The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

the hand which holds the pen with unconscious grace, ready to write down the gentlest prayer.’ *
    Rubén says that Berceo’s verse has both freedom and dignity and like the gerfalcon returns to his master’s wrist bringing from the blue sky rhymes of gold:

    tiene la libertad con el decoro
    y vuelve como al puño el gerifalte,
    trayendo del azul rimas de oro.

    And Machado writes of the mediaeval poet:

    His verse is grave and gentle; monotonous rows
    of winter poplars under a leaden sky,
    row after row like furrows in brown fallow land,
    and in the distance blue Castilian mountains....
    And it was he who said; no minstrel song is mine;
    what I have written is true history.

    So absorbed was I in my thoughts of Gonzalo de Berceo that I plodded up the road towards the monastery in a dream and paid no attention to the wind and the driving snow. When I arrived at the monastery gates I felt as if I had arrived at a mansion of the dead, for there was not a soul about. I rang again and again, but there was no answer. The wind moaned through the porch and the drifting snow covered me. “I have arrived at the wrong time,” said I to myself. “The whole community is at Mass in the chapel.” At length the door was opened by a lay brother and I was presented to a charming young monk who accompanied me round the monastery.
    The monastery was originally Benedictine in the thirteenth century, but it now belongs to the Recoletos, a branch of the Augustinian Order. The young monk and the Abbot, to whom I had a letter of introduction, showed me the ancient library, which contains incunabula and manuscripts of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, also the celebrated Becerro which is as venerable as our Domesday Book and contains the early history of all this part of Spain. There are also documents signed by the Catholic monarchs, and by Philip II and Philip III. I also visited the seminary of a hundred students who lead Spartan lives in this Escorial of Rioja with its chilly halls and draughty passages. Here, however, in the cloisters where once St. Dominic of Silos had studied, there has always existed a high standard of humanistic learning, and we remember how in the eleventh century the other Dominic, whom we call St. Dominic of the Causeway (Santo Domingo de la Calzada), when he sought admission here and in Valbanera, was denied for alleged illiteracy.
    The Abbot explained to me that above hi the valley was the original hermitage of the Saint and the first monastery called San Millán de Suso, and the surrounding hills were studded with caves which in the seventh century were inhabited by the hermits who gathered around the sanctuary of the Saint when San Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa, wrote the life of the great miracle-worker in the year 630. That upper church with its two narrow naves and its massive horseshoe arches, is a striking example of Mozarabic art and it was originally the burial-place of San Millán. Sancho El Mayor, King of Navarre, however, after driving out the Moors from all the land lying between the Pyrenees and the castle of Nájera to enable pilgrims to journey in peace along the road to Santiago, transferred the relics of San Millán to a more imposing monastery which he built lower down in the valley and gave it the name San Millán de Yuso.
    The Kings of Navarre and those of Castile conferred great privileges upon the monks of San Millán and gifts of land which became farm settlements, and villages were built under the protection of the great abbey. In the heyday of San Millán the towns and villages of pjoja, Castile, Navarre, Biscay and Alava enriched the monastery by their gifts in kind: some gave sheep, others oxen, wine, wheat, fish olive oil, wax and iron. It was said that every peasant and nobleman in Castile was a taxpayer to San Millán and contributed to the votive offerings which corresponded to the votive offerings to Santiago. *
    The monastery of San Millán possessed the most celebrated scriptorium in north Spain in the tenth century, and how high was the standard exacted from the scribes and limners appears in the admonitions of the renowned Velasco and Sisebuto taken from a manuscript of that century. Idleness was severely castigated, for any copyist who stopped work for half an hour was suspended and received two stripes, and the master adds jocularly: “My friend, if you are capable of copying and limning twice, three times or four times better, you must do so if you want to