The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Gascoyne to Bordeaux and the Pyrenees.
    The pilgrims in the eighteenth century that plodded the road in their caravans and confraternities still sang their songs to give them courage, and it was in 1718 that a collection was made of ‘les chansons des pèlerins de St. Jacques ’. * One of the most rousing in the collection is that entitled ‘Ma Calebasse’:

    Sometimes the kings and dukes who visited the Apostle came as crusaders rather than pilgrims, as happened in the case of John of Gaunt, ‘Time-honoured Lancaster’. John of Gaunt married Constance, the eldest daughter of Pedro the Cruel, and after the death of Henry of Trastamara, with the authorization of the Pope, laid claim to the throne of Castile. The Pope gave the Duke the rights and privileges of a crusade, which in 1386 was proclaimed in St. Paul’s. When the expedition reached Corunna, or Coulogne as Froissart calls it in his quaint narrative, John of Gaunt resolved to impress Compostella that he and his English knights had come full of good will and rather as pilgrims to pray at the tomb of the Apostle. A deputation from Compostella then met the Duke and his knights and when they entered the city they went straight to the cathedral and made their prayers and offerings in great pomp. The lords and ladies of Santiago entertained them right royally, but, as Froissart says, of the guests,— ‘they founde there flesshe and strong wyne ynought, whereof the Englysshe archers dranke so moche that they were ofte tymes dronken, wherby they had the fevers, or elles in the mornyng theyr yedes were so evyl, that they coulde not helpe themselves all the day after.’ * Although Lancaster and Constance gave many receptions and met the townspeople of Compostella and the Galician noble families, and although their knights and squires ‘lyved at adventure where they might catche it’, the cause of John of Gaunt did not awaken any favourable response in Castile. Then in the summer of 1387 the Duke fell in a perilous sickness in the town of St. James, and often the rumour ran in Castile and in France that he was dead, ‘and surely he was in a great adventure of his life’. But St. James, so the people said, protected him because of Constance his wife, the daughter of Castile, and restored him to health, though he did not give him the kingdom.
    Another prominent traveller who visited Compostella in 1466, the Bohemian Baron Lev de Rozmital de Blatna, made no pretence like Lancaster of being a pilgrim: he deemed himself a man-at-arms, eager to study military discipline in foreign countries, but not averse to jot down his observations as a cultured traveller. Rozmital reminds us of Beckford; he travelled in the grand manner with forty retainers and fifty-two horses, and he is one of the first of the European tourists who has recorded his direct observations. With him was his friend Gabriel Tetzel who also published his account of his Spanish journey. * When the two arrived in Compostella, they found the cathedral in a state of siege, for the Archbishop Fonseca and his clerics were besieged there by the partisans of the Conde de Trastamara, Don Alvaro Paz Osorio. The townspeople, too, had risen and held the city, but the archbishop, aided by his mother and his brother had spurred on the clerics inside to barricade the doors and turn the cathedral into a fortress, following the example of Diego de Gelmirez and Queen Urraca in the twelfth century. Rozmital, who gives vivid details of the cows and horses stabled in the cathedral, and the men at arms cooking, dining and sleeping, as though bivouacking before a battle, was greatly shocked at the profanation he witnessed in Compostella.
    In normal times, however, travellers even in later centuries, refer to the bloody battles that would take place between groups of pilgrims who wished to station themselves in the most privileged position near the Apostle’s tomb, and things often came to such a pass that the archbishop was obliged to reconsecrate the cathedral. *
    The early travellers continually refer in their descriptions to the turbulent crowds of pilgrims that kept arriving at the cathedral night and day, and they strike a modern and familiar note when they describe conducted tours of loutish pilgrims tramping in serried crowds through the basilica, while the clerical cicerone, in vain, endeavours to make those on the outskirts of the mob hear his explanations. The pilgrims, like a herd of unruly sheep, push and