Pilgrimage Sample

It's Thanksgiving. And before we get to the next episode, which is going to feature a lot of Anselm, of which I'm very thankful for, but I'm also very thankful that he's not alive today.

First, on the members feed, we're talking about pilgrims and not the buckles on your hat kind of pilgrim, but the earlier type. Here's a sample.

But we're talking about pilgrimage, and we're bringing this up in the context of the Crusades for a couple of reasons. The Crusaders saw themselves as going on a type of pilgrimage.

This was some sort of in their mind, and we'll go into this. An armed pilgrimage, as well as

an evolution of pilgrimage.

They also saw themselves as one of the narratives around why the Crusades were necessary was to protect pilgrimage and protect pilgrims.

So in order to understand the Crusades, you really have to understand what this practice is.

And I think just to understand this period, you really have to understand pilgrimage because it was really important to the culture. Right.

So to do this topic properly, we just have to kind of go back and admit that pilgrimage is not a medieval practice exclusively. It's not a Christian practice exclusively.

It's kind of amazing that people, humans, kind of love the concept of traveling and going to a place in order to have a spiritual experience.

It's hard to find a culture or a time where we're not seeing evidence of some version of this practice going on.

We think Stonehenge was a place that people were traveling to under,

you could call it a pilgrimage.

We have burials there from people who are thousands of miles away, was where they actually lived, and they seem to be traveling here probably for some sort of spiritual religious experience or purpose.

That would be a pilgrimage. Today, we have multiple religions that pilgrimage is still central to how they practice their religion,

the Hajj being one of the most famous examples, but but by no means is it that exclusive. Some of the pilgrimage spots that we will talk about today are still visited by Christian pilgrims.

So it's still a modern practice. And hilariously, they do some of the exact same actions at these same pilgrim sites.
So when we talk about this, think about it as a,

I see this as a fundamentally human practice. that takes a very particular shape during the medieval period.
And it both informs a lot about how we do religious practice today, even.

There's direct lines of practices and behaviors that go all the way through. But also, there's just something,

it's interesting to me that humans keep returning to this, basically. So, think about it in this broader cultural,

I'm not sure what word I'm looking for here. Let's just say just holistic.
It's not terribly peculiar, even if there are like some peculiar specifics ways that the medieval Christian did pilgrimage.

Right. Now, in the Christian context, Christian Western pilgrimages started almost immediately upon the start of Christianity.

There was an immediate desire to go to places that were associated with Jesus and other parts of what became the New Testament as early as 200, 300 AD.

So almost instantly, you have people traveling to gain insight, usually to the Holy Land

and to specific places in Jerusalem to get closer to Christ and what's being told as the story of his life. But it really takes off after Constantine.

He builds the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and that becomes the penultimate from there on site of pilgrimage for Christianity.

And from there, pilgrimage picks up and becomes a religious spiritual mainstay in Christianity going forward. And that's also the start of another type of pilgrimage.

So basically what happens is during this fourth century explosion of Christian pilgrimage, there were, they call them the Desert Fathers. These were basically

early mystics

who go to asceticism is a big thing in Christianity, which is the removal of yourself from sort of worldly comforts.

And there are many Christian mystics and holy people who go to an ascetic lifestyle. It's this repeated tradition in Christianity that people keep coming back to.

There was a big mode of it in the fourth century where you've got a bunch of holy men who first go to Jerusalem, but then sort of spread out into the desert, particularly around like out towards Egypt, and just sort of live as like mystic hermits.

It looks very much like the sort of story we have of like Buddhist or kung fu masters that sit up in the mountains.

of China where people travel to them for wisdom. People were kind of doing this in the Christian tradition for a little bit.
Fun. From these desert fathers.
So these guys just lived out in the

desert. Go and learn about Jesus and also the five-fingered punch.
Probably not the second one, but definitely about Jesus. Which is just to say, what happens is that is the sort of start of

where Christian pilgrimage goes, which is you have the main one, the big holy of holies, which is in Jerusalem. But then you have these secondary, tertiary, rolling other destinations.

And these first one were these desert fathers.

You could pilgrim to these guys who became sort of famous.

And that kicks off everything else from there.

While also melding with an existing sort of traveling spiritual practice that happens in Western Europe, was happening in Western Europe already, which is to say that it was already something that people did in very peculiar, localized ways that were broadly familiar, but locally very specific, of going to spaces that were considered spiritual or holy or magic for various other purposes.

Right.

So, health, good luck,

all that kind of stuff.

Various pagan practices where you would go to a place where it was associated with a particular deity or maybe some sort of mythical creature or being who would maybe grant you wishes or grant you hexes in some cases.

But as Europe gets Christianized, the practice stays, but the places become that, yeah, they they or they become

renarrated.

And I think there's a big story that that's like cynical or hidden at all times. Like,

oh, we know this isn't Christian. We're just continuing our old ways by going back to this spring or whatever, but we're going to give it a saint's name.
Right. That did happen in some cases.
Yeah.

But in other cases, it seems like, because this was over over 200, 300, 400 years. It gets forgotten.
Yeah, it's a natural progression.

But there is a suspicious number of saints associated with spiritual wells and

natural formations. There are tons of saints that are just straight pagan gods.
Like Bridget is one of them, where you're like, that's...

I mean,

you just stole a god.

Yeah, they get renarried often into martyrs. Martyrs were, especially in Western Europe, so Britain, France, Germany, etc.

Early Christians who were martyred, where they died or where they were buried were often some of these first local pilgrimage sites. Right.

