Pilgrims in Rome, 1300
During the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to see bands of travelers on their way to or from visiting a holy shrine. Most people believed that if you visited these shrines, you might be forgiven for your sins, and get into Heaven. If you were wealthy, you could pay someone to go on a pilgrimage for you.
People had different reasons for deciding to set out on a pilgrimage. Some were landowners, driven out of their gloomy castles by the sheer monotony of their lives. These wealthy pilgrims travelled on horseback in relative comfort, spending nights in inns.
Other pilgrims were monks or hermits who had dedicated their lives to travelling from one holy shrine to another in order to atone for the sins of men. These sorts might wear wide-brimmed hats decorated with shells and pewter badges collected from all the holy places they’d visited. Kind of the medieval version of snow globes, or Mickey Mouse ears.
By far the most miserably-dressed and bedraggled of this lot were those who’d been assigned to a pilgrimage by the Church, as a form of atonement for crimes they had committed. Prison sentences were rare back then. Outside of a few castle dungeons, hardly any prisons even existed. More often than not, the punishment for most crimes was execution. The mode of dispatch depended on the nature of the crime and the social status of the accused. If a criminal was spared from execution, his punishment tended to match the nature of the crime. Very often, punishments were much harsher than the crime.
But punishment was not the same thing as atonement. Even if you survived your punishment, everyone knew you’d go straight to Hell unless you atoned for your wickedness by doing penance. That’s where the Church stepped in. To atone for their crimes, pilgrims shaved their heads, abandoned their families, and gave up eating meat. They put on long penitential robes (usually white or russet-colored, and patched with crosses), and set out, badly-shod or even barefoot, on a very long journey, often to some distant Holy Land.
A popular destination for pilgrims was the shrine at Canterbury Cathedral of poor, murdered, hair-shirt-wearing Thomas a Becket.
