[78] In 1032 Bermudo III of León, the last ruler of the dynasty of Alfonso III, made a grant of land to the church of Santiago de Compostela. The estates thus transferred had been forfeited by one Sisnando Galiárez, whose recent revolt against the king was described at some length in the royal charter. Sisnando's crime was that the had rebelled, in the king's words, 'against me and against the lord bishop Vistruario of the apostolic place'.⁽¹⁾ It is a small but significant reminder to us that the links between the kings of León and the church of St. James had remained exceptionally close since the time of Alfonso III. To trace these links in detail would take us far from our immediate concerns. The testimony of the royal charters shows clearly that the kings of León had continued to regard St. James as their patron. The phrase patronus noster (with variants) occurs again and again in the charters of the tenth and eleventh centuries.⁽²⁾ For Ordoño II the saint is 'the hauberk of justice' and 'the helmet of safety'.⁽³⁾ For Bermudo II the sors regni, the 'luck' or fortune of the kingdom, is assured by the intercession of St. James.⁽⁴⁾ He helps these kings to rule their kingdom well; he gives them victory over their enemies.⁽⁵⁾

Royal courts set fashions, in religious devotion as in much else besides. It was doubtless through the direct or indirect encouragement of the royal family that the cult of St. James began to spread within Christian Spain. Alfonso III's collaborator in promoting the cult, bishop Sisnando, had received a grant of land from the king as early as 883 for the [79] foundation of a church in honour of St. James in the region of the Asturias, the area of which Sisnando was a native.⁽⁶⁾ A charter of 914 reveals that Egila, the grandmother of Ordoño II's wife, herself married to one of the greatest men of the kingdom, count Gaton of Astorga, had granted land in El Bierzo, between Astorga and Lugo, to the shrine of St. James.⁽⁷⁾ Aristocratic patronage in its turn set a fashion which was followed at more lowly social levels. Alfonso III granted land near Alcoba de la Rivera, not far from León, to St. James in 885, and in his charter referred to the nearby 'road which the merchants (cives) of Galicia are accustomed to use in their comings and goings'. Might it have been through the devotion of such travelling cives that a church dedicated to St. James had been founded at Viñayo, not far away, before 918?⁽⁸⁾

Evidence of this kind, the records of grants of land and church-dedications, shows us, albeit in an imperfect way, how the new cult seeped through the mountain barriers of Galicia on to the central plateau of the Spanish peninsula. As the renown of the apostle spread, so his shrine became in its turn a magnet drawing devout suppliants to it. In this fashion the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was born. Who the earliest pilgrims were, and whence they came, we have no means of telling. It is not surprising to discover that our first references to their coming date from the time of Alfonso III and bishop Sisnando. When the king granted salt-pans in Salnés to the church of St. James in 886 he stipulated that these were for the use 'of the monks, the poor and also the pilgrims'.⁽⁹⁾ Phrases of this sort become very common in royal charters after this date.⁽¹⁰⁾ They confirm the evidence of Usuard's Martyrology of c. 865 and of the Tours letter of 906 which were cited in the preceding chapter.

An incident in the middle years of the tenth century shows us how far the renown of the shrine of St. James had spread. The evidence is furnished by a letter from a Catalan [80] prelate, Cesarius, to pope John XIII.⁽¹¹⁾ Cesarius was one of the most distinguished Catalan churchmen of his generation. In 945 he had founded the monastery of Montserrat, near Barcelona. About ten years later he became bishop of Tarragona, and it was this that brought him into contact with the clergy of Santiago de Compostela. In his letter he told the pope how he had gone 'to the church (domum) of the apostolic see of St. James, who is buried in Galicia, the region of his apostolate'. There he had requested 'the blessing of the province of Tarragona'. After examination of his claims, which the bishops of Galicia found to be good, he was consecrated by bishop Sisnando II of Iria-Compostela in the presence of king Sancho I of León and nine Galician and Leonese bishops, probably on 29 November 956. On his return to Catalonia his claims were contested by the bishops of Barcelona, Gerona, Vich and Urgel, and the archbishop of Narbonne, on the grounds that 'the said apostolate, alleged to have been in the west of Spain, was not the apostolate of St. James, because that apostle was brought here only after his death'. Cesarius cited the text of the Breviarium Apostolorum in support of St. James's -- and his own -- claims and appealed to the pope. The latest editor of the letter, by plausible emendation of a desperately corrupt text, has interpreted it as a request for an archbishop's pallium.

The ecclesiastical politics that lie behind this extraordinary document are hardly our concern. Cesarius seems to have wanted to reconstitute the ecclesiastical province of Tarragona under himself as metropolitan, and to have run up against the opposition of the Catalan bishops whose loyalties lay with Narbonne. What is interesting is that in his bid for recognition Cesarius should have turned to the bishop of Iria-Compostela as the authority who might adjudicate in such matters and might command such spiritual prestige as would enable him to override domestic opposition. No less interesting is the revelation that some of the Catalan clergy were not convinced of the claims that were being made on behalf of St. James. They admitted the translation [81] of the saint's corpse; they did not recognize his Spanish apostolate during his lifetime.

