The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James by Walter Starkie

does the good man St. James do? And what was he doing?
    OGY. Why, truly, not so well by far as he used to be.
    MEN. What the matter, is he grown old?
    OGY. Trifler! You know Saints never grow old. No, but it is this new opinion that has been spread abroad thro’ the world is the occasion that he has not so many visits made to him as he used to have; and those that do come give him a bare salute and either nothing at all, or little or nothing else; they say they can bestow their money to better purpose upon those that want it.
    MEN. An impious opinion.
    OGY. And this is the cause, that this great Apostle that used to glitter with gold and jewels now is brought to the very block that he is made of, and scarce has a tallow candle.
    MEN. If this be true the rest of the Saints are in danger of coming to the same pass.

    We can imagine the slim, feasting smile of Erasmus as he penned these lines. His irony with its saline tang runs through the veins of most of the greater writers of the sixteenth century. We find it in the stoical Cervantes, humorist and soldier, even in Don Quixote when Sancho Panza asks the following significant question: “Which is the greater achievement, to bring a dead person to life or to kill a giant?” Don Quixote answers: “To raise the dead of course.” Then Sancho answers: “You and I, master, ought to be Saints so as the sooner to win this fame we’re after.”
    Sancho means that both of them should win the favours and prerogatives that are enjoyed by the bodies and relics of the Saints, “for they with the sanction and approval of our Holy Mother the Church have lamps, tapers, winding-sheets, crutches, paintings, periwigs, eyes and legs, to deepen devotion and enhance their Christian fame. Kings carry the bodies and relics of Saints on their shoulders, kiss bits of their bones and enrich and adore their oratories and favourite altars with them... Why ’twas only yesterday or the day before they canonized or beatified a couple of little bare-footed friars, and now it is held a great luck just to kiss and touch the iron chains with which they were bound and tortured.... So you see, master, it pays better to be a little humble friar, no matter what your Order than a valiant knight errant.” Don Quixote then replies that “chivalry is a religion and holy knights are there in glory”. But then Sancho’s answer, implacably voicing the general opinion of sixteenth-century man: “True, but I’ve heard say there are more friars in heaven than knights errant.” *
    In France the slim feasting smile of Erasmus became the Gargantuan laughter of Rabelais, which swept away superstitions and hypocrisy in a cloudburst of drollery. Over the great gate of his monastery of Theleme was the inscription in great antique letters:

    Here enter not vile bigots, hypocrites,
    Externally devoted apes, base snites,
    Puft-up, wry-necked beasts, worse than the Huns,
    Or Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons.

    But there was gravity and wisdom too in that laughter, for, as Coleridge said in classing him as one of the greatest creative minds of the world, his buffoonery was not merely Brutus’s rough stick which contained a rod of gold; it was necessary as an amulet against monks and legates. Hence the fatherly homily given by the aged Grangousier to pilgrims in general: “Go your ways, poor men, in the name of God the Creator, to whom I pray to guide you perpetually, and henceforward be not 'so ready to undertake these idle and unprofitable journeys! Look to your families, labour every man in his vocation, instruct your children and like as the good Apostle St. Paul directeth you in doing whereof: God his angels and saints will guard and protect you and no evil or’plague at any time shall befall you.”
    In the sixteenth century doubts arose in the minds of some of the pilgrims whether the body of St. James was at Compostella. Dr. Andrew Boorde, by far the most light-hearted and kindly of the pilgrims whose accounts