Read Online Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman - Free Book Online Page A

stream. The staff lent support to his steps and could in an emergency be used as a weapon. The scrip or leather shoulder bag held what little food or clothing he carried as well as some saint’s bones or dust from the Via Dolorosa or splinters from the Cross, bought as souvenirs. The bottle attached to his belt was used to bring home water from the Jordan. Sometimes, too, he carried a bunch of faded palm branches and wore a collection of medallions stuck around the crown of his hat, one for each shrine he had visited.These were the “signs of Synay” worn by the Palmer in
Piers Plowman
, who boasts that he has visited not only Sinai but also Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Babylon, Alexandria, and Damascus. Indeed, the palmer’s journeyings made him a famous fellow of medieval life, a sort of foreign correspondent for the people back home, whom he entertained with tales of far-off lands and strange peoples. Though he acquired a reputation as an inveterate liar, men would always gather eagerly to hear him tell about the Holy City, about the wickedness and splendors of the paynim Saracen, the fabled glories of Byzantium, of wild beasts encountered, brigands and pirates foiled, and great personages met along the way.
    Such a one was the Palmer of John Heywood’s play “The Four Ps,” with whom lying was “comen usage” and who spellbinds his fellow P’s—the Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedler—with an account of a barefoot tour of the Holy Places, of how “many a salt tere dyde I swete before thys carkes could come there.”
    Like the troubadour, the palmer earned alms for his tales, for he was a professional wanderer from shrine to shrine who depended for his livelihood on the free food and lodging that it was customary to offer these wayfarers. A pilgrim, on the other hand, was a settled person who undertook a specific journey for a specific reason at his own expense. Sometimes he went to fulfill a vow, expiate a sin, or perform a mission as did Sir James Douglas, who carried the heart of Robert Bruce in a golden casket to Jerusalem for burial there, since when the Douglases have borne a heart on their coat of arms. Sometimes he went to escape an uncomfortable situation as did a certain Abbot of Ramsay who in the year 1020 was expelled from his monastery when the monks mutinied over his too rigorous insistence on ascetic rules, and who took himself off to Jerusalem in a huff. But most often it was neither piety nor sin, but pure love of travel, that carried the generations of English pilgrims to Palestine. Indeed the English wereconsidered great travelers and from their love of moving about were commonly believed to be under the moon’s influence. That lusty epitome of medieval womanhood, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, mentions in passing that she has been to Jerusalem three times, though one wonders when she found the time in between her five wedding trips to the church door.
    Sometimes a pilgrim could earn vicarious glory for those who stayed at home if they subscribed to the cost of his journey. It was a practice among the London guilds of the fourteenth century to release a member from his dues if he undertook a pilgrimage, so that his guild brothers, by taking up the cost of his dues, could share in the salvation he earned. In addition each colleague subscribed a penny to the pilgrim destined for Jerusalem (only a halfpenny if his goal was Rome or Compostella) and accompanied him in a body to the outskirts of the town as he set off on his voyage.
    From the fourteenth century dates the most popular of all medieval travelogues on Palestine, the
Book of Sir John Mandeville
, knight, who tells us he was “born in England in the town of St. Albans.” The unrelenting detection of modern scholars has shown that the author was neither English nor a knight, that his name was not Mandeville, and that his book is a package of borrowings from earlier travelers, geographers, and explorers from Herodotus down to Marco Polo. Yet no other