These Catalan bishops were not alone in their scepticism. The Leonese scribe Florentius who copied a Bible in 953 -- now lost, but described by a seventeenth-century antiquary -- referred only to St. James's preaching in Judaea. In another Bible, now preserved at León, copied by the scribe Sancho under the direction of the same Florentius in 960, we are roundly informed of St. James that 'he is buried in Jerusalem'. Another doubter may have been the Andalusian Recemund, bishop of Elvira. He was a learned and well-travelled man -- he was sent by the caliph of Córdoba on an embassy to the court of Otto I in 956: yet in his famous Calendar, while noting St. James's feast-day, he had nothing to say of the saint's burial in Galicia.⁽¹²⁾

But the doubters were fighting a losing battle. It is during these same years of the mid-tenth century that there occur the first records of distinguished visitors coming from distant parts of Christendom to the shrine of St. James. The earliest whom we can trace was Godescalc or Gottschalk, bishop of Le Puy, who visited Compostela as a pilgrim in the year 951.⁽¹³⁾ Some years afterwards came Raymond II, count of Rouergue.⁽¹⁴⁾ A still more distant and distinguished visitor is recorded in 961. Vgo Remensis episcopus - that is, Hugh of Vermandois, archbishop of Rheims, was at Compostela on 27 February 961, when he set his name thus to a document issued there.⁽¹⁵⁾ A few years later, when in 970 the Viking band which had killed bishop Sisnando II in 968 was finally expelled from Galicia, they met their defeat at the hands of a certain count Guillelmus Sancionis: might this have been William-Sancho, count of Gascony, on his way to or from Santiago de Compostela?⁽¹⁶⁾ It is at about the same time, too, [82] that we should locate a probable, though unproven, visit from Abbo of Fleury.⁽¹⁷⁾

These are stray references in the few sources that happen to have survived from the third quarter of the tenth century. They present us with a remarkable clutch of men -- the most famous monastic reformer of his day, an Auvergnat and a Neustrian bishop, two Languedocien lords who were survivors in the wreckage of the sub-Carolingian world; not forgetting an ambitious cleric from the Spanish March. What they had in common was their social or ecclesiastical distinction; that is why we know about them. We can be certain that there were others of less distinguished rank or office, perhaps many others, of whom individually we know nothing. The concern of the royal charters with pilgrims who were 'poor' is significant; and we have already met a Frenchman, apparently of no very exalted rank, in the town of Compostela in 955 -- though of course we cannot demonstrate that it was devotion to St. James that had brought him there in the first place.⁽¹⁸⁾ Further evidence comes from a surprising source, an Arabic panegyric poem celebrating Almanzor's exploits in 997 when he led an army into Galicia, sacked and burnt the town of Compostela and led off the bells of the apostle's church in triumph to Córdoba. The poem tells us that Santiago de Compostela was the goal of pilgrims coming from all over the place.⁽¹⁹⁾ Though the occasion of Almanzor's expedition remains somewhat mysterious, we can at the least safely deduce that Compostela was a town worth sacking. Booming cult-sites usually were, as the Vikings could have told him. Perhaps we have here the explanation for their descent on Compostela a generation earlier in 968.

It is a simple matter enough to compile a list of names; all that is required is a certain dogged industry. It is more difficult to discover why these people went on pilgrimage: why any people have done so in the past; why they still do.

[83] 'I have found that which my soul was seeking; I shall hold fast to it and shall not let it go.' It was in these words that one of the earliest pilgrims to the Holy Places, Jerome, attempted to sum up the spiritual renewal that lay at the heart of his journey.⁽²⁰⁾ A secular age such as our own will seek to 'explain' religious experience, but too often succeeds only in explaining it away, and thereby necessarily missing the point. It is with the thirsty soul (an unfashionable and uncomfortable concept) that we must start if we are to understand pilgrimages. For a pilgrimage marks, or should mark, a decisive stage in the religious development of the individual who undertakes it.⁽²¹⁾ It is not for nothing that in Christian tradition the idea of journeying is associated with conversion: all pilgrimage-roads lead, at least potentially, to Damascus. Ritual immersion in the Jordan at the place where it was believed that Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist impressed upon the pilgrim to the Holy Land that he was beginning a new life. The pilgrim is stained with sin in his everyday life, but his pilgrimage is designed to take him away from the daily round. The dislocation which a journey entailed, the rupture with accustomed people and routines, were part of a process of spiritual therapy. Returned with new and contrite heart, the pilgrim should experience spiritual renewal, a closer walk with God. Prayers for the returning pilgrim will ask that 'he should not again wander from the paths of the Lord'.⁽²²⁾ Pilgrimage is a time for amendment of life. It is a form of initiation.

The notion of anachoresis -- withdrawal, disengagement from the secular world -- was at the heart of the ascetic movement which took so firm a hold of Christians in late [84] antiquity and the early middle ages.⁽²³⁾ It is no coincidence that pilgrimage and ascetic monasticism should have emerged at about the same time as means of living a purer Christian life. Both sprang from an act of anachoresis. The pilgrim and the monk alike renounced the saeculum. And pilgrimage, like monasticism, drew on biblical roots. The type of the pilgrim was prefigured in Abraham: 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house.' (Genesis 12:1.) The example of Abraham was quoted approvingly by the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in chapter 11, which is a key passage for the understanding of our subject. Abraham and others like him 'confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth'. The word rendered 'pilgrim' in the Authorized Version appeared in the Vulgate as peregrinus. This became the normal term in medieval Latin for 'a pilgrim'. But we should bear in mind that it had originally been a technical term in Roman law. A peregrinus was an alien, a stranger to the community; a man without kin, without friends, without sureties, without patrons; a man alone. In late antiquity it was Augustine who swooped upon the possibilities latent in this term and exploited them more vigorously, more movingly and more influentially than any other Christian thinker. The true Christian is a peregrinus in this world. He has renounced his worldly patria. The city that he seeks is a heavenly one, and its houses are not made with hands.

Ascetic renunciation of the homeland -- to become literally an expatriate -- gave rise to the most characteristic manifestation of peregrinatio, pilgrimage, in the early middle ages. the wanderings of the saints. This was a form of religious exercise especially associated with the Irish, though by no means their exclusive possession. For those who practised it, life became a pilgriniage conducted in self-imposed exile. Columba 'sailed away from Ireland to Britain, wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ' (pro Christo peregrinan volens); Egbert, who travelled in the opposite direction, vowed to live in Ireland as a pilgrim and never to return to [85] his homeland.⁽²⁴⁾ Hundreds of similar examples might be cited. As an ideal it was at its most influential between the sixth and ninth centuries, though it was not dead --a point which is worth stressing because it is often overlooked -- in the period which is my main concern.⁽²⁵⁾

