The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

morning in anticipation of Easter Sunday. I had hitherto seen the Easter Saturday rites, which possess such deep significance, celebrated in the early morning in sparsely filled churches, after the crowds on Good Friday, and I was surprised to find the church at Logroño crowded to the doors. The congregation were given booklets explaining the significance of the ritual, so that all might join in the responses. When it came to the kindling of the fire, the lights in the church were all extinguished except that of the Paschal candle, which gives light to the whole world. The priest then went to the door of the church and made fire with flint and tinder. And when he had blessed the Holy Water he divided it in four parts and sprinkled it to the four parts of the world, signifying that all men are called to baptism. Then he breathed three times on the water to impart to it the immortal spirit of the Holy Ghost, and after the font had been blessed the congregation renewed its baptismal vows.
    As I watched the huge congregation devoudy following step by step the complicated ritual and, joining in the responses, I wondered why a far greater attempt is not made by the priests in their churches to inspire their congregations more actively to participate in the less-known rituals of the Church, which are so dramatic and so beautiful. After the Midnight Mass I met in a neighbouring café a number of factory workers who had been my neighbours in the church. They all agreed that they had never attended a more beautiful or more devout religious celebration, and what moved them was the feeling that they were taking part with the priest in the ritual of their Church with its kindling of the Fire, blessing of the Holy Water and its Prophecies.

THE HORSE OF ST. JAMES

    The church of St. James in Logroño fascinated me, for above the portal rides the most defiant St. James the Moor-slayer I have ever seen. He is in full panoply of war and is about to sweep down from the clouds on destruction bent, and his warlike spirit reflects itself in his charger, a thundering stallion who snorts as aggressively as the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Grani of Brunhilde the Valkyrie. Gazing at the massive Jacobean steed I realized how the spirit of the warrior reflected itself in the horse he rode into battle. How intimate was that relationship between master and steed, we can learn from the mediaeval ballads describing the death of Spain’s national hero, the Cid, at Valencia. On his deathbed the hero commanded that his body be carried ‘in full armour upon his war horse Babieca to the church of San Pedro de Cardena near Burgos’. Another ballad describes the sad procession of knights and retainers tearing their hair, beating their breasts, throwing ashes on their brows, as they followed the corpse of the Cid, clad in full armour, mounted upon the loyal Babieca, and another ballad tells us ‘that the horse himself understood his sad mission and looked as crestfallen as the mourners’.
    According to Spanish chivalry the horse prolonged the legs of the knight, and such was the companionship between the steed and cavalier that the mediaeval warrior would tether his horse in the tent where he slept with his wife. Whereas the dog was considered the emblem of fidelity and was represented on the tombstones sleeping at the feet of his master, the horse was regarded with deeper comradeship, as we know from Cortés and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who in their chronicles say again and again: ‘After God we owed the victory to the horses.’
    The prolonged war against the Moors influenced the Spaniards in their attitude towards the horse, and they learned more from the Moslems than the Moslems learned from their Christian conquerors. The ancient riding style of the knights was called a la brida and the horseman sat erect, riding with long stirrup leathers. The Moorish method was called a la gineta and when the Moors were expelled from Spain they left their saddles and their style of riding with short stirrups and legs bent backwards, for, as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega says in his chronicle of the Conquest of Peru, ‘my country was won a la gineta, that is, by men riding in the fashion of the Moors’. * Nevertheless the Christian knights mastered both ways of riding, and it became the highest praise to say of a cavalier that he could ride well in both saddles, and as the great expert Don Roberto Cunninghame Graham tells us, the fact was even cut upon