Every September two buddies and I’m going on pilgrimage. They’re each fairly religious – one is a priest. I’m indulged as a wistful agnostic. Rising enthusiasm for the Camino de Santiago over latest many years attests to an growing need to undertake this demanding bodily expression of medieval Christian devotion, at the same time as church attendance slumps. In Britain routes have been helpfully plotted by the British Pilgrimage Belief. They have an inclination to run cross-country. For lengthy stretches, one escapes from the trendy world. The tempo is essentially sluggish. If the climate is nice, there’s loads of alternative to understand the surroundings; if dangerous, because it was in buckets this yr, the expertise can develop into a bit gruelling. Each these elements are a part of the purpose. They afford lots of time and area for reflection, and an intimation of 1’s personal limitations. Pilgrimage will not be meant to be simple. Even in firm, and tempo Chaucer, a lot of the dialog when strolling is inside. Conviviality tends to resurface in the course of the stops.
However a pilgrimage is not only an extended, usually nice, typically arduous and due to this fact penitential, nation stroll. It has all the time been a journey voluntarily undertaken, with a pre-selected aim. In Christian theology, it’s analogous to the devoted pilgrim’s journey by way of earthly life to his or her celestial house. The vacation spot of a pilgrimage will not be other-worldly; however as a result of it’s a place the place a saint was as soon as seemingly current, and normally the place some related relics stay, it gives a this-worldly materials hyperlink to the saint within the different. The place is hallowed each by the saint’s presence, previous and present, and the devotion of former pilgrims. A pilgrim journeys into this historic background; she or he is inspired by bodily proximity to the shrine to hope that prayer may safe intercession from the saint in heaven.
Whether or not or not one believes that celestial intervention might be wrought by prayer, happening pilgrimage affords insights into the experiences of the lengthy lifeless that are unlikely to emerge from studying works of historical past. This September we walked ‘St Edward’s Approach’ from Wareham to Shaftesbury, the route alongside which the stays of King Edward ‘the Martyr’ (c.962-78) have been conveyed in February 979. He had been assassinated on 18 March 978 at Corfe, close to Wareham. The initially hid corpse was reportedly found on 13 February 979, very briefly stored in what’s now the Church of Girl
St Mary, Wareham, after which translated to the far grander nunnery at Shaftesbury on 18 February. The space is 30 miles. Strolling it ourselves, we have been impressed by how tough it should have been in sensible phrases to (based on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) ‘bear the physique with nice honour’ to Shaftesbury, the place it was first interred to the north of the excessive altar. We arrived with a way of fulfilment most likely shared with our predecessors as they too, finally, toiled up the steep hill to the shrine. And visiting Shaftesbury with some understanding of why pilgrims have been doing so over a millennium in the past provides the positioning a which means which might not be obvious to an informal customer. In that respect, a pilgrimage is a stroll again into the previous, and a veneration of greater than its materials stays.
It isn’t, nonetheless, an try and pay a go to to a single second prior to now – on this occasion, the late tenth century, when the cult took off with exceptional pace (most saints in Anglo-Saxon England have been very lately lifeless). Edward grew to become and remained the abbey’s most essential saint, being translated once more contained in the church in 1001. The cult was not confined to Shaftesbury. Inside a couple of years, celebration of the royal saint’s festal day was a authorized requirement all through England. Regardless of Henry VIII’s destruction of Shaftesbury Abbey and Edward’s shrine in 1539, Edward stays to today within the festal calendar of the Church of England, in addition to the Roman Catholic one. A casket of bones unearthed on the abbey web site in 1931 might or will not be these of Edward, swiftly hid by panicking nuns in 1539 – osteological opinions differ. The bones are actually, after a lot authorized wrangling, enshrined in an Orthodox monastery in Woking, established in 1984 with them as the main focus of its devotion. Its chapel options Russian-style icons of the Anglo-Saxon saint, inscribed in Previous Church Slavonic.
By venerating the previous, pilgrims search to attract power from it. Probably the most arresting place we’ve got visited to this point will not be Shaftesbury Abbey, however 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 constructing is Victorian; from the surface it seems to be a bit grim, as Victorian church buildings typically do. It and the shrine it incorporates are comparatively talking new, even when the relic is previous. However the architect was Augustus Pugin (1812-52), collectively accountable (with Charles Barry) for the Palace of Westminster. Pugin was transformed to Catholicism by medieval structure: he believed that Gothic was the one pure, really Christian fashion, that neo-classicism was basically pagan. He constructed
St Augustine’s shut by his home, and established an adjoining monastery to serve each the church and a faculty primarily based in it. In different phrases, he created a reproduction Anglo-Saxon minster, albeit within the anachronistic fashion which he believed to be quintessentially Catholic, near the spot the place Augustine had introduced Catholicism to England. If the church’s exterior is forbidding, the inside is peculiarly shifting. It’s one thing to do with a not fairly cruciform plan decided by a truncated nave, and the variety of discrete areas, all exquisitely lit by way of Pugin’s stained glass. His re-imagining of a medieval church to deal with the shrine of the founding father of English Christianity is extra clearly artistic than the train of historic and non secular creativeness on the a part of a pilgrim. But it surely attracts from the identical fount, and is itself a becoming vacation spot for pilgrimage.
George Garnett is Professor of Medieval Historical past at Oxford College, Fellow of St Hugh’s Faculty and the creator of The Norman Conquest in English Historical past: Quantity I: A Damaged Chain? (Oxford College Press, 2021).