Many though these peregrine holy men were, it could in the nature of things never have been more than a tiny proportion of the population of Christendom who undertook a lifelong pilgrimage in this fashion. Others might renounce the world to live as a pilgrim only towards the end of a secular career; king Ine of Wessex, for example, only after a reign of nearly forty years. For the vast majority, however, the experience of pilgrimage would come in the form of a journey, long or short as the case might be, to a place, and then back home again. In western Christendom -- for we must leave on one side the obviously very special case of the Holy Places themselves -- the place was one made sacred by its association with a holy man or woman; normally the resting-place of his (or her) body. It is important to grasp that the shrine of a saint was a potentially active source of spiritual energy. Though dead in the flesh, the saint was there; a formidably powerful being who, if approached properly, could bring help to the suppliant. That is to say, the saint could work miracles. 'All sites of pilgrimage have this in common; they are believed to be places where miracles once happened, still happen, and may happen again.'⁽²⁶⁾ This is the essence of the shrine: it is 'a place where earth and heaven meet in the person of the dead, made plain by some manifestation of supernatural power, some wonderful happening'.⁽²⁷⁾ The supplication of faith -- expectant faith -- is answered in the form of a miracle. As an Irish cleric of [86] the ninth century put it, 'You will not find the King whom you seek unless you bring him with you.'⁽²⁸⁾ If miracles revealed God's power in and through his saints, they also plumbed the wells of faith within the individual suppliant; and that self-knowledge lay at the heart of the pilgrim's spiritual renewal.

So much for general considerations. The mistake we must not make, however, is to suppose that the subject of pilgrimage may safely be left in the hands of the anthropologist or the sociologist of religion or of others who claim to traffic in the larger generalities relating to the workings of human beings. And this for one simple reason: it is an observable fact that the impulse to undertake pilgrimages is stronger at some periods than at others. Historians of the middle ages are agreed that between, roughly, 950 and 1150 the practice of pilgrimage in the second sense -- a journey to a miracle-working shrine -- experienced a surge of popularity. Contemporaries, indeed, commented on it, such as the chronicler Raoul Glaber in the middle years of the eleventh century. We must try to explain this, for the fortunes of Compostela (in the most literal sense) in the days of Diego Gelmírez were very largely founded on it.

Two lines of approach are promising. The first of them concerns changes in the penitential discipline administered by the ecclesiastical authorities.⁽²⁹⁾ The penitential system in vogue during the early middle ages had been developed largely, though not exclusively, under the influence of Irish and Anglo-Saxon moral theologians between the sixth and the eighth centuries. (We are not here concerned with the penitential system of the early church which these new developments displaced.) The controlling notion was that penance was a form of heavenly medicine. Rigorous demands upon the penitent sinner not only induced a mood of proper contrition but also (it was hoped) served to bridle the passions which might give rise to future sin. The sinner confessed his [87] sin to a confessor, who laid down an appropriate penance in accordance with the tariffs of penitential books such as those associated with the names of Columbanus, Theodore or Egbert of York. When the penance had been completed -- but only then -- absolution was granted. Now an important change was coming over this system during our period. It was heralded by no act of policy such as might have been recorded in, for example, the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, but arose (it seems) from the spontaneous and therefore largely unrecorded practice of individual confessors. Hence it is peculiarly difficult to date. It is evident that the change was very gradual: the first signs of its appear in the ninth century; it seems to have become widespread by the second half of the eleventh. During this time it became the practice for confessors to grant absolution to sinners not on the completion of penance but rather at the moment of confession itself. This change served to underscore and to widen the distinction between sin and its punishment. The sinner had confessed his sin and received absolution; but he would still have to suffer in the next world the punishment for his sin. However, the discipline of penance in this world could serve to wipe out the punishment that awaited the sinner in the next. Penance as 'satisfaction' for sin came to receive more emphasis than the older idea of penance as spiritual 'medicine' Thus this modification of the practice of the church, while laying more stress on the individual act of contrition and the saving grace mediated through absolution, paradoxically resulted in more fervent and more literal fulfilment of the actual course of penance itself.

This development helps to explain much that is not otherwise easily explicable in the culture of Europe between c. 950 and c. 1150: for instance, the prodigious number of monastic foundations, the extraordinary appeal of the crusading movement, and the great surge in the popularity of pilgrimages. A period of time spent in peregrinatione, i.e. as an exile, makes its appearance among the tariffs laid down in the penitential books of the seventh and eighth centuries. But the practice of confessors reflected social realities, and as the practice of temporary pilgrimage to a shrine gained upon the practice of lifelong pilgrimage, so [88] we find them beginning to send the penitent sinner to one (or more) named shrines. It was thus that the practice of penitential pilgrimage was born.

A famous story which occurs in three miracle-collections of this period, including those of Santiago, expresses neatly how efficacious such pilgrimages were believed to be.⁽³⁰⁾ A sinner confessed a grave sin to his priest, who sent him on a penitential pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (or to Saint-Gilles, or to Vézelay, depending on our source). He carried with him a written account of his sin which he was told to place upon the altar in the church of his destination. When he did so, the sheet of parchment was found to be blank. The writing had miraculously disappeared. The act of pilgrimage had, literally, erased the sin. We have plenty of examples of the same idea at work in the practice of the churchmen of this period. Abbo of Fleury sent the abbot of Beaulieu on pilgrimage to Rome and Monte Gargano as a penance for simony.⁽³¹⁾ Peter Damian sent an Italian nobleman to Jerusalem, 'so that you may abate the rigour of God's justice by the satisfaction of a distant pilgrimage'.⁽³²⁾ Adhémar III, viscount of Limoges, 'setting out for Santiago on pilgrimage, instructed (ammonitus) by abbot Gerald of Uzerche, gave one of his properties' to the monastery before his departure.⁽³³⁾ Shortly before his death in 1031 king Robert of France visited several shrines 'to evade the awful sentence of the day of judgement'.⁽³⁴⁾ A few years later, in 1035, Robert the Magnificent, duke of Normandy, set out for Jerusalem 'making satisfaction to God' (Deo satisfaciens) for the death of the brother whom years before he had poisoned.⁽³⁵⁾

[89] The appearance of liturgical provision for pilgrims is one testimony to the importance of the penitential pilgrimage in the central middle ages. Rituals were devised, prayers composed, for the blessing of pilgrims and their accoutrements. These accoutrements, the pouch or scrip and the staff -- the hat was to follow later -- are themselves of interest: for the appearance of what was in effect a kind of pilgrim 'uniform' testifies to a new self-consciousness on the part of the pilgrim, a feeling that he should be set apart, distinguished, from other men and women. The nexus of ritual and equipment reinforces what was said earlier about the solemnity of the pilgrim's undertaking in the context of his religious life. Charters could be dated by it: 'on the day in which he took up his scrip (sportam) for his pilgrimage to Santiago'.⁽³⁶⁾ It was a never-to-be-forgotten moment in a man's earthly career.

