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

service of the church as a child. In the years after his prolonged pilgrimage Willibald became a renowned bishop carrying on the proselytizingwork of his uncle, St. Boniface, among the Teutons.
    Two accounts of his life and journeys survive, one anonymous, and one by a nun related to him who took down his reminiscences in after years.
    He was described in his old age as “perfect in charity and gentleness”; yet “his look was majestic and terrible to gainsayers.” As a youth he must have been equally terrible to less high-minded souls, for at the age of eighteen he managed to persuade his father, brother, and sister, much against their inclination, to undertake the long journey to Jerusalem with him (one wonders how his mother resisted, but the chronicle is silent). When first he urged his father to become a pilgrim and “despise the world” the King refused on the not unnatural ground that it would be “contrary to all humanity” to leave his wife a widow, his children orphans, and his house desolate. But the persistent Willibald maintained that love of Christ prevailed over all natural affections, and the father, “overcome at last by the conversation of his truth-telling son,” agreed to go. The decision proved to his sorrow, for the King died on the way, even before the party reached Rome, and was buried at Lucca in Tuscany. In Rome the brother fell ill, but Willibald, leaving him in the care of his sister, pressed on to Palestine in the year 721.
    At any given time it is possible to gauge the degree of religious feeling in England by the reaction of the traveler to his first sight of Jerusalem. In the fervent Middle Ages some wept, some prayed, some fell on their knees and kissed the soil. Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century fanatic, was so overcome at the sight that “she was in point to a fallen offe her asse,” but her companions put spices in her mouth to revive her. Indeed, at every place memorable for some incident in the life of Jesus this pilgrim was so much given to “wepyng and sobbyng in lowde voys” that “hir felows wold not latyn hir etyn in their cumpany.” Later, after the Reformation, adventurous Elizabethans, seventeenth-century merchants and scholars, cool eighteenth-centuryskeptics could make the ascent and never notice the bend in the road where Jerusalem first comes into view. Victorians revert to medieval fervor and tend to tears, awe, and solemn thoughts.
    Perhaps Willibald set the style for medieval English travelers, for certainly no pilgrim was ever more deeply affected than he. “What spot was there which had witnessed the Lord’s miracles,” says his chronicle, “on which Willibald, the man of God did not imprint his kisses? What altar was there that he did not bedew with his tears and sighs?”
    So ardent were his feelings that he made four sojourns in Jerusalem during his extended stay of several years in the Holy Land. In between he visited all the usual places of religious interest throughout the country and one unusual one, a church on Mt. Tabor consecrated jointly to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. He drank sour ewe’s milk without approval, remarked on the extraordinary native sheep “all one color” (were eighth-century English sheep parti-colored?), and once on a plain thick with olive trees he encountered a lion that roared dreadfully but when approached “hurried off in another direction.”
    Sometimes he traveled alone, at another time in company with seven unnamed countrymen. On one occasion all eight were arrested on suspicion and imprisoned by the Saracens. “The townsmen used then to come to look at them because they were young and handsome and clad in good garments.” When they were brought before the King of the Saracens he asked whence they came and was told: “These men come from the west country where the sun never sets and we know of no land beyond them, but water only.” Apparently not regarding such origin as a crime, the King replied: “Why ought