4 June
2017
“I woke on day two with very good spirits,” I wrote
twenty years ago, to start my journal of that part of the pilgrimage path that
we are now on. I woke this morning to news that nine people died last night and
another fifty were injured when terrorists drove a van through a crowd of
pedestrians on London Bridge and then stabbed people in the Southwark market
area. That is where we were ambling last
Tuesday, as it is the neighborhood of the Globe Theatre and the George Inn. We
walked across London Bridge, enjoying the evening and even talked about the
earlier attack on Westminster Bridge.
I like
to think that travel makes people more understanding and sensitive to other people
and cultures, and I don’t want to live my life in fear or isolation, so onward
we go on our pilgrimage, hoping for peace.
May 1997: The Shoes of Despond
The ride cut my trip from six miles to
three. It had been my plan to walk along
the A39, thinking that there might be a sidewalk along it as there had been the
day before going into Farrington Gurney, but according to Betty there was no
sidewalk and it would not be a nice walk; she dropped me at the head of a
bridle path that led down the hill into Wells.
While this was a clearer path than any of those through the fields of
yesterday, it was still hard going. The
decline was steep and the surface was first muddy and then rocky. It was difficult anywhere along the path to
put my foot down with confidence. I felt
my ankles twist and turn and through the whole walk the pain of my feet was
first and foremost on my mind. It's too
bad too, because the views through the mist were really pretty. It was a soft cool day and the air was filled
with the sounds of many different kinds of birds, the bleating of sheep, the
mooing of cows, and the movement of the leaves on the trees. On my left was a woodsy patch, with more
bluebells, to my right a broad pasture swept down to a farm in the valley
below, and other fields rose in a mirror image on the other side. I should have been singing, instead I was
moaning, “Ow, ow, ow, ow.” With each
step, an “ow.” Step, step, “ow, ow,”
step, “ow,” step, “ow.”
The day before I had noticed how the
young lambs wag their tails when nursing and the same comical picture was
presented today. “Gamboling” is the
perfect word for the sort of hoppity skip movement of the lambs. They all stared at me as I passed, and I
found myself talking to them as they moved out of the way in front of me. “Good sheep, pretty lamb, how are ewe
mama?” I was reminded me of a drive
Stuart and I made several years ago around the Dingle peninsula in
Ireland. From the tops of the steep
hills, the sounds down in the valley rose up to us: the barking of the dogs,
the bleating of the sheep, and the sound of the farmer calling to his dog in
Irish. Here today I noticed again how
the sound travelled across the valley.
The sheep bleat in a whole range of tones and with differently pulsed
bleats. I also thought at one point that
I heard a wolf howling across the valley, and couldn't remember if they have
wolves in England. Listening carefully I
thought it might be a dog, or even a cow mooing intensely. Clearly, I am not a country girl.
My progress was extremely slow. My route into Wells brought me along the
north side of the Cathedral just in time to see the clock chime eleven. I had walked three miles in two hours. It occurred to me that I had completed my
walk for the day and my husband back in Massachusetts wouldn’t even wake up for
another three hours. My feet were
throbbing. I wanted to sit down and the
cathedral clock was a great excuse to do so.
From the stone wall below it there is a great view of the two armoured
knights mounted above the clock face who alternated beating upon a bell eleven
times with their axes. “Wonderful.”
I must have spoken this aloud, because
the man standing next to me turned and asked, “Have you seen it inside?” When I shook my head, he said, “When the
clock strikes inside there’s a jousting match.”
I determined to see the battle on the clock when it chimed at noon, and
set about finding a place to stay nearby so that I could dump my pack and get
back to the cathedral.
The Swan Hotel was right around the
corner from the Cathedral and centrally located. It was a bit beyond my price range, but had
bathtubs, which I wasn’t sure I would find at a B&B, and, as my feet would
sorely need one by the end of the day, I splurged. Pack off, face washed, shoes changed, I
returned to Wells Cathedral.
