It is not without reason that the pilgrims returning from the threshold of Saint James bear shells

The scallop shell was the sign of the pilgrimage to Compostela. They were plentiful on the coast of Galicia where pilgrims would go the short distance to reach the western sea shore as the final act of their journey to collect their emblem.

At the Burgundian shrine of Saint Lazarus at Autun, there is the great porch sculpture of the Final Judgment. Christ reigns in Majesty, to the left is the college of the Apostles and to the right the Weighing of Souls.
On the lintel below is the procession of the Damned and the Elect. At the head of the line of the Elect is a diminutive figure bearing a scallop shell on his bag, the first to be admitted to the Heavenly Paradise: the Compostelan pilgrim.

Lazarus was celebrated as the first to be resurrected by Christ and there is no more eloquent image of the meaning of the journey to the shrine of Saint James.

The Codex of Calixtus, the collection of twelfth century manuscripts which sets out the cult of Saint James, contains a sermon to be read on the feast day. It explains the significance of the shell as a symbol of charity.

Yet the mystery of the shell’s meaning goes much deeper. We know that since prehistoric times men were buried with shells, even at great distances from the sea. This age old association with funerary rites leads reasonably to speculation as to the general symbolic importance of shells in human consciousness. For the appearance of an inanimate stone object containing a vital living thing inside, appeared as a wondrous thing to our ancestors. They associated it with notions of death and rebirth.

A short distance south of Burgos in Castille, the Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos has a double storied cloister which contains on its north eastern pier one of the most sublime images of the pilgrimage roads.

It portrays the story of the New Testament of the Journey to Emmaus. Immediately after the Crucifixion two disciples travelling from Jerusalem chance upon a fellow traveller they call a stranger. Only after they have invited him to join them in breaking bread does the stranger reveal himself as the risen Christ

In Latin, the words “stranger” and “pilgrim” are etymologically synonomous. Is this why Christ is here depicted with all the attributes of a twelfth century pilgrim to Compostela, most notably with a scallop shell sewn onto his bag? In a literal sense Jesus appears to be travelling in pilgrimage to the shrine of his own disciple - a strange and anomalous concept but one which says much about the meaning of the Compostelan pilgrimage in the medieval mind.

Aulnay de Saintonge

The church of Saint-Pierre de la Tour at Aulnay de Saintonge lies south of Poitiers in western France and is one of the best examples of the Aquitainian style of Romanesque. It stands on the Via Turonensis pilgrimage road which came from Paris via the great shrine of Saint Martin of Tours on the way to Santiago de Compostela.

One of the features of Romanesque church building in the Poitou and Saintonge regions is the abundance of parish churches which display a surprisingly high level of sculpted material relative to the seeming importance of the building.

In spite of its name, Aulnay is not actually in the Saintonge but in the Poitou and it is celebrated for the particular richness of its sculptural progamme which dates from about 1140. The clip here shows the south porch which features a succession of concentric arches presenting an Apocalyptic theme. The subject of the outer arch is a vivid Bestiary. It has been suggested that this represents the procession of all living creatures who will appear at the End of Time. The inner arches portray the Twenty-Four Elders of the Book of Revelation and the Old Testament Prophets. The Elders are identifiable by their attributes: the instruments which they use to accompany the songs of praise as they surround the returning Messiah and the phials which contain the accumulated essence of the prayers of the saints.

The undersides of the voussoirs feature atlant figures taken from Greek mythology. They are derived from the faithless who are punished by spending eternity supporting the weight of the heavens.

It was here that the Emperor set out with his armies for Spain

In order to enter Spain, pilgrims had to cross the Pyrenees. The most popular route was the Cize Pass and as the descent into Spanish territory began, the road led through a narrow and heavily wooded defile called Roncevaux. It was here that in the long distant and mythical past, the mother of all battles had taken place between the Christian Franks and the Moors of Spain.

The legend was epic. It told of the betrayal of Charlemagne's Frankish army by the Judas-like Ganelon and the subsequent ambush of the rearguard led by the heroic knight Roland. They were surprised and overwhelmed by a massive Saracen force and Roland tried to recall the main body of the army by sounding his horn, the Oliphant made of elephant tusk, blowing so hard that he burst the vessels of his temple. In a dying gesture, Roland tried to smash his great sword Durendal against a rock rather than have it fall into enemy hands but finding that his stroke was so powerful and the sword so well made that it split the boulder in two. Roland died a martyr's death.

At Blaye, not far from Bordeaux, pilgrims could visit the tomb of Roland in the church of Saint Romanus where he was buried with his famous horn and sword. A little further south at Belin was the burial ground of the fallen Frankish warriors. All along the pilgrim roads jongleurs would recite the epic poem known as the Song of Roland which was but the most famous of a huge repertoire of popular legends centered around Charlemagne and the heroic feats of his twelve paladins

This epic story was based on a real event, but rather than a great battle between the forces of Islam and Christianity it involved a minor skirmish between Franks and a small band of Basques.

