There was no bridge, and the only means of crossing this river was by raft. And here, Picaud explains ruefully, the pilgrim was at the mercy of the local ferrymen — ‘and may they all be damned’, he fulminates. He explains how they have the habit of demanding a coin from everyone they ferry over, whether rich or poor. And for a horse they extort four coins, if necessary by force. But their boat being small, made of a single tree, it is barely capable of conveying a horse. You will do better to guide your horses by the reins behind you in the river, he says, outside the boat. As for the passengers, the boat is often dangerously overloaded; and many times the ferryman, having by this time taken his money, has so many pilgrims in his boat that it capsizes and the pilgrims all drown. At this point, Picaud concludes, ‘the boatmen, having laid their hands on the spoils of the dead, wickedly rejoice.’
Perhaps Aimery Picaud had observed such a scene himself, or more likely it was a favourite piece of juicy gossip being bandied about in the local inn over a jar of wine. We are reminded, reading his account, that it was intended only for the tiny minority of pilgrims who were literate, and in consequence likely to be better-off than most, and probably making the pilgrimage on horseback — as Picaud himself would have done. They were, after all, supposedly a party of three pilgrims, the other two being a man and his (supposed) wife. Picaud’s description of the ferrymen’s murderous behaviour at Sorde raises the question of whether he made not one pilgrimage but two. If the account is based on a personal experience, or at least on stories told him locally, then the journey to present the Codex Calixtinus manuscript to Santiago cathedral must have been on a subsequent occasion, since the Guide’s account of evil-doings at Sorde are contained in the Codex itself.
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From Sorde pilgrims had a choice of two roads leading south towards the Pyrenees, depending on whether they had risked the river crossing or wisely continued westwards until a bridge took them on to the old Roman road. Either route led them into the Basque Country. At this point Picaud offers some robust observations. ‘This land’, Picaud writes, ‘where the local language is barbaric, is wooded, mountainous, without bread, wine or any kind of food good for the body’ — except, he grudgingly concedes, ‘it abounds in apples, cider and milk.’
Picaud regarded the Basque language as barbarous because it was incomprehensible to him. As a monk he would have understood Latin, and spoken one or more of the local languages, or dialects, all of which derived from Latin — which Basque does not. It is one of the oldest languages in Europe, with its roots deeper than ancient Greek and Latin; scholars still argue exactly where. Picaud is quite likely to have thought of it as the language of the Devil. He may even have known the story of how the Devil, keen to win the Basques to his side, set himself to learn their language: and in seven years managed to learn three words. Today’s travellers in the region may find themselves faring little better.
Village follows village very closely in the Basque Country, always with the snow-covered peaks of the Pyrenees drawn like a long curtain across the road ahead, drawing closer hour by hour. Here and there a house is still marked ‘Pelegrinia’, a reminder that we are now entering the region where pilgrim roads from far-distant parts of France draw closer together and finally converge. At the height of the Santiago pilgrimage, in the 12th and 13th centuries, virtually every house in these Basque villages would have offered accommodation — like a modern bed-and-breakfast. It was a regular source of local income during the spring and summer months, and innkeepers would compete with each other for trade, often posting their male children in the street to invite passing pilgrims in. Picaud was as suspicious of such innkeepers as he was of ferrymen.
They were not the only locals he despised. There was a third category of predator whom the Guide warns pilgrims to be especially wary of. ‘In this land’, writes Picaud, ‘in the town called Ostabat… there are evil toll-gatherers who will certainly be damned.’ He goes on to explain how these toll-gatherers regularly approach pilgrims wielding two or three wooden rods that they use to extort a totally unjust tribute by force. And if a traveller should refuse to hand over the money, they set about him with the rods, all the time cursing him and searching even in his breeches for the toll-money. They are ferocious people, Picaud warns, and they live in a land that is equally savage. As for their appearance, it is as barbaric as their language, and guaranteed to ‘scare the wits out of anyone who sees them.’
Picaud goes on to point out that pilgrims were in fact exempt by law from such tolls. This exemption was widely known, though not always widely observed, one reason being that it was also widely abused. Merchants, as well as other kinds of traveller, were well known to pose and dress as pilgrims precisely in order to avoid payments; and it was this practise which may have offered a slender excuse for the behaviour of the Ostabat toll-gatherers, at least in their own eyes.