If the experience of Bath the day
before had somehow not met my expectations of finding a sense of the medieval
in modern England, Wells Cathedral more than made up for it. In truth, I hadn’t heard of Wells Cathedral
until I started planning my trip. Though
I had been several times previously in Bath, Wells had never been on any itinerary
and it was only because it was on the road between Bath and Glastonbury that I
first began to read about it. I was
pleased to learn they had a cathedral there, without investing any expectations
in it being remarkable. But it is
remarkable. The broad West face, covered
with medieval stone carvings of angels, saints, bishops, kings, knights, and
noblemen took my breath away. Though the
statues were originally painted, the color has worn off over the centuries and
it is all now a warm brown color.
Inside it was just as wonderful. Dramatic crossed “scissor arches” define the
end of the nave and the near-noon light coming through the medieval stained
glass on this overcast day heightened all the lines and shadows. It was a memorable moment for me. I worked my way down the long nave to the
transept—where the shorter section of the church crosses the longer. There, at noon, I was ready with a small
crowd to witness the chiming of the clock.
Though the original works of the clock
are now ticking away at the Science Museum in London, the inside dial and
figures, dating from Chaucer’s time, are all still splendidly on display in
their original location, the oldest to survive anywhere in the world, though
now run by more modern machinery. The
complex dials illustrate Ptolemy’s universe, with the earth in the center, and
rotating disks of minutes, days, and phases of the moon.
Above the dials is a carved tower
around which four wooden horsemen ride in a joust, two in each direction, every
quarter of an hour. One of them is
knocked off his horse by an opponent on every turn. The effect is so wonderful that I returned
every fifteen minutes for the two hours that I was in the cathedral to see it
again. On the hour there is an
additional mechanism, a carved figure called Jack Blandifer (though no one
knows why), who sits in a sentry box above and to the right of the clock. Jack holds two hammers in his hands with
which he strikes a bell in front of him every hour, while simultaneously
kicking his heels at two bells under his chair.
Unlike at Bath, where the Abbey seems a
jumble of additions and renovations, one can see in Wells Cathedral most of the
original fabric of the building. All the
major components were in place by the middle of the fourteenth century. The original cross shape, with its long axis
of the nave and choir (or “quire”) crossed by the transept, was built in the
twelfth and thirteenth century. It did
not take long for the octagonal chapter house to be built off the north
transept, or for the lady chapel and retro-choir to elongate the building
beyond the choir. The chapter house is
elevated and reached by a flight of worn stone steps, the relic of many
tramping feet.
Though ancient, Wells Cathedral was not
a real pilgrimage site in medieval times because it lacked famous relics. According to the architectural historian Alec
Clifton-Taylor, the retro-choir was built specifically to house the relics of a
saint, but the local choice, Bishop de la Marchia, who died in 1302, “failed to
qualify for canonization. So the retro-choir
remained untenanted.” I could easily
imagine the Wife of Bath visiting here anyway, as any woman who had been three
times to Jerusalem could certainly have travelled down the road to Wells from
Bath. There are three carved tomb
effigies of bishops from the thirteenth century. They had walked upon the stones on which I
stood. Had Chaucer ever stood here and
looked upon them, I wondered? Had Jane
Austen?
The precincts of the Cathedral did
nothing to diminish my feeling that I had discovered the medieval world just
beneath the surface of modern England.
Nearby was the “Vicar’s Close,” a whole street built in the fourteenth
century. In the other direction was the
Bishop’s Palace, surrounded by a moat which was fed by the wells from which the
town took its name. Most surprising was the
seeming lack of tourists. Bath had been
crowded with them, especially French school children, but Wells seemed crowded
mostly with locals taking advantage of their market day. The market square was filled with vendors and
it was busy and festive, even with the light showers that fell most of the
day. At four-thirty. the light showers became a heavy downpour and
I ducked into a covered passageway built into the wall that surrounds the
Cathedral. A plaque identified it as the
“Penniless Porch” where, in 1450, the Bishop had provided a dry place for
beggars.
The Bishop always had a close
relationship with the public in Wells.
