The wave of enthusiasm struck our own shores, and passed beyond them. William of Malmesbury says in his “Chronicles of the Kings of England” that, “there was no nation so remote, no people so retired, as not to contribute its portion.” This ardent love not only inspired the continental provinces, but even all who had heard the name of Christ, whether in the most distant islands, or savage countries. The Welshman left his hunting; the Scot his fellowship with lice; the Dane his drinking party; the Norwegian his raw fish. Lands were deserted of their husbandmen; houses of their inhabitants; even whole cities migrated. There was no regard to relationship; affection to their country was held in little esteem; God alone was placed before their eyes. Whatever was stored in granaries, or hoarded in chambers, to answer the hopes of the avaricious husbandman, or the covetousness of the miser, all, all was deserted; they hungered and thirsted after Jerusalem alone. Joy attended such as proceeded; while grief oppressed those who remained. But why do I say remained? You might see the husband departing with his wife; indeed, with all his family; you would smile to see the whole household laden on a carriage, about to proceed on their journey. The road was too narrow for the passengers, the path too confined for the travellers, so thickly were they thronged with endless multitudes. A French eye-witness tells us that “thieves and evil-doers of all kinds cast themselves at the feet of priests to receive the cross.... The rustic shod his oxen like horses; the children on approaching any large town or castle would ask: ‘is that Jerusalem?’”
These undisciplined hordes became turbulent; their march was marked by famine, pillage and murder. The few who reached Asia Minor were exterminated.
Macaulay’s “schoolboy” knows the story of the disciplined army of the First Crusade; how, after the Caliph of Cairo had wrested Jerusalem from the weakened Turk and offered peace and security to Christians in vain, the slow advance of the invaders, marked by incredible cruelty on both sides, was so far successful that the crusading barons and their followers hurled themselves against the Holy City and took it (A.D. 1099). “Even civilization always bears a brute within its bosom,” remarks Sainte-Beuve; and assuredly Mediæval Religion made small attempt to caste out the devils that made the Cross their screen. The loftiest passions are often unstable; the enthusiasm of the crowd readily passes from mood to mood. The fervour of faith became the frenzy of carnage. Raymond of Agiles, an eye-witness, declares that the Mosque of Omar and its portals ran blood up to the knees and even so far as to the reins of the horses. For seven days, Jerusalem was given up to slaughter and pillage.
Yet, in spite of a campaign tarnished with shame and dyed with guilt, the Christian ideal had not wholly disappeared. The growing spirit of Chivalry was not wanting, nor was the Norman genius for statesmanship absent. At the famous “Assizes of Jerusalem,” a code of laws was drawn up better than the Middle Ages had yet known. But after Baldwin was crowned at Bethlehem (A.D. 1100), the new Kingdom remained unsettled. Neither Christian nor Saracen was likely to forget the atrocities of war; the whole of Palestine was far from being subdued; a few parts were still held by the Infidel; the paths to Jerusalem were still perilous for the pilgrim; but once again the Holy City and other sacred places were under Christian rule. The enthusiasm and joy of Western Europe ran high. The tide of pilgrimage at once set in, and an obscure Englishman was one of the first pilgrims to reach Jerusalem.
CHAPTER III. SÆWULF’S RECORD.
There is preserved in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a valuable collection of ancient manuscripts presented by an old pupil of the College, who was no other than Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Among these manuscripts is a mere fragment, written in Mediæval Latin, which tells of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem of one Sæwulf, an Englishman, who must have started from his native shores thirty-six years after the landing of William the Conqueror, and less than two years after the coronation of Baldwin.[8] The record of Sæwulf is the broken voice of an obscure, unlettered palmer, which chance has preserved from common sepulture with things more important in the Ancient Silences. It gives us little more than a glimpse of a single year of adventurous pilgrimage in the life of a plain Englishman who, like the Chinaman who undertook a sacred journey nearly five centuries before him, having beheld “a gleam upon the mountain, needs must arise and go thither.”
The narrative begins with the statement: “I Sæwulf, an unworthy person and an evil doer, made for Jerusalem that I might pray at the tomb of our Lord.” Who Sæwulf was, is open to conjecture. It seems probable that he was the man of that name of whom William, Librarian of Malmesbury Abbey, speaks in his “Book of Bishops”; a merchant who had recurring spasms of penitence, during which he was wont to repair to Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, a prelate of “pious, simple truth,” who commanded the affection of the people and the confidence of the King. This Sæwulf was probably a native of Worcester. Wulstan, we know, was the last of the Saxon Bishops; for the hand of the Norman was heavy on the prostrate land, and it was the policy of the Conqueror, as William of Malmesbury tells us, in another of his works, to replace the native bishops on their death “by diligent men of any nation except English”—a policy which the Church supported; for religion had been in a decaying state in England for some years before the arrival of the Normans. Indeed, “the clergy, contented with a very slight degree of learning, could scarcely stammer out the words of the sacraments; and a person who understood grammar was an object of wonder and astonishment. The monks mocked the rule of their order by fine vestments and the use of every kind of food.” Wulstan implored Sæwulf to give up a livelihood which was beset with all manner of temptation, and to take the habit; for his conviction of sin was soon over, and he invariably resumed his former vices. Wulstan told him that the time would come when he would become a monk, “which” says the Chronicler, “I afterwards saw fulfilled; for he was converted in our monastery in his old age, being driven to it by disease.” There is nothing in Sæwulf’s narrative to indicate that he was in holy orders; more than once he speaks of himself as one oppressed by a sense of sin; and the record of his pilgrimage may very well have been translated into the dry, terse Latin of the monks by another hand, or, conceivably, may have been written by himself in his last years at Malmesbury.