The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

and their wandering ‘poor preachers’ were constant bitter critics of the clergy in England, for they championed the cause of the poor peasantry against the barons and the prelates. We have the Ploughman s Complaint in the same period, which describes the popes, cardinals, prelates, monks and friars, who call themselves followers of Peter and keepers of the gates of Heaven Hill.
    In the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance introduced the spirit of free enquiry, there emerged a far more disturbing critic of Santiago than the heavy-handed Luther, who threw his inkpot at the Devil, and that was Desiderius Erasmus, who visited the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. No man sapped the faith of Western Europe with subtler influence than Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the age, whose mild reasonableness attracted such staunch Catholics as Luis Vives and St. Thomas More. In one of his Colloquies entitled ‘Religious Pilgrimage’, he describes the return home of a certain pilgrim called Ogygius who had visited St. James at Compostella, not of his own free will but because his wife and mother-in-law had forced him. As he approaches his home, he meets a friend called Menedemus, and the two converse as they walk towards the town. The dialogue was translated in the eighteenth century by the lexicographer, Bailey:

    MEN. From what part of the world came you? For here there was a melancholy report that you had taken a voyage to the Stygian Shades.
    OGY. Nay, I thank God, I never was better in all my life than I have been ever since I saw you last.
    MEN. And may you live always to confute such vain reports. But what strange dress is this? It is all over set off with shells scollop’d full of Images of Lead and Tin and Chains of straw-work and the cuffs are adorned with Snakes eggs instead of bracelets.
    OGY. I have been to pay a visit to St. James at Compostella, and after that to the famous Virgin on the other side of the water in England: and this was rather a revisit; for I had been to see her three years before.
    MEN. What? Out of curiosity, I suppose.
    OGY. Nay, upon the score of religion. «
    MEN. That religion, I suppose, the Greek tongue taught you. OGY. My wife’s mother had bound herself by a vow that if her daughter should be delivered of a live male child, I should go to present my respects to St. James in person and thank him for it.
    MEN. And did you salute the Saint only in your own name and your mother-in-law’s name?
    OGY. Nay in the name of the whole family.
    MEN. Truly I am persuaded your family would have been every whit as well if you had never complimented him at all. But prithee, what answer did he make you when you thanked him?
    OGY. None at 'all; but upon my tendering my present he seemed to smile and gave me a gentle nod with this same scallop shell.
    MEN. But why does he rather give those than anything else?
    OGY. Because he has plenty of them, the neighbouring sea furnishing him with them.
    MEN. O gracious saint that is both a midwife to women in labour and hospitable to travellers too! But what new fashion of making vows is this that one who does nothing himself shall make a vow that another man shall work? Put the case that you should tie yourself by a vow that I should fast twice a week if you should succeed in such and such an affair, do you think I’d perform what you had vowed?
    OGY. I believe you would not, altho’ you had made the vow yourself: for you made a joke of fobbing the saints off. But it was my mother-in-law that made the vow, and it was my duty to be obedient: you know the temper of women and also my own interest lay at stake.
    MEN. If you had not performed the vow what risk had you run?
    OGY. I don’t believe the saint could have laid an action at Law against me; but he might for the future have stopp’d his ears at my petitions or slily have brought some mischief or other upon my family; you know the humour of great persons.
    MEN. Prithee tell me how does the good man St. James do? And what was he doing?
    OGY. Why, truly, not so well by far as he used to be.
    MEN. What the matter, is he grown old?
    OGY. Trifler! You know Saints never grow old. No, but it is this new opinion that has been spread abroad thro’ the world is the occasion that he has not so many visits made to him as he used to have; and those that do come give him a bare salute and either nothing at all, or little or nothing else; they say they can bestow their money to better purpose upon those that