IV. ERASMUS VISITS THE SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM (1513).
While Sir Arthur Plantagenet and Queen Katherine were going on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, to give thanks, the one for the defeat of the Scots, and the other for deliverance from shipwreck, Erasmus took it into his head to go on pilgrimage also. He had told his friend Ammonius, in May, that he meant to visit the far-famed shrine to pray for the success of the Holy League, and to hang up a Greek Ode as a votive offering.[454] He appears to have made the pilgrimage from Cambridge in the autumn of 1513, accompanied by his young friend Robert Aldridge,[455] afterwards Bishop of Carlisle. It was probably this visit which Erasmus so graphically described many years afterwards in his Colloquy of the ‘Religious Pilgrimage.’
Erasmus visits the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The College of Canons, under their Sub-prior, maintained chiefly by the offerings left by pilgrims upon the Virgin’s altar; the Priory Church, a relic of which still stands to attest its architectural beauty; the small unfinished chapel of the Virgin herself, the sea-winds whistling through its unglazed windows; the inner windowless wooden chapel, with its two doors for pilgrims’ ingress and egress; the Virgin’s shrine, rich in jewels, gold and silver ornaments, lit up by burning tapers; the dim religious light and scented air; the Canon at the altar, with jealous eye watching each pilgrim and his gift, and keeping guard against sacrilegious theft; the little wicket in the gateway through the outer wall, so small that a man must stoop low to pass through it, and yet through which, by the Virgin’s aid, an armed knight on horseback once escaped from his pursuer; the plate of copper, on which the knight’s figure was engraved in ancient costume with a beard like a goat, and his clothes fitting close to his body, with scarcely so much as a wrinkle in them; the little chapel towards the east, containing the middle joint of St. Peter’s finger, so large, the pilgrims thought, that Peter must needs have been a very lusty man; the house hard by, which it was said was ages ago brought suddenly, one winter time, when all things were covered with snow, from a place a great way off (though to the eyes of Erasmus its thatch, timber, walls, and everything about it, seemed of modern date); the concreted milk of the Holy Virgin, which looked like beaten chalk tempered with the white of an egg; the bold request of Erasmus, to be informed what evidence there was of its really being the milk of the Virgin; the contracted brows of the verger, as he referred them to the ‘authentic record’ of its pedigree, hung up high against the wall,—all this is described with so much of the graphic detail of an eyewitness, that one feels, in reading the ‘Colloquy,’ that it must record the writer’s vivid recollections of his own experience.
The Greek Ode of Erasmus.
The concluding incident of the ‘Colloquy,’ whether referring to a future visit, or only an imaginary one, evidently alludes to the Greek Ode mentioned in the letter to Ammonius. It tells how that, before they left the place, the Sub-prior, with some hesitation, modestly ventured to ask whether his present visitor was the same man who, about two years before, had hung up a votive tablet inscribed in Hebrew letters: for Erasmus remarks, they call everything Hebrew which they cannot understand. The Sub-prior is then made to relate what great pains had been taken to read the Greek verses; what wiping of glasses; how one wise man thought they were written in Arabic letters, and another in altogether fictitious ones; how at length one had been able to make out the title, which was Latin written in Roman capitals—the verses themselves being in Greek, and written in Greek capitals. In reward for the explanation and translation of the Ode, the ‘Colloquy’ goes on to relate that the Sub-prior pulled out of his bag, and presented to his visitors a piece of wood cut from a beam on which the Virgin mother had been seen to rest.
Whether this concluding incident related in the ‘Colloquy’ was a real occurrence or not, it, at all events, confirms the testimony of the ‘Colloquy’ itself to the fact that Erasmus made this pilgrimage in a satirical and unbelieving mood, and that his votive ode was rather a joke played upon the ignorant canons, than any proof that he himself was a worshipper of the Virgin, or a believer in the efficacy of pilgrimages to her shrine.