Other illustrations of pilgrim costume may be found scattered throughout the illuminated MSS. References to some of the best of them are here added. In the Royal, 1,696, at f. 163, is a good drawing of St. James as a pilgrim. In the Add. MS. 17,687, at f. 33, another of the pilgrim saints with scrip and staff; in the MS. Nero E 2, a half-length of the saint with a scallop-shell in his hat; in the MS. 18,143, of early sixteenth-century date, at f. 57 v., another. In Lydgate’s “History of St. Edmund,” already quoted for its pictures of shrines, there are also several good pictures of pilgrims. On f. 79 is a group of three pilgrims, who appear again in different parts of the history, twice on page 80, and again at 84 and 85. At f. 81 the three pilgrims have built themselves a hermitage and chapel, surrounded by a fence of wicker-work. In Henry VII.’s chapel, Westminster, the figure of a pilgrim is frequently introduced in the ornamental sculpture of the side chapels and on the reredos, in allusion, no doubt, to the pilgrims who figure in the legendary history of St. Edmund the Confessor.
Having followed the pilgrim to his very tomb, there we pause. We cannot but satirise the troops of mere religious holiday-makers, who rode a pleasant summer’s holiday through the green roads of merry England, feasting at the inns, singing amorous songs, and telling loose stories by the way; going through a round of sight-seeing at the end of it; and drinking foul water in which a dead man’s blood had been mingled, or a dead man’s bones had been washed. But let us be allowed to indulge the hope that every act of real, honest, self-denial—however mistaken—in remorse for sin, for the sake of purity, or for the honour of religion, did benefit the honest, though mistaken devotee. Is our religion so perfect and so pure, and is our practice so exactly accordant with it, that we can afford to sit in severe judgment upon honest, self-denying error?
THE SECULAR CLERGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
CHAPTER I.
THE PAROCHIAL CLERGY.
he present organisation of the Church of England dates from the Council of Hertford, A.D. 673. Before that time the Saxon people were the object of missionary operations, carried on by two independent bodies, the Italian mission, having its centre at Canterbury, and the Celtic mission, in Iona. The bishops who had been sent from one or other of these sources into the several kingdoms of the Heptarchy, gathered a body of clergy about them, with whom they lived in common at the cathedral town; thence they made missionary progresses through the towns and villages of the Saxon “bush;” returning always to the cathedral as their head-quarters and home. The national churches which sprang from these two sources were kept asunder by some differences of discipline and ceremonial rather than of doctrine. These differences were reconciled at the Council of Hertford, and all the churches there and then recognised Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, as the Metropolitan of all England.