The pilgrim roads led travellers not just from shrine to shrine but from legend to legend. Pilgrims who had gathered at Vézelay would have been made familiar with the story of Mary Magdalene and her supposed life and death in France after her arrival on the miraculous raft from the Holy Land (described in Chapter 7). But the Magdalene story was part of a wider legend. The raft (or boat) that bore her to the shores of Provence had also contained other followers of Christ including Mary Magdalene’s brother Lazarus, whom Jesus had brought back from the dead in Bethany. Furthermore the saint’s body was now claimed to be in the possession of the cathedral authorities at Autun, a Burgundian city only a short distance off the pilgrim road to the south of Vézelay and no great distance from of Cluny.
The overwhelming popularity of the Magdalene cult at Vézelay during the 11th century had the effect of stirring the authorities at Autun to create a shrine to Lazarus that might match the appeal to pilgrims of the shrine to Mary Magdalene. Autun was clearly missing out. As a result, early in the 12th century the decision was made to build a new cathedral dedicated to St Lazarus, and to create an elaborate shrine to the saint in which his body would be placed. This was to incorporate numerous carved figures in attendance, including that of Mary Magdalene, to be installed behind the high altar. Sadly it is no longer in place, yet fragments of this magnificent sculptural ensemble survive on display in the adjacent Musée Rolin; and they make it easy to understand how striking the Lazarus shrine would have been in the eyes of the new wave of pilgrims who soon began to swarm to Autun. How many of these would have been pilgrims bound for Santiago (who had made the short detour to pray at so important a shrine) is impossible to ascertain, just as we have no record of how many Santiago pilgrims would have made the similar detour to Cluny. But it seems clear that pilgrims often made their way from shrine, offering prayers to local saints to sustain them on their long journey.
Today’s travellers are more likely to embrace all three of these sites — Vézelay, Cluny and Autun — as a single group. Together they represent a trio of incomparable artistic masterpieces. Even though so little remains of Cluny itself, without the imaginative vision of its abbots and its school of carvers and stonemasons there would have been no Vézelay and no Autun. Cluny was the birthplace of some of the finest mediaeval art and architecture. And in the case of Autun we even have the rare experience of knowing the name of its creator — a discovery that came about by chance.
Early in the 19th century, the local authorities responsible for the maintenance of Autun’s mediaeval cathedral decided to remove an innocuous slab of plaster that in the previous century had been laid over the original tympanum above the cathedral’s west door. The 18th century had been happy to regard mediaeval art as crude, even barbaric, entirely inconsistent with the prevailing taste for elegance and good manners. Ironically, by covering over the entire area above the west door these 18th-century fathers of the church managed to preserve what would very likely have been wrecked by the anti-clerical mob during the French Revolution a few decades later. When the 19th-century restorers set to work they revealed a vast sculptural panel on the theme of the Last Judgment, with the figure of Christ in Majesty seated imperiously on a throne, his arms outstretched towards the damned on one side and the saved on the other. And below the feet of Christ emerged a Latin inscription, boldly engraved in the stone, which read Gislebertus hoc fecit. ‘Gislebertus made this.’
Only an artist held in the highest esteem would have been permitted to trumpet his achievement quite so proudly, and in such a place where it would catch the eye of every parishioner and pilgrim entering the cathedral — right above their heads as they gazed up at the majestic figure of Christ in Glory. But for that inscription the identity of a sculptor of genius would never have been revealed. Few artists in any era have been solely responsible for decorating an entire house of God. Gislebertus was one of that rare breed. He was responsible for all the carvings throughout the building. His spirit inhabits the cathedral of Autun much as Michelangelo’s inhabits the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
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It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of sacred places such as Vézelay, Cluny and Autun on the ordinary pilgrim in 12th-century France, who in all probability had never experienced any religious ceremony more splendid than Sunday mass in the local village church. The opulence of the buildings, the grandeur of the church services with their elaborate liturgy, and of course the shrines of the saints with their jewel-studded reliquaries and so many vivid accounts of miracles performed there: all of these, put together, would have amounted to an overwhelming experience imbued with mystery and magic, an introduction to a totally unfamiliar world, even a glimpse of heaven on earth.