In an oft-quoted passage Eckhard of Aura referred in about 1100 to the priestly blessing of scrip and staff as a 'new ritual'.⁽³⁷⁾ It has for long been known, in a general way, that he was correct. In earlier ages the ecclesiastical authorities had required simply that pilgrims should confess before they set out; there had been no special ceremony of blessing. We can now see much more clearly how new the 'new ritual' was. The so-called Romano-German Pontifical is the first collection to contain it.⁽³⁸⁾ A pontificial is a liturgical book containing prayers and ceremonies for all the rites conducted by a bishop -- confirmation, ordination, the consecration of churches, exorcism, the blessing of an abbot, prayers in time of war, plague, drought, flood, dearth, cattle-murrain, and so forth. The Romano-German Pontifical was compiled at Mainz about the year 960. Comprehensive, orderly and dignified, it rapidly became authoritative and was [90] diffused among the churches of Latin Christendom with astonishing speed. (It is a small indication of the isolation of western Spain that the Pontifical did not penetrate there until very much later.) The earliest recension contained no provision for the blessing of pilgrims and their accoutrements. However, in one eleventh-century manuscript (Vienna 701) there features a 'Blessing on scrips and staves (capsellas et fustes) and those who are about to set out with them to seek the shrines and intercession of the holy apostles'.⁽³⁹⁾ The most recent editor of the Pontifical, Mgr. Vogel, is prudently hesitant to date this manuscript precisely. At different points in his apparatus he offers us 'avant 1070', '1021/1031?', and 'dans la premiere moitié du XI^e siècle'.⁽⁴⁰⁾ But the crucial point is that the benediction in question was itself an addition to the manuscript in which it occurs: the text of the pontifical begins on folio 4^r; the benediction is a later addition on folio 3^v. It could have been inserted at about the very time that Eckhard was writing; a new ritual indeed.

At much the same time one of the earliest surviving representations of a pilgrim in the new 'uniform' was executed. It is an outstandingly fine piece of sculpture in stone carved for the decoration of the cloister of Sto. Domingo de Silos, itself a house on the pilgrimage-road to Compostela. It portrays Christ on the road to Emmaus -- and we should note the context of a journey -- but accoutred as a pilgrim to Santiago, carrying a scrip decorated with the scallop-shell which was the distinctive mark of the pilgrim to the shrine of St. James.⁽⁴¹⁾

If Christ could be portrayed as a pilgrim, it may be said that pilgrimage was a Christ-like undertaking: an imitatio Christi. Men and women famous in the world's history could be portrayed as pilgrims too; Helena the mother of Constantine, for example, or Charlemagne. The latter is a particularly interesting case, for it was one of the manifestations of the myth of Charlemagne which was being [91] elaborated during precisely this period. The rendering of Charlemagne as a pilgrim must have commended the idea of pilgrimage to those who revered his memory, looked back to him, listened to poems and songs about him: that is, not only kings, but the secular nobility and gentry generally -- let us simply say, adopting a favourite medieval classification, the bellatores as against the oratores and the laboratores. This brings us to our second line of approach in trying to explain the phenomenon of pilgrimages in the central middle ages.

We may start by asking ourselves this: what do influential churchmen present as the ideal pattern of Christian observance for the layman, and to whom do they present it? It is obvious enough that both the content of the moral pattern preached by the authorities and the social groups at which it is directed will change from time to time. In the early middle ages before (let us say) the tenth century the target of ecclesiastical attention was principally composed of barbarian kings and their warrior aristocracies.⁽⁴²⁾ In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the target was, increasingly, the urban bourgeoisie and the urban poor. The moral teaching of the friars reflected, either in approval or rejection, the mores of the town-dweller.⁽⁴³⁾ These changing concerns were the expression of ecclesiastical adaptation to social change.

During the intervening period the more thoughtful churchmen were concerned to deepen the Christian observance of those whom our sources refer to by such terms as bellatores, potentes, and the like: the directing secular élites of the feudal age.⁽⁴⁴⁾ There was plenty of scope for such deepening. An aristocracy which listened for recreation to Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland or the Siete Infantes de Lara was one [92] into which Christian moral teaching had not penetrated very deeply. The traditional teaching of the clergy had been that for the layman who remained in the secular world there was very little hope of salvation. The only sure road to heaven lay in renunciation of the saeculum by entry to a monastery; in short by an act of anachoresis. However, from the tenth century onwards some churchmen could be found who were prepared to encourage devout layman to remain in the world and to claim that their prospects of salvation were no worse than the chances of those who had renounced it. This was a change in sensibilities which was to have far-reaching consequences for European civilization.