For one thing, he controlled the water supply, which was in three wells
on his property. Bishop Beckington, who
established the porch, also had a conduit built to take fresh water out to the
citizens. In return, they agreed to
visit his tomb in the cathedral once a year.
A fair exchange, I’d say, and it generated pilgrimages to his grave,
which must have been a comforting thought to him as he lay dying.
The rain was like a tropical storm,
heavy downpours with lighting and thunder.
I sat there for almost half an hour, usually with about a dozen other
people. When a bolt of lightning hit the
cathedral and set off the fire alarm, the Penniless Porch filled with all the
people sent out into the storm and we stood shoulder to shoulder, wall to
wall. A woman there told me that they
sometimes got storms like this in April, but never in May. But then, she reflected, April had been especially
dry this year. I could not help but
think about the opening line of The Canterbury Tales: “When April with
its certain showers, the drought of March has pierced to its root... Then folks
long to go on pilgrimages.”
That evening I went to a remarkable
concert in Wells Cathedral. The
performers were members of a local choir called “His Master’s Voices” who sing
chants appropriate to the age of the Cathedral.
The audience of about 100 people sat on the fold-down seats called
misericords in the “Quire,” where the clergy, choir, and vicars sit during a
service. The last row was carved in
stone, the front two carved in wood.
Each seat has a name carved above it, most with dates in the 15th
century. Other names, with accompanying
heraldic devices, are woven into small tapestries that hang above the
seats. The stone seats are each set into
their own Gothic archway, and as the hour progressed details of their carving
began to emerge. What I had at first
thought were just ornamental finials carved at the base of the arches proved to
be tiny faces, on the left a dog-like creature and on the right a man and each
of the men’s faces was different, as if they were portraits of individuals.
As the night came on outside and the
windows darkened there was such a wonderful quality to the feeling of the choir
space, lit by candles and small lamps, within the vast darkness of the
cathedral. It was still twilight when I
came out at about 9:15 and I sat for a time on a bench in front of the
Cathedral. I discovered that evening,
the third I spent in England, the essential pilgrim spirit I sought. I felt a connection to the past through the
place and the music. I was completely at
peace. I did not expect to find it every
day, but I hoped I would find it again during the course of my pilgrimage.
Chapter Three: Of Relics and Pilgrimages
In a way, England was a strange choice
for my pilgrimage.
On the plus side: they speak English,
they have public footpaths that make access across the countryside possible,
there are villages that are not more than a day’s walk apart, and I had
the model of the Wife of Bath’s pilgrimage to follow.
On the minus side: the relics are gone,
and this is a pretty big minus. My focus
was always on the thing, on the power of the object. How much was the absence of them going to
impact my quest? In order to answer this
question, it is worth describing what relics were and are, and what happened to
them in England.
Wells Cathedral was not a major
destination for pilgrims because it did not have famous relics, but that
doesn’t mean that there were no sacred bones there. No Catholic church can be consecrated without
the bones of some saint, a practice that began in the middle ages and continues
today. Holy relics are still a topic of
serious discussion among the Catholic hierarchy, even though their role in the
modern church is somewhat downplayed today.
Relics, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, are:
“The
material remains of a saint or holy person after his death, as well as objects
sanctified by contact with his body. ...
Real
(or first-class) relics include the skin and bones, clothing, objects used for
penance, instruments of a martyr’s imprisonment or passion; while
representative relics are the objects placed in contact with the body or grave
of a saint by the piety of the faithful or by circumstance. ... The Church is
gravely concerned with the public cult of relics and distinguishes between
notable relics (insignes reliquiae), such as the head, hands, torso,
arms, and parts of the body that suffered torture, and all other relics.”
The importance of this macabre practice
is not outlined in any passage in scripture.
“It is vain to seek justification for the cult of relics in the Old
Testament,” says the NCE, “nor is much attention paid to relics in the
New Testament.” The Apostles, say the
experts “inherited Jewish diffidence regarding relics” and would certainly have
been horrified to realize that their own corpses would begin the cultish
practice. But the first miracles
associated with relics were attached to the mortal remains of the Apostles, and
gradually the people they converted began to take notice. The Vatican altar was constructed over the
tomb of St. Peter.