Now, after so many highly-charged events those pilgrims who had gathered at Vézelay only a week or so before might have expected a less demanding stretch of road as they finally left Burgundy and headed southwest along the fringes of the central mountains in the direction of Limoges, Périgueux and the distant plains of Gascony. But it was unlikely to be so. Protected though they might be by their scallop shell and their status as spiritual travellers, pilgrims were nonetheless exposed to the political climate of the day; and towards the end of the 12th century those hoping to make their peaceful way south from shrine to shrine would have found themselves drawn into two of the major social upheavals of the day — the Crusades to the Holy Land on the one hand, and on the other the burgeoning war between England and France over the English-held territory of Aquitaine, which they were now entering.
The pilgrim road had become a battle zone as well as a sanctuary for returning Crusaders who had been captured or wounded in battle; and for travellers at that time there were reminders of both events everywhere they went. At Issoudun, just a few miles along the road from Bourges, the main street today known as the Rue St Jacques leads to the Tour St Jacques which originally formed part of a massive fortress built by the king of England, Richard the Lionheart, on his return from the Third Crusade in the last decade of the 12th century. The tower was a bulwark in his heavy-handed campaign to secure his territories against the French king Philippe Auguste, who had laid his hands on them in Richard’s absence. The pilgrim road passes through the very town where the English monarch was fatally wounded by a bolt from a crossbow. Nearby, in the small town of Neuvy, pilgrims would pause to offer their prayers in a church dedicated to St James that had been built by an earlier returning Crusader as a copy of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on the site of Christ’s tomb. A few miles further still another small settlement, Cluis, lay on the very frontier between territory ruled by the kings of France and the Duchy of Aquitaine, which was ruled by England.
Altogether this was hardly the tranquil progress through the gentle countryside that pilgrims may have expected. In addition to the customary hazards of the road they would have found themselves continually assaulted by echoes of crusading fervour mixed with the roar of battle. Today’s traveller in this historic region of France can still hear those same echoes rebounding from the mediaeval churches and castles that survive along the road, overlaid by further echoes of the great pilgrimage itself as it took place throughout these troubled centuries.
Relations between the English and French kings had for a time seemed amicable. Richard and Philippe Auguste were united in their commitment to the Third Crusade, and had spent months together in 1189 at the abbey of Vézelay planning the great adventure in which they were to lead their respective armies. It was during the course of their campaign in the Holy Land against the Muslim leader Saladin that the two monarchs fell out. The French king decided to return early, to the contempt of Richard, leaving the English king to continue the campaign. After making a peace pact with Saladin, Richard set sail for home, only to be shipwrecked on his return journey and held captive by the Duke of Austria until a vast ransom was raised to obtain his release and return to England in 1194.
This précis of one of history’s most famously romantic melodramas would have little relevance to the Santiago pilgrimage had Richard quietly remained in England. But he was English only in name. Neither of his parents, Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Henry II, were English; and Richard himself did not even speak the native language. He was born, and mostly lived, in France. And now, as soon as possible after his release from captivity his ambitions turned to France, and in particular to the security of Aquitaine, which his mother’s marriage to Henry had placed under English rule. And as he led his army to secure its borders, his opponent was naturally his former fellow-crusader and companion at Vézelay, King Philippe Auguste of France. The ensuing conflict turned the pilgrim road into a battle zone. One longs for a traveller’s eyewitness account of how pilgrims fared in such threatening circumstances.
Today Richard the Lionheart’s presence is never far from this stretch of the pilgrim road. One of the most striking landmarks in the region is the slender spire and bell tower of the church of St Léonard-de-Noblat, rising high above the river valley to the east of Limoges. The English monarch is known to have contributed to its building costs in thanksgiving to St Léonard for having facilitated his release from prison in Austria on his ill-starred return from the Third Crusade, so the king believed. In fact the connection between St Léonard’s church and the crusading movement dated back to its foundation a century earlier in the aftermath of the First Crusade, when one of its chapels was sponsored by a returning crusader and named after the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Christian saints in the Middle Ages tended to rise from obscurity in response to particular needs and circumstances of the day; St Léonard seems to have been a case in point. There is no record of his very existence until the 11th century: then his emergence as a focus of popular veneration coincides with the beginning of the crusading movement as well as with the military campaigns of Reconquest in Spain that was heavily supported by Cluny. In both spheres of operation the saint was reputed to have performed numerous miracles in which prisoners captured in battle were released. From nowhere Léonard became widely recognised as a patron saint of prisoners; hence Richard the Lionheart’s gesture of thanks in Aquitaine following his release from captivity.
