"Thanne Longen Folk to Goon on Pilgrimages"
Abstract
(Chaucer: General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 1.12)
They come, they come from all climates and nations of the
world and even further away, French, Normans, Scots,
Irish, Welsh, Teutons, Gascons, those from Navarre, Basques,
Provincials, Anglo-Saxons, Britons, those from Cornwall,
Flamands, Frisians, Italians, those from Poitiers,
Danes, Norwegians, Russians, Sicilians, Asians, Indians,
Cretans, Jerusalemers, Antiochans, Arabs, Moors, Lybians,
and many others of all tongues, who come in companies or
phalanxes and they all sing in unison to the Apostle. 1
The writer who was so impressed by the coming together of the nations to venerate the Apostle was describing the popularity, in the middle of the twelfth century, of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to venerate the body of St. James the Great, one of the most important of the medieval pilgrimages, and one that can still be retraced by anyone interested in seeing for himself the nature of a journey that figures so prominently in medieval history and literature.
References
Translated from the Codex Calixtinus by T.A. Layton, The Way of
Saint James or the Pilgrims' Road to Santiago (London, 1976), p.15.
V. and H. Hell, The Great Pilgrimage of the Middle Ages: the Road
to St. James of Compostela, with an introduction by Sir Thomas Kendrick (London, 1966)
M. Lefls (ed.), The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff (Hakluyt
Society: London, 1946)
'The Pilgrims Sea-Voyage and Sea-Sickness', 11.69-72, ed. F.J.
Furnivall, The Stacions of Rome and the Pilgrims Sea- Voyage,
Early English Text Society, 0S25 (1867).
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