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pilgrims, if they could afford a choice, to stay as close to
the deck as possible:
‘for in the lowst under hyt is ryght smoulderyng, hote
and stinking.’
High born half Norman Gerald of Wales, selected
to accompany the Archbishop of Canterbury on a
journey through Wales in 1188 to recruit for the Third
Crusade, tells us that the Welsh speak poetically and sing
beautifully but he also accuses them of a whole litany of
vices from rape and incest to murder! Gerald also visited
Ireland, his somewhat doubtful record of which includes
accounts of a wolf reading the Eucharist and an Irish King
consecrated while he sits bubbling away in a mare stew.
Although these early guide books could be a tad fanciful
over the following centuries a handful of travellers would
record their observations as they explored these islands
and beyond and some at least were more practical for
other travellers. Marco Polo’s descriptions of central Asia
and China and his meetings with Kublai Khan in the 13
th
century would be useful to later explorers like Christopher
Columbus and were much translated to use as handbooks
for merchants explaining, for example, local weights
and measurements. No single version of Marco Polo’s
travels survives, instead there about 150 variants, each
transcribed and written by hand allowing for many errors
and discrepancies – Chinese whispers indeed!
The Moroccan Ibn Battuta is without doubt one of the
greatest travellers of all time. His travel tally of 75,000
miles completed 700 years ago would not be beaten until
the coming of the steam age some 450 years after his
death. When he set off on Haj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca the
journey, which should have taken this 21 year old son of a
family of lawyers from Tangiers no more than 16 months,
would turn into 24 consecutive gap years as, hooked on
travel, he went off the pilgrims’ route on many side-trips
and diverting excursions. Throughout a whole lifetime
of travel Ibn Battuta visited the equivalent of 44 modern
countries. His writings are very entertaining. He is shocked
to his marrow when he discovers that the quiet man
accompanying a free speaking Turkish woman is not
her servant but her husband and in several places he is
horrified by the near naked state of the natives.
Encouraged by the Sultan of Morocco he dictated an
account of his travels into a guide book whose official
name is
A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders
of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling
but is more often
simply called The Rihla or Journey.
Interest was gradually building in topographical works
and we find that one of the earliest printed books was a
descriptive guide book. Two Benedictine monks from a
Chester monastery had put together a Latin compilation
of various chronicles of the Middle Ages which give a
detailed history from the arrival of man right through
to the Black Death. Known by the name of the monk
Ranulph Higden it was later translated into Middle English
and it was this version that William Caxton, the inventor
of the printing press, cherry picked for all the British bits.
He also added to it to bring it bang up to date and in 1482
published it as a best-seller called
The Description of
Britain
. About 20 original printings of the book survive,
one of which was given to Tenterden Town Council in the
1920s. This is believed to have been the very first copy and
is signed by Caxton who is believed to have been born in
the Wealden town. The book is now on permanent loan to
Canterbury Cathedral Library but it was displayed in the
Tenterden Museum this summer just gone as part of the
Diamond Jubilee celebrations.
One motive for pilgrimage had been acquiring intangible
promises known as indulgences. These “get out of hell
cards” represented the promise of remission from time
spent in purgatory. By the time of Pope Alexander III
(1159-81) the spiritual contract of pilgrimage involved
a fixed scale of indulgences calibrated according to the
distance travelled. Thus for Italian pilgrims a pilgrimage
to Rome was worth a remission of one year, from Britain
two years, for the Swedes three years etc. By the 16
th
century pre-signed papal indulgences had become an early
form of paper money and were being bought and sold in
an increasingly unspiritual fashion sparking a movement
for reform among men like Martin Luther. The world
was changing. The traditional mediaeval pilgrimage was
coming to an end but new forms of tourism were just
beginning.
In England reform would lead to the dissolution of the
monasteries in the 1530s with its attendant wholesale
destruction of church buildings and confiscation of
church properties. The dissolution would whip up interest
in topographical works. It’s clearly a defining human
characteristic that has endured throughout the centuries
this need to take special note of what is about to be lost
forever.
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