T. Thurai's Blog

Medieval pilgrims have featured prominently in my writing this year.
First, there was William of Perth, the mysterious Scottish baker who shot to fame as Rochester’s patron saint and provided the inspiration for my story The Baker’s Boy. The research for this story also provided material for my first blog on medieval pilgrims.
Now, with a sense of déjà vu, I am about to give a talk on writing historical fiction in Canterbury’s Dominican Priory.
The building currently known as the Dominican Priory sits on the west bank of the River Stour. It represents only a fragment of what was once an extensive complex of monastic buildings, the greater part of which was situated on the opposite river bank.
Today’s ‘Dominican Priory’ was originally a guest-house. Run by the Dominicans, it served the needs of pilgrims who travelled to Canterbury from both Britain and Europe in order to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket in the Cathedral.
It is ironic that the means to build the Priory was provided by the grandson of Henry II, the king responsible for Becket’s demise.
Young Henry III came to the throne when he was nine. Like other child-monarchs who emerged from the shadow of multiple regencies, he had to contend with powerful nobles who had thrived in the absence of royal authority.
Having taken the reins of power in 1234, Henry soon ran into trouble with the nobility. From 1237, objections were expressed, first to the influence of Henry’s Savoyard relatives, then to his sister’s marriage to the man who would become the king’s fiercest opponent, Simon de Montfort.
Perhaps it was this atmosphere of increasing tension and unease that prompted Henry to make a generous gift to the Dominicans: a large plot of land within the safety of Canterbury’s city walls and £500 to build a church and priory.
The Dominican guest-house was originally located on an island with two small wooden bridges spanning the River Stour which provided access to the Priory’s refectory on the opposite bank.
However, following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1538 – which also resulted in the destruction of Becket’s shrine – the guest-house suffered a drastic decline in fortune.
Without pilgrims, it no longer had a purpose. The former guest-hall, once a haven for the faithful and penitent and, no doubt, a lucrative source of income for the Priory, was stripped of its identity. Even its unique island status was lost when the small, encircling branch of the river was in-filled.
Over succeeding centuries, it has fulfilled a variety of functions. Having served Canterbury’s Huguenot weavers, it became a private home in the 18th century then, in 1905, a furniture store. Gradually, it declined and fell into ruin.
It is thanks to the dedication and generosity of Donald and Poppy Beerling that this unique building was saved and restored – a work that began in 1969.
By this time, most of the original Dominican Priory had disappeared, with the exception of the guest-house and the refectory on the opposite bank.
The Beerlings’ vision and tireless hard-work rescued the guest-house from certain oblivion and the fate originally intended for it by Henry VIII in 1538.
The flint-covered building with its leaded windows and steep, sloping roof sits beside the river, a timeless and tranquil spot which contrasts with straight-edged modernism of the new Marlowe theatre. Inside, the old guest-house retains some of its original stained glass as well as its massive oak beams, dyed black by the smoke from medieval fires.
Although privately run, the old guest-house has been put to public use, serving as a community hall and events venue for a variety of functions, including two Saturdays of creative writing workshops arranged by the SaveAs Writers group as part of this year’s Canterbury Festival Umbrella.
Sadly, Donald Beerling passed away in August, some 18 months before the old guest-house’s 700th anniversary celebration. From December, the building will close indefinitely while the charity that now runs it considers its future.
Hopefully, that future will once more be one of public service: the original function of the guest-house that the Beerlings understood so well.
This wonderful building is a tribute to an extraordinary couple who devoted themselves whole-heartedly to the rescue of a unique piece of British history.
All those of us who love our heritage owe them a huge debt.

Additional Information
The creative writing workshops taking place on Saturday 26th October include: poetry, historical fiction, technology for writers, and blogging. For more information, click here
For more information about SaveAs Writers group, click here
For more information about T.Thurai’s books The Devil Dancers and Barley Bread and Cheese, click here

If you are packing your bags for a summer holiday, spare a thought for the medieval pilgrim. In most cases, the modern holiday from hell amounts to little more than a long queue at the airport or a hotel resembling Fawlty Towers. If you fall sick there will be pharmacists, doctors and hospitals on hand to treat you.

If your car breaks down or you lose your camera, you will be covered by insurance and receive a replacement. However fraught your holiday, you can usually expect to return home safely after a relatively short period of discomfort.

To fund your holiday, you probably saved a little every month over a year. Even if all goes wrong, your trip is a disaster, your hotel is half-built and you cannot claim compensation, you would probably not expect to lose everything you own. Not so the medieval pilgrim.

In the Middle Ages, some pilgrims would sell everything they had to fund a trip to a holy place. Why? In some cases, the trip was prescribed by the church as penance for a crime. In others, pilgrims were motivated by piety or, in the case of wealthier travellers, by a desire to see the world.

Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is described as a wealthy widow “five times at church door had she been”. The wealth accumulated from her various marriages obviously funded her love of travel. We are told that “Thrice at Jerusalem had this dame been … And she had gone to Rome and to Boulogne, To Saint James in Galicia, and Cologne …”.