For the first four centuries after the
crucifixion there are occasional references to miracles, but for the most part
the corpses of holy men were treated with traditional respect and buried. In the fifth century, the tombs of the saints
began to be opened and objects which had touched their bodies distributed to
the faithful to be worn in small cases suspended around the neck.
One thing led to another and before
long powerful guys in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, were asking to
have the actual corpses of saints brought into the centers of civilization to
perform their miracles closer to home.
From there it wasn’t much of a leap to thinking that you didn’t need the
whole body—a limb or two could do the job just as well, and the skeletons of
saints began to be divided up for wider distribution. Pilgrims to Rome in the eighth and ninth
centuries were encouraged by their guidebooks to visit the catacombs and even
long-abandoned suburban cemeteries to help themselves to bones. Far from dissuading people from these
desecrations, the Popes were giving the most important pilgrims whole bodies of
important martyrs. A brisk business was
born.
During the Crusades, the rescue of
relics from the hands of infidels became a big goal, especially the cross on
which Jesus had been crucified. Brought
back to Europe, these would often be buried under the altar of a church, though
they were just as often placed in elaborate “reliquaries” made of gold, silver,
crystal, and precious stones, and displayed so that believers could see them. In the year 787, at the Nicene Council,
bishops were prohibited from consecrating a church without relics, and that
decree is still enforced. By the tenth
century the Mass included a salutation directed at the relics in or under the
altar.
The big time for relics was in the
Middle Ages when the number available grew dramatically. The most important ones in England when the
Wife of Bath made her pilgrimage, were the bones of Thomas Becket, the
Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170. Miracles began almost immediately at the site,
and the blood and brains that had been spilled out on the pavement when he was
killed were collected and stored, as were all of his clothes and whatever other
personal effects could be identified.
From this beginning, the cult of Becket relics was born.
At least at first, these were actual
relics of Becket. There were
eye-witnesses to the murder and to the collecting of the remains. Before long, however, the demand exceeded the
supply and things began to be associated with Becket where no evidence
indicated they had been, including at least one spare arm.
During Chaucer’s lifetime you could see
a number of relics around England, many of them of highly questionable
authenticity. At Walsingham they venerated
milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary, at Glasgow they preserved the mouth of
St. Ninian and some of St. Martin’s sweat.
Wimborne Abbey had a piece of the true cross, a sample of the seamless
robe of Jesus, some hairs from his beard, a vial of Becket’s blood, and the
hair shirt of St. Francis. Pieces of the
manger in which Christ had been born were all over England, including at
Glasgow, Warwick, and Canterbury.
Warwick also had Abraham’s chair, the burning bush of Moses, and part of
the face of St. Stephen. Thorns from the
crown of thorns were numerous, as were bits of bone, teeth, hair, and etc. from
almost any saint you can name.
For years both Glastonbury and
Canterbury claimed to have St. Dunstan.
St. Swithun, whose shrine was a pilgrimage spot in Winchester, lost his
skull to Canterbury and an arm to Peterborough in the eleventh century. And poor John the Baptist! When one looks at all the pieces of his head
that were exhibited in medieval times, it would seem that he actually had
several lopped off. Several good-sized
chunks still survive: the back of his head is at Constantinople, the front at
St. Sylvester’s Church in Rome, his jaws are at Genoa, and at least one tooth
is in Vienna. The block on which he was
decapitated was brought from the Holy Land to England by Richard the
Lionhearted, and was visited by pilgrims until it was destroyed in a fire.
Before Becket’s murder, Canterbury
Cathedral was already a treasure trove of relics. Among the hundreds of holy items there were
the heads of St. Blasius, St. Fursus, and St. Austroberta, each in a head
reliquary; the arms of eleven saints; bones, dust, hair, teeth, of numerous
others; the rock on which the cross stood; the table of the last supper; the
stone from which Christ ascended into heaven; and the coup de grace: a
piece of the clay out of which Adam was formed by God!!! Several items there would have been of
interest to the Wife of Bath, who was a weaver.
