English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century)

by J. J. Jusserand

There were indeed authorized pardoners who paid the produce of their receipts into the treasury of the Roman Court. The learned Richard d’Angerville, otherwise de Bury, Bishop of Durham, called by Petrarch, whom he had met at Avignon in 1330, “vir ardentis ingenii,” speaks, in a circular of December 8, 1340, of apostolic or diocesan letters, subject to a rigorous visa, with which the regular pardoners had to be furnished.[442] But many did without them, and the bishop notices one by one the same abuses as the Pope and as Chaucer. “Strong complaints have come to our ears that the questors of this kind, not without great and rash boldness, of their own authority, and to the great danger of the souls who are confided to us, openly setting at nought our jurisdiction, distribute indulgences to the people, dispense with the execution of vows, absolve the perjured, homicides, usurers, and other sinners who confess to them; and, for a little money paid, grant remission for ill-atoned crimes, and are given to a multitude of other abuses.” Henceforward all curates, vicars and chaplains must refuse to admit these pardoners to preach or to bestow indulgences, {325} whether in the churches or anywhere else, “if they be not provided with letters or a special licence” from the bishop himself. And this was a most proper injunction, for with these bulls brought from far-off lands, adorned with unknown seals “of popes and of cardynales, of patriarkes and of bisshops,” it was easy to make people believe that all was in order. Meanwhile let all those who are now wandering round the country be stripped of what they have taken, and let “the money and any other articles collected by them or on their behalf,” be seized: the common people not being always possessed of actual cash, Chaucer’s pardoner contented himself with “silver spones, broches, or rynges.” One more allusion is to be noticed in this text to those associations of pardoners which must have been so harmful.

They employed, in fact, inferior agents; the general credulity and the widespread wish to get rid of religious trammels which men had imposed on themselves, in the shape of vows or otherwise, or which had been imposed on them on account of their sins, were a mine for the perverse band, the veins of which they carefully worked. By means of these subordinate representatives of their fanciful power, they easily extended the field of their operations, and the complicated threads of their webs covered the whole kingdom, sometimes too strong to be broken, sometimes too fine to be perceived.

Occasionally, too, the bad example came from very high quarters; all had not the Bishop of Durham’s virtue. Walsingham relates with indignation the behaviour of a cardinal who made a stay in England when the marriage between Richard II and the emperor’s sister, Anne of Bohemia, was being negotiated. For money this prelate, just like the common pardoners, removed excommunications, dispensed people of pilgrimages to St. Peter, St. James, or Jerusalem, and had the sum that would have been spent on the journey duly computed and given {326} to him;[443] and it is much to be regretted from every point of view that the curious tariff of the expenses of a journey thus estimated has not come down to us.

The list of the misdeeds of pardoners was in truth enormous, and it is found even larger on exploring the authentic ecclesiastical documents than in the work of Chaucer himself. Thus in a bull of Pope Urban V, dated 1369, mention is made of practices apparently untried by the otherwise experienced “gentil pardoner of Rouncival.” These doings were customary with those employed by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem in England. Helped by the connivance of the “very priors” of the order, they pretended to be “privileged” and exempted from the formality of showing apostolic letters before they were allowed to proceed with their preachings and to offer to the people their “negotia quæstuaria.” The parish rectors and curates naturally enough objected to such pretensions, but their complaints were ill received, and the pardoners, to get rid of them, sued them before some distant authority for contempt of their cloth and privileges. While the suit was being determined they remained free to act as they liked. Sometimes they were so lucky as to secure sentence against the priest who had tried to do his duty, and even succeeded in having him excommunicated: which could of course but be a cause of great merriment among the unholy tribe.

“Very often, also,” adds Pope Urban, “when they mean to hurt a rector or his curate, they go to his church on some feast-day, especially at such time as the people are accustomed to come and make their offerings. They {327} begin then to make their own collections or to read the name of their brotherhood or fraternity, and continue until such an hour as it is not possible to celebrate mass conveniently that day. Thus they manage perversely to deprive these rectors and vicars of the offerings which accrue to them at such masses.” They have, on the other hand, Divine service performed “in polluted or interdicted places, and there also bury the dead; they use, as helps to their trade, simple and almost illiterate subordinates, who spread errors and fables among people as ignorant as themselves.”