The travels of this fictitious character are, in some degree, mirrored by those of the 15^th century mystic Margery Kempe. Born into a Norfolk merchant’s family, Margery married a local tradesman and, for a while, ran her own businesses of brewing and milling.

However, Margery’s religious visions prompted her to make numerous pilgrimages. Her first trip abroad lasted two years (1413 – 1415) and reveals a staggering itinerary which took in the Holy Land, including Jerusalem and Calvary; Constance; Venice; Assisi and Rome.

Two years later, Margery was off again to visit the shrine of St James of Compostella in Spain. At a later date, she accompanied her daughter to Danzig and was blown off course to Norway. When she finally reached Germany, Margery visited sites with holy relics at Wilsnack in Brandenburg and Aachen, returning home via Calais to London.

While Margery is said to have lived off alms on her trip to the Holy Land, it is doubtful that such a wealthy woman was deprived of all of life’s comforts. Perhaps, like the Wife of Bath, she travelled on horse-back at least part of the way.

However, life was very different for poorer pilgrims who were obliged to travel on foot. Unlike the wife of Bath who wore fine clothes, including red stockings and soft leather shoes, they would have worn what amounted to the pilgrim’s uniform: a hat with a broad brim; a long, rough woollen tunic called a sclavein; a leather pouch or scrip in which they carried their money and a heavy staff tipped with metal for protection against attacks from wild animals or robbers.

The only kind of insurance that these travellers had was a blessing from their priest before setting out. If they were sensible, they would have travelled in a large group and, if possible, spent the night under cover. Monasteries were supposed to offer free board and lodging to travellers (only the wealthy could afford inns) and beds were shared. But such Spartan hospitality was not always available at the end of the day.

Sickness, bad weather or treacherous roads could easily slow a journey and pilgrims would have had to rely on the kindness of local people for shelter. A hay-barn would have seemed like luxury compared to a damp bed under a hedge or a tree dripping with rain. Then, of course, there were robbers and bandits who stalked the woods and countryside and who even infiltrated unsuspecting groups of pilgrims, waiting for a chance to ambush them on the open road.

Even when they reached their final destination, pilgrims would have had to endure further physical discomfort, suffering fatigue, hunger and extremes of cold or heat as they waited in long queues to visit a popular saint’s shrine which they may have approached up a flight of steps on their knees.

Yet, in some ways, medieval pilgrims resembled their modern counterparts. They, too, had an insatiable taste for trinkets and souvenirs. The seasoned pilgrim would decorate his broad-brimmed hat with small metal tokens. Each badge had a design which signified a particular shrine, for instance: a scallop shell for Compostella, a palm for the Holy Land, a set of keys for Rome.

Shrines in England also had their own distinctive tokens, for example: a depiction of Becket’s shrine (Canterbury); a portrait of St Bridget (Syon Abbey); St George fighting the Dragon (Windsor).

And, for the folks back home, holy water could be transported in small pewter flasks called ampullae.

In their desire to see the world, to experience different cultures and to collect keepsakes, medieval pilgrims were not so different from us. However, the hardships endured on their travels were far greater. If your holiday does not quite live up to expectations, just be thankful. Your discomfort is only likely to last two weeks. Theirs could last for two years!

Additional information

William of Perth, a hapless pilgrim who became Rochester’s patron saint, was the inspiration for ‘The Baker’s Boy’, one of the short stories in my new collection Barley Bread and Cheese. For more information, click here

For information about my novel The Devil Dancers and other writing, please click here to visit my website

When researching medieval pilgrims for my story The Baker’s Boy, I was struck by the many facets of what resembled an early form of the tourist industry.

The subject of my research was William of Perth, an obscure Scottish baker who, having met an untimely death outside Rochester, became not only its patron saint but whose shrine also provided a much-needed source of income for its Cathedral and Benedictine priory.

What fascinated me about William was how someone who would probably have been regarded as a complete foreigner about whom little or nothing was known, was catapulted to saintly stardom and whose shrine became a ‘must-see’ for pilgrims.

Very little is known of William’s former life and what we have dates from a source printed some 300 years after his death. However, the reasons underpinning his celebrity probably have something to do with the rise of another medieval saint, Thomas Becket.

Formerly Chancellor of England, Becket had become Archbishop of Canterbury and famously opposed King Henry II’s attempt to subject ‘criminous clerks’ to the rule of secular law. Whether or not Henry actually ordered Becket’s death or, as he claimed, his words of frustration were wrongly interpreted as a signal for decisive action, Becket was subsequently murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four of the king’s knights.

Following his death in 1170, Becket’s tomb rapidly became a focus of pilgrimage – a trend which can only have been strengthened by his canonisation in 1173. Although this was not the quickest canonisation – that distinction belongs to St Anthony of Padua who was canonised in under a year – Becket was, nonetheless, something of a ‘fast-track’ saint.

What probably accounted for Becket’s popularity was that he was contemporary, not a half-forgotten Saxon or Roman saint, but a man famous in his lifetime both for his status and his long-running conflict with the king.

