Pilgrimage is universally recognised by historians as a principal
feature of medieval popular religion, if by ‘popular’ we mean
something in which the ordinary laity fully participated. While we
can be confident of the fact of this participation, accurate measures of its
scale are less easy to come by, while putting names to the thousands of
humble participants is less easy still. Narrative sources, such as chronicles
and hagiographies, tend to describe the pilgrimages of the great and good
(and also of the not so good), and even when, especially in and after the
fourteenth century, pilgrims themselves begin to leave accounts of their
journeys for their own satisfaction, or for the edification and information
of others, they can be seen, almost by definition, as standing somewhat
apart from the nameless masses because they are either literate themselves,
or addressing a literate pilgrimage ‘public’.The task of putting not merely names, but faces, to ‘ordinary’ pilgrims
is not quite hopeless, however, although the materials which make it
possible vary in their availability and abundance at different times and
places. Use has been made of monastic cartularies to trace at least
fragments of the biographies and family histories of members of the
knightly classes whose participation in pilgrimage, it has been argued,
helped to foster the crusading movement. A little later, the records of
English royal government reveal the names of numerous pilgrims who
sought royal licence and safe-conduct for their travels, registered the
appointment of attorneys for the duration of their absence, or, as witnesses
at inquisitions post mortem, remembered births and deaths by the year in
which they themselves, or kin or friends, went to the Holy Land, to
Canterbury, Compostela or elsewhere. Some at least of these names are
those of men (and women) who occur elsewhere in surviving records and
about whose lives and connections it is therefore possible to know at least
a little. From all over Christendom, too, there are wills, made by
intending pilgrims as a necessary part of their preparations.
The Disappearance of an Author and the Emergence of a Genre: Niccolò da Poggibonsi and Pilgrimage Guidebooks between Manuscript and Print*
