Pilgrim's Road

monastery until the abbot and his monks had come out to greet her, and to sing Te Deum. After the formal installation it seems she had no desire to leave.
    To the medieval mind, relics were not merely objects of veneration but possessed power in themselves, particularly powers of healing and intercession, which were commensurate with the saint’s position in the heavenly hierarchy. Powers of healing were a particular draw in a world where diseases flourished, where the dreaded leprosy, plague and pestilence stalked the land, much as AIDS and cancer do nowadays. As modern man pins his hopes on science, so medieval man looked to miraculous intervention — though who would be so bold as to say that the two are entirely separate? Saints often became associated with particular cures, much as surgeons and doctors specialise today. Vézelay got off to a flying start with the story of a blind man who came to the shrine with the cry of ‘If only I had eyes to see the shrine of the blessed Madeleine’ and immediately regained his sight.
    The intercession of saints on behalf of suppliants was of equal, if not greater importance. Life on earth being so very uncertain, and usually a good deal shorter, as well as considerably harder than it is today, the hereafter occupied people’s thoughts a great deal more than it does now. Sin was taken seriously, for hell, with its hideous punishments loomed real and terrifying, and purgatory was little better. The loathsome creatures inhabiting both places, and the repulsive and hideous tortures perpetrated there were spawned in legion by the fertile imagination of the Middle Ages. Studying the horrific scenes, so plentifully depicted among the carvings on the walls and the capitals at Vézelay, I found it not surprising that people were eager to avoid eternal damnation.
    Saints were thought of as inhabiting two places. They were present in their shrines certainly, but were also in the courts of heaven, where they were able to influence God on a penitent’s behalf in much the same way as could a well-placed courtier who had the ear of his earthly king. And who better to intercede on a sinner’s behalf than the woman who understood at first hand the frailty of human nature, and who had been among the first to see the Risen Lord? Perhaps it was the centuries of the prayers of pilgrims who felt they could identify with La Madeleine that gave Vézelay its warm human quality in spite of its immense size. The anomaly is that scholarship has established, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the bones that were cherished here throughout all those centuries were almost certainly not those of Mary Magdalene at all.
    It was in order to see more of the carvings, particularly the wonderfully lively capitals with their medieval beasts and purgatorial scenes that we climbed up to the gallery. After gazing our fill at all we could examine from there, we noticed a small door leading into the tower. This was a world apart from the glories of the church below, a place where the bones of the structure were revealed, and where massive frames of rough-hewn timber pinned the walls together. The wind howled through the embrasures as we climbed upwards, the stone steps giving way to flights of wooden slats, slippery with centuries of pigeon droppings. The higher we rose the more the building appeared to sway and rock in the wind, so that the analogy of a ship upon the waves was heightened. From the leads the view was enormous: together with the gargoyles we gazed down on a land struggling reluctantly into spring, earth showing bare in the fields, and black trees thrashing winter branches as they bent under the assaults of the wind. The year was not nearly so far advanced here as it had been in Southern England. It promised a tough beginning to my journey.
    Retracing our steps after this excursion, we found the tower door locked and ourselves trapped on the stairs behind it. Whoever had turned the key had also gone far away, for although we shouted ourselves hoarse no one came. Churches on the Continent are often locked for days or weeks on end — the thought crossed my mind that we could moulder away in this windy tower until Pentecost. Patience might be a suitable virtue for pilgrims to cultivate, but immediate rescue was necessary if Peter was to get the unspeedy Toad to the ferry on time.
    Studying the door, after a trial push or two had assured us that it would not yield, we wondered if the gap between the