Medieval Pilgrimage: With a Survey of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Bristol

By Nicholas Orme

Pilgrimage was popular throughout medieval England until it was suppressed at the Reformation. This book explains how it originated, what it involved, and what it meant to those who practised it. Normally it is imagined in terms of long journeys to famous places in England or Christendom. In fact most pilgrimages were short ones, made to hundreds of nearby shrines and images. This study breaks new ground by exploring the subject through these local journeys and reveals the places that most people visited for most of the time. It shows who went, where and why they went, and what they experienced when they got there. The general study is followed by a detailed survey of the whole of the West of England: from Bristol to the Scillies and back to east Dorset. It lists over 80 sites, ranging from great churches like the cathedrals at Bristol, Exeter, and Wells down to small rural chapels and holy wells. Many of these sites still exist, allowing the book to be used as a guide to places to visit, where one can get a sense of what it was like to be a medieval pilgrim. The book contains four maps and forty illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911293361

Book preview

MEDIEVAL PILGRIMAGE

With a Survey of

CORNWALL, DEVON, DORSET, SOMERSET AND BRISTOL

NICHOLAS ORME

For John and Pippa, Tom and Kate

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Part I: Pilgrimage in Medieval England

What was Pilgrimage?

How, When, and Where?

The Pilgrim’s Experience

The End of Pilgrimage

References

Part II: Pilgrim Places in the West of England

Cornwall

Altarnun

Bodmin

Colan

Dupath near Callington

Liskeard

Looe Island

Madron

Minster

Morwenstow

Newlyn East

Padstow

Perranzabuloe

Roche

St Buryan and Grade

St Cadoc near Padstow

St Cleer

St Clether

St Columb Major

St Day

St Endellion

St Germans

St Helen, Isles of Scilly

St Issey

St Mary Vale

St Michael Penkevil

St Michael’s Mount

St Neot

Whitstone

Devon

Bere Ferrers

Bideford

Bigbury

Braunton

Cheriton Bishop

Chittlehampton

Colaton Raleigh

Crediton

Exeter: Cathedral

Exeter: Chapels

Exeter: Cowick

Exeter: St Olave and St Nicholas Priory

Exeter: St Sidwell

Frithelstock

Hartland

Ilfracombe

Instow

Mortehoe

Ottery St Mary

Pilton

Plymouth: St Katherine

Plympton

Sidbury

Stoke Fleming and Stokenham

Tavistock

Thorverton

West Alvington

Dorset

Abbotsbury

Bere Regis

Cerne Abbas

Chaldon Herring

Halstock

Milton Abbas

St Aldhelm’s Chapel, Worth Matravers

Shaftesbury

Sherborne

Wareham

Whitchurch Canonicorum

Wimborne Minster

Somerset and Bristol

Athelney

Bath

Brislington

Bristol

Bruton

Burrow Mump

Chapel Cleeve

Chew Magna

Congresbury

Crewkerne and Cricket St Thomas

Culbone

Farleigh Hungerford

Glastonbury

Haselbury Plucknett

Luccombe

Montacute

St Decuman

Selwood

Wells

Copyright Details

Bibliography

Index

By the same author, published by Impress Books

Copyright

List of Illustrations

1 A pilgrim in traditional dress, from a text of Piers Plowman.

2 Pilgrims receiving communion before departing.

3 Chaucer’s pilgrims as imagined in the fifteenth century.

4 The Annunciation to the Virgin from Ashton church, Devon.

5 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from Caxton’s 1483 edition of The Canterbury Tales.

