The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

towards enemies who sent him threats resembled that of a Sevillian priest I knew, who on one occasion, when he had received a death threat from an enemy through an emissary, said: “Tell him to mind his step. I act as all men do, and in addition I say Mass.”
    Father Bustillo and his sister killed the fatted calf for me, and in the cool of the evening the priest and I set out on foot for the neighbouring village of Santoyo, but first of all he made me visit the church of Sta. María del Castillo which had been the fortress of the town in 1379. From the church I had a wonderful view of the huddled roofs of Frómista below and the fertile panorama of Tierra de Campos which in the golden sunlight resembled a huge brown quilt patched up here and there in brown and yellow but fading in the distance to the colour of straw. As we descended towards the plain the priest strode along preceded by his greyhound—a magnificent dog whom he intended to show at the forthcoming international competition in Madrid. Father Bustillo is a sportsman and enjoys roving the countryside with a gun, but he is an intellectual too, and he told me with pride that he had been at school with my Benedictine friend from Santo Domingo de Silos, the celebrated mediaevalist and poet, Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, and the present Abbot of Silos, Fray Toribio Ramos, who was a native of Santoyo. When we reached the little village of Santoyo the priest stopped to speak to the men and women harvesters, who were still threshing busily. The sun had nearly sunk behind the horizon, leaving in its wake a red furnace in the sky, and the workers on the threshing floor amidst their hillocks of golden wheat looked in the half light like phantom slaves of an invisible Midas piling up his gold in the shadowy spaces of the underworld.
    The priest told them it was time to stop their labours and he gathered the men and the women into separate bands and made them sing for me. First the men sang a copla in unison—a solfemn liturgical song which made me think of the Middle Ages when kings and bishops passed along this way towards imperial León. Then, as a contrast, the women sang a rhythmic baile redondilla and danced round us. In the background was the pueblo of Santoyo nestling in the shadow of its majestic church. The houses and hovels were of a deep ochre colour and made of adobe, in contrast with the yellow hillocks piled on the threshing-floors.

SANTA MARÍA LA BLANCA DE VILLASIRGA

    From Frómista I followed carefully the map traced out by the hospitable priest. After passing Población with its small Romanesque shrine of St. Michael; Villavieco with its shrine of St. George patronized by the French; Arconada winch was given in fief by Alfonso VII to his vassal Don Gutierre and became a junction for pilgrims from north Palencia, with a hospital, and Villamentero with its church of San Martín de Torres which has a Mudejar ceiling of the fifteenth century, I arrived at the important church of the Knights Templar at Villalcázar de Sirga, or Villasirga as it is more commonly called.
    The church of Santa María la Blanca of Villasirga is a stately building of the thirteenth century, and was, according to Ponz, the celebrated eighteenth-century travel writer, the third in Spain possessed by Templars. The church was originally fortified and had a lofty tower which was pulled down, and the magnificent porch recalls that at Las Huelgas. From the porch we enter the chapel of Santiago which though rebuilt in the fifteenth century contains a sarcophagus standing on six lions, and the effigy lies with a falcon on his wrist and three dogs at his feet.
    There are, however, two even more interesting tombs in the choir of the church, those of Prince Philip, the fifth son of Ferdinand the Saint, and his wife Leonor Ruiz de Castro, a Princess of Portugal. I was fascinated by the tomb of Philip, the most restless of the sons of the saintly conqueror of Seville, who was one of the quixotic personalities created by the age of chivalry. He had been a pupil of the great Archbishop Roderick, who made him Canon of Toledo, Abbot of Valladolid and Covarrubias and, when Seville was captured in 1248, he was made an Archbishop. Then after the death of his father the Infante left Holy Orders and chivalrously took up the cause of the forlorn Princess Christina of Norway: she had been brought to Spain as bride for Alfonso X, who wished to repudiate his wife Doña Violante on the score of her