Wenten forth in hure way with many un-wyse tales,
And heven leve to lye al hure lyf-tyme.”
Thorpe (Skeat’s Notes to Chaucer, p. 49), when examined by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1407, complains of the pilgrims, saying: “They will ordain to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs: and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town that they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the King came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a moneth in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after, great jangelers, tale-tellers, and lyers.”
But the Archbishop said, “Leude Losell, Thou seest not ferre ynough in this matter, for thou considerest not the great trauel of pilgremys, therefore thou blamest the thing that is praisable. I say to thee that it is right well done that pilgremys have with them both syngers and also pypers, that whan one of them that goeth barfoote striketh his toe upon a stone and hurteth hym sore, and makyth him to blede; it is well done that he or his felow begyn then a songe, or else take out of his bosom a baggepipe for to drive away with suche myrthe the hurt of his felow. For with soche solace the trauel and weeriness of pilgremys is lightely and merily broughte forth.”
Sometimes the people invented saints and shrines for themselves, as when they flocked to the tomb of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a man far removed from the saintly life, or to that of Simon de Montfort. In 1338 a grocer of London sold a mazer ornamented with the image of St. Thomas of Lancaster. And a few years later the people made a saint of the preacher and hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole. All these popular but ephemeral saints worked miracles abundantly while the faith in their power lasted. Would that some poet had depicted the swarm of pilgrims who, in the year when the grocer sold that mazer, rode out of London on a pilgrimage to Pontefract where St. Thomas of Lancaster was buried!
Not only must men get a license to go on a pilgrimage: the shipmen who carried them were also licensed. Pilgrims to foreign parts went either to Calais and thence by land, or, if they were going to Compostella, they went all the way by sea. Thus, the ship called La Charité de Paynton, Peter Cok, Captain, was licensed to carry a hundred pilgrims. “Le Petre de Dartemouth” was licensed for sixty, “La Marie de Southampton” for one hundred, “Le Thomas de Saltash” for sixty, and so on.
In the narrative of Felix Fabri (A.D. 1484) pilgrims to the Holy Land (see Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, vols. vii.-x.) we can read how the long pilgrimages were conducted on board ship. Felix sailed from Venice. The methods were much the same for pilgrims from every country, except that the ships which had to cross the Bay of Biscay, and to sail round the headlands of Portugal, were probably stouter than those which sailed in the Mediterranean alone.
The pilgrim paid so much for the voyage there and back: he was also taken to the Holy Places under escort. A special contract was entered into with each party. Thus, that of Felix consisted of twelve, viz. four noble Lords and eight attendants, viz. a kind of general manager or courier, a barber and musician, an old soldier for a manservant, a bourgeois for manciple, a cook, an ex-trader who had been a galley slave and acted as interpreter, a “man of peace,” who was a schoolmaster by profession, and Felix himself, Priest of the Order of Preaching Friars. The articles of the contract were, in brief, these—the party were to be conveyed from Venice to Joppa and back again. They were to receive two full meals a day, with a cup of malvoisie every morning before breakfast; they were to be protected from ill-usage by the galley slaves; they were to be taken to see all the Holy places; and they were to pay forty ducats a head. The value of the ducat at this time I cannot pretend to estimate. There were gold ducats and silver ducats; ducats of Hungary, Austria, Hamburg and Italy.
On the weighing of the anchors, the Germans sang together the Pilgrims’ Hymn:—
“In Gottes Namen fahren wir: