The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

butt their way through the dark aisles, stumbling over penitents kneeling outside the confessionals, asking from all and sundry where they were supposed to go for a certificate of confession or Communion, how much money they had to have in hand for this or that ceremony. And as the restless crowd moved about, the everyday congregation, in the centre stood silent, following the celebrant of the Mass at the high altar. In the vast shadowy spaces of the basilica there sounded a perpetual whispering from the confessionals and now and then the insistent tinkling of sacring bells at minor altars.
    Among the many different classes of pilgrims who gathered in the Cathedral of Compostella, none were more picturesque than the minstrels or juglares who haunted all the road of the Apostle from France into Spain. From the Codex Calixtinus or Codex Sancti Jacobi, we learn the importance given to music at Compostella. In it we find a hymnary of the Apostle with both words and music, and the author describes how when the pilgrims came from all parts of the world, including Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, they filled the cathedral ‘in ordered phalanx’, and while some played upon their native instruments and others held candles, they chaunted devout lays. And the author adds that the pilgrims most remarkable for their singing were the Teutons, the Greeks and the English. They all sang the celebrated refrain of the Pilgrims’ Song of Santiago:

    Herru Sanctiagu
    Grot Sanctiagu,
    E ultreja e sus eja!
    Deus adjuva nos.

    A reading of this song was made by the expert Canon Tafall and runs as follows:

    This ‘Canto de Ultreja’ has been performed in modern times sung in unison and is most impressive when the voices of a mighty choir of pilgrims shout the barbaric refrain. It was always a tradition for the pilgrims to sing at the gates of the cathedral, and this custom lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. * In the Jubilee Year of 1868 (when St. James’s Day fell on a Sunday) the Puerta Santa was opened to the sound of the traditional hautboys or Chirimías, while a band in the cathedral played a march by Chiodi an Italian composer who had been Maestro de Capilla a century before. At dusk a number of blind singers sang at the gate of the cathedral; they sang again at succeeding jubilee years but by 1897 the tradition had disappeared and only one old lady could be found who remembered any of the old songs. One of the old songs she remembered was sung in dialogue between two groups of voices and described the defeat of Don Rodrigo and the beginning of the reconquest with the Battle of Covadonga, the tribute of the hundred virgins and events from the Myth of St. James.
    Then in 1914, in the binding of a fourteenth-century manuscript of Cicero’s De Ojficiis, a collection of ancient Galician songs were discovered. They were the Siete Canciones de Amor of Martin Codax, a Galician minstrel who was a native of Vigo. Martin Codax was more of a troubadour than a juglar but according to Canon Tafall, his melodies are genuinely Galician in feeling, for they have the free rhythm of plain-song and the grace of the characteristic Alalás sung in remote parts of Galicia even today. The tradition of music at Compostella owed a great deal to Archbishop Gelmirez, who was a great patron of minstrels, and so enjoyed their singing at his meals, that in his banqueting hall he ordered sculptured groups of musicians to be carved upon the walls. Furthermore, the tradition among the minstrels of leaving musical offerings in the cathedral goes back to the great archbishop under whose aegis worked Maestro Mateo, creator of the supreme masterpiece of Compostella, the Portico de la Gloria, whose twenty-four ancients playing their instruments might be called the Orchestra of Paradise.
    Many pilgrims at the end of their long pilgrimage would murmur the proverb of St. Bernard: “Le pèlerin à son pais sospiret et à son pais tent.” If they were poor they were allowed to beg at the feet of the archbishop for alms to the amount of two liards or one cuarto which would serve as viaticum. The return journey was more rapid, and some made it by boat from Corunna to Bordeaux. Most made their way on foot by Corunna (where there was a celebrated hospital for the sick), Ferrol, Cape Ortegal, and so on towards Oviedo, where they felt bound to visit the Cámara Santa, if they had not paid their respects to El Salvador on their way to Santiago. We do not