Sche hadde passed many a strange stream:
At Rome she hadde been and at Bologne:
In Galice at Seynt James and at Cologne.”
One imagines that the long civil wars and the widespread Lollardy, which was only silenced, not killed, interfered with the practice of pilgrimage in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, Erasmus shows us that the pilgrims to English shrines, at least, were numerous in his time. The regular service of personally conducted pilgrimages to Venice and back proves that pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not diverted or interrupted, in spite of war raging all around.
At every shrine the pilgrim bought or was presented with a sign to show that he had been there. These signs were cast in pewter or in lead. A pilgrim who had been to many shrines came home with his cap or his coat covered with these emblems. Thus Chaucer says (Archæologia, xxxviii. p. 130):—
“Then as manere and custom is, signes there they bought,
For men of contre should know whome they had sought:
Eche man set his silver in such thing as they liked,
And in the meen while the miller had y-piked
His bosom ful of signs of Canterbury brochis.”