Episode 177 of the Renaissance English History Podcast is all about pilgrimages. We tend to think that our medieval and early Tudor friends were stationary, never traveling more than a mile or two from their homes, where they were tied to the land. But no! Opportunities for adventure presented themselves in the forms of pilgrimage. Who could deny their serf time off if the time off was to go to Canterbury? Or Santiago de Compostela?
But then, what happened when the shrines in England went away? When the idea of pilgrimage was seen as papist? Ah, people still had itchy feet, and found ways to get their adventure in – eventually it became the famous Grand Tour that young people would go on (and even today’s gap year), and a whole tourism economy developed.
Let’s discuss!
Transcript of Pilgrimage:
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is Episode who knows and it’s on the changing pilgrimage in Tudor England.
But first, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the Tudorcon Streaming ticket. So I swore up and down I wasn’t going to do another online ticket this year when I was doing Tudorcon in person, but so many of you requested it, I decided to go ahead and offer it. So basically, you can go to Englandcast.com/TudorconOnline to buy a streaming ticket for just $24. What does your $24 get you? Streaming access to all of the talks, parties, and entertainment on Zoom. The Zoom sessions will be recorded, so you can go back and watch things afterwards. I’ll be posting all the links in a private group in the Tudor Learning Circle – and the talks will be archived for at least 6 months afterwards if not longer. Finally, you’ll get a goody bag with digital welcome materials that are actually worth more than the ticket itself, and some very special entertainment for the Saturday evening when the people who are there in person are going to the Renaissance Faire. So again, englandcast.com/TudorconOnline. And I will see you there hopefully.
So now I want to chat about Tudor pilgrimages. Specifically, how they changed during the reformation.
One thing about me is that I Love Travel. There is no place I’d rather be than sitting in a window seat on a plane going to some country I’ve never been to before. One of my proudest achievements is that in 2020 when I got a new passport, they sent me the thicker version that flight attendants get, because I had used every page. Of course then the pandemic hit, so now I doubt I’ll fill that one, but I’m very happy that I had achieved that goal of having a filled passport.
So what would i have done in medieval England? And how did that change in Tudor England?
Basically, I would have become like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and I would have gone on pilgrimage. For a long time I held the belief – like so many people do – that our pre-modern friends didn’t travel, but that is incorrect. They had the wonders of the pilgrimage.
Now look, I’m not going to tell you that every woman went on pilgrimages to Cologne, and Santiago de Compostela, or Rome, or Corinth, or Ephesus or Jerusalem like Chaucer’s wife of Bath did. But the fact that she was even a believable character in the 14th century tells you that it wasn’t unheard of for a woman to go on those pilgrimages.
And most monataries wanted to acquire relics – like the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, or a sliver of the True Cross not so much for the devotional experience it provided the monks – although that was, of course, one attraction, But also because it drew pilgrims.
A pilgrimage had been defined by those in the middle ages as a journey away from home in search of spiritual well being. And one of the earliest sites of pilgrimage in England was the holy island of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, where I actually made a pilgrimage myself back in 2016 with a dear friend. An island three miles off the coast, there is a line of posts marking the pilgrim’s way, which can be crossed twice a day at low tide when the land appears out of the North Sea. These days you can drive, but in the middle ages people were told that suffering on a journey to a holy place would help you to secure your space in heaven, and the pilgrimage was an important part of everyone’s lives. Before the Reformation, about 200,000 people a year were visiting Canterbury, which was close to 10% of the entire population of England. England was a mobile country thanks to these pilgrimages. They went on trips for a variety of reasons – solely for spiritual piety. Others for penance, for sins. Then there was the healing. And finally, just for the chance of adventure – pilgrims were given the opportunity to travel more than others. Interestingly, every type of person went on pilgrimage, from lords and knights to simple farmers, so it was the one time when everyone would have the opportunity to meet with other social classes. The routes would be dangerous, so they would all have to stick and work together.
You could go either to a trip to a shrine in the next parish, or a trip across the country, or even to another country. The cathedral at Lincoln was a popular destination for our early Tudor friends – it was the tallest building on the planet for 200 years from the 14th to 16th centuries.