The key text is the Vita of St. Gerald of Aurillac composed by Odo, abbot of Cluny, in about 940.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Gerald, self-styled count of Aurillac, was another survivor among the drifting flotsam of Carolingian west Francia. He carved out for himself a principality in the Auvergne in the second half of the ninth century which he ruled in effective independence until his death in about 909. Odo was concerned to present Gerald as a man in some sense holy -- a sanctus -- despite the fact that he did not become a monk, because of the manner in which he exercised his worldly responsibilities. For Odo the office of a count, no less than that of a king, was a Christian one. The virtues which Gerald displayed were of a fairly rudimentary sort, and Odo's reporting of them sheds a lurid light on social conditions in the Auvergne in the ninth and tenth centuries. Gerald was never drunk when presiding over a court of law. He always insisted on paying for goods requisitioned by his vassals from the peasantry. His personal life was virtuous; he would read and meditate on the scriptures; he was chaste; he was charitable; he was moderate in food and drink, unostentatious in his dress -- he wore no gold jewellery and could make a sword-belt last twenty years. He founded a monastery at Aurillac. And he went on pilgrimages. Odo laid special stress on this last. There were several shrines which Gerald was accustomed to visit, such as those at Tours, Limoges and [93] elsewhere, but above all he used to go to Rome: at least seven times he visited the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul. Odo emphasized the regularity of his pilgrimages: as a matter of routine Gerald went to Rome every other year. Odo wanted to show that pilgrimage was one of the foremost religious exercises of the Christian gentleman.

Odo of Cluny's biography of Gerald of Aurillac had a didactic purpose, and it can be shown to have been influential. About a century after his day a monk of Limoges named Adhémar of Chabannes composed a chronicle which is our principal source of information about the affairs of south-western France in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Adhémar included in his work a well-known pen-portrait of William II, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine (d. 1029). His sketch was not original but was copied almost word for word from Einhard's celebrated description of Charlemagne. But Adhémar added one new touch to his portrait of William which was not to be found in his source. 'From his youth it was his custom to visit the shrines of the apostles in Rome once every year; and if he found that he could not go to Rome he would make up by undertaking a devout pilgrimage to St. James of Galicia.'⁽⁴⁶⁾ We note with interest that by Adhémar's day Compostela, never mentioned by Odo of Cluny, is on the same sort of footing as Rome for pilgrims from southern France. The more general point needs stressing that Odo's teaching was bearing fruit. Going on pilgrimage was something that prominent territorial lords were expected to do, irrespective of whether or not they were being urged to it as penitents by their confessors.

Here is an example which instructively brings together both pilgrimages and monastic foundations. It is the foundation-charter for a small religious house, Notre Dame de la Ferté-Avrain, established by Hervé, archdeacon of Orléans, in about 1035.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Hervé's charter tells us that he had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 'desiring to wash away my sins by [94] my tears at those most holy shrines'. He brought back with him relics from the Lord's Sepulchre which he determined to deposit in the church of a religious house, 'not only for the remission of my own sins, but also for the salvation of the souls of my parents Havranus and Adela, my late brother Peter and my living brothers Alberic and Thedwin'. The act of pilgrimage and the act of founding a monastery are brought together here. What unites them is the emotion of guilt experienced by the pilgrim-donor. (Notable too is the sentiment of family solidarity.) Guilt, anxiety, dread-these are emotions which meet us time after time in accounts of pilgrimages and pious benefactions from this period. Who was encouraging these feelings? in what sort of people? and why?

These are large questions, and ones to which satisfactory answers have not yet been proposed. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw very far-reaching changes in the economic, social, political and intellectual arrangements of western Europe. New wealth, new opportunities, new social mobility, new relationships; moral disorder; the assertion of certain disciplines to guide the perplexed beneficiaries of these processes.⁽⁴⁸⁾ It was so often the 'new men' who experienced, or were brought to experience, the emotion of guilt. Gerald of Aurillac himself was a 'new man'. But there were many more of them in the eleventh century than there had been in the ninth. Take, for example, the Catalan adventurer Arnal Mir de Tost.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Of modest origins - his father had been castellan of Tost, not far from Urgel in the eastern Pyrenees - he amassed through successful soldiering for a variety of paymasters both Christian and Muslim in the middle years of the eleventh century a prodigious fortune in land, no less than thirty castles, and vast quantities of movable goods. Inventories of the latter have survived, so that we are permitted a rare glimpse of the material trappings of an upstart feudal lord. Arnal Mir and his wife possessed clothes of silk and a Bukhara carpet; in the winter they [95] could wrap themselves in cloaks of ermine. Frisian hatters and glovers in Lucca and Le Puy had contributed to their ample wardrobe. Arnal Mir had 'plenty' (plurimos) -- he did not trouble to number them -- of gold rings set with precious stones; his wife Arsendis could deck herself in a gold tiara for grand occasions. The silver cutlery on their dinner table must have glinted agreeably in the light shed by the candles in their silver candlesticks; while the variety and quantity of their baterie de cuisine suggests that their repasts were generous. In their leisure moments they could divert themselves with one of their three ivory chess-sets. When Arnal went to war his charger was caparisoned with saddle and harness chased with silver; he could take his pick of thirteen tents; he did not bother to enumerate his swords and coats of mail. And there was masses more besides. We know enough about how Arnal Mir had made his pile to be confident that a confessor would have found plenty of guilt, and anxiety about the destination of his soul, on which to play. He went on pilgrimage to Compostela in 1071. Was it guilt and contrition which sent him there? Was it a fulfilling of what was expected of a man in his now exalted station? Was it both?

Arnal Mir, like his near-contemporary Rodrigo Díaz, el Cid, rose from undistinguished beginnings to become a very great man indeed; one of Catalonia's potentes. His was one of the most remarkable 'success-stories' of the eleventh century. There were many men of modest background who prospered, though less sensationally, during this period. If churchmen were holding up the ideal of pilgrimage to society's potentes as a means of assuaging guilt, demonstrating virtue and averting the wrath to come, they were presenting it too to men of lower station. Many of these men were such as could be described as milites; men who followed the profession of arms. As a result of the work of several scholars, and especially of Professor Georges Duby, it is now a commonplace that milites occupied a more important niche in European society by 1100 than they had done in, say, 900.⁽⁵⁰⁾ It is fairly clear that, at least from the mid-eleventh century onward, churchmen were concerned to civilize these [96] unruly thugs whose main claim to consideration lay in their skills in combat. The clergy were presenting them with a social role over which some sort of Christian veneer had been daubed. Some of the signs of this process are familiar. For instance, certain thinkers -- Guibert of Nogent, Stephen of Muret, Bernard of Clairvaux and others -- were coming to urge that there was a holiness in certain types of war which the Christian miles should wage. Or again, the very procedure, the ceremonial, of becoming a miles was gradually invested with a religious significance. Knighthood, as we may begin to call it, was turning into a Christian vocation. Another sign lay in the encouragement of milites to undertake pilgrimages.

