[Illustration: A BED IN THE REIGN OF HENRY III.]
In the time when the road connecting village with village and town with town was but an uncertain bridle path through woods and over waste places, where in winter horse, man, and wayfarer struggled with bog and quagmire, where robbers lurked in the thickets, and fevers and agues haunted the marsh, where men went armed and every stranger was a foe: it would seem as if most men stayed where they were born and desired not to court the dangers of the unknown world. In many villages, especially in the remote places of the country, this was the case. The men of Somerset abode where they were born, speaking their own language, a race apart: the men of Norfolk abode in their county cut off from the rest of the world by fens in the west and sea on the north and east: their language was not understood by the men of the west or the south country. Had the other conditions of life allowed this isolation to continue undisturbed, the nation could never have been created: we should have remained a scattered collection of tribes speaking each its own language and developing its own customs.
There were three causes which stirred the stagnant waters. The first was War. The Baron, or Feudal Lord, carried off the young men of the village to fight: those of them who returned had things to tell of the outside world. They fired the imagination and awakened the enterprise of the lads. The second was Trade at the trading ports: the lads saw, and continued to talk with, the foreign sailors--the Fleming, the German, the man of Rouen or Bordeaux: some of them went on board the ships of the merchant adventurers and sailed to foreign lands. Lastly, there were the Pilgrimages.
From the tenth to the fifteenth century there was a rage for pilgrimage. Everybody wanted to become a pilgrim. No money was wanted: there would certainly be found every day some monastery at which bed and a supper would be provided for the pilgrim: it was a joyous company which fared along the road, some riding, some on foot, travelling together for safety, all bound to the same shrine where they would hear the masses and make their vows and so return, light-hearted: it was, in fact, the mediæval way of taking a holiday. Sometimes it was to Canterbury, where was the shrine of Thomas Becket, that the pilgrims were bound: sometimes to Walsingham, where was the miraculous image of the Virgin: sometimes to Glastonbury, hallowed by the thorn miraculously flowering every year on Christmas Day, planted by Joseph of Arimathea himself: sometimes it was farther afield--to Compostella in Spain, Rome, or even Jerusalem--that the pilgrims proposed to go. Chaucer describes such a company all starting together, riding from London to Canterbury on pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket. They are pilgrims, but there is very little piety in their discourse: one can see that, whatever the motive, whether for the expiation of sin, or any other cause, the journey is full of cheerfulness and enjoyment. The Crusades were one outcome of this passion for pilgrimage. Nay, the first Crusade itself was little better than a great pilgrimage of the common people, so ignorant that they asked at the sight of every walled town if that was Jerusalem. It was a pilgrimage from which few, indeed, returned.