The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

fiddled and my friend the student thrummed the guitar, the rest of the Jacobeans awoke the echoes of the plaza by their pilgrim songs. My most lasting musical memory of that night was the mediaeval Catalan pilgrim-song (Els Cants dels Romieus ) which my young friend sang as a song of farewell:

CHAPTER 10

THE ASTURIAN DEVIATION

    Qui a esté a Sainct Jacques
    Et n’esté a Sainct Salvateur
    A visité le serviteur
    Et a laissé le seigneur.

    T HE Jacobean road to Compostella has never been a straight, undeviating path through France and Spain, for even at an early date other saints appeared as offshoots and disciples, of the Apostle and so impressed the pilgrims by their saintly virtues and their miracles that the latter turned aside to visit their shrines, provided the deviation was not too great. Among those deviation pilgrimages the most important of all was that which the Jacobeans made to the shrine at Oviedo to venerate the relics contained in the ‘holy ark’ which lay in the Cámara Santa. Indeed the local cult of the Oviedo relics is as old or even older than that of the tomb of St. James, and internationally it became in the Middle Ages the most important pilgrimage in the Peninsula after that to Compostella. The shrine must have been important in the eleventh century, even before the state visit of Alfonso VI in 1075, but no mention is made of it in the Book of St. James. *
    According to modern scholars, such as Juan Uria, the pilgrimage to Oviedo became definitely associated with the Jacobean in the latter years of the eleventh century. Nevertheless, many refused to attempt the arduous journey of deviation, as we know from Antoine Lalaing, Seigneur de Montigny, who accompanied Philip the Fair on his state visit to the Catholic monarchs in 1301, and afterwards made the pilgrimage to Santiago. Lalaing says that the pilgrims dreaded the road to Oviedo because it was thinly populated, barren and more mountainous than the main Jacobean road by Astorga and the Bierzo.
    On two occasions, in 1944 and 1951, I have made the deviation by Oviedo, and in this chapter I shall describe my memories of that route on those two occasions.
    The pilgrim road from León to the north passes between the river Bernesga and the river Torio and after the pueblos of La Sica and Cascantes reaches La Robla, where the road begins to ascend to La Collada and then descends to Villasimpliz, where in 1548 a pilgrim hostel was founded by Don Fabián Bayón, a canon of León.
    After the pueblo of Villamanin the road crosses the bridge over the River Tuero and continues on its right bank to the church and hospital of Arbas, which was founded at the end of the eleventh century, according to tradition, by Count Fruela, brother of Doña Jimena, the wife of the Cid. The monks of Arbas followed the rule of St. Augustine and, because of the services they rendered to Jacobean pilgrims, they were given many privileges by the kings, and in 1214 Alfonso IX, King of León, ordered a church to be erected there. *
    After Arbas comes the Pass of Pajares, which even today in the winter months is often blocked with snow, and cuts off the Asturian highlands from the south. There are many references in the pilgrim songs to the sufferings of pilgrims who plodded their way through the sinister pass.

    Jamais nous n’eûmes si grand froid
    Que quand nous fûmes au Mont d’Etuves
    Étions transis jusqu’au coeur,
    Ne voyant soleil ni lune,
    Le vent, la pluie nous importune,
    Mon Dieu, le vrai Médiateur,
    Nous a délivrés de la pluie
    Jusques dans Saint-Salvateur....

    After negotiating the Pass of Pajares, we arrived at Vega de Ciego, which is mentioned in the old itineraries, and on the right of the road perched on a hill are the ruins of a small church of Santa Cristina de Lena, which dates from the period of Ramiro I.
    After Pola de Lena, one of the mining towns of Asturias, we arrived at Ujo, where the valley expands and we passed through Santullano and Mieres, where a hospital for pilgrims was built in the twelfth century beside the bridges over the River Caudal, which lasted until the eighteenth. Further on, at Copián, there was also a twelfth-century hostel, and, as Jovellanos tells us in his detailed diaries, the people believed that the place had belonged to the Templars. *
    The summit of Pachán which separates the valley of Mieres from that of Olloniego used in ancient days to be infested with bandits who ambushed the pilgrims and robbed them