The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

of the Italian Laffi, who evidently suffered from the heat and the lack of shade as he trudged over the meseta. He mentions the villages of Hontanas hidden in a dry river bed where there were shepherds living in thatched huts surrounded by palissades to keep out the wolves. All he could find to eat was bread and garlic and little wine, and he had to sleep on the ground.
    The Castle of Castrojeriz, however, a little further on played a noble part in the Moorish wars of the ninth century and its fortified position was as important as that of Burgos. After Fitero the pilgrims crossed a great plain well supplied, according to the Gula of Aymery Picaud, with wheat, but completely treeless. When I passed it in the sweltering heat of the summer I recalled the words of Menéndez Pidal when he quotes the ancient Gaul, Trogus Pompeius describing Castilian rigid sobriety as dura omnibus et adstricta parsimonia. ‘Even today’, says Don Ramón, ‘the Spaniard contents himself with little, and we continually see around us examples of that austerity allied to hard work to which Trogus referred. The humblest of all is the reaper in our fields—an astonishing specimen of dura et adstricta parsimonia .’ *
    At the entrance of village after village I saw the inhabitants working away on their threshing floors without any refreshment but the lukewarm water of their porous alcarrazas. Women worked in the fields as well as the men; in fact the women seemed to me to be the moving spirit, for it was they who sat upon the wooden board, studded underneath with sharp nails, and drove the mule round and round, crushing the ears of corn that lay scattered on the threshing floor. Great advances have been made since the end of the Civil War in 1939 and machinery has been introduced into harvesting, but the Castilian small farmer still clings to the biblical methods of Boaz, and many a Ruth did I see gleaning at sunset, while the men and women chanted folksongs that echoed liturgically from past centuries.
    When I reached Frómista, which in ancient days called itself Frómista del Camino, to assert its claim to be a station on a Jacobean road, I came across the most graceful church I had yet seen on the Camino francés. It was founded in the eleventh century by Doña Elvira, the widow of Sancho el Mayor of Navarre, for monks she had imported from Asturias, but in 1118 it was handed over to the-monks of Cluny. It is built of a lovely pale yellow soft stone which harmonizes with the golden wheat piled up on the threshing floors and the all-pervading brown immensity of Castile and Visigothic Tierra de Campos. With its three vaulted naves and its amazing variety of decorative corbels it belongs to the new Romanesque style which was initiated in Spain in Jaca Cathedral. * Its two strange little towers and its octagonal lantern which was brought, like that of Irache, along the pilgrim road, give an impression of extraordinary originality.
    I was very fortunate in Frómista, for I made a new friend. I had been told by a pilgrim whom I met at Estella to call on the parish priest of the church of San Pedro as soon as I arrived. When I knocked at the door of his house in the plaza and asked to see him, it was opened by the priest’s sister, a good-looking girl who answered gaily, “Está echado.” Not wishing to disturb a priest’s siesta, least of all in those sultry regions, I was preparing to depart, when the girl put a gigantic key in my hand telling me to open the church of San Pedro opposite, adding: “You can have a little snooze there until my brother awakes: it is as cool as a crypt.”
    There was not much of interest in the church, except for a fine statue of Santiago with his big staff, his scallop shell and his scrip: just a humble pilgrim, without a trace of the Matamoros. While I was drowsing in the cool church I was joined by the priest.
    Father Bustillo was a sturdy, handsome man with the black hair and sallow skin of the true Castilian. One look at his open, manly face convinced me of his integrity and we straightway became friends. He had all the virtues of a parish priest: he was the life and soul of Frómista, for he came from the neighbouring village of Santoyo and knew every soul in the town. He was jovial and light-hearted but knew how to put the fear of God into those who tried to deceive him. He had no physical fear and in the tragic years of the Civil War he played a valiant part as a chaplain at the front. His attitude