‘And did those feet...’
TO make a pilgrimage was the fun part of religion in medieval England, as Chaucer reveals in the Rabelaisian adventures stacked up with his Canterbury Tales. Yet it was also a physical journey to the site of a shrine or miraculous event—an apparition of the Virgin Mary or the discovery of a holy cross—with the aspiration of attaining some sort of encounter with the divine.
The famous pilgrimage abbeys encased beneath their Gothic vaults the relics of a saint or a sacred object—in Waltham Abbey, for example, a jet-black cross of flint that had been found 150 miles away at sacred Glastonbury. The abbeys underwent continuous embellishment driven by centuries of devotional gift giving, for everyone understood that a saint who had answered a prayer had to be rewarded with a respectful visit of thanks and a votive gift—anything from a beeswax candle to an entire estate signed and sealed with a charter.
A pilgrimage also offered the chance for an intercession—perhaps for a wished-for child, a cure or a successful war. It served, too, as an act of contrition for a public crime or a private sin.
The holiday atmosphere of the journey would gradually subside as the company approached the shrine and the carnival transformed into a three-day