But the principal reason they gathered in such predatory numbers in this small town was that Ostabat was the very first halt for travellers after the junction of three main pilgrim roads, from Paris and the Loire, from Vézelay and Burgundy, and from Le Puy and the mountains of central France. Pilgrims would have collected here from every country in Europe, and for toll-gatherers they were easy prey. They were a source of easy profit for innkeepers as well: in the Middle Ages this small Basque town, hardly more than a village, contained at least twenty hospices. From spring through to autumn there would have been an exceptionally large number of pilgrims from all parts of Europe grateful for a roof and a bed of straw in Ostabat.
Today Ostabat gives out scarcely an echo of what the place must have been like in the Middle Ages. For a more genuine sound of the past the modern traveller needs to leave the main pilgrim road for a short distance and head into the woodlands of the Bois d’Ostabat in search of a tiny community by the name of Harambels. Here survives a fragment of the mediaeval pilgrimage that the modern world has bypassed. The core of this tiny village consists of four houses and a rugged stone chapel dedicated to St Nicolas, a 4th-century saint widely associated with the giving of gifts (and often believed to be the original Santa Claus). The chapel of Harambels is one of the earliest pilgrim churches in Europe, recorded in documents as early as 1039 (at least a century before the Pilgrim’s Guide was written). The tiny community was built as an extended hospice for pilgrims, created by four lay friars who brought their families here. All were Basques, named Salla, Borda, Etcheto and Etcheverry. Such is the timelessness of life in these Basque woodlands that the four houses they built are still owned by the same four families. And generations of them have been buried for a millennium in the small graveyard beside the chapel.
After the solitude and silence of Harambels the main pilgrim road can seem a bustling highway — which relatively speaking it has been for more than one thousand years. It has been the pilgrims’ highway to Spain. The road crosses and re-crosses a fast-flowing river deeply shaded by overhanging trees, and close to one of the bridges is another witness to the history of the pilgrimage — one that is even more secluded than the Harambels chapel. At first it is merely an ordinary track cutting through the undergrowth. Then, as we descend towards the river the track is seen to lead to a line of massive stepping stones, each well over a yard in diameter, which have been laid in a long curve across the fast current from bank to bank. How old is a stepping stone? Who can tell? Though there is one thing we can tell: these stones must have been put in place at least a thousand years ago, because this simple track, cutting through the forest on either side of the river, is one of the four main pilgrim routes — the one from Le Puy and the Massif Central. The road descends to the river on one side, then on the farther side rises out of the woods to disappear round the flank of the hill to the west.
Where it is heading — out of sight from here — is one of the pivotal points of the entire Santiago pilgrimage. It is a site so understated that you might pass by without even noticing. We are on the crest of a hill whose name, Mont St-Sauveur (Mount St Saviour), at least provides a hint that this is no ordinary hill. The only other clue is a modern stele, a marker-stone, set on an ancient carved gravestone. But then if we stand here and gaze southwards we can pick out three tracks threading their way towards us through the fields and the deep hedgerows from three different directions: and from the point where they converge they are joined by a lane which runs down the slope to become a single broad track snaking its way through the rough terrain beyond and over the far hill towards the Pyrenees and the Spanish border now only a few miles away.
The three converging tracks are three of the ancient pilgrim roads — the first the road from Paris which we have been following, the second the road from Vézelay, and the third the road from Le Puy by way of the stepping stones we saw on the far side of the hill. From this junction point the three tracks become just one pilgrim road which leads over the Pyrenees — until on the far side of the mountains this will be joined by the fourth road, the one from Arles and Provence, from that point on to become the single Spanish road to Santiago, the camino.
But that must wait. Meanwhile today’s travellers need to follow in the footsteps of their mediaeval forebears on the second of those ‘four roads to heaven’ — beginning many hundreds of miles further north among the noble vineyards and fertile valleys of Burgundy, always the heartland of the pilgrimage movement.
No 1 rue St-Jacques, Paris: the beginning of the long road to Santiago
Paris, the Tour St-Jacques, tower of the former church of St James where pilgrims attended their last mass before setting out
Pilgrims passed in front the cathedral of Notre-Dame along the Rue St-Jacques on the first leg of their long trek south
Aulnay, the great pilgrim church in western France on the road south
The magnificent decorated interior of the church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, in Poitiers
Pilgrim bridge and mediaeval town gate of Parthenay, near Bordeaux