6 St James of Compostella, from Doddiscombsleigh church, Devon.

7 The chapel, well, and cave at Guy’s Cliff, near Warwick.

8 The chapel of St George, Cotehele, Cornwall.

9 A pilgrim badge: the head of Thomas Becket.

10 Votive wax images, from Exeter Cathedral.

11 Pilgrims at the shrine of St William, York Minster.

12 Cornwall: pilgrimage sites.

13 Altarnun church.

14 Medieval reliquary casket, Bodmin parish church, Cornwall.

15 Dupath well near Callington, Cornwall.

16 Minster church, Cornwall.

17 Chapel of St Michael, Roche rock, Cornwall.

18 Chapel and well-house, St Clether, Cornwall.

19 Probable saint’s shrine, St Endellion, Cornwall.

20 St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall.

21 Window images of Neot and the pope, St Neot church, Cornwall.

22 Devon: pilgrimage sites.

23 St Urith on the pulpit of Chittlehampton church, Devon.

24 Crediton church, Devon.

25 The tomb of Edmund Lacy, Exeter Cathedral.

26 Window image of St Sidwell, Exeter Cathedral.

27 Hartland church, Devon.

28 St Nicholas chapel, Ilfracombe, Devon.

29 Ottery St Mary church, Devon.

30 Dorset: pilgrimage sites.

31 Stockwood church, Dorset.

32 The abbey church, Milton Abbas, Dorset.

33 St Aldhelm’s chapel, Worth Matravers, Dorset.

34 Edward the Martyr, king and saint.

35 Sherborne Abbey, Dorset

36 Shrine of St White, Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset.

37 Wimborne Minster church, Dorset.

38 Somerset and Bristol: pilgrimage sites.

39 Chapel of the Three Kings, Foster’s Almshouses, Bristol.

40 Medieval chapel of St Michael, Burrow Mump, Somerset.

41 Culbone church, Somerset.

42 Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, the Lady chapel.

43 Glastonbury Abbey, the basement chapel of St Joseph of Arimathea.

44 Haselbury Plucknett church, Somerset.

45 Luccombe church, Somerset.

46 The tomb of Ralph Shrewsbury, Wells Cathedral.

Abbreviations

Preface

This book has two aims. The first is to explore the nature and importance of pilgrimage in medieval England. Normally, a study of this kind centres on long journeys and famous shrines like Jerusalem, Rome, and Compostella, or Canterbury and Walsingham in England. Most people who visited holy sites, however, did so close to their homes for obvious reasons of time and expense. Large numbers of local shrines, images, and holy wells grew up to satisfy their needs, which have received less attention. The book that follows seeks to redress the balance through a study of these most common kinds of pilgrimage in one English region: the West, comprising Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and the city of Bristol.

The second aim of the book is to serve as a guide to the pilgrimage sites that survive and may be visited. Some still keep their ancient shrines or other signs of the cults of Christ, Mary, and the saints that people once revered. The book enables readers to go there, to feel something of what our ancestors experienced, and perhaps to make their own pilgrimages. Here I have only tried to point out some of the major sights to be seen, because there are architectural guides like Pevsner’s and other ways of learning more about these places.

The number of potential pilgrim sites in the region runs into thousands. Every church and chapel housed at least one altar and image, and often relics as well, to which people could travel for prayer and veneration. This study includes all the places where evidence of pilgrimage has been found, as well as some others where it can be reasonably assumed. Over eighty sites are described, with the intention of showing the range of locations that attracted visitors or tried to do so.

I am grateful to Joseph Bettey, David Lepine, and Joanna Mattingly for reading and improving parts of the book, and to John Allan, Michael Blandford, Peter Insole, Jeanne James, Kathryn Lowe, Marrina Neophytou, Oliver Padel, Claire Pinder, James Russell, Michael Schmoelz, and Ken Taylor for discussing issues and providing detailed information. My publishers, as always, have provided sterling help in producing the book and researching the illustrations.

Nicholas Orme

Oxford, 2018

Pilgrimage in Medieval England

What was Pilgrimage?

As you came by the holy land

    Of Walsingham,

Met you not with my true love

By the way as you came?

How should I your true love know

    From another one?

By his cockle hat and staff

And his sandal shoon.¹

This song, sung by the distracted Ophelia in Hamlet and well-known in the sixteenth century, evokes a vivid image of a pilgrim. The image was centuries old in Shakespeare’s day and it was still a powerful one, despite the abolition of formal pilgrimages some sixty years earlier.² It pictures a traveller, always male, in a recognisable costume. He wears a large hat garnished with badges from the shrines he had visited: the cockle shell was that of Compostella. He has a wooden staff for support and defence, a scrip or bag for his food, and sandals on his feet.

What was his undertaking: pilgrimage? The word comes from the Latin peregre meaning ‘across the land’, in other words journeying. It prompted other words: peregrinus, ‘a traveller’, and peregrinatio, ‘travel’, which passed into French as pelerin and pelerinage and thence into English as ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’. When Christianity arose in the first century, it came to envisage two kinds of pilgrimage. The first came about when saints were martyred, venerated, and had churches built around their tombs. Christians began to visit and honour these saints and their churches, and such visits became so common that the words peregrinus and peregrinatio acquired the specific meaning of religious travel. The second kind of pilgrimage was a notion inherited by Christianity from Judaism: that God’s people are wanderers, set apart from the world.³ The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews thought of Noah and Abraham as ‘strangers and travellers on earth’.⁴ The First Epistle of Peter uses similar terms.⁵ In due course medieval writers began to imagine the Christian life itself as a pilgrimage, a religious journey. This idea was most famously explored in England in the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman and in its lineal descendant, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress of 1678.

