The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

in turban, the other is a Christian, but both take part in a friendly consort of viols. Such a picture illustrates the tolerant humanism of King Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, who was the first European monarch interested in secularizing culture, and consulted Moorish and Jewish as well as Christian sources when expressing his vast knowledge in the Romance tongue.
    Emile Mâle, who discovered, to his astonishment, architectural devices in the Mosque of Córdoba, which coincided with certain traits he had observed in the Romanesque monuments in France, eventually came to the conclusion that at all the principal stages on the roads of Saint James expressions could be found of Moslem art which the Christians were unable to forget. And he adds that although Arab Spain had not given to Romanesque art more than a number of ornamental patterns, it was due to them that the great epic of the pilgrimage to Santiago is written on the façades of those ancient churches along the Spanish road: it is written on the transept of Cluny, on the bell-tower of the church of Charité-sur-Loire, and on the façade of Notre Dame de Paris. 1
    Professor Ringsley Porter, in his great work states that the pilgrimage united the art of all Europe and even Asia, but that the most important contribution to mediaeval art was the group of sculptures produced in the twelfth century along the lower portion of the road to Santiago. 2
    Even more vivid are the memories of the Jacobean pilgrimages that have descended to us in epic poems, chronicles, hymns, lyric poems, songs and tales of adventure written by those who plodded the road to far off Galicia and, on their return to their country, wrote their story in quaint language which today makes fascinating reading, for each writer describes lois own personal experiences on the road ‘on which millions of shoes were worn out, and infinities of feet were blistered’, or like Master William Wey of Eton College, who went by sea to Galicia, in 1456, advising future pilgrims to equip themselves before starting out with a barrel of water for their cabin, ‘a lytel cawdron and fryying pan, dyshes, cuppys and such nessaryes’, and adding on the fly-leaf of his manuscript the following Latin tag as a parting piece of advice: Si fere vis sapiens sex serva quae tibi mando; Quid loqueris et ubi, de quo, cui, quomado, quando, which has been translated:

    If your life would keep from slips,
    Five things observe with care:
    Of whom you speak, to whom you speak,
    And how, and when, and where.

    Salutary advice indeed and no less pertinent today than in the. fifteenth century.
    Many of the mediaeval stories concern the lives of kings, for most of the monarchs of Christendom at some time or other in their lives, travelled the Jacobean road. For example Jaime de Aragon, surnamed ‘the Conqueror’ after his conquest of the Balearic Islands: at birth his mother resolved to name him after an Apostle. Accordingly she obtained twelve candles of equal size and called each one after one of the Twelve Disciples. She then lit all the candles at the same time, but the candle bearing the name of Saint James outlasted all the others ‘by a good three finger’s breadth’. So she called the little prince Jaime, and all his life he was a devotee of the Son of Zebedee.
    In the Middle Ages there were pilgrims like St. Godric of Norfolk, who gave up piracy after his visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and'on his way back to England called in at Compostella. His singularity as a pilgrim was that he brought his mother on his journeys, and he was wont to bear her on his shoulders, but when she left London on the pilgrimage she took off her shoes and walked bare-foot all the way. And according to Reginald of Durham, who wrote the life of Saint Godric, mother and son met a strange woman of ‘wondrous beauty’ on their journey, who every night would wash their feet, and Godric discovered that their companion was none other than the Blessed Virgin herself to whom he prayed for consolation in his privations and from whom he learnt songs and hymns.
    In those days kings and warriors as well as saints' believed that Saint James lying in his tomb at Compostella was still a living personality whom they would address at the moment of battle, as did the heroic Scottish warrior Lord James Douglas:

    The Good Sir James, the dreadful Douglas,
    That in his dayes so wise and worthie was,
    Wha here, and on the infidels in Spain,
    Such honour, praise and triumphs