The medieval mind made no difference between legend and historical fact - such a distinction was alien. The popular retelling of the oral tradition where subsequent versions added to the old, met the learned, written tradition of the elite. Professor Jacques Chocheyras has observed that because of the rupture in classical culture caused by the collapse of the Latin Western Empire in the sixth century, a process took place whereby each was contaminated by the other. Monasteries were deliberately located in rustic areas where pagan traditions thrived. Correspondingly, the vast body of the illiterate imbued the written Latin word with magical properties and undeniable truth.

Out of this came the simultaneous perpetuation of legendary traditions in both clerical texts and oral tales. And so the legend of Roland has its written Latin version - the Historia Rotholandi et Karoli Magni which was included in the five books of the Codex of Calixtus which set down the tradition of Santiago in manuscript.

In this latter version we find the Apostle James appearing to the Emperor Charlemagne in a vision calling him to liberate his forgotten tomb from the Saracens and the expedition which was then undertaken to do his bidding. Charlemagne not only liberated the shrine of Galicia but also built the first church there and made the road safe for pilgrims to follow. It was when returning victorious but exhausted to France, that the misfortune at Roncevaux took place.

Of the two versions, it is not possible for us to know which came first, but heroic knightly tales and pious lives of saints coexisted comfortably in the age of Pilgrimage and Crusade

The ruin of Spain and its many and great evils

A Spanish chronicler writing in 754 about forty years after the Arab invasion was at a loss for words to describe the extent of his country's misfortune: “Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?” he wrote.“Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human capacity to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils”.

In 711 when an army of Arab and Berber invaders crossed from north Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar, Spain was a Christian Catholic kingdom of Visigoths.

The Visigoths were one of the two branches of the Gothic people who had migrated to the eastern Roman empire from the Russian steppes in the fourth century. The word visi suggested noble in the Gothic language although contemporary historians took it to mean western when they settled in France and Spain in the sixth century.

The Visigoths were Christianised early on but they had adopted the Arian creed which was then quite prevalent in the Roman Empire but was subsequently contested and denounced as heretical. Although the ruling elite later accepted orthodox Catholicism, this combined with the Arab invasion had meant the the Spanish church was for a long time distinctive and seperate. In particular the Book of Revelation held a special significance in the liturgy. These differences were to have important consequences later on.

After the Arab invasion, Christian Spain was restricted to a small kingdom north of the Cantabrian mountains called Asturias. It was from here that the origins of the Reconquest were born and that an abbot, Beatus of Liebana composed a famous commentary on the Apocalypse in the late eighth century. The Christians of Asturias found significance in their defeat at the hands of the Saracens.

These were events long prophesied. It was reckoned that the Antichrist was now come and the End Times were unfoldng. Beatus was one of the first to claim that Saint James had fulfilled his Apostolic Mission in Spain following the Pentecost and prior to his martyrdom at Jerusalem in A.D. 44.

It was not long after, in the early years of the ninth century that the miraculous discovery of his tomb was made by a shepherd at Compostela. The location of the most important shrine of western Europe at such a significant site as the frontier between Christendom and the Caliphate on the very edge of the known world, may not have been mere coincidence but it certainly had a great pull on contemporary imaginations. How the body had reached Spain from Jerusalem was the subject of an elaborate legend.

The manuscript of Beatus' Commentary on the Apocalypse was copied in the monasteries which lined the pilgrim road, for a long time the front line of the war between Christians and Arabs

We venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics

In the Book of Revelation, after the breaking of the fifth seal, the author declares, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held”

From early Christianity, it was the practice to venerate the relics of the saints. Relics were the bodies. It was said that these were in many cases prefectly preserved and that rather than smell of decompostion they emitted an attractive perfume, hence the expression “to die in the odour of sanctity”. In reality it was the skeleton or a part thereof.

Men would have to wait until the End of Time to enter Paradise, but the saint ascended directly into the presence of God. Out of this arose the notion of their mortal remains being a conduit bewteen Heaven and Earth. Prayers said before relics carried much greater weight.

The Christian cult of the saints held that they were of two orders: the martyrs and the confessors. That is those who were killed for their faith and those who were celebrated for upholding and spreading it. The wave of persecutions of Christians which spread through Gaul in the early fourth century produced no shortgage of martyrs and a canon of the Council of Carthage in 401, taking its lead from Revelation, stated that the bones of saints should be placed under all church altars.

The popularity of relics grew as more and more pagans were converted. Their cults were transformed from the magical to the miraculous. Secondary relics, such as cloth worn by the saint also became widespread.


In the East an alternative cult had developed, that of icons - pictures of saints which held the same miraculous properties as relics. In about 790, the Frankish ruler Charlemagne issued a lengthy text to Pope Adrian on the question of icons. Charlemagne insisted on the cult of relics: “The Greeks place almost all the hope of their credulity in images but it remains firm that we venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics”.

