The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

part cf the inhabitants who refused to collaborate in his schemes for opening communications. When the bridge was finished the Saint built a hospital nearby, where he personally attended the pilgrims, and around this hospital grew the town which later took from the Saint the name, Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Kings vied with one another in dowering the town of St. Dominic: Alfonso VI gave money and land, which the Saint devoted to land reclamation and road-building; the Bishop of Calahorra and Nájera consecrated the original church and Alfonso I, ‘the Battler’, Alfonso VII and Alfonso VIII bestowed many privileges upon the city. *
    As soon as I arrived in the town I went to the cathedral whose majestic belfry towers over the city and can be seen as a distant landmark by the pilgrim approaching along the road from Nájera. Its work was begun in 1168 and was ready for religious services in 1180, and it is thus one of the first Gothic churches in Spain and is influenced by the architecture of the pilgrim roads of southern France. Inside a number of pilgrims were gathered round the shrine of St. Dominic which stands in the south transept. It is richly ornamented and has wrought-iron railings and the carvings represent scenes from the Saint’s daily life and his miracles: we see him building the bridge over the River Oja with the help of the people who are carrying the bricks on their shoulders, and among the miracles we see the celebrated one of the boy hanging from the gibbet, while his mother and father carrying their pilgrim staff stand forlornly by the side of St. Dominic: in another we see the cock and hen flying up off the table in vindication of the miracle.
    So important have the white cock and hen been to the Jacobean pilgrims arriving in Santo Domingo de la Calzada for the past four hundred and fifty years that they deserve explanation. Aymery Picaud, as we have shown, when describing the miracles on the Road of St. James in the second book of the Codex, refers to the German pilgrims, father and son, arrested at the instance of a rascally innkeeper at Toulouse who had planted a silver cup in the knapsack of one of them. After arrest, one was condemned to be hanged and the son who sacrificed himself for his father was resuscitated by St. James. That miracle, which was also related in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais and the Golden Legend of Voragine and was called ‘The Great Miracle’, assumed a more dramatic form in the fifteenth century by the introduction of the miracle of the white cock and hen. The first pilgrim who mentions the fowls was Nompar II, Lord of Caumont de Castelnau, who wrote a diary on the pilgrimage to Santiago he made in 1417. The story, which has been told and retold by every Jacobean pilgrim from 1417 to the present day, has been sung by minstrels and embroidered by poets down to the nineteenth century, when Robert Southey made it into a facetious Christmas tale for children. Of all the versions the quaintest and raciest comes from the pen of our good old friend ‘Merry Andrew’, Dr. Andrew Boorde, who tells it in his quaint sixteenth-century language:
    ‘There is a mother towne called saynt Domyngo, in the whyche towne there is a churche, in the whyche is kept a whit cock and a hene. And every pilgreme that goeth or commyth that way to saynct James in Compostell, hath a whit feder to set on hys hat.
    ‘The cock and the hen is kept there for this intent. There was a yonge man hanged in that towne that wolde have gone to saynct James in Compostell; he was hanged unistly; for ther was a wenche the whych wolde have had hym to medyll with her carnally; the yonge man refraynyng from hys dysyre, and the whenche repletyd with malice for the sayd cause, of an evyll pretence conneyed a sylver piece into the bottom of the younge mans skrip.
    ‘He wyth his father and mother, and other pylgrims, going forthe in theyer Jumey, the sayde whenche raysed offycers of the towne to persew after the pylgrims, and take them, fyndynge the aforesayd peace in the younge mans scryp; wherefore they brought to the towne the younge man; and [he] was condemned to be hanged and was hanged by-yonde see, shall never be cutte nor pulled downe, but shall hange styll on the galowes or Jebet.
    ‘The father and the mother of the yonge manne, with other of the pylgryms, went forthe in theyr pilgrymage. And when they returned agayne, they went to the sayed galows to pray for the young mans