Characteristically, the fame of St Léonard soon attached his name to the list of saints whose shrines were required places of veneration for pilgrims generally, in particular those bound for Spain, where many cases of prisoners miraculously released from Muslim hands had been reported. The 12th-century Pilgrim’s Guide includes a fulsome entry on St Léonard, who is reputed to have been a 6th-century nobleman who abandoned a life of riches for a hermit’s existence in the forests around Limoges, ‘enduring freezing cold conditions, inadequate clothing and excessive physical labour before finally passing away in a saintly fashion.’
The overheated style of writing suggests that the author may well have been the same Benedictine monk from Parthenay-le-Vieux, Aimery Picaud, whose ribald comments on the behaviour of the Gascons earlier in the Guide we encountered in Chapter 6. His account of St Léonard’s legacy continues in the same rich vein: ‘His extraordinarily powerful virtues have delivered from prison countless thousands of captives. Their iron chains, more barbarous than one can possibly recount, joined together by the thousand, have been placed in testimony of such great miracles all around his basilica.’
One of the saint’s miracles mentioned in the Guide concerned a crusader by the name of Bohemond, Prince of Antioch and son of the Duke of Apulia (1052-1111), who had been taken prisoner by the Turks in the year 1100 in the aftermath of the First Crusade. The author attributes his release from captivity entirely to a miracle performed by St Léonard. In fact the ‘miracle’ consisted of the emir’s acceptance of a huge ransom for Bohemond’s release — a fact omitted from the Guide. Such was the universal belief in the power of miracles that Bohemond himself attributed his release to the saint’s intervention, even travelling halfway across Europe to the newly founded church of St Léonard at Noblat in order to offer his effusive prayers of thanks.
The pilgrimage movement was founded on a cult of the saints; and in turn the cult of the saints rested on a widely held belief in miracles. The canonisation of a new saint by the pope would take place only if the proposed candidate could be shown to have performed an impressive number of miracles. And since a church or abbey in possession of relics of a newly canonised saint stood to gain massively as a result by donations and bequests of land, not surprisingly there grew up something of a ‘miracles industry’ in 11th- and 12th-century Europe. Candidates for sainthood were virtually queuing up. Centuries later, at the time of the Counter-Reformation, Protestant jibes induced the Vatican to appoint a canon lawyer specially to mount an argument against the canonisation of a candidate — a role popularly known as the ‘Devil’s Advocate.’ But in the Middle Ages no such corrective system existed, and papal judgment was a more haphazard affair depending largely on the strength of each case as presented to His Holiness, and on the pope’s personal inclinations.
In modern terminology it all sounds like an exercise in skilful public relations. Priests and monks who were guardians of an important shrine are known to have taken pains to maximise its profitability by drawing up lists of miracles their saint was claimed to have performed. Sometimes the eagerness of an abbey to claim a miracle led to an outcome at odds with public interest as well as the rule of law, as when the monks of Vézelay keenly supported the release of a prisoner after the miraculous intervention of Mary Magdalene, even though the man was a convicted murderer.
The process of claiming and authenticating a miracle was not always as naive or grasping as it may appear to our eyes. Any number of events that today would be attributed to some identifiable natural cause did not appear so to the mediaeval mind. If there is an eclipse of the sun, we know without hesitation what shadow has caused it, and know that it will duly pass. If there is a severe flood in the plains we know that excessive rainfall in the mountains has caused rivers to burst their banks. If there is an outbreak of malaria we know that mosquitoes are the cause. But in the mediaeval world there was no such understanding of the workings of the natural world. Our life on earth was full of wondrous and fearful mysteries, many of which lay outside the natural order of things and could not be explained except in terms of divine will: that God — and sometimes a punitive God — had willed it so.
But God was also perceived to be merciful: hence it seemed natural to appeal to Him for forgiveness and help. What He had willed he could be persuaded to ameliorate; and here a channel of communication existed through which such an appeal could be made. That channel was through the good offices of the Christian saints, who had God’s ear. They were the essential intermediaries: accordingly their shrines were of supreme importance in the mediaeval world. They were God’s listening posts. An appeal to divine authority through the intercession of His saints could lead to a radical transformation of human fortunes, whether in matters of illness, a natural disaster, an unjust imprisonment or personal misfortune, a crisis in battle, or whatever. And that divine intervention was the miracle.
