As the Crow Flies: Roads and Pilgrimage

Christian pilgrimage is conventionally allegorized as a linear, forward, teleological progress toward a final destination. Consider Augustine's powerful and influential caution in representing the Christian life as a journey toward heaven during which we either dawdle on the road, enjoying (frui) as an end what we should use (uti) as a means, or we press on, eager to "enjoy" our destination;¹ or John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which Christian's route "is as straight as a Rule can make it." "There are many ways… and they are Crooked, and Wide: but … [the right] only being straight and narrow."² My purpose in this paper is to ask how the material experience of the road's detours and digressions complicates this ideate pilgrimage, and suggest that if in theory the destination determines the road it is as much the case that in reality the road determines the destination; or consider that if there are certain road networks because there are pilgrims, it is equally the case that there are pilgrims because there are roads. The argument applies generally, but pertains here to the experience of travel in late medieval England, particularly to Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century wife and business-woman of Lynn, Norfolk, who records her revelations and pilgrimages in the narrative known as the Book of Margery Kempe.³

The good condition of roads was never something to be taken for granted, by pilgrim, merchant, or any traveler. As a town dweller reared in the thick of local business and politics, Margery Kempe must have been acquainted with civic obligations to repair and maintain the street directly outside the home. Maintenance of the road, relationships with it, the sense of it as a lifeline to occupation and community was a daily, immediate, conscious and time-demanding solicitude.⁴

So personal was the sense of responsibility for roads that wealthy testators fairly routinely left monies for their repair. Often mentioned alongside gifts to the poor and imprisoned, road-repair was a corporal act of mercy toward the vulnerable traveler.⁵ In his testament dated July 10, 1407, William Vescy, a mercer of York and traveler.parishioner of All Saints, North Street, makes a bequest to mend the infrastructure in and around York.⁶

To the repair of the road near the Horsefair⁷ in the suburbs of York 20/-, of the bridge betwn. Ugglebarnby⁸ and Sleights⁹ 6/8, to the bridge of Sutton, nr. Elvington¹⁰ 13/4, to the repair of the road from Tadcaster¹¹ to York 10/-.

These are main roads and bridges between satellite towns and cities around the city of York, ranging in distance from about one to fifty miles, the largest amount of money going to the road closest to him (around the Horsefair). Vescy, a merchant, has to have used and known them well, have known what it was to have had carts stuck in mud and overturn in the Horsefair, or animals and merchandise washed away when falling through the unsafe bridges. This is someone who understands that without the road, there is no market, there are no merchants. Roads do not just happen, and cannot be assumed.

In the same testament Vescy supplies a methodical itinerary for various pilgrimages by-proxy that he required to be made for the good of his soul.

Furthermore I bequeath for one faithful man to travel for me and in my name to the house of St. James beyond the seas, 7 marks.

Also for one faithful man to travel for me and in my name, first to Lincoln, giving there in offering and alms 4d., thence to Walsyngham giving there in same 5d., thence to St. Edmundsbury giving there 4d., thence to Canterbury giving there 6d., and at Bromeholm 1d., to the crucifix in the church of St. Paul's, London, 1d., and to the shrine there 1d. And at Hayls in offerings and alms to York 4d. Total 2/2, and for his trouble and expenses 20/-.

Also for a man to travel to Beverley, in alms 8d., and for his trouble and expenses. 2...