The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

his hall with his family’, as the monk of St. Augustine’s Abbey, who relates the incident, duly observes, ‘which was never seen before’. This was the signal for the fatal blow which fell on April 24 of the following year, when a summons was addressed in the name of King Henry VIII to Thomas Becket, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, charging him with treason, contumacy and rebellion. It was read within the walls of the Cathedral and thirty days were allowed for his appearance, and when, at the expiration of that time, the dead man had not risen to answer for himself, the case was heard at Westminster: the Attorney-General on the part of Henry VIII, and for the accused an advocate.
    On June 10 the sentence was pronounced against the Archbishop that his bones should be burnt and the offerings should be forfeited to the Crown. The bones, it is generally believed, were scattered to the four winds, the jewels and gold were carried off in carts and deposited in the royal stores, and the ‘Régale of France’, the glory of the shrine, W as worn in the King’s thumb-ring and afterwards adorned the golden collar of his daughter, Queen Mary.
    What amazes us today is the thoroughness with which this proclamation was carried out. Not only has every statue and picture of ‘the traitor’ been swept away, but there is hardly a copy of any historical or legal document from which the pen or the knife of the eraser has not effaced the once-honoured name of St. Thomas. Wherever it occurs, every record of the shrine was so completely destroyed that the Cathedral archives throw hardly any light either on its existence or removal.
    Dean Stanley shows that the shrine of St. Thomas fell not simply from a love of destruction or a desire of plunder, but before a sense of overwhelming necessity. Had the reformers, he adds, been ever so anxious to retain it, they would probably have found it impossible to do so. For one of the most surprising parts of the whole transaction is the apathy with which the clergy and the people acquiesced in the act of the Government.
    When similar destruction was effected in France at the time of the French Revolution, although the horrors perpetuated were even greater, yet there were loyal hands to save some relics at least from general ruin.

ERASMUS AND ST. JAMES

    We have turned aside from the Road of St. James to follow the way to Canterbury because the fate of St. Thomas Becket in England is instructive when we examine the causes of the decline in the popularity of our Apostle in the sixteenth century. By the middle of the fifteenth century the attitude of many Christians towards Santiago was one of unbelief. The masses of Christendom, however, both clergy and lay, still held that the Devil himself was the cause of the opposition to the cult of St. James, and as the devil was the father of lies the unbelief that was inspired by him should be condemned. For this reason, the good people everywhere fought the devil and resisted all doubts. They thanked God for giving them legends and miracles and were not discouraged. *
    Molina, writing in the seventeenth century, considers that the decline of the pilgrimage to Compostella was due to the ‘damnable doctrines of the accursed Luther which diminished the numbers of Germans and wealthy English who attended the pilgrimages’. But the hostile attitude towards both pilgrimages and pilgrims existed a century before Luther, for we find it in Langland’s Piers Plowman. His soul craved for a pilgrimage that would be the passage from a lower to a higher phase of life, and in his vision he describes the company that went out to seek the truth. They meet a ‘painim in pilgrimes wise’ having on him tokens of all the holy places he had visited—‘signes of Synay and shelles of Galice and many a crouche [cross] on his cloke...’. When some of the company ask him whence he came, he replies: “Ye may se by my signes, that sitten on myne hatte, that I have walked wide in weet and drye, and sought good seintes for my soules helthe.”
    When they ask him whether he knows a saint whom men call Saint Truth and could he show them the way to the place where he dwells, he can only reply: “Nay, so me God helpe:

    I seigh never palmere, with pyk ne with scrippe,
    Asken after hym er til now, in this place.

    The company then agree that “Truth is not the sort of Saint that pilgrims go to seek.”
    Before the arrival of Luther on the scene the Lollards or Wycliffites