Colchester was a place of import to pilgrims in old wayfaring times, for it lay along the line of the pilgrims’ trail to Walsingham. Among the inns of this town, and older than any of its fellows, but coyly hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from sight, behind modern alterations, is the “Angel” in West Stockwell Street, whose origin as a pilgrims’ inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants, on the way to, or returning from, the road of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here, and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would, as already hinted, be the gravest mistake to assume pilgrims to have been, quâ pilgrims, necessarily decorous; and, indeed, modern Bank Holiday folks, compared with them, would shine as true examples of monkish austerity.
HOUSE FORMERLY A PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, COMPTON.
The shrine at Walsingham, very highly esteemed in East Anglia, drew crowds from every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St. John of Colchester sheltered some of the greatest of them, while others inned at such hostelries as the “Angel,” and the vulgar, or the merely impecunious, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.
Pilgrims would boggle at nothing, as was well known at the time. That they could not be trusted is evident enough in the custom of horse-masters, who let out horses on hire to such travellers, at the rate of twelvepence from Southwark to Rochester, and a further twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury. They knew, those early keepers of livery-stables, that little chance existed of ever seeing their horses again unless they took sufficient precautions. They therefore branded their animals in a prominent and unmistakeable way, so that all should know such, found in strange parts of the country, to be stolen.
Ill fared the unsuspecting burgess who met any of these sinners on the way to plenary indulgence, for they would, not unlikely, murder him for the sake of anything valuable he carried; or, out of high spirits and the sheer fun of the thing, cudgel him into a jelly; arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how soiled was the old one. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity, and licence of the grossest kind were, in fact, the inevitable accompaniments of pilgrimage.
THE “STAR,” ALFRISTON.