Belief in miracles lay at the heart of church teaching and of the Christian faith in mediaeval Europe. It was a belief universally held, and tended to invite scenes of public celebration that were sometimes far from godly. In the words of Jonathan Sumption, ‘every major shrine was perpetually besieged by a motley crowd of pilgrims, hawkers, musicians, beggars and idlers whose appetite for new wonders was insatiable.’ (6)
Yet, for all the trappings of funfair and fairground, without an unquestioned core of belief in the miraculous there would have been no such occasions: there would have been no cult of the saints, and no shrines to attract worshippers. Without those shrines there would have been no pilgrimages. And those of us today who love majestic church architecture, and the masterpieces of painting and sculpture that accompany it, would be sorely deprived. For many centuries the pilgrim roads in France and Spain were the inspiration for some of the most glorious achievements of western civilisation. To us, places like Vézelay, Autun, Aulnay, Chartres and Santiago de Compostela itself may appear to be the real ‘miracles’ of the Middle Ages. Their magnificence transcends all cults and matters of faith. They lift the human spirit, bearing witness to the soaring power of the creative imagination.
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This stretch of the pilgrim road along the edge of the central mountains was the front line in territorial battles between England and France for more than three centuries. It is hardly surprising that as a result, so many of the saints revered in this region should have been honoured for miracles in which victims of war were healed of their wounds or released from captivity. In the mediaeval church at St Léonard-de-Noblat, with its massive bell tower and spire pointing so confidently to heaven, kings, dukes and countless more humble soldiers came to offer prayers of thanks to the saint whom they believed to be responsible for their deliverance from enemy hands.
Mediaeval pilgrims who paused here to pay their respects to those miraculous events then headed westwards across the valley to the city that gave its name to this road. The city was Limoges, and in the Pilgrim’s Guide the road is named the Via Lemoviense. Its two 13th-century bridges still lead the traveller along the ancient trail. Limoges was the city of another miracle-worker, St Martial, who surprisingly gets no mention in the Pilgrim’s Guide. The little we know about Martial is that he was a preacher in pre-Christian Roman Gaul who defied persecution and achieved popular acclaim for his miraculous powers. It is reasonable to suppose that he might have been forgotten like St Léonard but for the fact that seven centuries later the newly-founded monastery of Cluny began to extend its influence southwest from Burgundy, sponsoring abbeys and priories which serviced the pilgrim road to Spain. And the abbey of St Martial was one of them.
With the growing popularity of the pilgrimage movement, spurred by the legend of St James and the emotive cause of Reconquest in Spain, the abbey of St Martial soon became richly endowed, and by the 11th century the abbey church could offer pilgrims the dramatic sight of a reliquary of the saint as a seated figure entirely encased in gold, with hands outstretched in a gesture of blessing. The impact on pilgrims entering the candlelit church after days and weeks on the road in this war-torn countryside must have been hypnotic. Here was the golden saint himself, the master of miracles, arms extended in welcome to the weary traveller. It would have been the closest to being blessed by God. Alas, the reliquary-statue no longer exists. But travellers on the third of these pilgrim roads, the one from Le Puy, will soon come face to face with a similar reliquary that has survived, the extraordinary Majesté de Saint-Foy at Conques, about which a great deal will be said later.
The abbey church of St Martin in Limoges was one of the five archetypal pilgrim churches which conformed to the same plan, designed to accommodate large congregations capable of circulating freely along the broad aisles and behind the high altar in order to venerate the relics placed in full view on the altar itself (as described in Chapter 3). Such was the power and appeal of the great church of St Martin, with its iconic reliquary-statue, that pilgrims threw themselves before the miracle-working reliquary in the most extreme states of self-abasement. There is even a record in the 14th century of pilgrims arriving at St Martial and stripping off their clothing in order to appear before the saint entirely naked and therefore bereft of all worldly trappings. Yet late in the same century, devotional practice shifted from the dramatic to a more prosaic form of veneration: the golden statue with the outstretched hands was removed (and presumably the gold melted down) and replaced by a mere box with a little door that pilgrims could open in order to observe a hand of the saint. It is hard not to think that a certain magic had been sacrificed in the interest of being able to set eyes on the relic itself. Miracle-working had come down to earth.
Today almost everything here has gone — golden statue, reliquary box, saintly relic, church and abbey too. Most fell victim to the furious iconoclasm of the French revolutionary mob, with its loathing of all monastic institutions in the late 18th century. But then in 1960, during building work in the city centre, a small but important discovery was made. Excavations revealed the crypt of the original church, part of it dating from the 4th century — barely a century after the death of St Martial, in the very first years after the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity.