They had wool woven by the Virgin Mary, along with a garment she made
from it.
At some point the pope decreed that all
holy relics had the “Divine gift of self multiplication” which allowed a
certain legitimacy for some secondary items, but outright fakes were
proliferating in the medieval era and it caused concern among believers. The Knights Templar, the order of
soldier-monks that protected pilgrims headed to the Holy Land, considered
“simony” or the perpetration of false relics to be a major crime.
Even after the authenticity of relics
became highly questionable, the tradition of making a pilgrimage to the places
where they were kept continued to flourish because of the “indulgences” that
were granted at important shrines. When
I was a kid, before Vatican II did away with this sort of thing, certain
prayers printed in the back of missals had amounts of time written after them,
like “Fifteen minutes,” or “Five years.”
As I understood it, by saying these prayers when you were alive, you
would get the allotted time removed from your sentence in Purgatory after you
were dead. (Purgatory was where you went
if you weren’t bad enough to go to Hell, but not quite good enough to go to
Heaven. After a certain amount of time
there, you could proceed on to the pearly gates.) In medieval times, you could actually hire
somebody to say the prayers on your behalf, or make the pilgrimage for
you.
You could buy indulgences from corrupt
churchmen for all the wrong reasons, and you could even buy them from good guys
if they were desperate enough for funds to keep their parishes working and
their buildings standing..The amount of “time off” earned at each shrine was
advertised. Indulgences were even
printed up and distributed. (The first
commercial job completed on Guttenberg’s new printing press was a line of
indulgence forms, which had blank spaces for the faithful to fill in their name
and to get it signed.)
The guys who made a living hawking
indulgences were called “Pardoners,” and one of them was on the road with the
Wife of Bath. By Chaucer’s time the
marketing of false relics and the selling of indulgences had become common
enough that we find Chaucer’s Pardoner selling a pillow case as the Virgin
Mary’s veil, and pigs’ bones as saints’ bones.
He wears St. Veronica’s handkerchief on his cap, the symbol of a
pilgrimage to Rome, and he admits freely that he takes advantage of the
willingness of his victims to believe.
But
of his craft, from Berwick unto Ware,
Ne
was there such another pardonere,
For
in his mail he hadde a pillowbere
Which
that he seyde was Oure Lady veyl:
He
seyde he hadde a gobet of the seyl
That
Seint Peter hadde, whan that he wente
Upon
the see, til Jhesu Crist hym hente.
He
hadde a croys of latoun ful of stones,
And
in a glas he hadde pigges bones.
But
with these relics, whenne that he fond
A
poore parson dwelling aupon lond,
Upon
that day he gat him more money
Than
that the parson gat in moneths tway;
And
thus with feigned flattering and japes,
He
made the parson, and the people, his apes.
As the profusion of fake relics made
all relics suspect, indulgences continued to bring pilgrims, until indulgences
also became suspect. The cult of relics,
and the obvious abuse of them, was, not surprisingly, one of the things pointed
to by reformers like Martin Luther as a rationale for dumping Catholicism. John Calvin attacked false relics, but not
the practice of venerating the real thing.
John Hus and John Wyclif said the whole thing was idolatrous and within
a century of the Reformation that was the accepted Protestant line. The abuse of indulgences was another of the
factors regularly pointed to by reformers.
In fact, the document nailed by Martin Luther to the door of the castle
church in 1517 was a condemnation of the practice.
Among Catholics, relics continued to be
venerated, but the Church hierarchy clearly needed to exercise some control
over the marketplace in which they were traded.
In 1588 the authentication of relics was centralized by the Pope, and in
1669 a special “Congregation of Indulgences and Sacred Relics” was created to
control the flow of relics and to provide standards for identifying and
authenticating them. Included in the
process of canonization is the exhumation and examination of the nominee
saint’s corpse.
