Abstract
A few years ago a group of Irishmen rowed from Dublin to the Spanish port of A Coruña in a naomhóg which they had built themselves. They took it in stages over three years, the final stage being to walk from A Coruña to Santiago de Compostela. They completed their journey and, as one does nowadays, made a film about it, dedicated to the memory of one of the original four oarsmen who had died after the first two expeditions. Nowhere in Cunningham’s thoroughly researched study of Irish journeyings to the shrine of St James in Galicia does she suggest that this was a common form of pilgrim transport. Rather the contrary. The first Irish pilgrims to Santiago would have gone by way of England, the shortest sea-crossing even if there were two of them, and only later, by the mid-15th century as the technology of sailing improved, did they travel direct from one of several ports on the island of Ireland to A Coruña or to Vigo, or possibly to Lisbon, a more common destination for merchant ships. In 1473 the ship ‘Mary of London’ sailed from New Ross with 400 pilgrims, a quite astonishing number: one can’t help wondering how that many people coped once they reached the further shore.
There is no way of knowing this because, unlike pilgrims from other lands, including England, none of the Irish ones left accounts of their pilgrimage, which also means that, for many of the pilgrims whom we know about, we do not get to learn of their motives for undertaking such a lengthy, and sometimes perilous, journey when they were often warned against it. Cunningham quotes a verse written by a scribe in Irish into a ninth-century manuscript which deserves repeating:
Coming to Rome, Much labour and little profit. The King whom you seek here, Unless you bring him with you, you will not find him. (p. 32)
That was Rome. Undoubtedly one of the attractions of Santiago was that it was much nearer than Jerusalem—the shrine par excellence—and somewhat nearer, and easier to reach, than Rome. And there were always local shrines, more frequently visited, as Eamon Duffy has insisted for England in his recent collection of essays, Royal Books and Holy Bones, than those overseas. An Irish life of St Kevin recounts that he was authorized in Rome to establish a pilgrimage centre at Glendalough, seven pilgrimages to which would earn the pilgrim exactly the same spiritual benefits as one journey made to Rome itself. For of course the purpose of a pilgrimage was to earn indulgences, time off Purgatory, for sins committed: in this, the Irish were no different from anyone else. What is, however, surprising, and what rather remains unexplained, is the difference Cunningham emphasizes between the Anglo-Norman region of Ireland and the Gaelic territories, inhabitants of the former embracing the journey to Santiago a couple of centuries before those of the latter. An Irish ninth-century martyrology recorded the passion of St James and his post mortem trip to Northern Spain on 25 July—still of course his feast day—which strikes me as remarkably early when the story of his body arriving in Galicia was only circulating there a couple of centuries before. Yet other references are, apparently, sparse. ‘Just as St James has left a very weak footprint in Irish hagiographical literature,’ writes Cunningham, ‘the Saint and his Galician shrine are scarcely noticed by the bardic poets’ (p. 71).
Nonetheless once the journey to Santiago had become established, it flourished, especially in Jubilee years (still true to this day) when the Saint’s feast day fell on a Sunday and there were even greater spiritual benefits to be had (not, I think, true to this day). The fact that jubilee indulgences were available in Santiago much more frequently than in Rome was, Cunningham thinks, one of the major reasons for its attraction for pilgrims. They fell in a fixed pattern so it was possible to calculate well in advance when they would occur, and prepare to set off. This was obviously true around Europe and not just in Ireland. As Cunningham comments towards the end of her book, ‘There was little that was distinctively Irish about Irish involvement in medieval pilgrimage to Santiago’ (p. 151). This may come as a disappointment to some who pick up this attractively packaged volume, but it shouldn’t. Bernadette Cunningham has done a massive amount of research, carefully presented, in Latin and Irish sources of a wide variety of types. In a series of appendices she lists Irish pilgrims to the shrine of St James she has managed to identify from the middle ages to the middle of the 18th century, as well as church dedications and holy wells. She has even identified an Irish Franciscan as an assistant bishop of Santiago in the late 16th century. And the scholarship, though evident, is lightly worn: the book is a great read.