Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

and uneasy—and still they yearned for more. The peace councils, at which the parading of relics was a particular attraction, had served to instil in them a taste for mystery and spectacle; nor, for all that they admired the secluded sanctity of the monks, were they content to have everything holy locked away. Ground down as most people were by the harshness and sheer monotony of their existence, the chance to set out on a journey to a famous shrine, to look upon the remains of a saint, and perhaps to witness a miracle, had become a precious one indeed.

So it was, in the first decades of the new millennium, that the roads came increasingly to swell with pilgrims—and many of these, exceptionally, were peasants. This, in a world where most people never thought to raise their gaze beyond the brow of the nearest hill, was yet another prodigy – and not the least unsettling. Women, in particular, finding themselves and their families suddenly abandoned, were liable to accuse their husbands of setting off on pilgrimage out of ‘vain curiosity rather than any devotion to religion’. Yet they needed to watch their tongues. The saints did not take kindly to shrews. A woman in Normandy, for instance, who had presumed to nag her husband to stay at home and put food on his family’s table, rather than visit a local shrine, found ‘her blasphemous mouth, the organ through which she had shamelessly uttered outrageous language against God and her husband, elongated rigidly in a distorted and deformed way, so that it became fixed to both her ears’. A fitting punishment, no doubt; and yet, the truth be told, there were plenty of monks who would not have disagreed with her criticisms, The increasingly vulgar character of the pilgrims at their shrines had not gone unmarked. Particularly resented was the tendency of peasants to camp out in churches and stay up all night telling rude jokes. Some monks, driven to distraction by their ‘abominable shouting and unruly singing’, would go so far as to lock them out.

Yet invariably, whenever this occurred, the saints themselves would show their disapproval by miraculously unfastening the doors. This was a lesson that most monasteries, not surprisingly, were quick to absorb. Uncouth the peasants might be, but a shrine that could harness their undoubted fervour, and their yearning for wonders, was a shrine with a future. Increasingly, then, far from discouraging the masses, monasteries sought to attract them in ever vaster numbers. Whereas once it had been forbidden to disturb the bones of the saints, now, in the wake of the peace councils, monks began to send their relics out on tour, to the accompaniment of clanging cymbals, soaring anthems and flickering torches. Sometimes, if the holdings of a neighbouring house made it worthwhile, they might arrange a swap. Sometimes, if they felt their own to be inadequate, they might attempt an upgrade. The most audacious example of this took place in Aquitaine, when the monks of the hitherto obscure monastery of St-Jean-d’Angely suddenly announced a truly sensational discovery: the head of John the Baptist. Quite how it had ended up there, buried within a mysterious pyramid of stone, was never fully explained. The enthusiasm of the pilgrims who soon descended upon the monastery, crowding the narrow stairways in their excitement, pushing and shoving their way down into the shrine, ensured that it did not have to be. Even King Robert himself, on a rare trip south, and in dread of the Day of Judgement, came to reverence it. Not surprisingly, then, monks in other monasteries too, keen for a share of the action, began to rifle around in their own crypts. Yet more spectacular finds were duly made. Such discoveries, coming as they did only years before the millennial anniversary of Christ’s Passion, powerfully intensified the mood of febrile expectation. ‘For it was as though the relics had been waiting for a brilliant resurrection and were now at last, by God’s permission, revealed to the gaze of the faithful. Certainly, they brought much comfort to many people.’

But not, however, to all. Sometimes, above the excited hubbub of the pilgrims, dark mutterings about idol worship might be overheard. Heretics, scornful of what they saw as the Church’s mummery, flatly refused to respect ‘the honour of God’s saints’. As a result, monks who wished to boost the profile of their relic holdings had to tread carefully. They could not afford to push their luck too shamelessly. Crowds who felt that they were being taken for a ride might very well turn ugly. Nothing better illustrated this than a particularly over- ambitious attempt at self-promotion by the monastery in Limoges. The monks there, rather than grubbing up some new relics, had opted instead to promote the saint whose bones they already owned. St Martial, it was grandly announced in the autumn of 1028, rather than the obscure missionary that everyone had previously assumed him to be, had in fact been one of the original apostles: the nephew of St Peter, no less. Though this claim was wildly implausible, it had nevertheless secured a heavyweight supporter: Aquitaine’s leading historian, Ademar himself. For eight months, displaying yet again his inimitable talent for blending erudition with wilful distortion, the famous scholar cobbled together an impressive number of works designed to prove that St Martial had indeed been an apostle. Finally, on 3 August 1029, the fateful day arrived when the whole campaign was officially to be blessed, at a special service in the cathedral of Limoges.

Ademar, basking in the glow of his achievement, had even invited his parents to come and witness his hour of glory. Unfortunately, however, he had reckoned without the scepticism of an unexpected visitor: a rival scholar, an Italian from Lombardy by the name of Benedict. Ferociously, even as the service was about to begin, the Lombard denounced the whole farrago as an outrage – and Ademar himself as a fraudster. The people of Limoges, far