Travels with my Donkey

it is sometimes with cats,' I offered, and she shot a quick glance at Hanno. In the name of all that is holy, said the glance, who is this baby's arse of a man?
    The donkeys came to me again that night, massing snortily around the caravan as I pursued elusive sleep. A huff led to a puff, then to a bray and within a minute the formica walls around me were shaking to the nostrilled trumpets of a frenzied wind section. Was this a warning to safeguard their diminutive colleague? A hearty 'bon voyage'? Drawing the covers up to my taut features, I began to understand their dreadful orchestra. They were laughing at me.
     

Four

     
    A gricultural peasantry formed over 90 per cent of Europe's medieval population, and theirs was an almost claustrophobically tiny world. The hills girdling a village were its ultimate horizons, broached only for a rare trip to fair or market; a serf would live and die in the same house that had been home to his family for generations. What a thing, then, to step beyond this world, to walk and keep walking, to cross seas and cities, through lonely woodland stalked by wolves and brigands. To stand awed before ecclesiastical structures of unimagined might and splendour, to encounter alien realms of senseless words, bewildering customs, funny food. A leap of faith indeed. Try as I might not to, I could only contextualise the heroic recklessness that sent a pilgrim on his way by picturing Frodo and his hobbit mates setting forth from the Shire.
    No wonder that departing pilgrims were blessed by the local cleric and seen off by emotional fellow villagers, who'd typically accompany them for the first few miles. Nor indeed that it was considered poor form for a pilgrim not to have made provision for the future care of any dependants. How did they ever make it, there and back? For obvious reasons of security pilgrims always travelled in convoy, but even then the basics — navigation, shelter, provisions — can't have been any easier to sort out. With a motley crew of road buddies, you'd have had the blind leading the blind, the deaf leading the Welsh, the thieves leading them all into a big hole covered over with branches. All those brave but clueless millions, tramping blithely through foreign field and forest seven hours or more a day.
    What they needed was a travel guide, and in 1137 they got one — no less than the world's first. 'Thanking you, sire,' breathed a humbly awed pilgrim as he weighed the Liber Sancti Jacobi in his filthy hands. 'Um, now can you read it out for us please?'
    Also known as the Codex Calixtinus in honour of the Pope to whom it was dedicated, the LSJ — or at least its pertinent practical chapters — is widely supposed the work of a French monk, Aimery Picaud. As a good holiday-brochure copywriter, Picaud's aim would have been to maximise interest in his destination by talking up its positives and glossing over any downsides. Regrettably for his readers, but rewardingly for us, Picaud was not a good holiday-brochure copywriter. After the magnificent deceits of a first paragraph in which he confidently decrees the 500-mile, trans-Iberian trek to Santiago as a thirteen-day walk, Picaud allows his quill to scratch and twitch to the darkest whim of xenophobic scaremongering.
    Having saluted at onerous length the qualities of his regional brethren — 'handsome, brave... vital and giving... these are the people of Poitou' — he vaults the Pyrenees with racial malice aforethought. You know what they say about Spanish food: eat beef, pork or even a tiny fish and 'you will no doubt die shortly after'. Most rivers were poisoned, their inviting waters instantly fatal to horses. And then there were the natives. Ferrymen invariably pushed their passengers out midstream; 'having laid their hands upon the spoils of the dead, they wickedly rejoice'. Crossing from France you'd meet the Basques, who 'dress poorly and eat disgustingly, from a single bowl', spoke in a language like 'the barking of dogs', and were 'ugly, corrupt, drunken, savage, impious and uncouth'.
    A Basque 'would kill a Frenchman for no more than a coin', perhaps a fate to be preferred to that awaiting any survivor encountering the residents of Navarre: 'Here they not merely rob pilgrims going to St James, but ride them as if they were asses.' Doubts as to the implications of this statement are laid to rest two pages on. 'It is told that the Navarrese affixes a lock to the behind of his mule or horse, so that no one