The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

of Alfonso El Sabio, too, has many provisions for the protection of pilgrims against innkeepers who overcharge, mayors of towns, lords of lands, and robbers. At the Council of Valladolid in 1312 the Church laid it down that the rector and parish priests should extend charity to all poor clerics and pilgrims, and ensure that they should be adequately housed on the way. University professors, too, received special privileges when they became pilgrims, for according to the Constitutions of Salamanca in 1422, a professor might be lawfully excused from reading (i.e. giving his lectures) if he was on a pilgrimage to the threshold of St. James ( peregrinationis ad litnina Sancti Jacobi). 21 Also a special moratorium was granted to a debtor if he was absent on a pilgrimage. As much as a year’s moratorium was granted in the case of wills, if one of the beneficiaries was on a pilgrimage.
    We can gauge the number of Slovenian pilgrims who must have journeyed to Compostella in the Middle Ages by the fact that they gave their name in Italian, Spanish and in English to the long pilgrim’s shaggy garment the schiavina, esclavina or slaveyn, which was also worn by the nomadic Gypsies. The Slovenians made a practice of taking part in the pilgrimages for three successive years, for in their country a man who had made three trips might live exempt from taxation. They would arrive at the end of April so as to be present in the sanctuary on May Day and when they reached their third year and had fulfilled their vow they paraded in solemn procession wearing garlands on their heads. 22
    So important did the pilgrimage become politically in the fourteenth century that it was included in the terms of treaties between one country and another, as in the case of the treaty signed on Christmas Eve, 1326, between the King of France and Count Louis of Flanders and the Flemish cities, wherein it is stipulated that three hundred persons of Bruges and Cambrai must go on pilgrimage, one hundred to St James, one hundred to St. Gilles and one hundred to Rocamadour.
    Occasionally, however, in early times we do find a critical attitude towards pilgrimages, as, for instance, in the Capitularies of Charlemagne where perpetual pilgrimage (which had been prescribed by the Council of Oviedo for certain offences) was forbidden because it ruins the man and creates the tramp. In the twelfth century, too, when Archbishop Hildebut received a letter from Foulques, Count of Anjou and Maine, informing him that the Count wished to set out on the pilgrimage, he replied that gadding abroad, was not among the talents that the master of the house divides among his servants, and he concludes his letter by advising the Count to stay at home in his palace, to live for his State, do justice, and protect the poor and the churches. *

RELICS AND SHELLS

    English royal pilgrims to Compostella go back to an early date. William the Conqueror rode into battle at Hastings on a horse brought to him from Spain by a knight who had been a pilgrim to Santiago. And the cult of St. James passed from William to his granddaughter, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and wife of the Emperor Henry V of Germany. After the death of her husband in 1125 at Utrecht, she brought back from Germany to England a relic of the hand of the Apostle, and Henry I was so overjoyed at possessing so precious a relic that he founded the Abbey of Reading and conceded to it the privilege of putting the Jacobean scallop shells on its coat of arms. * The relic remained in the monastery until the Dissolution in 1538. How the Saint’s relic reached Germany before it passed into the possession of the Empress Matilda remains a mystery, but we must remember that among kings, dukes and prelates all over the world in the Middle Ages there was a positive craze to possess some portion or other of the anatomy of a celebrated saint, for it was generally believed that even the smallest fragment of the saint’s bones could operate miracles, and martyrs if invoked possessed the power of intercession. No greater proofs were there of the popularity of St. James than the distribution and multiplication of the parts of his body. *
    An interesting sidelight on the behaviour of saintly clerics in the matter of relics is thrown by the Historia Compostelana, written in the days of Gelmirez, which describes how Mauricio, Archbishop of Braga, with infinite resource, succeeded in abstracting secretly from a church in Jerusalem the head of the