Figure 1 A pilgrim in traditional dress from a text of Piers Plowman, wearing hat, gloves, and boots, with windings round his staff and a bell to announce his coming.

When Christianity reached Britain and later England, journeys to shrines became a recognised part of religious life. A rite was invented for dressing and blessing a pilgrim before he set out. He made his confession in church to a priest and prostrated himself in front of the altar. The priest blessed his scrip or wallet and hung it round his neck. He blessed the pilgrim’s staff and the cross on his cloak. He gave him communion: something normally received only at Easter or in a terminal illness. Then the pilgrim set forth on his way.⁶ Men dressed in this way became familiar figures. Piers Plowman describes one in terms that anticipate Ophelia’s ballad:

He bore a pilgrim’s staff with a broad bandage

Wound around it as a bindweed winds;

A bowl and a bag he bore by his side,

A hundred holy-water phials sewn on his hat,

Signs of Sinai and shells of Compostella,

And many a cross on his cloak, and the keys of Rome,

And Veronica’s handkerchief, so men should know

And see by his signs which saints he had sought.⁷

Figure 2 Pilgrims receiving communion before departing: a common practice on very long journeys.

These lines, however, offer a different view of the subject. They are disapproving ones. Pilgrimage had its critics as well as its devotees. Bindweed hangs on other plants; so, Piers Plowman implies, do pilgrims fasten on society. The author goes on to depict this pilgrim as someone who has been to many holy places and boasts of the fact with his badges, but he has never found Truth and knows not where it lies.

So much for images, but medieval pilgrimage is a much larger subject than the history of pious or supposedly pious men going long distances in special costumes. Pilgrimages were not the only spiritual journeys, and not the commonest ones. Going to church is a journey with a religious intention, although it is not normally classified as a pilgrimage because it is a more routine and less distinctive activity. Up to the Reformation, churchgoing involved taking part in processions outside church on seven days of the year, from Palm Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) to Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday). The longest of these journeys, on the four days of Rogation Week in May or June, took parishioners for two or three miles from their own church to another church or chapel to hear mass or a sermon. They fasted beforehand and picnicked afterwards. These journeys came closer to being pilgrimages, but they too are not generally regarded as such because they were regular community events rather than individual choices.⁸

Pilgrimage, then, might be more narrowly defined as a religious journey which is not part of the routine of life but made on someone’s own initiative. That is how it is now understood, but the definition should not be too narrow. As well as pilgrimages in a specific sense, a journey undertaken for everyday reasons might have a religious dimension. Many people in the Middle Ages were regular travellers. Monarchs, the nobility, the higher gentry and clergy, and sometimes their wives and children, moved about: from dwelling to dwelling, on business, or for pleasure. So did their servants; so did merchants and tradesmen, drovers, carriers, and sailors; so did ‘ordinary’ people to markets and fairs. These journeys might lead them to visit roadside churches and chapels, or shrines in towns and monasteries, along with their other activities. In 1297, for example, King Edward I spent six weeks in Devon, chiefly at Plympton, arranging the defence of his lands in south-western France against attacks by the French king. He was expected to visit the major churches on his route and to offer money at their high altars, and his ‘wardrobe accounts’ record him doing so at Exeter Cathedral, Buckfast Abbey, Plympton Priory, and even some parish churches. While not a pilgrim as such, his journeys imitated those of a pilgrim.⁹

A traveller of another kind was William Worcester, the former secretary of a knight, who made a long journey through the West of England in 1478. Worcester lived in Norwich but had relatives in Bristol and small pieces of business to do there and elsewhere. He was an antiquarian, interested in local history and topography, who made notes about them as he travelled. His ultimate goal was St Michael’s Mount: not only because he had a devotion to Michael but to see Cornwall and, among other things, to gather information to feed his interest about the local saints of the British Isles. He too was not a pilgrim in the classic sense. He spent only a morning at the Mount before moving on, but he heard mass there, he visited some of the religious houses on his way, and there was a spiritual side to his journeys although he had other reasons for making them.¹⁰

