The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

gallows from which the youthful pilgrim was hanged. As I was the only one in the party who spoke Spanish I expressed my gratitude to our good-natured cicerone for showing us round, but there were black looks from my French companions. They were unimpressed by the piece of wood from the hanged pilgrim’s gibbet and did not consider it adequate compensation for having been defrauded of the miracle of the white cock and hen.
    “Pendant tout le pèlerinage nous n’avons rêvé que de cela,” they cried again in querulous chorus.
    “He might at least have given us white feathers from one of the fowls to put in our hats,” said the leader who had hummed ‘la Grande Chanson’.
    The real reason for their disappointment, I then discovered, was that it had always been the tradition among French Jacobean pilgrims to push crumbs of bread with the tips of their staves into the church cage for, according to their superstitious belief, if the cock and the hen ate the crumbs the pilgrims would arrive safe and sound at Compostella, but if the fowls did not eat them the pilgrims would die on the Road of St. James.
    “At last I have met pilgrims who are more superstitious than I am, and yet they come from the country of Voltaire!” said I to myself as the French pilgrims continued to denounce the cathedral clergy for failing to observe their local ritual. As for the inhabitants of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, they accept the miracle as an article of faith, and in May for five days they live under the ‘demon’ of their tribal hero who has done more good and made more money for the town by the myth and ritual that have spread from his tomb in the past eight hundred years than he did during his lifetime when he cleared the forest, laid the road and built the bridge.
    The cock and the hen miracle was a godsend to the town, for it led to a revival of pilgrim interest in the Saint’s old road from Nájera to Burgos on which traffic had diminished in the fourteenth century, when many of the foreign Jacobeans followed other routes, and certain sceptical historians attribute the spate of miracles that took place at the tomb of St. Dominic in the fifteenth century, especially that of the white cock and hen, to the propaganda campaign of the innkeepers on the road who needed more rich pilgrims to fleece.
    Miss King, in her account of the miracle, says that the story of the chickens offers a very delicate instance of a mytho-poetic process and was probably invented après coup to explain some Roman relief discovered in the twelfth century somewhere along the Roman street near the town, and she refers to the Roman relief discovered in the Rhineland which shows all the dramatis personae of the Spanish legend including the roasted fowl on the table. The tablet, she suggests, belongs to the cult of Mithras. *
    There are, it is true, elements in the story which show ancient precedents. The silver cup, which was secredy slipped into thë pilgrim’s scrip, has its precedent in the Book of Genesis where Joseph does likewise to his brother Benjamin. There have also been many precedents for the man cut down while alive from the gallows. As to the resuscitated cock it is not necessary to go to Mithraistic ritual for a precedent. We have one in the widely spread story of the cock that rose from the dead to crow against Judas Iscariot, and there is also the cock whose crowing made St. Peter weep bitterly. But these precedents are just as miraculous as the story told at Santo Domingo of the roasted fowls and do not help us to explain the story.
    For an explanation we have to go to a rare Spanish pamphlet of the sixteenth century entitled Probadas Flores Romanas which the bibliophile son of Christopher Columbus bought at Valencia for two reales in August, 1513. The pamphlet, however, is older, for the Spanish text is a translation from the Italian. *
    The pamphlet is a hotchpotch compiled, as the author tells us, for ‘health and comfort in human life’ and begins with a list of the current mediaeval remedies for the plague, which had reached its climax in 1348. It also includes tricks and games that must have amused many a home circle or gathering of guests in an inn on a winter evening when they drew their stools round the fire and mine host passed round the porron of wine. Among the tricks described by the author is one which resembles the cock and hen miracle. The author defines the trick as follows: ‘How it is possible to make a chicken