Becket’s brutal death shocked a nation and, almost overnight, his tomb became a place of pilgrimage. The popular reaction to his death might well have resembled the extraordinary outpouring of grief on the death of Princess Diana.

Becket’s death had a profound impact on both the Cathedral and town of Canterbury, attracting pilgrims from all over Britain and Europe and becoming the focus of an early and lucrative form of tourist trade. It has been estimated that, in one year alone, some 100,000 pilgrims visited Becket’s shrine. They brought not only their devotion, but also their money.

To illustrate the wealth generated by medieval shrines, here is a contemporary account of Becket’s tomb: “the shrine appeared, blazing with jewels and gold; the wooden sides were plated with gold, and damasked with gold wire, and embossed with innumerable pearls and jewels and rings, cramped together on this gold ground.”

During the 12^th century, Rochester Cathedral was confronted with serious challenges which could have resulted in its permanent decline. In 1137 and 1179, it suffered two devastating fires. Then, in 1199, Pope Innocent III imposed an unprecedented tax of one fortieth of all income on the clergy in order to finance a crusade. In the same year, a note in a contemporary text records an investigation into Rochester Priory’s debts.

It seems clear that Rochester was in financial difficulties.

In 1201, the untimely death of an unknown pilgrim just outside Rochester could well have saved the Cathedral and Priory from economic catastrophe.

Was the saintly cult of William of Perth modelled on that of Becket? It certainly seems likely.

Without doubt, William’s shrine was extremely popular. The Pilgrim Steps that led to his shrine have been so worn down by pilgrims that they are now preserved under a wooden frame. The funds raised from medieval pilgrims almost certainly contributed to the renovation of the Cathedral.

In this respect, it is tempting to see William’s career as contemporary medieval saint running in parallel with that of Thomas Becket. Sadly, their shrines both shared the same fate, being destroyed c.1538 as a result of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

Additional Information

The Baker’s Boy is one of a collection of stories inspired by Rochester Cathedral, its history and treasures which appears in T. Thurai’s new book Barley Bread and Cheese. Click here

To learn more about Rochester Cathedral, click here

For T. Thurai’s website, click here

In one of its most ambitious graphics yet, Google recently displayed an animated title with a humorous portrayal of a flying saucer piloted by a tiny spaceman. This commemorated the 66^th anniversary of the Roswell incident in New Mexico in which the crash landing of an Unidentified Flying Object spawned numerous theories relating to alien visitors.

It is probably no coincidence that, when the first pulsar was spotted some 20 years later in 1967, regular flashes of light from deep space became known to astronomers as LGMs – an acronym for ‘Little Green Men’.

But you do not have to search outer space to find LGMs. They have been living here among us for centuries – and many have settled in churches. At least 25 reside in Rochester Cathedral.

The origins of these little green men are almost as mysterious as those of the supposed aliens at Roswell. Carvings of leaf masks and foliate heads can be traced back hundreds of years, springing up in ancient Rome, Iraq, Nepal, Borneo and Rajasthan.

Possibly one of the earliest occurrences of a foliate head in a Christian context is that of the foliate head that appears on the tomb of St Abre. This dates from c 400 AD and is now located in the church of St Hilaire-Le-Grand in Poitiers.

Carvings of green men continued to flourish throughout the middle ages, especially in churches. Several 14^th century examples can be seen on the scalloped stone canopy which adorns the tomb of Bishop Hamo of Hythe located near the Pilgrim Steps in the North Quire Aisle of Rochester Cathedral.

This popular motif was revived in 1840 when several brightly painted Green Men roof bosses were added to the Crossing ceiling. This was probably influenced by architect Lewis Cottingham who was in charge of Cathedral renovations from 1825 – 1840. Medieval themes were popular with the Victorians, influencing not only contemporary visual arts but also literature.

Another character which is closely related to the Green Man carvings is the character of ‘Jack-in-the-Green’ which regularly accompanies Morris dancers during May Day celebrations. Since 1980, Rochester has hosted its own popular version of these celebrations called the Sweeps’ Festival.

Theories as to the origins and meaning of the Green Man are as numerous as those relating to UFO’s and alien life-forms. Perhaps it is its mystery that has turned this motif into such a popular metaphor for so many cultures. In fact, it is the central theme for a story entitled ‘Jack’; one of a selection of short stories inspired by Rochester Cathedral and its treasures which appear in my new book Barley Bread and Cheese.

When I gave a public reading of ‘Jack’, one of the audience told me that he knew a storyteller who had set himself the task of counting all the stories relating to green men. So far, he said, some 83 had been recorded. That must mean that my story is number 84.

So, in 20^th century astronomical parlance, would that be LGM-84?

Additional links and information:

Click here for Barley Bread and Cheese

Click here for T. Thurai’s website

Click here for Rochester Cathedral, UK

Click here for Pulsars

Click here for Victorian medievalism (An article by Megan Morris, Rochester University, USA)

Click here for Rochester Sweeps’ Festival