Pilgrim's Road by Bettina Selby Read Free Book Online

actively aware of the low continuous roaring of the river. I found it a soothing sound, reassuring, like the audible breathing of a trusty companion. Long since tamed; safely confined between solid banks and plentifully provided with convenient bridges, it isn’t easy to imagine the rivers of Europe as T. S. Eliot’s ‘strong brown gods — sullen, intractable, destroying’. Only after four months’ journey along the largely unconquered River Niger in West Africa did I gain some degree of understanding about the geographical hazards faced by medieval travellers in regions lacking both roads and bridges. When the barrier was as wide and powerful as the Garonne the prospect was formidable indeed, but getting across any unbridged river was one of the major hazards of medieval pilgrimage, as Aimery Picaud’s account of a ferry crossing in Gascony so graphically describes:
     
‘Their boat is small, made from a single tree trunk, ill-suited to carry horses; and so when you get into the boat you must take care not to fall into the water. You will do well to hold on to your horse’s bridle and let it swim behind the boat. Nor should you get into a boat that has too many passengers, for if it is overloaded it will at once capsize.
Often, too, having taken the passengers’ money, the boatmen take such a number of passengers on board that the boat overturns and the pilgrims are drowned; and then the wicked boatmen are delighted and appropriate the possessions of the dead.’
     
    That night a short sketch featured in my dreams:
     
    A poor thirteenth-century pilgrim enters La Réole. Asks a fat priest (looking very like the one I had encountered) for a seal upon his pilgrim’s passport. Fat priest is arrogant and dismissive.
    Enter Richard Coeur de Lion clad in full Crusader armour. He has overheard the exchange and berates the fat priest for his lack of Christian charity. As a penance (much to the embarrassment of the pilgrim and the fury of the priest), Richard orders the priest to wash the pilgrim’s feet.
     
    Which was possibly the result of all my thoughts and experiences of the day being woven into shape by sleeping so near to swift running water.
    I was on my way by eight the following day having first cooked a most beautiful fried egg (quite a triumph in a thin aluminium pan). The tent was still wet with dew, but I couldn’t wait for it to dry. The ancient pilgrim map I had with me marked the Garonne as a major dividing line, and having crossed it, I felt I had reached a significant point in the journey and was impatient to press on.
    Thinking about rivers, and about how fortunate I was to be able to cross them under my own steam without being at the mercy of villainous ferrymen and the like, occupied the short distance to Bazas, so that I noticed little about the route except that it was pleasant and rural.
    Bazas jerked me into the present. Calm and golden in the early morning sunshine, it looked the sort of provincial town where nothing more exciting than the weekly market ever happens. But it was in fact a town where one of the most decisive events in medieval history had taken place; the town where the Church Militant had its official beginnings. Here in 1095, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade — a holy war, no less, against the forces of Islam which were barring the way to Jerusalem. It was a call that sent a tidal wave of change crashing through the Western and Near-Eastern worlds, the ripples of which spread out as far as Mongolia, and could be said to be still active nine hundred years later in territories like the former Yugoslavia. It was also an extraordinary doctrinal departure in the name of a religion that stood primarily for peace and which preached the virtues of loving one’s enemies and of turning the other cheek. True, the Emperor Constantine had changed Christianity for ever when he had adopted it as the state religion more than seven hundred years earlier. But it could be argued that