Like so many places along this pilgrim road, Limoges bore the scars of battle from the protracted conflict between England and France known as the Hundred Years War, which actually went on for 300 years. In 1370 Edward the Black Prince, son and heir of the English king Edward III, occupied the city after a siege and proceeded to massacre 3000 inhabitants in an act of reprisal, or so it was claimed by the French chronicler Froissart. And if little remains in Limoges itself as witness to those violent times, today’s travellers continuing south along the pilgrim road soon find themselves in the small town of Châlus, where a gaunt stone tower stands as a monument to another grim event in that conflict. It was from this tower in the year 1199 that the English King Richard the Lionheart was fatally wounded by a bolt from a crossbow. The monarch who had survived a crusade and years of imprisonment eventually fell to the unlikely shot of a distant marksman.
Echoes of the crusades continued to follow pilgrims on their journey southwards from Limoges and Châlus. The next major halt on the road was the city of Périgueux. And here the modern traveller may be confronted by the same sense of disorientation as the mediaeval pilgrim would have experienced: the huge, sprawling cathedral of Périgueux, built in the 12th century, is likely to make any visitor feel transported far away to the eastern Mediterranean. The building is crowned by a huge white dome, quite unlike any other cathedral in France, its design having clearly been drawn up at the behest of French crusaders or merchants familiar with the churches of Byzantium. Opinions vary as to its precise origin, but the consensus favours either the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, or possibly St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
To the mediaeval pilgrim on the road to Santiago this was the shrine of another miracle-working saint. The appropriate entry in the Pilgrim’s Guide makes this quite clear: ‘After the Blessed Léonard it is important in the city of Périgueux to visit the remains of the Blessed Fronto.’ The saint whose name now translates as St Front is reputed to have been the first bishop of Périgueux, and the Pilgrim’s Guide gives a colourful account of his life. It seems he was ordained in Rome by no less than St Peter himself, who then sent him to preach in newly-conquered Roman Gaul together with a colleague by the name of George. When the latter died, Front returned to Rome and was given Peter’s staff, which had the magical power to restore a man to life. ‘And so it was done’, the Guide assures us. Front proceeded to convert the city of Périgueux to Christianity, ‘rendering it illustrious through many miracles.’ It was a story widely enough circulated for the scene of St Peter presenting the saint with his staff to have been carved in stone for the main portal of the original cathedral, the carving now displayed in the local museum.
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The St Front story itself is a variation on the tales told of so many of these revered early saints who were rediscovered by a revitalised Christian world after so many centuries in obscurity, and whose relics were now venerated by pilgrims all along the pilgrim roads in France and elsewhere in Europe. The saints themselves were generally isolated figures living in Roman Gaul, often hermits, who bravely preached the gospel in the face of persecution and who frequently suffered martyrdom. Crucially in the eyes of the mediaeval church (particularly so in the case of St Front), for a religious house to possess the relics of these early saints provided a direct link with the time of Christ and his disciples, and thereby created an invaluable bridge between the ‘modern’ Christian era in Western Europe and the fountainhead of the Christian faith in the Bible lands so very far away in time and place.
The pilgrim route from Vézelay is especially rich in shrines, churches and other monuments that offer that bridge between the early centuries of embattled Christianity and the mediaeval world, as well as a further bridge to our own time, a total span of more than 2000 years. To travel along this rural stretch of road is to be constantly reacquainted with the past as we journey through different time zones — a trail of miracles and memories which threads its colourful way from Burgundy to the Pyrenees and Spain.
The shrines and weathered churches along this route are like signposts directing the pilgrim onwards. Soon after Périgueux the squat fortified tower of Sainte-Marie de Chancelade offers a further reminder that here was an Anglo-French battleground. This was once another of the numerous abbey churches established by religious orders for the wellbeing of passing pilgrims. The former abbey was (for once) not part of the chain of religious houses set up by Cluny, but was Augustinian, following the Rule of St Augustine of Hippo, whose greatest contribution to the pilgrimage movement was to establish the great monastery of Roncesvalles high in the Pyrenees at the gateway of Spain (see Chapter 14).
A short distance further, and the village of Sainte-Foy la Grande can feel as though it fell asleep in mediaeval times and has scarcely woken since. And then, at La Réole, pilgrims reached the Garonne, the broadest river they would encounter on this route. River crossings were a constant hazard for pilgrims, since they were entirely at the mercy of local ferrymen, who were mostly not there for charitable reasons but to make money out of travellers who had no choice but to employ their services. Aimery Picaud’s graphic account in the Pilgrim’s Guide of the murderous ferrymen at Sorde, on the route from Tours and Paris, was quoted in Chapter 6. Here at La Réole at least travellers were relatively safe: between spring and autumn, when pilgrims were generally on the road, the River Garonne was shallow enough for people to wade across it. On the other hand, having crossed the river, pilgrims were now entering that region of swamp and vicious insects known as the Landes, about which his pronouncements were almost as dire. ‘This is a region deprived of all good’ was his blunt warning.