The earliest recorded pilgrim from England to Santiago de Compostela was such a man. His name was Richard Mauleverer, the village where he held some property still bears the family name -- Allerton Mauleverer, about ten miles west of York -- and he made his pilgrimage shortly before 1105.⁽⁵¹⁾ That is all we know of him. It is all too sadly characteristic of the sources for this period that we can, when dealing with people of his social rank, so very rarely penetrate beyond a name and an approximate date to the personality and the motive behind the bleak reference in charter or chronicle. The miracle-collections that survive deserve more attention than they have yet received.⁽⁵²⁾ Casual soundings among those of the eleventh century, such as the miracles of Ste. Foi and St. Benedict, reveal that many of the beneficiaries of the miracles recorded therein were milites who had come on pilgrimage to the shrine. Another indication, however imprecise, that eleventh-century pilgrims were people of fairly modest wealth and station, might be found in the spate of foundations of hospitals and guest-houses from c. 1050 onwards.⁽⁵³⁾ Great people might travel in style and expect to be put up in comfort at the smartest [97] monasteries: in 951 bishop Gottschalk of Le Puy had travelled 'with a great following' (magno comitatu) and had successfully sought hospitality at the monastery of Albelda. But humbler travellers would need different treatment.

This brings us to the last feature of eleventh-century pilgrimages. Many participants were even humbler than the milites (itself a term that could embrace men of extremely modest rank). We meet these men and women, once again, in the miracle collections where they tend to occur as individuals or small family groups. One of the most interesting features of the eleventh century, however, is the appearance of large parties of pilgrims composed of what contemporary chroniclers vaguely called 'the poor', organized by local bishops and abbots. In 1026 the abbot of Verdun led a party of 700 to the Holy Land: this was the size of a respectable army in early eleventh-century France.⁽⁵⁴⁾ In 1056 a party under the leadership of abbot Albert of Liège made the journey to Compostela. We do not know how many men and women it numbered, but our source assures us that the band of pilgrims was a large one.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In 1064 a gigantic expedition led by four bishops travelled from Germany to the Holy Land. One contemporary estimated its size at 12,000 persons. Even if we regard this as surely an exaggeration and -- shall we say? -- halve it, we still are left with a body of about the same size as the army with which William of Normandy conquered England two years later.⁽⁵⁶⁾ These military comparisons are not made unadvisedly. The biggest of all pilgrim expeditions were those which set off at the bidding of pope Urban II in 1096. We call them the armies of the First Crusade, but the participants did not. They thought of themselves as undertaking a special and unusual sort of pilgrimage.

[98] Here again, as with other social groups, we are witnessing the presentation of certain patterns of Christian behaviour to the laity by the clergy. These were patterns which were long to endure. Consider this: 'I am a good Christian, catholic and faithful. I pay tithes and first-fruits, I give alms to Christ's poor, I go on pilgrimage like a good Christian; last year I went with my wife to the Virgin of Montserrat, and this year to St. James of Compostela.' The speaker was Pierre Sabatier, weaver, of Varilhes, near Foix, in about 1320.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Marxist historians have claimed to discern in this mobilization of the masses by the clergy simply a vast exploitative system articulated by the cult of relics. Relics are the focus of cults and attract pilgrims; pilgrims bring offerings and the churches become rich; the masses are drawn in and kept in a submissive posture both morally and economically. Such an interpretation -- which has of course a respectable ancestry in Protestant polemic during the Reformation -- is not lightly to be dismissed, but it is too one-sided to be wholly convincing. What it fails to allow for is the fact that all ranks of society experienced this clerical influence. It was not simply a question of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, by implication closely tied to a feudal nobility, preying upon a subject peasantry. What is really striking is that the whole of lay society was being encouraged to submit to a common Christian discipline. Some will interpret this as a rather late stage in the Christianization of Europe; some as an element in that very complex process called for short 'the Gregorian Reform'; some as a pragmatic response by churchmen to economic and social trends. Perhaps, in any case, these are no more than three different ways of saying the same thing.

In trying to say something about the phenomenon of medieval pilgrimage one runs the risk of losing sight of the individual pilgrim himself. The solemn notes which have been sounded here -- contrition, amendment of life, deepening of Christian observance -- may not have sounded for him at all. Most pilgrims (we may suspect) were perfectly ordinary people with only the humdrum problems of daily life to contend with; provided always that we bear in mind that that [99] little word 'only' can mask whole worlds of tempestuous and ghastly experience. In the miracles of Santiago we meet a family from Poitou who went to Compostela to escape a plague that was ravaging their homeland; a barren couple who sought the intercession of St. James to assist them in conceiving a child; a paralytic seeking a cure; a man who had been cured of cancer of the throat (?) by contact with a shell of St. James brought back from pilgrimage by a neighbour and who then went to Compostela in gratitude for his cure.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Naturally, the miracle stories record only the successes. There must have been many sufferers, like St. Gerald the founder of La Sauve-Majeure in Gascony, who were dragged from shrine to shrine in vain.⁽⁵⁹⁾ There were too those whose afflictions were less tangible, less easily avowed, less open to inspection. The most harrowing story in the miracles of St. James concerns a young man from near Lyons, also named Gerald, who with his widowed mother followed the trade of a skinner. He was devoted to St. James and was accustomed to go on pilgrimage to Compostela every year. He was unmarried, but chaste. But one day, shortly before setting out on his annual pilgrimage, he committed the sin of fornication. In the course of his journey the Devil appeared to him in the guise of St. James and told him that the only way in which he could purge himself of his sin was by amputation of the offending member. Accordingly he cut off his genitals, immediately afterwards stabbing himself in the stomach and thereby dying a lingering and horrible death. The story continues with an account of his miraculous resuscitation through the intercession of St. James, but we need follow it no further.⁽⁶⁰⁾[100] There is some reason for supposing that Gerald was not the only sufferer from the torments of sexual guilt whom one might have encountered on the road to Compostela at this period.⁽⁶¹⁾