We need, then, to extend our concept of pilgrimage to include journeys in which religious devotion might be an element but not the only one. We also need to enlarge it beyond its traditional image as a long expedition to a famous shrine: Canterbury or Walsingham in England; or Compostella, Rome, or Jerusalem in the wider world. Every religious site was a potential place of pilgrimage, from cathedrals and monasteries down to parish churches, free-standing chapels, and even holy wells. Every such site had one or more days in the year when it sought to attract visitors. These would include the festival day of the saint (the patronal festival) or the anniversary of the day that the church was consecrated (the dedication festival). Such days were likely to draw not only the immediate supporters of the church in question, but people from nearby places. There was a social dimension to this. In Cornwall, where some ancient customs were kept up after the Reformation, the county historian Richard Carew observed how, even in 1602, householders in a parish that was celebrating its patronal festival would entertain their friends from elsewhere. The friends returned the favour on their festivals.¹¹ Church visiting like this was voluntary and out of the ordinary, and can therefore claim to be a form of pilgrimage. It was certainly regarded in that way in medieval times, because spiritual rewards – indulgences – were offered to local people who visited churches and chapels on their festival days, just as they were to those who went on the long major pilgrimages.

Religious travel, then, was very common. Indeed, pilgrims in the most specialised sense, going to major destinations chiefly for spiritual reasons, were a minority of such travellers. Most religious journeys were local rather than distant. At cities like London, Bristol, and Exeter the fact left a mark on the landscape in scatterings of churches and chapels a few miles away, to which such journeys were made. Visiting a nearby church, chapel, or holy well did not need permission if permission was required to go on pilgrimage, as it was for some people. Nor did it entail missing much of one’s work, spending much money, or meeting with hardship or danger. There are no statistics of pilgrimage, but if we envisage a parish and its inhabitants, the number of people likely to make short local religious journeys in any one year would have been vastly greater than the number going on long, overnight pilgrimages. It is for that reason that this book is conceived as a study of what might be called ‘majority’ or ‘normal’ pilgrimage to destinations fairly close to home. This is an aspect of pilgrimage that has been less explored than that of travel to the great English shrines or those of the wider world.¹²

In short, the study of pilgrimage needs to extend itself well beyond male adults travelling long distances in pilgrim costumes. Even those whose principal purpose was to go to a shrine did not always dress in that way. When Chaucer conceived his Canterbury Tales, he pictured his pilgrims wearing a range of everyday clothes, denoting their social ranks or occupations. He included three women in his company, reminding us that nuns and wives might go on pilgrimage too. He did not feature any children, but Jesus himself was recorded making such a journey when he was twelve.¹³ In practice children were often taken to shrines for healing, so they too may be counted as pilgrims.¹⁴ And just as a secular journey might have a religious dimension, so a journey for religion’s sake might harbour other motives. Chaucer imagined his pilgrims as varying their quest with a measure of recreation: enjoying each other’s company and no doubt the experience of seeing new places. Critics of pilgrimages, as we shall see, thought that such journeys were not solely or even primarily spiritual, but done for self indulgence and, at worst, in order to sin.

Figure 3 Some of Chaucer’s pilgrims as imagined in the fifteenth century, leaving Canterbury to return home. All are in everyday clothes.

This particular study sets out to provide a broad, concise account of medieval English pilgrimage with a detailed examination of the West of England: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and the adjoining city of Bristol. It is not concerned with the travels of their inhabitants beyond the region to Canterbury or elsewhere, but it takes account of journeys in from outside. The list of sites in the region has been chosen on the following principles. Every place is noted where a saint was believed to be buried, with the exception of Cornwall. There large numbers of saints were said to lie in the churches dedicated to them, while others were unique to the county and may have done so as well.¹⁵ It would distort the balance of the book to cover them all, so only the major saintly burials receive attention and the rest may be traced in the author’s work on The Saints of Cornwall (2000). Beyond this the book takes notice of all the places (including Cornwall) for which there are records of pilgrimage, and makes a representative selection of others where the fact may be reasonably assumed. The aim is to indicate the range of sites that pilgrims visited, especially on the short journeys that they mostly undertook.