And again, it keeps exploding from there. So locally in Britain, Bede actually describes Germanus going to St.
Albans as early as 429, suggesting that there was a church there to be visited.

And it seems like pilgrim activity to St. Albans is contiguous from that point on, which is 1500 years worth of pilgrimage activity.

So that is just to say, pilgrimage was this sort of like on the landscape, almost ubiquitous. And what that did as we go into the medieval period is

understanding of spiritual life is really revolving around the idea of pilgrimage, the idea of moving through space, of leaving your home, and that spiritual experiences are tied indelibly to a place, not to the self.

And that becomes one of those tensions as we move into, once we move past medieval is what changes, partly from the Protestant Reformation.

So that's partly why we need to understand this pilgrimage thing, because it's going to peak in the 12th century, kind of decline, and then be one of those ideological points of breaking as we move into the modern era.

This all means that the like the picture of pilgrimage in the medieval era is actually pretty complex and really broad.

So, I'll say pilgrimage, and you might just be thinking traveling to Jerusalem, right? And that was the biggie,

but it's also this like almost daily small activity that exists too. And it doesn't seem that anyone was making a huge distinction between any of it.

Is this tied into how the church were really cheeky about how they handled religious service, where they're like, we'll do mass, but that's not for you, that's for us.

So, the public knew there was a God, very much believed there was a God, had no access to any of it. It was all cloistered away.

And so all you got is like, you know, fish is out there, but you can't go and talk to the members of fish. You're not allowed to.
So you just follow them around

at these shows. They just go to the show.

I mean, I think, sure, that's not the metaphor I'd pick. But yes, I actually think that's a big takeaway here is, especially for lay people,

this was the main spiritual practice that they could directly engage in. And that's partly why it was so important.

Yeah, you had an entire class of people whose entire purpose in life was to be like, no, God is present, present in the world. Well, cool, can we see him? No, that's not for you.
Like, that would be.

It would be like having Gandalf around and him being like, yeah, no, I can do wild shit. And I, you know, I fight ballrogs, it's crazy.
Well, can I see it? No, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this was the main way for people to experience the divine for themselves if they weren't part of the professional religious order.

Yeah, um, and that's why I think you have all the way from this really, these really micro experiences, all the way to the big pilgrimage, which is going all the way to Jerusalem.

And when I mean micro, I mean micro. Uh,

what was very common and what became later one of the basis for how we just do holidays, period, is

it was common for if there was, because basically where you were going for smaller pilgrimage were various shrines associated with saints. Right.

And the lore around these shrines were often very like almost openly magical, essentially.

And they were legion. And you had very local ones with very like esoteric, weird local stories.

Like in a lot of cases, they're almost indistinguishable from fairy stories, except for there's like a saint in front of their name.

But what would happen, one of the bigger ways

spiritual life was going down in a medieval village or, you know, local medieval region is you would have many pilgrimages from the center of the town out to

um the shrine at the that were often a cemetery in the suburb of the city. And what that turned into were the processions that then turned into the saint days.
Right.

So this was the start of the calendar of saints and

like religious holidays where the mini pilgrimages that were literally just like a 20-minute walk from the center of the town to the outside of the town to the shrine. Right.

And from there, almost every length of

space

would find itself another level of pilgrimages. So it was very common to take a day and a half pilgrimage to, you know, a known local shrine, or you could take a week, or

if you were more adventurous and you were really taking

a more formal pilgrimage, you might take a year to go, you know, truly abroad to

one in France or one in Germany if you were living in Britain, say. And people were less likely to move into Britain,

but because it's, there was, there is a sort of like general flow from the outskirts of Christendom down towards Jerusalem.

So often, if you're truly taking the road to Jerusalem, you would be visiting shrines along the way. Is this also

tied into, like, whenever we look at archaeology,

whenever we look at human movement, we always drastically underestimate travel and underestimate contact with like just the general wonderlust of humanity. We underestimate it repeatedly.
And like,

was pilgrimage also functioning, not for everybody, obviously, but for some people, as a way to indulge in wonderlust in a way that was more socially acceptable and safer because you did have certain protections when you're a pilgrim?

Sort of like, whenever I see

tourists come to Portland, I'm always like, why?

Why?

What do we even have? Why are you here?

Whereas, like, it makes perfect sense to me if somebody goes to like Disney World, because these days it's you have destination travel and that justifies your travel.

And obviously, not everybody does that kind of travel, but like that, that is the more socially, like, yeah, that's what you do. Or you go to a beach.
Portland famously does not have one.

We have rain. But yeah,

was there also just a

fulfillment of that desire to see new vistas and it's just more socially acceptable to be like oh i'm i'm doing this for god though i think that's reason number two why this is such a central practice is because exactly that um and i don't think it

now there are people who are

suspicious of pilgrims. So what happens in the medieval era is you will have people who do have complaints about pilgrims and suspicions about pilgrims, not pilgrimage.

When you go into the modern era and you get the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant critique, there is deep suspicion about the concept of pilgrimage, period.

But that's not under question. However, there are a lot of suspicions that certain pilgrims are just like,

you just want to travel.

You're just having fun. Like, are you truly in a spiritual mindset when you're going?

So it's clear that there are some people who were just

on a wanderlust and were so much so that, like, they barely pretended that there was some sort of spiritual component for them, or they didn't pretend successfully.

However, I do think for many people, it was both. All right, if you'd like to hear more, you can listen to all of that episode.
It's well over an hour long, as well as all the other members' extras.

We're, I think, now up to around 150.

And you can get instant access to all of them by signing up for membership at the BritishHistory Podcast.com. Happy Thanksgiving!