The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

strong drink of wine at the end of their long day’s tramping, before going to bed. ‘If they be Englishmen’, he adds, ‘ale should be their drink, for ale is a natural drink for an Englishman, even as beer is a natural drink for a Dutchman. As to wine, it doth actuate and doth quicken a man’s wits, it doth comfort the heart, it doth scour the liver’. Not even Merry Andrew’s contemporary, Falstaff, has said nobler words in praise of sherris-sack which makes ‘the brain apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes’, nor has George Borrow paid a greater tribute to the national drink of England than his fellow Romany Rye of the sixteenth century, who was the first to give us specimens of English Romani and the lure of Gypsy life. But Master Andrew condemned all excess, saying that ‘Intemperance is a great vice, for it doth set everything out of order, and where there is no order there is horror’. His twenty years as a Carthusian, in the

    strictest of all Orders, followed by his riotous living among the medical students of Montpellier, not only made him an excellent doctor, but gave him a philosophical outlook on life and developed the kindly qualities in his nature, which were shown in his good-natured behaviour to the nine English-Scottish pilgrims whom he accompanied to Compostella and back.
    In the second part of this double journey I have given memories from my diaries of 1954, the Holy Year, including incidents from the three former pilgrimages I made during the years 1924 to 1952.
    During my pilgrimage in 1954 I followed closely the route travelled by the elusive clerk, Aymery Picaud, the earliest known travel-writer on Spain and one of the most lively. Aymery, the Poitevin, by his chauvinism and his prejudices, reminds me, too, of George Borrow, but he also recalls Richard Ford by his ebullience of spirit and his practical recommendations to travellers. He passed the torch to a number of kindred spirits whose descriptions of the Jacobean pilgrimage still enchant us; not only Andrew Boorde, but also Laffi the Italian clerical pilgrim, Manier, the eighteenth-century peasant from Picardy, and a host of simple travellers, many of whom, if asked why they were setting out on their pilgrimage, would have answered in the words of the great Montaigne: ‘I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.’
    Their accounts fascinate us because after trudging all the way to Compostella and back and hanging up their tattered shoes in their local church like old Tom Coryate, and giving their scallop shells to their grandchildren as relics, they conclude that they are best off in their respective countries. Aymery with his friend Lady Gebirga returned with relief to their native Poitou where the wine is good and the people do not speak a foul patois. Doctor Andrew Boorde, like his fellow-traveller Borrow, discovered that the beer of old England tastes better than the wines of the Rioja and that the sight of a juicy sirloin whets the appetite more than the finest Spanish cocido.
    Such travellers’ tales and diaries from the twelfth to the nineteenth century are the antithesis to the modern guide-books, for the latter belong to a category which might be labelled ‘Travelling without Tears’, because they are designed to give the globe-trotter of today a fine supply of labels which he may stick on his mind and administer just the right dose of potted knowledge, enabling him to hustle and skim over frontier after frontier and return unscathed to his native land, comforting himself with the thought that he has not wasted a moment of his time and has been mercifully spared all adventure.
    In the age of Aymery de Picaud and Andrew Boorde every day was full of adventure, for Life was fierce in tooth and claw, and a pilgrim had to fight for his daily bread as well as pray for it, and though he mumbled to himself the Christian adage, ‘the Lord will provide’, he needed to be forewarned of the dangers lurking ahead.
    Today few have the time or the leisure to tramp to Santiago from the Rue St. Jacques in Paris to the Puerta Francigena in Compostella, and pilgrims arrive by train, by motor bus, even by aeroplane, thus emulating the feat of Saint James himself, when on one occasion he picked up a charitable pilgrim in the Pyrenees, who had stayed behind to tend his dying companion, and carried him on his flying charger in the twinkling of an eye and set him down on the