But the Reformation changed all of this. Catholic and Orthodox Christians continued to revere traditional shrines but in countries that went through the Reformation, pilgrimage was linked with the cult of the saints, the veneration of images, the earning of merit and the granting of indulgences, was a prime target. Martin Luther moved from questioning the value of pilgrimages to outright condemnation. In 1520 he declared ‘All pilgrimages should be stopped. There is no good in them: no commandment enjoins them, no obedience attaches to them. Rather do these pilgrimages give countless occasions to commit sin and to despise God’s commandments’ Because what happens in Canterbury stays in Canterbury. But Luthers points repeated what the Lollards had been saying in the 14th century too. He challenged the close association between pilgrimage and the concept of acquiring acceptance with God through ‘good deeds’ (which ran contrary to his belief that human beings could not earn salvation but needed to depend on God’s grace). He suggested that emphasis on special ‘holy places’ devalued other locations, such as the local parish church, where believers should also expect to encounter God, ‘who is the same God everywhere’. He also maintained that those who went on pilgrimage were all too often simply evading their daily responsibilities.
As pilgrimage died down in England, it was a blow both to local economies who relied on the influx of pilgrim money, and also for people who either believed in the pilgrimage’s power to heal, or simply wanted adventure.The local towns would sell badges – souvenirs that would often be pressed against the bones of a saintly relic. You would get a badge and pin it to your cloak both as a souvenir, proof that you completed the pilgrimage, and also just to have as a bit of a talisman.
Before long, the majority of English shrines had been destroyed; their statues and relics discredited. The monasteries, which had supported ‘place’ pilgrimage through maintaining shrines and providing hospitality for pilgrims, were suppressed. Implementing change at the level of popular devotion and parish worship took time, for deeply-rooted beliefs and long-established patterns of devotion do not vanish overnight, whatever official policy may dictate. However, by the late 1570s even parish churches, which had experienced a bewildering series of changes and reversals through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor, found a new order taking hold.
Protestants might have turned away from both pilgrimage to places and the inner journeying of the anchoritic and monastic movements, but the concept of life as pilgrimage remained a powerful and fruitful image. The continuing power of pilgrimage to shape the imagination can be seen in the work of a number of post-Reformation writers. ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, is a poignant expression of this theme, traditionally thought to have been written on the eve of the poet’s execution. George Herbert and William Shakespeare also explore the pilgrimage motif.
The greatest, and undoubtedly the most influential, expression of this theme occurs in John’s Bunyan’s The Pilgrims’ Progress, which portrays the journey through life of a representative figure who leaves his home and family in the City of Destruction in order to seek the Celestial City.
Even in the context of journeying, the pilgrimage concept did not entirely lose its power. Pilgrimage might have been rejected by Protestants, but travel went on and the discontinuities were fewer than might have been imagined. Pre-Reformation pilgrimage had often included an element of curiositas, a desire to see the world and the marvels which it offered, which was sometimes criticised as undermining devotion. The centuries which followed the Reformation were ages of exploration in which curiositas was unfettered. The English still journeyed overseas to be educated and transformed, and to bring home souvenirs. Some visited Rome, which drew criticism from Protestant writers for its ‘images’ and ‘relics’. Others were still keen to visit Palestine and some seventeenth-century travellers including Henry Timberlake and Henry Maundrell have left accounts of their journeys. Timberlake, in particular, was clearly moved by his experiences, falling to his knees at his first sight of Jerusalem. Some of his contemporaries, though scorning relics, inscribed their names on the walls of the great churches (as medieval pilgrims had done before them) and had the Jerusalem cross tattooed upon their arms.
During the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour formed a kind of cultural pilgrimage from which travellers returned with new artistic and architectural perspectives and artefacts, which influenced and shaped their everyday environment.
Pilgrimage also has meaning outside religion: it is common to speak of ‘pilgrimages’ to sports arenas, such as football or baseball grounds, or to the resting places of celebrities, Yankee Stadium, etc. We also use the word to describe returning to places which have particular personal meaning, to celebrate, to mourn or simply to remember. An attachment to special places is a very persistent human characteristic which seems to extend across a wide range of cultures and belief systems.
And you know, it’s easy to imagine the people in the pre-modern period as being so provincial, never going anywhere or seeing anything, and surely yes, just the simple act of getting around from place to place was much harder. But I also think we need to look at it differently. Only about ⅓ of Americans currently have valid passports, and can travel to distant shores. Within a few hundred years, if we’re all living on Mars, or have figured out ways to Tessar between planets like in A Wrinkle in Time, people might look back at us and think of how provincial we all are. The people in the middle ages lived their lives as we live ours. And trying to end pilgrimages is just one part of the massive upheaval that would have trickled down to ordinary people during the Reformation.
With that in mind, Tudorcon. Online. Streaming ticket. Grab it now at englandcast.com/tudorcononline. And I’ll be back here philosohizing again in a couple of weeks.
Want more Tudor in your life? Join the Tudor Learning Circle - the only social network devoted solely to Tudor History. Sign up free at TudorLearningCircle.com! And why not Tudorfy your YouTube algorithm by getting exclusive videos and content on Heather's YouTube channel!
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.