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    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims
    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims
    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims
    Ebook154 pages54 minutes

    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims

    By Roger Rosewell

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    About this ebook

    In the Middle Ages, it was thought that praying at the right shrine could save you from just about anything, from madness and famine to false imprisonment and even shipwreck. Kingdoms, cities, and even individual trades had patron saints that would protect them from misfortune and bring them wealth and prosperity, and their feast days were celebrated with public holidays and pageants. With saints believed to have the ear of God, veneration of figures such as St Thomas Becket, St Cuthbert, and St Margaret brought tens of thousands of pilgrims from all walks of life to sites across the country. Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims takes the reader across Britain, providing a map of the most important religious shrines that pilgrims would travel vast distances to reach, as well as descriptions and images of the shrines themselves. Featuring over 100 stunning photographs and a gazetteer of places to visit, it explains the history of pilgrimage in Britain and the importance that it played in medieval life, and describes the impact of the unbridled assault made on pilgrimage by the Reformation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 23, 2017
    ISBN9781784421991
    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims
    Author

    Roger Rosewell

    Roger Rosewell is the News and Features Editor of Vidimus, the international online magazine about medieval stained glass. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, he is the author of an award-winning study of medieval wall paintings and is a member of the Royal Photographic Society.

    Read more from Roger Rosewell

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      A picture is worth a thousands words or more especially when you are dyslexic/dislesik.

    Book preview

    Saints, Shrines and Pilgrims - Roger Rosewell

    To Cameron and Lyn, generous friends.

    Thanks also to

    Revd Katerina Barnes; Russell Butcher (SHIRE books); Christopher Guy (Worcester Cathedral); Cameron Newham; Gethin Owen (who rescued me when my car broke down in Wales); Revd Gordon Plumb; Revd Jenny Replogle; Christine Rosewell; Joseph Spooner and Lyn Stilgoe.

    Contents

    Introduction

    Sainthood

    Shrines

    Christ and the Virgin Mary

    Saints in Daily Life

    Legends and Miracles

    Pilgrimages

    Reformation

    Glossary of Well-Known Saints

    Further Reading

    INTRODUCTION

    Around 1207 a savage ‘trial by combat’ was fought before a huge crowd in the northern English city of York. During the fight, the loser, a man called Ralph, was blinded by his stronger opponent. Weakened by his suffering and unable to see, he was subsequently stretchered to the shrine of one of the city’s most famous former archbishops, St William, in York Minster, where, after he had prayed for the saint’s help, his eyesight was miraculously restored.

    Detail of the legend of St Nicholas and The Cup in which a drowning boy is resuscitated by the saint. Stained glass window, c. 1510–19, in the Church of All Saints, Hillesden, Buckinghamshire.

    Such amazing stories were not uncommon in medieval Britain. Similar accounts of lost eyes being regrown by the intervention of saints were told in Canterbury and Worcester, alongside reports of cures of various afflictions ranging from leprosy to paralysis, as well as rescues from wrongful imprisonment and unjust punishment. The power of saints to help effect miracles of these magnitudes was one of the staples of Christian spirituality. The Church taught that saints like William, who sat close to God in the ‘holie company of heaven’, were uniquely placed to intercede with him when humans asked for divine help. Rich and poor alike believed in these intercessionary powers for almost a thousand years, shaping and defining the lives of twenty generations.

    The stories of saints and their miracles were told by word of mouth, in manuscripts and through art such as stained-glass windows, wall paintings and drama. Churches were dedicated to God in their names. Kings carried their banners into battle. Every village or parish remembered them on special feast days where plays and other events re-enacted their lives and communities celebrated the protection of their powerful, if invisible, defenders and allies. Even the landscape was shaped by their stories and miracles. When young virgin girls, such as St Winefride in north Wales and St Sidwell in Exeter, were beheaded by wicked suitors or jealous relatives, holy wells were said to have sprung up where their heads fell. At Whitby in Yorkshire spiral fossil ammonites found in the rocks below the cliffs were said to be snakes that had been transformed into stone by the prayers of the seventh-century saint, St Hilda, a local abbess.

    Late fifteenth-century rood-screen painting of St Apollonia holding a tooth in pincers in the Church of St Michael, Barton Turf, Norfolk.

    Over time many saints achieved reputations for possessing special skills or areas of expertise. Favourites included St Apollonia, a Roman martyr whose teeth had been pulled out with pincers and who was consequently invoked to relieve toothache; St Nicholas of Bari (nowadays better known to many as Father Christmas) who protected children and seafarers; St Margaret of Antioch whose miraculous emergence from the belly of a dragon saw her adopted by mothers in childbirth; and St Eloi (sometimes ‘Eligius’, ‘Eloy’ or ‘Loye’), a former goldsmith turned Bishop of Noyon, in northern France, whose shoeing of an uncontrollable horse possessed by the devil (he reputedly detached the leg, fixed the shoe and reattached the leg, while making the sign of the cross) saw him adopted by horse-traders and farriers.

    Saints were an intrinsic part of daily life, loved and trusted by every social group. Pilgrimages to their shrines funded the building of great cathedrals and abbeys, and created networks of roads, hostels, and chapels across Europe, forking westwards to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain or eastwards via Venice and by ship to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the eastern Mediterranean.

    St Winefride’s Well (1512–26), at Holywell, Flintshire, Wales.

    For most of the Middle Ages, enduring beliefs in the miracles and intercessions of saints provided hope for those who sought relief from pain, sin and injustice. Saints were confidants and friends, helpers and protectors. Their lives were held up as models to follow – devout, pious, pure, immune to temptation and evil; their virtues were employed as aides and inspiration; their mercy and strength were available to all.

    Stained glass in York Minster, c. 1414, depicting Ralph praying at the shrine of St William of York, after which his eyesight was miraculously restored.

    Life was unimaginable without them.

    SAINTHOOD

    Christian ideas about sainthood flowed from the experiences of the early Church. After the death of Jesus around

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