Though a great number of important
relics were lost in the Reformation and in the wars of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, new relics are still being produced. According to the NCE, “the wars of
religion, the revolutions, and occasional uprisings in missionary territories,
occasioned many martyrdoms among both missionaries and converts, thus providing
modern relics whose authenticity cannot be questioned.”
The generation of new relics is
important because even today a church cannot be sanctified without one. The most recent Code of Canon Law
specifies that the “ancient tradition of keeping the relics of martyrs and
other saints under a fixed altar is to be preserved.” In the Code of 1917 this was described
as a small space or sepulchre “cut into the altar or altar stone which
contained the (usually very small) relics of saints.” The 1970 Code states that “the relics
intended for deposition should be of such a size that they can be recognized as
parts of human bodies. Hence excessively
small relics of one or more saints must not be deposited.”
Relics came under renewed attention in
the wake of Vatican II, the 1962 conference that modernized the Catholic
liturgy, with new guidelines specifically addressing relics appearing quietly
in 1994. The local Catholic paper in
Rhode Island, The Providence Visitor reported in March 1996 that the
Vatican was “gently putting the brakes on the distribution of relics,” despite
the fact that Pope John Paul II had “made sure” that plenty of new saints and
martyrs were entering the pantheon.
“‘They were being passed around like
candy,’ said Msgr. Piero Marini, the papal master of liturgical
ceremonies.” Henceforward, the Vatican’s
Apostolic Sacristy, which is responsible for the official distribution of
relics, would limit them to venues of public veneration, and would attempt to
keep them out of the hands of individuals.
“The new rules are not a sign that the Catholic Church is moving away
from the veneration of relics, but it is an attempt to restore order, dignity
and meaning to the practice [according to] Vatican officials.”
By the time the Vatican brought the
practice of relic distribution under control, the relics of saints were long
gone in England. In 1577 Henry VIII,
having formed his own Protestant sect and set himself at the head of it,
ordered the dissolution of Catholic religious houses and the destruction of all
relics. In injunctions written at the
time, the men who undertook the destruction, and who approached their task with
a disgusting enthusiasm, were instructed to “take away, utterly extinct, and
destroy all shrines, coverings of shrines, all tables (engraved pictures),
candlesticks, trindals and rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all monuments
of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there
remains no memory of the same in walls, glass-windows, or elsewhere within
their churches and houses.” The
reliquaries with precious metals or gemstones were hauled back to London, the
bones were burned.
My destination of Canterbury had come
in for the most vigorous assault because the inhabitant of the shrine at
Canterbury Cathedral, Thomas Becket, had been the rival of his king. Henry VIII actually had him tried
posthumously and condemned in civil court, in addition to having his remains
decimated and his shrine pulled down.
All along my route I would find the destruction, at Glastonbury,
Shaftesbury, Winchester, and Faversham, especially. But I also found something interesting.
Just because the bones of saints are
gone does not mean that English people have lost their desire to seek the
magnificent and the historical in the tangible.
At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the coat that Admiral
Nelson was wearing when he was shot at Trafalgar, the bullet that killed him,
and his bloody socks are all on exhibit.
They are viewed with a fascinated horror by crowds of English people who
have grown up with a Nelson cult that is not all that different from the Becket
cult that flourished all those centuries earlier.
The end of the relics was the end of
the medieval pilgrimage in England. The
question I asked myself several times was whether or not it made the pilgrimage
less meaningful for me, and the answer was a definite no. I am a firm believer in the power of
artifacts, but I am also confident that most of the relics venerated in England
in the Middle Ages were fakes. Would it
have been meaningful to go to Glasgow to venerate the mouth of St. Ninian if I
don’t know who St. Ninian was, and I don’t believe or care if the mouth really
belonged to him or her? And, in fact if
I’m suspicious about it even being a mouth?
In truth, I’m too much of a skeptic on
issues of religion to suspend my disbelief and rely on faith. It brings me back to the history
pilgrimage. The past is tangible along
my route. The ruins speak volumes. The landscape becomes the artifact, and it is
powerful. To walk where the faithful have
walked for a thousand years is a spiritual experience even if one doesn’t share
their faith. Onward History Soldiers!
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