People went on pilgrimages for every sort of reason. Some churchmen were worried by the fact that not all reasons were good.⁽⁶²⁾ There was little that they could do about it. In the early summer of 1151 earl Ronald (or Rognvald) of Orkney set off with a large party of his fellow Orkneymen on a pilgrimage to the Holy Places.⁽⁶³⁾ They had a cracking good time. Round the coast of Muslim Spain 'they ravaged far and wide and got much booty'. They wintered near Narbonne, where the elderly Ronald enjoyed a flirtation with Ermengarde, the daughter of count Aymeric of Narbonne. They repaid his generosity, which had proved so unexpectedly agreeable, by capturing the stronghold of a nearby brigand. After resuming their journey in the spring of 1152 they attacked, captured and burnt a Saracen galley somewhere off Sardinia. Arrived at their goal they landed at Acre, visited Jerusalem and on 10 August -- note the precision of dating -- they bathed in the Jordan. On their way back they put into port somewhere in the Aegean where they got very drunk; one of them was killed in a brawl. The winter of 1152-3 was spent in Constantinople where the emperor Manuel Comnenus, tactful and long-suffering as always in his dealings with barbarians from the west, received them in audience: or so they later claimed. In 1153 they went overland to the Adriatic, crossed to Italy, travelled by way of Rome through Lombardy and Germany back to Denmark, and thence homewards across the North Sea. Earl Ronald was hardly the model pilgrim as conceived by high-minded churchmen. The pilgrim was not meant to carry arms; Ronald and his men not only carried them but used them. The pilgrim was meant to abstain from fleshly pleasures; this did [101] not deter Ronald from his dalliance with Ermengarde. The pilgrim was meant to travel with only the bare necessities for the journey; the Orkneymen enriched themselves with plunder. The Orkneyinga Saga is engagingly frank about such matters -- far more so than the accounts composed by ecclesiastics. It is also wonderfully revealing about what the pilgrims got out of it. Here is no solemn piety. Instead, the author's comment is far more robust. After they had crossed the sea for the last time, berthed their longships at Kirkwall, stepped out again on to their native Orkney soil, this is what he tells us. 'They all passed for men of more importance after the journey they had made.'

1. R. 25 August 1032.

2. e.g. R. 30 January 915, 21 November 927, 5 March 951, 29 September 985, 5 March 1011.

3. R. 29 January 915.

4. R. 24 May 991.

5. R. 8 August 929, 2 March 958.

6. R. 25 September 883.

7. R. 6 December 914.

8. R. 885, 8 January 9l8.

9. R. 24 June 886.

10. e.g. R. 25 July 893, 25 November 899, 20 April 911, 30 January 915, 18 May 920, 28 June 924, and many others.

11. For what follows, see R. d'Abadal i de Vinyals, 'L'abat Cesari, fundador de Santa Cecilia de Montserrat i pretès arquebispe de Tarragona', in his collected essays Deis Visigots als Catalans (Barcelona, 1970), II. 25-55.

12. J. Pérez de Urbel, 'El culto de Santiago en el siglo X', Compostellanum 16 (1971), 11-36.

13. J. M. Lacarra, L. Vázquez de Parga and J. Uría Ríu, Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela (Madrid, 1948-9), I. 42, note 6.

14. Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, ed. A. Bouillet (Paris, 1897), I, c. 12, pp. 41-2.

15. AC Santiago de Compostela, Tumbo A, fo. 13: printed in España Sagrada 19, 367-70.

16. Sampiro, Cronica, in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro, su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo X (Madrid, 1952), pp. 341, 432.

17. M. Défourneaux, Les Français en Espagne aux XI^e et XII^e siècles (Paris, 1949), p. 66.

18. Sobrado Cart. I, no. 2.

19. J. Pérez de Urbel, 'El culto de Santiago en el siglo X', Compostellanum 16 (1971), 11-36.

20. Jerome, Ep. 46 (ed. J. Labourt (Budé: Paris, 1951), II. 114). The letter runs in the name of Paula and Eustochium, but scholars are agreed that it was the composition of their friend Jerome. For Jerome and other early pilgrims see now the masterly study by E. D. Hunt, Holy Land pilgrimage in the later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1982).

21. Of the many works devoted to pilgrimage I have found particularly stimulating the essay by A. Dupront, 'Péleninage et lieux sacrés', in Mélanges en l'honneur de Fernand Braudel, vol. II, Méthodologie de l'histoire et de: sciences humaines (Toulouse, 1973), pp. 189-206. I am grateful to Professor J. A. Bossy for drawing my attention to this article.

22. 'Ne ultra deviet a viis tuis', from a twelfth-century German pontifical quoted by A. Franz, Die birchlichen Benedictionen im Mittelalter (Freiburg-im-Bresgau, 1909), II. 278.

23. In what follows I am much indebted to the writings of Peter Brown: for some reflections upon anachoresis see his The making of late antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), chapter 4, especially pp. 85-6.

24. Adomnan's Life of Columba, ed. and trans. A. O. and M. 0. Anderson (Edinburgh, 1961), c. 4a, p. 186; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896), III, c. 27, p. 193.

25. Consider, for example, the case of Anastasius of Cluny (d. c. 1085?): Vita sancti Anastasli auctore Galtero, in Patrologia Latina CXLIX, cols. 425-34.

26. V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian culture (Oxford, 1978), p. 7. It is a pity that this valuable work is disfigured by the repellent jargon of the social scientist.

27. P. Brown, 'Relics and social status in the age of Gregory of Tours', in his Society and the holy in late antiquity (London, 1982), pp. 222-50, quoted from p. 225.