Today this eastern area of the Landes is no longer the hostile swamp of earlier centuries, being largely forested or agricultural. But before setting out to cross it today’s traveller is reminded that the miracle trail is still very much with us. On the edge of the Landes the handsome town of Bazas, small though it is, possesses a cathedral modelled on the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France. Its surprising grandeur is due to its dedication to John the Baptist, a phial of whose blood was said to have been preserved here, unlikely though it may seem, and was the object of much veneration by pilgrims and (not surprisingly) the source of a great many miracles.
The Pyrenees are now in sight, and the road from Vézelay is drawing closer every mile to the Paris road which at this point runs almost parallel only a short distance to the west; while closing in from the east is the third pilgrim road, from Le Puy, which we shall shortly be taking. Soon all three roads will converge in the Basque Country just this side of the mountains, while the fourth and most southerly road, from Arles and St Gilles, will keep its distance and not join the other three until the far side of the Pyrenees.
Meanwhile the Vézelay road continues southwards across the eastern expanse of the Landes. One of the few human settlements of any size along this lonely stretch of highway is the small fortified town of Roquefort. And here, in a modest way, is the response of feudal lords to the scathing description in the Pilgrim’s Guide of the Landes as a region ‘deprived of all good things’ because Roquefort is an example of the ‘new towns’, known as bastides, which were established later in the Middle Ages specifically to bring together into viable communities those scattered inhabitants of the swamps with their pigs and waterlogged hovels. Aimery Picaud would have appreciated Roquefort with its massive ramparts and towers, and a hospice where pilgrims could enjoy ‘bread, wine, meat, fish’ and other delights of the flesh which the area as he knew it so sorely lacked.
After reaching the far side of the Landes, yet another in the chain of abbeys founded by Cluny in the 12th century awaited pilgrims. This was St-Sever. All that survives today is the handsome abbey church, distinguished by a group of capitals startlingly painted in bright colours. The colours seem incongruous at first until we realise that most stone-carving in mediaeval churches was once similarly painted — even the great tympana of Vézelay and Autun. Then, a short distance beyond St-Sever, an even earlier historical echo greeted the traveller. At Hagetmau in the year 778 the Emperor Charlemagne founded an abbey here to house the relics of St Girons, another early preacher, who had suffered persecution in Roman Gaul. Though the abbey, greatly enlarged at the hands of Cluny in the 12th century, was destroyed in the 16th-century wars of religion, the crypt with its 14 magnificently carved capitals survives. And perhaps because we come across it unexpectedly in this unsung rural region it gives out an especially powerful echo of those times when medieval pilgrims would arrive at this same place after a long day on the open road, to admire these same carvings in this enclosed vaulted room to offer their humble prayers.
Finally there was one more river to cross, the Gave de Pau. And today at Orthez a mediaeval bridge supports an imposing central watchtower that for 800 years has presided over the passage of pilgrims as they made their crossing. From here it is less than a day’s walk into the Basque Country, for which Aimery Picaud reserved some of his most vituperative epithets, as recounted in Chapter 6. And soon, on the crest of the gentle hill called Mont St-Sauveur, is where we have been before: this hillside, with the broad stretch of the Pyrenees not far ahead, is where our road joins the road we took from Paris. It is also where we shall find ourselves yet again in a later chapter — because on this lonely spot, commemorated by a modern stone cross — is where the third of the four pilgrim roads joins the first two.
That third road is our next journey.
Pilgrims from England would worship at the great cathedral of Chartres on their way south to join the pilgrim road at Vézelay
Pilgrims from England heading for Vézelay faced the hazard of many river crossings, including the Loire and its many tributaries
A major shrine in Burgundy was the cathedral of Autun, with its magnificent portal carved and signed Gislebertus hoc fecit
A wayside shrine on the pilgrim road approaching the Pyrenees
The village of Ostabat, first halt for travellers after the junction of three pilgrim roads, once boasted more than 20 hospices
After the junction of three pilgrim roads a single track led travellers towards the Pyrenees and Spain