The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

soule.
    ‘When they dyd come to the place, the younge man did speke and sayd: “I am not ded: God and his servants saynt James hathe here preserved me alive. Therefor go you to the iustis of the towne, and byd him come hyther and let me down.” Upon the which wordes, they went to the Justice, he syttyng at supper, havyng in his dyshe two greate chykens; the one was a hen chick, and the other a cock chyk.
    ‘The messengers shewyng him this wonder, and what he should do, the iustice sayd to them: “this tale that you have shewed me is as treue as these two chekenes before mee in thys dysshe doth stonde up and crowe.” And as sone as the wordes ware spoken, they stode in the platter, and dyd crowe; where upon the Justice, wyth processyon, did fetche in alyve from the galows, that sayd young man. And for a remembrance of this stupendyouse thynges, the prestes and other credyble persons shewed me that they do kepe styl in a kaig in the church a white cocke and a hen.’
    And Dr. Andrew Boorde, whom we discovered to be so sceptical a pilgrim and who denied the presence of St. James’s body in Compostella, does not, as we should have expected, express incredulity at the miracle of the cock and hen, for he adds gravely: ‘I did see a cock and a hen ther in the churche, and do tell the fable as it was tolde me, not of three or IIII parsons, but of many.’
    The Seigneur of Caumont, who was the first to mention the fowls, says of the pair in the cage: ‘Je les ay veuz de vray et son toux blancs’, 37 and in 1495 the German pilgrim Hermann Kiinig writes that God, he believes, may perform miracles, and he adds: ‘I know it is not a lie that they escape from the roasting-jack, for I myself saw the room where they were roasted.’ * And even Manier the peasant pilgrim from Picardy, in the age of Voltaire, asserts that the shirt of the pilgrim was preserved in the church as a pious relic and he gives a drawing of the wooden gibbet which hung on a wall below a window.
    While I was examining the carvings on the shrine of the prince of road-menders a French pilgrim with cloak and water-bottle and carrying a stout stick came up to me excitedly and asked me in a loud whisper to tell him where were the cock and hen of St. Jacques: to which I replied:
    “Au fond de l’église en haut derrière la grille.”
    “Mais Monsieur la cage est vide!”
    “Pas possible!”
    “Venez voir vous même. Ah! quelle désillusion! Tout le long du chemin avec nos compagnons je frédonnais la Grande Chanson des Pèlerins de St. Jacques.”
    With that the worthy pilgrim began to hum in a low voice:

    “Quand nous fûmes à Saint-Dominique,
    Hélas! mon Dicu,
    Nous entrames dedans l’église
    pour prier Dieu;
    Le miracle du pèlerin
    par notre adresse;
    avons ouï le coq chanter
    dont nous fûmes bien aise.”

    I led the French pilgrims to the cage on which the two fowls are painted, expecting to hear the two of them inside the grating clucking and scratching to their hearts’ content, but to my surprise on this occasion, the cage was empty. I then went up to one of the priests, a rosy, jovial old man and enquired what had happened to the miraculous chickens of Santo Domingo. The old priest looked at us quizzically and said: “Come with me.” He led us along a passage out into a courtyard where a number of white fowls were preening themselves in the sun.
    “Aquí los tienen Vds,” said he, “you may make your choice. Surely you don’t think we would be so cruel as to shut the poor cock and hen in the dark cage while the weather is so cold and the mountains are covered with snow. When May comes round and the weather is nice and warm you’ll hear them clucking and crowing during the Mass itself in celebration of the Saint’s feast on May the twelfth.”
    I learnt many details about the sacred fowls from the good-natured old priest. He told me that the fowls lived seven years and that it was customary to renew them on the twelfth of May, the feast of the saintly patron of the city. His information tallied with that given by Philip II’s guardsman, Enrique Cock, who in his Jornada de Tarazona (1592) says that every seven years a new cock and hen are produced for the cathedral ad perpetuam Dei memoriam. *
    The priest, to make up for our disappointment at not finding the fowls in their accustomed place, brought us over to the side wall and showed us hanging below the window a piece of wood which was supposed to have formed part of the