The Pilgrim as a Historian

Every September two friends and I go on pilgrimage. They are both pretty devout – one is a priest. I am indulged as a wistful agnostic. Growing enthusiasm for the Camino de Santiago over recent decades attests to an increasing desire to undertake this demanding physical expression of medieval Christian devotion, even as church attendance slumps. In Britain routes have been helpfully plotted by the British Pilgrimage Trust. They tend to run cross-country. For long stretches, one escapes from the modern world. The pace is necessarily slow. If the weather is good, there is plenty of opportunity to appreciate the scenery; if bad, as it was in buckets this year, the experience can become a bit gruelling. Both these aspects are part of the point. They afford a lot of time and space for reflection, and an intimation of one’s own limitations. Pilgrimage is not meant to be easy. Even in company, and pace Chaucer, most of the conversation when walking is interior. Conviviality tends to resurface during the stops.

But a pilgrimage is not just a long, often pleasant, sometimes arduous and therefore penitential, country walk. It has always been a journey voluntarily undertaken, with a pre-selected goal. In Christian theology, it is analogous to the faithful pilgrim’s journey through earthly life to his or her celestial home. The destination of a pilgrimage is not other-worldly; but because it is a place where a saint was once reputedly present, and usually where some associated relics remain, it offers a this-worldly material link to the saint in the other. The place is hallowed both by the saint’s presence, past and current, and the devotion of former pilgrims. A pilgrim journeys into this historic background; he or she is encouraged by physical proximity to the shrine to hope that prayer might secure intercession from the saint in heaven.

Whether or not one believes that celestial intervention can be wrought by prayer, going on pilgrimage affords insights into the experiences of the long dead which are unlikely to emerge from reading works of history. This September we walked ‘St Edward’s Way’ from Wareham to Shaftesbury, the route along which the remains of King Edward ‘the Martyr’ (c.962-78) were conveyed in February 979. He had been assassinated on 18 March 978 at Corfe, near Wareham. The initially concealed corpse was reportedly discovered on 13 February 979, very briefly kept in what is now the Church of Lady

St Mary, Wareham, and then translated to the far grander nunnery at Shaftesbury on 18 February. The distance is 30 miles. Walking it ourselves, we were impressed by how difficult it must have been in practical terms to (according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) ‘bear the body with great honour’ to Shaftesbury, where it was first interred to the north of the high altar. We arrived with a sense of fulfilment probably shared with our predecessors as they too, at last, toiled up the steep hill to the shrine. And visiting Shaftesbury with some understanding of why pilgrims were doing so over a millennium ago gives the site a meaning which would not be apparent to a casual visitor. In that respect, a pilgrimage is a walk back into the past, and a veneration of more than its material remains.

It is not, however, an attempt to pay a visit to a single moment in the past – in this instance, the late tenth century, when the cult took off with remarkable speed (most saints in Anglo-Saxon England were very recently dead). Edward became and remained the abbey’s most important saint, being translated again inside the church in 1001. The cult was not confined to Shaftesbury. Within a few years, celebration of the royal saint’s festal day was a legal requirement throughout England. Despite Henry VIII’s destruction of Shaftesbury Abbey and Edward’s shrine in 1539, Edward remains to this day in the festal calendar of the Church of England, as well as the Roman Catholic one. A casket of bones unearthed on the abbey site in 1931 may or may not be those of Edward, hastily concealed by panicking nuns in 1539 – osteological opinions differ. The bones are now, after much legal wrangling, enshrined in an Orthodox monastery in Woking, established in 1984 with them as the focus of its devotion. Its chapel features Russian-style icons of the Anglo-Saxon saint, inscribed in Old Church Slavonic.

By venerating the past, pilgrims seek to draw strength from it. The most arresting place we have visited so far is not Shaftesbury Abbey, but St Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate, which holds what purports to be a relic of St Augustine of Canterbury (534-604), Pope Gregory I’s apostle to the English. The building is Victorian; from the outside it looks a bit grim, as Victorian churches sometimes do. It and the shrine it contains are relatively speaking new, even if the relic is old. But the architect was Augustus Pugin (1812-52), jointly responsible (with Charles Barry) for the Palace of Westminster. Pugin was converted to Catholicism by medieval architecture: he believed that Gothic was the only pure, truly Christian style, that neo-classicism was fundamentally pagan. He built

St Augustine’s close by his house, and established an adjacent monastery to serve both the church and a school based in it. In other words, he created a replica Anglo-Saxon minster, albeit in the anachronistic style which he believed to be quintessentially Catholic, close to the spot where Augustine had brought Catholicism to England. If the church’s exterior is forbidding, the interior is peculiarly moving. It is something to do with a not quite cruciform plan determined by a truncated nave, and the number of discrete spaces, all exquisitely lit through Pugin’s stained glass. His re-imagining of a medieval church to house the shrine of the founder of English Christianity is more obviously creative than the exercise of historical and spiritual imagination on the part of a pilgrim. But it draws from the same fount, and is itself a fitting destination for pilgrimage.

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of St Hugh’s College and the author of The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? (Oxford University Press, 2021).