28. K. H. Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany (revised edn., Harmondsworth, 1971), no. l2l, p. 136.

29. For a clear exposition see C. Vogel, 'Le pélerinage pénitentiel', in Pellegrinaggi e culto dei santi in Europa fino alla prima Crociata (Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale, IV, Todi, 1963), pp. 39-92.

30. LSJ pp. 262-3.

31. Aimon, Vita sancti Abbonis, in Patrología Latina CXXXIX, coll. 398-9: note that Aimon thought that Abbo was doing something novel.

32. Peter Damian, Ep. VII, xvii (Patrologia Latina CXLIV coll. 455-8): cf. also his Opuscula V and LVI (ibid. CXLV, coll. 89-98, 807-20).

33. Cartulaire de l'Abbaye d'Uzerche, ed. J.-B. Champeval (Paris-Tulle, 1901), no. 543. The date was between 1068 and 1090. It is not clear whether the admonition was to undertake the pilgrimage or to make the gift or both.

34. Helgaud of Fleury, Epitoma vitae regis Rotberti pii, ed. R.-H. Bautier and G. Labory (Paris, 1965), c. 27, pp. 124-8.

35. Gesta consulum Andegavorum, in Chroniques des comtes d'Anjou, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin (Paris, 1913), p. 50.

36. Cartulaire de l'Église cathédrale de Grenoble, ed. J. Marion (Paris, 1869), no. cxvi.

37. Eckhard of Aura, Chronicon universale, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, VI. 214.

38. Le Pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle, ed. C. Vogel and R. Elze (Studi e Testi vols. 226-7 (text), 266 (introduction and indices), 3 vols., Rome, 1963-72). See also C. Vogel, 'Les rites de la pénitence publique aux X^e et XI^e siècles', in Mélanges offerts a René Crozet, ed. P. Gallais and Y.-J. Riou (Poitiers, 1966), I. 137-44.

39. Ed. cit., II, no. ccxii, p. 362: note the reference to Abraham.

40. Ed. cit., III, pp. 34, 56, 67.

41. The date of the Emmaus at Silos has been much debated: I understand that it is now thought unlikely that the work was carried out before c. 1090.

42. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971); P. Wormald, 'Bede, Beowulf and the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy', in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. T. Farrell (British Archaeological Reports 46, 1978), pp. 32-95.

43. B. H. Rosenwein and L. K. Little, 'Social meaning in the monastic and mendicant spiritualities', Past and Present 63 (1974), 4-32.

44. See the interesting remarks of I. S. Robinson, Authority and resistance in the Investiture Contest. The polemical literature of the late eleventh century (Manchester, 1978), pp. 101-2.

45. Odo of Cluny, Vita sancti Geraldi Auriliacensis comitis, in Patrologia Latina CXXXIII, coll. 639-704; there is an English translation in G. Sitwell, St. Odo of Cluny (London, 1958), pp. 90-180.

46. Adhémar of Chabannes, Chronicon, ed. J. Chavanon (Paris, 1897), III, c. 41, p. 163.

47. J. Doinel, 'Un pèlerinage à Jérusalem dans la premiere moitié du XI^e siécle', Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes 51 (1890), 204-6.

48. For a stimulating discussion see A. Murray, Reason and society in the middle ages (Oxford, 1978), especially chs. 2-4.

49. For Arnal Mir see P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle (Toulouse, 1975), II. 789-97.

50. See his collected essays Hommes et structures du moyen âge (Paris-The Hague, 1973), especially 'Les origines de la chevalerie', pp. 325-41.

51. Early Yorkshire Charters, ed. W. Farrer (Edinburgh, 1914-16), II, no. 729.

52. For a rather later period, good use of some English miracle-collections has been made by R. C. Finucane, Miracles and pilgrims: Popular beliefs in medieval England (London, 1977). Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the medieval mind (London, 1982) was published only after the final version of this chapter had been drafted.

53. Much information about such establishments in Spain is to be found scattered in J. M. Lacarra, L. Vázquez de Parga and J. Una Ríu, Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela (Madrid, 1948-9): see especially the documents printed in vol. III, nos. 36-54, pp. 44-60.

54. Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, VIII, p. 393.

55. J. Stiennon, 'Le voyage des Liégeois à St. Jacques de Compostelle', Mélanges offerts à F. Rousseau (Brussels, 1958), pp. 553-81.

56. E. Joranson, 'The great German pilgrimage of 1064-1065', in The Crusades and other historical essays presented to Dana C. Munro, ed. L. J. Pactow (New York, 1928), pp. 3-43.

57. E. le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (English trans, London, 1978), p. 300.

58. LSJ, pp. 263-4, 268-9, 273-4, 286.

59. Vita sancti Geraldi fundatoris Silvae-Majoris in Aquitania, Acta Sanctorum, Aprilis I (Brussels, 1865), c. 2, pp. 408-9. He was taken to Rome, Montecassino and Monte Gangano; ironically, he was cured on his return to his native Corbie by the intercession of St. Adalard.

60. LSJ, pp. 278-82, where the gruesome story is attributed to Anselm of Bec and Canterbury, who appears to have had it from Hugh of Cluny. The same story, with variations, is told by Guibert of Nogent, who claimed to have got it from Geoffrey of Saumur, nephew of Hugh of Cluny. An earlier version of it, lacking the theme of sexual mutilation, occurs in a poem composed at Montecassino, where the miracle is said to have taken place near Cluny in the time of abbot Hugh. I am grateful to Dr P. P. A. Biller for drawing my attention to this complex literary web, which might repay further attempts to disentangle.

61. See the curious passage on the stream called Lavamentula in LSJ, p. 354.

62. G. Constable, 'Opposition to pilgrimages in the middle ages', Studia Gratiana 19 (1976), 125-46.

63. For what follows, see The Orkneyinga Saga, trans. A. B. Taylor (Edinburgh, 1938), pp. 275-303. The pilgrims 'stayed a short time' in Galicia, but we are not told that they visited the shrine of St. James.