The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

thought the cause was anno Domini, pampered living and lack of exercise, and that my Spartan pilgrim life would harden my feet. The pain, however seemed to increase in intensity during my slow tramping with the two French pilgrims. Perhaps they are ‘gafe’, thought I, and have put the evil eye on me. I then turned to my old friend, St. Nicholas of Bari, whose manna had proved so efficacious when I had walked the Via Appia from Taranto to Brindisi in 1919. Alas I had no bottles of his oil in my knapsack and all I could remember of his charm was four lines from the beginning:

    Sospitati dedit aegros
    Olei perfusio,
    Nicolaus naufragantum
    Adfuit praesidio
    (The sick are given health by the miraculous oil and St. Nicholas saved those in danger of shipwreck.)

    My pain, however, was not only sore feet, of that I was sure, for there were no blisters and the skin was not broken. Perhaps I was getting gout or rheumatoid arthritis. When I spoke of my sore feet to the bearded pilgrim he answered at once: “There is only one thing for you to do: go straightway to Lourdes. Your feet will be healed in the pool. My son has great faith in Lourdes and we are going there. But you must jump the first lorry to Toulouse where, you will be easily able to get a lift.” A few minutes later when we saw a lorry approaching he stood in the middle of the road waving his arms. When the lorry stopped he told a wonderful sob-story about my feet and I was hoisted into the lorry beside the driver and I said a regretful farewell to my pilgrim companions.

TOULOUSE AND ST. SERNIN

    When we reached Toulouse and I was deposited by the good Samaritan of a lorry-driver in the Boulevard de Strasbourg I felt indeed forlorn, for it was raining cats and dogs and my feet were as painful as if I had just received the bastonado. Hobbling along with the aid of my stick through the rain, I found my way to the Cathedral of St. Sernin, which stands in its own square off the rue St. Bernard, near the Boulevard. The sight of the huge massive church looming out of the mist on that rainy afternoon was as welcome to me as the Pole Star. It was one of my chief halting-places in my pilgrimage. I remember the words of my lamented friend Kingsley Porter, in his epoch-making book. 24
    ‘The Pilgrimage’, he says, ‘united the art of all Europe and even Asia, but the most important contribution to mediaeval art was the group of sculptures produced in the twelfth century along the lower portion of the Road of St. James. By that road travelled the artistic forms of Lombardy together with the Lombard pilgrims and intimately related to the road was the type of Romanesque cloister with twin columns supporting arches with pillars in the angles.’ ‘In consequence’, continues Kingsley Porter, ‘a single style spreads from Santiago along the pilgrim road to Toulouse, Moissac and Conques, but we should look in vain for the creative centre, even though the importance of Santiago is greater than of Toulouse, for the same sculptors were employed in both.’
    What struck me about St. Sernin’s, as I walked up the nave, was its immense original size. It is one hundred and fifteen metres in length and thirty-two metres and a half broad, including its double aisles on each side, and only the cathedral at Compostella surpasses it in the length of its transepts. According to a local chronicle, the consecration of the church and the high altar was made in 1096 by Pope Urban II, in the presence of Count Raymond of St. Gilles and many nobles from the South of France and fifteen French and Spanish Bishops. 25 Gómez Moreno believes that the decorative work of the Sanctuary of St. Sernin was done by one master, the sculptor Bernardus Gelduinus, the sculptor of the cloisters of Moissac, whose signature appears on the marble altar table. 26 From the early Middle Ages, therefore, attention was paid by the authorities to the necessity of accommodating large numbers of pilgrims, and this is shown at St. Sernin by the addition of double aisles on each side to accommodate the multitude. In the Guide of the twelfth-century Aymery Picaud tells the story how the original church was built upon the ruins of an abbey raised at the end of the fourth century to house the body of St. Sernin or Saturnin, the first Bishop of Toulouse and Apostle of Languedoc, who suffered martyrdom: he was dragged by a bull from the Capitol of Roman
    Toulouse to the spot where the Augustinian Abbey afterwards was