To a degree I’ll be roving around this week in that I’ll be looking briefly at medieval pilgrimage after mentioning a rather splendid cavalry officer from Cornwall who fought at Waterloo and rose to the dizzy heights of Lord of Truro. However, before I introduce the speakers on these topics I thought I would mention that tales of pilgrims in Canterbury and fighting the French are two subjects that will feature at the Canterbury Medieval Weekend. This as I’m sure you know is now only a couple of weeks away and one of the exciting speakers on Saturday 2 April is Gordon Corrigan who will be exploring The Hundred Years’ War. As a historian and an ex-army officer, he can grasp far more from the records regarding how and why medieval commanders adopted certain tactics, and it is these insights and his engagement with the sources that means this promises to be a fascinating hour. Sadly I shall miss it because at the same time I’m taking a guided tour around St John’s Hospital. However I shall look forward to hearing about it afterwards.

The second subject, tales of pilgrims once they actually arrived in Canterbury, rather than Chaucer’s version where they remain forever on the road to the ‘holy martyr’s city’, will be given on Sunday morning 3 April by Peter Brown. This too promises to be a fascinating talk about what people were reading in their mother tongue apart from The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other works, for he was not the only writer whose works have survived from Richard II’s reign and from the time of the Lancastrian kings. I am hoping to be able to hear Peter Brown’s talk unless Diane Heath, my fellow organiser, says she particularly wants to hear him, in which case I’ll expect a summary afterwards.

To come to the two lectures I heard this week, and to one which sadly I had to miss because I was teaching. The first was a Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society talk by Jayne Wackett that took place at Canterbury Christ Church on Wednesday. Jayne worked on a Westminster Abbey manuscript for her doctorate, but since then she has become the curator of the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro and it was wearing this hat that she introduced her topic. Having curated an exhibition last year on material associated with the important Cornish Vivian family, she wanted to share her findings about one particular exceedingly large portrait of Sir Richard Hussey Vivian. I won’t go into the details of her deconstruction of this full-size portrait with its sitter in a commanding, indeed swaggering pose; its great white horse; the stormy, brooding sky, and its black (African) groom at the horse’s head, but needless to say this is a clever piece that was intended to create a particular identity of its subject. Indeed a slightly earlier portrait of Napoleon, this time riding a white horse, provides one of the keys to unlocking this portrait for it provides a worthy opponent, yet one who was overcome by the British Army that was led by men such as Hussey Vivian. I will leave it there, Jayne is due to publish an article on the portrait soon, but it is worth mentioning that Hussey Vivian’s great house outside Truro was stuffed full on military memorabilia, right the way down to boot scrapers – commemorating his brave defence of a bridge in the Peninsula Wars – to lots of little cavalry men curtain hooks.

The paper I missed was yesterday, where Rachel Koopmans was speaking to the postgraduate medievalists and lecturers at Kent in the weekly seminar series. Her topic was the miracle stories recorded by the two monks William and Benedict in the early years after Becket’s murder, and how these stories informed the illustrations in the great Becket stained glass windows of the Trinity Chapel. However not having been there means that I’ll leave this talk, although I will just mention that the speaker next Thursday will be Louise Wilkinson from the Centre here. As an expert on royal and aristocratic medieval women, Louise will be focusing on a group of sisters who were also royal princesses.

However to return to medieval pilgrimage, and to the Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library Lecture that took place this evening. The speaker today was John Jenkins from the University of York, although I met him a few years ago not that long after he had completed his doctorate on monastic history using West Country case studies. He is now the Research Assistant of a large funded project exploring ‘Pilgrimage and Cathedrals’, the latest in a line of ecclesiastical projects led by Dee Dyas that includes one on ‘The English Parish Church through the Centuries’. The project John is working on is particularly ambitious and will involve some very highly technical digital imagery, but this evening he confined his talk to a powerpoint presentation. His topic was an exploration of the medieval pilgrimage experience at Canterbury. He focused on two periods, the first years after Becket’s murder when the tomb was the centre of attention, and then 1420 as a means to think about the differences when it was the shrine that drew pilgrims to Canterbury. He used a wide range of sources not only from the cathedral archives in Canterbury, but from Oxford and London because, as he said, once we get beyond the miracle accounts of William and Benedict there are no major sources, instead it is a matter of gleaning what one can from fragments. However, there is one good document that he did use and this is the Customary of St Thomas, and it is something that close readers of this blog may remember from a previous occasion.

John’s wide-ranging examination of these two periods highlighted the seemingly more chaotic arrangement at the tomb compared to the more organised pilgrim presence at the shrine. He also drew attention to the fervour of the early pilgrims about which we know so much compared to their later counterparts. Moreover these early pilgrims had been able to get up far closer to St Thomas in his tomb, as well as receiving an ampulla of Thomas water that was said to contain blood from the murdered archbishop, something their successors at the shrine would not have received. Instead these later pilgrims would have gazed on the saint’s magnificent gold, silver and jewel-encrusted shrine, albeit from a ‘safe’ distance in case such wealth was too tempting. Not that these precious metals and stones would have been the only things around the shrine, for as well as its wooden cover, let down on a pulley that in a somewhat different form is still in place where it has been for centuries, there were wax votive offerings. Amazingly examples of such offering still survive at Exeter and generally were in the shape of the body part or creature that had been cured, but might also be a trindle or rope candle the length of the cured person or creature. Because John was looking at individual pilgrimage, he did not mention what must have been the largest of these wax votive offerings, the great candle from the people of Dover that was brought up on its great reel every three years to sit next to the shrine, pieces being cut from it daily to serve as candles at the Mass of St Thomas and at the funerals of pauper pilgrims who died in Canterbury.

As the packed archive room witnessed, this was a fascinating reflection on what John has discovered about medieval pilgrimage at Canterbury, and after his talk and several questions, the audience repaired to the Chapter House to drink wine. This was not the beer, cheese and bread available to pilgrims in 1428 who came to Becket’s shrine on the night of the 28/29 December, but a very good modern substitute. And when I left the place was buzzing with conversation stimulated by John’s talk and perhaps even the archives and library’s generous hospitality on a chilly March evening.