The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

frequented road of all was that from London, celebrated in Chaucer’s Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. In the Canterbury pilgrimage every element of society except the very highest and lowest was represented—the knight, the yeoman, the prioress, the monk, the friar, the merchant, the Oxford scholar, the squire, the cook, the miller and the poet himself. It was a crowd similar to those on the road of St. James, except that occasionally we find popes, kings and their suites journeying towards Compostella.
    The Canterbury pilgrims were accustomed, like those of St. James, to be accompanied by minstrels and story-tellers, and indeed the pilgrims themselves became such adepts at story-telling that, as their enemies said, ‘if they be half a month out in their pilgrimages many of them become, half a year after, great jugglers, story-tellers and liars’. Miracles there were in plenty at St. Thomas’s tomb as at Santiago’s, as, for instance, that of the great carbuncle or diamond called the ‘Régale of France’, which had been given to the tomb by Louis VII when on pilgrimage. The King had come thither, so ran the legend, to discharge a vow made in battle, and knelt at the shrine with the stone set in a ring on his finger. The Archbishop, who was present, entreated his Majesty to present it to the Saint, but the King demurred, for it seemed too costly a gift, especially as it ensured him good luck in his enterprises. Scarcely had his refusal been uttered when the stone leapt from the ring and fastened itself to the shrine, where it remained as if a goldsmith had fixed it there.
    The Canterbury pilgrimage reached its height in the fourteenth century, when Chaucer wrote his Prologue. It was in 1370 when pilgrims thronged the great London road to Canterbury that Simon of Sudbury, afterwards Primate, openly told the people there that the plenary indulgence which they hoped to gain by their visit to the tomb would be of no avail to them. * Then between the years 1511 and 1513 there arrived at the Cathedral the two most illustrious strangers that had visited the spot since Chaucer. The one was John of Colet, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the other was Desiderius Erasmus, the prince and patriarch of the learning and scholarship of Europe. Both men were struck by the majesty with which the cathedral rose into the sky to strike awe even at a distant approach.
    Erasmus was naturally timid and shrank from making an open attack on so widespread a feeling as the worship of relics, but Colet, who was an earnest theologian, had no such scruples, and refused resolutely to give the accustomed kiss to the cross of St. George, and when the kind Prior offered one of the filthy rags torn from one of the robes of St. Thomas as a choice present, he held it up between his fingers and laid it down with a whistle of contempt which distracted Erasmus, between shame for his companion’s bad manners and a fear of the consequences. When the two visitors were leaving Canterbury, an aged almsman threw his accustomed shower of holy water upon them and offered them ‘the shoes of St. Thomas’ to kiss.
    “What,” cried Colet enraged. “Do these asses expect us to kiss the shoes of all good men who have ever lived? Why, they might as well bring us their spittle or their dung to be kissed.”
    The kind-hearted Erasmus, however, was touched, and he dropped into the hand of the old almsman a small coin.
    In spite of these ominous signs, the pomp of the pilgrimages continued apparently unabated almost to the very moment of the final crash. On the last jubilee in 1520 it was still pleaded at Rome that since the death of St. Peter there never was a man that did more for the liberties of the Church than St. Thomas of Canterbury. In that year Henry VIII had received the Emperor Charles V at Canterbury immediately before the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the two monarchs rode together from Dover on the morning of Whit-Sunday and passed through the streets of Canterbury lined with Spanish and English nobles and clergy in full ecclesiastical costume.
    Shortly afterwards the Queen, who had greeted her imperial nephew with such affection at Canterbury, was divorced, and in 1534 the royal supremacy and separation from the See of Rome was formally declared. The visitation of the monasteries began in 1535, the lesser monasteries were suppressed in 1536, and in 1537 on the Eve of St. Thomas ‘the Archbishop ate flesh and did sup in