Such abuses and many others, constantly pointed out by councils, popes, and bishops, moved the University of Oxford to recommend, in the year 1414, the entire suppression of pardoners, as being men of loose life and lying speeches, spending their profits “with the prodigal son,” remitting to sinners their sins as well as their penances, encouraging vice by the ease of their absolutions, and drawing the souls of uneducated people “to Tartarus.” But this request was not listened to, and pardoners continued to prosper for the moment.[444]

At the same time that they sold indulgences, the pardoners showed relics. They had been on pilgrimage and had brought back pieces of bone and fragments of all kinds, of holy origin, they said. But although the credulous were not lacking among the multitude, the disabused among the better sort were numerous and they scoffed without mercy. The pardoners of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and in the sixteenth century of Heywood and Lyndsay,[445] exhibited the most unexpected trophies. The Chaucerian one, who possessed a piece of the sail of St. {328} Peter’s boat is surpassed by Frate Cipolla, who had brought back much better from Jerusalem. “I will, as an especial favour, show you,” said he, “a very holy and goodly relic, which I myself brought aforetime from the Holy Lands beyond seas, and that is one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber, whenas he came to announce to her in Nazareth!”[446] The feather, which was from the tail of a parrot, through some joke played upon him was replaced in the holy man’s box by a few coals; when he perceived the metamorphosis he showed no embarrassment, but began the narrative of his long voyages, and explained how, instead of the feather, the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled would be seen in his coffer. He had received them from “My Lord Blamemenot Anitpleaseyou,” the worthy patriarch of Jerusalem, who also showed him “a finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and sound as ever it was, . . . and one of the nails of the cherubim, . . . divers rays of the star that appeared to the three Wise Men in the East, and a vial of the sweat of St. Michael whenas he fought with the devil”; he possessed also “somewhat of the sound of the bells of Solomon’s Temple in a vial.”

Poets’ jests; but less exaggerated than might be thought. Was there not shown to the pilgrims at Exeter a bit “of the candle which the angel of the Lord lit in Christ’s tomb”? This was one of the relics brought together in the venerable cathedral by Athelstan, “the most glorious and victorious king,” who had sent emissaries at great expense on to the Continent to gather these precious spoils. The list of their treasure-troves, which has been preserved in a missal of the eleventh century, comprises also a little of “the bush in which the Lord spoke to Moses,” and a lot of other curiosities.[447] Some {329} of the Virgin’s milk was, as all know, venerated at Walsingham and in various other places.

Matthew Paris relates that, in his time, the friar preachers gave to Henry III a piece of white marble on which there was the trace of a human foot; nothing less, according to the testimony of the inhabitants of the Holy Land, than the mark of one of the Saviour’s feet, left by Him as a souvenir to His apostles after His Ascension. “Our lord the king had this marble placed in the church of Westminster, to which he had already lately offered some of the blood of Christ.”[448]

In the fourteenth century kings continued to set the example to the common people, and to collect relics of undemonstrable authenticity. In the accounts of the expenses of Edward III, in the thirty-sixth year of his reign, a hundred shillings are put down for a messenger who had brought him a vest of St. Peter’s.[449] In France, at the same period, King Charles V “le sage” had one day the curiosity to visit the cupboard at the Sainte Chapelle, where the relics of the passion were kept. He found there a phial with a Latin and Greek inscription indicating that it contained some of the blood of Jesus Christ. “Then,” relates Christine de Pisan, “that wise king, because some doctors have said that, on the day that our Lord rose, nothing was left on earth of His worthy body that was not all returned into Him, would hereupon know and inquire by learned men, natural philosophers, and theologians, whether it could be true that upon earth there were some of the real pure blood of Jesus Christ. Examination was made by the said learned men assembled about this matter; the said phial was seen and visited with great reverence and solemnity of lights, in which when it was hung or lowered could {330} be clearly seen the fluid of the red blood flow as freshly as though it had been shed but three or four days since: which thing is no small marvel, considering the passion was so long ago. And these things I know for certain by the relation of my father who was present at that examination, as philosophic officer and counsellor of the said prince.”