The West had only two or three significant national shrines. St Michael’s Mount certainly came into this category. Glastonbury wished to do so, although the extent of its success is not very clear, and St Anne at Brislington near Bristol seems to have had more than a local profile. To this extent the region differed from Kent or Norfolk, where important shrines attracted people from all over England and even the Continent. In terms of the majority of spiritual journeys – the local ones – on the other hand, the West was in no way inferior to other parts of the country but shared the features common to most of them. It contained religious houses, parish churches, chapels, wells, and even trees that were visited for religious reasons. These places included all the objects typically venerated: shrines with bodies of saints, relics in reliquaries, and images in the form of statues or paintings. A few of the shrines survive to the present day.

The pilgrimage places in the West of England were also representative in the saints and devotions they honoured: as widely as in England generally. People travelled to venerate the Trinity, Christ as the Saviour, the Cross, the Virgin Mary, St Michael, and a large number of saints: international, national, and local, both canonised and uncanonised. The places covered in the book throw a good deal of light on the history of pilgrimage in terms of space, time, and to some extent amount. The distribution of the sites is displayed on maps, and their locations are considered. They occupied a variety of settings: cities, smaller towns, villages, roadsides, bridges, harbours, ferries, fairgrounds, woods, hills, and at least one cave. The kinds of people who came on pilgrimage are identified, in as far as this is possible, and changes are noted in their devotional interests as some saints fell out of fashion and new ones attracted support. All records of revenues at shrines have been noted, and although these are fragmentary, they give some indication of the popularity of such places and enable shrines to be ranked in relation to public acclaim.

How, When, and Where?

The history of Christian saint cults in Britain goes back to Roman times. Gildas, writing in the sixth century, mentions Alban as a Roman martyr at Verulamium (St Albans) and Julius and Aaron as others at Caerleon. All three were remembered after the end of Roman rule, and Alban’s cult was strong enough to survive the coming of pagan Anglo-Saxons and their rulers.¹⁶ When St Augustine reached Kent in 597, he found local people honouring a saint called Sixtus whose shrine had endured in a similar way.¹⁷ By the seventh century, as Christianity became more strongly established, new saint cults began to grow up, especially in the north of England. The historian Bede and other writers describe how the bodies of saints like Cuthbert and Wilfrid at monasteries like Lindisfarne and Ripon began to attract pilgrims and cause miracles.¹⁸ These writers had little contact with the West of England, however, and the region did not have its own historian in early Anglo-Saxon times, so that its saints and pilgrimages are not recorded until the end of the ninth century.

One of the oldest references in the West comes from Asser’s Life of King Alfred, relating to the 880s or 890s. It states that Alfred, while hunting in Cornwall, turned aside to visit a church ‘in which St Gueriir lies in peace’, to which somebody later added ‘and now St Neot lies there as well’.¹⁹ This place, the church of St Neot, must have been reputed holy enough to prompt the king’s visit and therefore, perhaps, those of others. We next hear of pilgrimage at Exeter, a few decades later. In about 932 King Æthelstan re-endowed the ancient minster church of the city and gave it a large donation of relics, said to be a third of his collection. This must have been meant to increase its status as a place to visit for prayer and veneration.²⁰ At about the same time, a guild of rich men was formed in Exeter to meet three times a year for worship and feasting. Its statutes envisaged that its members might wish to go on a much longer pilgrimage ‘south’, in other words to Rome. If that happened, each pilgrim was to receive 5d. from his fellow-guildsmen towards his expenses.²¹

Minster churches were served by groups of clergy living in private houses, who came to be known as canons. Another such church, the minster of St Germans in Cornwall, claimed in the tenth century that it owned relics of its namesake, St German of Auxerre, evidently to encourage devotees to come on visits.²² Then, during the second half of that century, there was a revival of monasticism in England, led by St Dunstan and others. New monasteries were founded and some minster churches were turned into monasteries. These newly founded or converted churches wished to make themselves centres of pilgrimage too, and some of them set out to do so by acquiring the bodies of saints from smaller churches and giving them more splendid shrines in a new setting. In Cornwall St Rumon was moved from Ruan Lanihorne to Tavistock Abbey, while in Dorset Edwold may have been taken from Stockwood to Cerne Abbey and Juthware certainly left Halstock for Sherborne Abbey.²³ There are similar examples elsewhere in England – notably, with regard to the West of England, in Huntingdonshire. There a new monastery at Eynesbury procured a saint by appropriating most of the body of Neot from his Cornish church, and duly named itself St