The edict of the Council of Carthage regarding the placing of bones under all altars had been allowed to lapse but it was now revived. However, with the wave of church building which was now taking place in western Europe, the shortage of suitable additional relics to furnish the corresponding altars posed a problem. The availability of martyrs had diminished since the Empire became Christian, although in Spain there were some who died for their faith at the hands of the Saracens.

There were several ways in which a relic could arrive at a church. Most obviously, the church was erected over the site of the saint's burial. Alternatively, it could be transferred in the ceremony known as a “translatio”. Also cases of relic theft were not infrequent and since it was reckoned that the saint chose themselves where their bones resided, these thefts were considered sacred or “furta sacra”. By extension, saints whose bones lay buried and neglected could choose how and when they were discovered: this was known as “inventio”.

The monk chronicler Radulfus Glaber writing in the early eleventh century noted that, “the relics of many saints were revealed by various signs where they had long lain hidden.”

And indeed, in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries a number of “inventios” of significant Biblical characters were discovered in Western Europe and siezed the popular imagination. In Burgundy there was Mary Magdalene and Lazarus, in Provence near Avignon, Martha. In Aquitaine, the head of John the Baptist and at Compostela, the Apostle James.

Each of these became important pilgrimage shrines in their own right but for reasons we will come to, none surpassed Compostela.

Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage

The development of monasticism had a profound effect on another medieval phenomenon: pilgrimage. Although people had started travelling to visit the Holy Places in Palestine in the third century and many pagan pilgrimage sites had already been appropriated by the Church and Christianised, it was not until the eleventh century that this form of worship began to increase at an exponential rate.

Judging by the size of the new pilgrimage churches which were built at the time, huge throngs of people were expected on the saints' feast days and the roads of western Europe must have been busy with the traffic of pilgrims travelling to the great shrines.

Often originating as hermitages, there was a strong tendency to establish monasteries in remote areas away from the towns and worldy trappings. Paradoxically, monks using relics to generate income sought the attention of the world beyond the cloister and did their best to promote the celebrity of their saint and the miracle working powers of the relics. Thus monasticism and pilgrimage became two sides of a particular coin.

And so the Tripartite Order produced a sub division - that of the pilgrim - who temporarily at least, wore the same mantle of sanctity as the monk and cleric. For the knightly and labouring castes who lacked the spiritual benefits which were the privilege of the monastic vocation and were fearful for their soul's eternal destiny important rewards could be obtained by travelling ever greater distances to the important shrines.

A monk writing in the early eleventh century observed this increase in travel to holy places: “Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage. Their numbers were greater than the past age had ever heard of”.

He was in little doubt why this should be: “Many consulted in these matters about the meaning of this concourse. They were answered that it portended no other than the advent of that corrupt Antichrist, whose coming at the end of this world is prophesied in Holy Scripture”.

The location of Santiago de Compostela proved attractive for several reasons, one of them being that it was as far west as man could possibly go at the time.

The gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away

In early medieval France, men could not help but notice that all around them lay the ruins of a great civilisation.

Temples and theatres, great bridges and roads had crumbled and fallen into disrepair through neglect. Yet what remained spoke of a glorious past, of a society whose organisational and technological capabilities were far beyond those of the present time.

And yet in the early twelfth century a monk, abbot of a northern French monastery wrote criticising those who praised the achievements of the ancients over those of his own day. In doing so he revealed an attitude prevalent in his day. Men believed that their world was quite literally growing old, that its period of greatness was now in the long distant past and that the Roman Empire had constituted a golden age.

What lay ahead was the Apocalypse and the task of society was to prepare the way for the inevitable: “Although pure strength was pre-eminent among the ancients, yet among us, though the end of time has come upon us, the gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away”, so wrote the abbot.


“Certain mortals” he continued, ”have developed the foul habit of praising previous times and attacking what modern men do ... However, no discerning individual could prefer in any way the temporal prosperity of the ancients to any of the strengths of our own day.”

By this the abbot, Guibert de Nogent, meant that the spiritual strengths of his day were of greater value than the material wealth of the past. As society moved inexorably towards the End Times a mutually supporting division developed, a caste system imported from the East. This was the Tripartite division: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. In other words, the monks, the knights and the feudal serfs. Each performed a vital service towards the greater good in a mutually interdependent sctructure.

Those who worked the land provided the necessary food, the knightly aristocracy protected the other two divisions and fought to defend Christendom. It was the monks and clerics however who provided the most vital function: prayer.

For it was considered that humanity was too sinful to be redeemed without constant prayer and so around the relics of saints an ever more elaborate liturgical ritual evolved. And so the monasteries were reformed, they received great donations from kings and the wealthy aristocracy for the provision of foundations and endowments. By the eleventh century European Christendom contained a network of thousands of abbeys and priories.