CHAPTER V

PILGRIMAGE

Pilgrimage, never so great a craze in London as in the country, or in England as in France, plays an important part in the mediæval life. The earliest pilgrimage was, of course, to the Holy Places of Jerusalem: it began in the second century with a journey to the site of the Ascension. The other sites multiplied with the increase of pilgrims and the demand for sites and sacred relics and associations. The desire to go pilgrimaging grew and spread with great rapidity among all classes. In the century before the Crusades the roads to Palestine were black with swarms of pilgrims: we have the history of many early pilgrimages, including that written down by the Abbot Adamnanus of Scotland from the lips of the shipwrecked pilgrim Arnulfus, and that of Willibald the English pilgrim who started with his father and sister Walfunga, his brother Wunibald, and a large party of followers and servants: in Italy the father died and the brother and sister went home: Willibald persevered and reached Jerusalem safely.

It is easy to understand why the pilgrimage attracted so many. It was full of adventure and of danger. On the other hand, it was greatly meritorious: if one was killed on a pilgrimage, the doors of heaven were thrown open: if one returned in safety the term of purgatory was shortened. Then the pilgrim got away from his work: he had nothing to do but to plod on: he wanted no money: every day brought him to some hospitable monastery where he found supper, bed, and breakfast: he made new acquaintances and new friends perpetually: the way was enlivened by talk, and by casual potations: in the evening there was sometimes revelry at an inn, with wine or ale and music and dancing and the shows of the _jogleurs_. Who would not exchange the dull and tedious life in the country for a time of such varied experience and entertainment?

The practice quickly became an abuse. The peasant deserted his plough, his wife, and his children, to go pilgrimaging. The craftsman left his bench and his shop, in search of adventures as a pilgrim: even the monk left his monastery to wander out into the world, sometimes never to come back again: sometimes he did come back, with the confession of broken vows. The Church, therefore, interfered. No one must go on pilgrimage without the Bishop’s license. This granted, the pilgrim was solemnly invested with the scrip and staff, and the long woollen robe which formed the chief part of his dress. The parish priest with his friends accompanied him to the boundaries of his parish and he set forth, armed with the Bishop’s license and a passport which procured him hospitality in all Christian countries.

“In the name of God,” ran the commendatory letter, “we would have your highness or holiness to know that the bearer of the present letters, our brother, has asked our permission to go peaceably on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, either for his own sins, or to pray for our preservation. Thereupon, we have given him these present letters, in which we salute you, and pray you, for the love of God and Saint Peter, to receive him as your guest, to be useful to him in going and coming back, so that he may return in safety to his house: and as is your good custom, make him pass happy days. May God the Eternal King protect you, and keep you in His kingdom!”

The Church did more than bless the pilgrim: it celebrated in one of those dramas by which so much was taught, the act of pilgrimage itself, in a service which has been preserved. The following is an abridgment:—

“In the nave of the church was erected a fort, ‘castellum,’ representing the house at Emmaus where the two travellers entered and broke bread with Christ. At the appointed time two priests, ‘of the second seats,’ appointed for the day, came forth from the vestry singing the hymn which begins ‘Jesu, nostra redemptio.’ They were to be dressed in tunics, ‘et desuper cappis transversum,’ were to have long flowing hair and beards, and were each to carry a staff and scrip. Singing this hymn, and slowly marching down the right aisle, they came to the western porch, where they put themselves at the head of the procession of choristers waiting for them, and all began together to sing, ‘Nos tuo vultu saties.’ Then the priest for the day, robed in alb and surplice, bare-footed, carrying a cross on his right shoulder, advanced to meet them, and ‘standing suddenly before them,’ asked, ‘What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another as ye talk and are sad?’ To which the two pilgrims replied, ‘Art thou a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?’

‘What things,’ asked the priest. ‘Concerning Jesus of Nazareth,’ they replied, with the words which follow. ‘Oh, fools!’ said the priest, ‘and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.’ And then, feigning to retire, the priest would there have left them, but they held him back, and pointing to the ‘castellum,’ entreated him to enter, singing, ‘Abide with us for it is towards evening and the day is far spent.’ Then singing another hymn, they led him to the ‘Fort of Emmaus,’ which they entered, and where they sat down at a table already spread for supper. Here the priest brake bread sitting between them, and being recognised by this act for the Lord, ‘suddenly vanished out of their sight.’ The pilgrims, pretending to be stupefied, arose and sang sorrowfully (_lamentabiliter_) ‘Alleluia,’ with the verse, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?’ Singing this twice they walked to the pulpit, where they sang the verse, ‘Dic nobis Maria.’ After this, another priest, dressed in a dalmatic and surplice, with head muffled up like a woman, came to them and sang, ‘Sepulcrum Christi Angelicos testes.’ He then took up a cloth from one place, and a second from another place, and threw them before the great door of the choir. And (the directions conclude) then let him sing, ‘Christ has risen,’ and let the choir chaunt the two other verses which follow, and let the women and the pilgrims retire within: and the memory of this act being thus recalled, let the procession return to the choir, and the vespers be finished.”

There was also the pilgrimage of punishment, when a criminal was condemned to wander up and down the road whithersoever the Pope should direct him. There were many of those poor wretches to be met with on the road; most of them were murderers; a chain was made in which was worked up the sword or knife or other weapon with which the crime was committed; the neck, arms, and body of the criminal were bound round with this chain; so equipped, the malefactor toiled painfully from shrine to shrine, living on alms. It was not until the fourteenth century that the practice was discontinued. Can anything prove more abundantly the power of the Church than this punishment of murderers, who were simply loaded with these chains and then commanded to go forth on a pilgrimage from shrine to shrine? There was no police to enforce obedience; there was no guard set over the criminals; they were told to go and walk to a certain shrine and there to await further orders; and they obeyed.

There were two kinds of pilgrimage: _peregrinatio major_ and _peregrinatio minor_. Of the former kind were those to the Holy Land and to Rome. Of the latter kind, those which generally satisfied our ancestors, were those to Walsingham with its Virgin, Glastonbury with its holy thorn, Waltham with its black cross, St. Edmund’s Bury with the body of the King, Durham with the shrine of St. Cuthbert, Chichester with that of St. Richard; there were also Beverley, Winchester, Lincoln, York, Peterborough—all famous shrines. The two places most popular were the Walsingham and the Canterbury pilgrimages. But in thinking of Chaucer’s immortal company we must remember that such companies left London daily in the summer bound for one or other of these holy places. In the illogical confusion of things belonging to the period the pilgrimage which for many was an orgy and a period of unbounded license all the way, was coupled with prayers devout and tears unfeigned.

It would be idle to look too closely into the accounts of pilgrimages for evidences of the religious spirit among the pilgrims. Yet such evidences are found, notably in the fervent prayers and praises of Felix Fabri, who will be mentioned immediately. It is sufficient to remember that with the great mass of the people religion consisted in obedience. They had but to do what the Church ordered. After death there would be purgatory. Pilgrimage and other observances shortened the period of purgatory. They went, therefore, partly with that object, partly with the desire of seeing strange countries, partly to work off the restlessness that falls upon men, as upon nations, from time to time.

Wyclyf, William of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, all the mediæval writers, continually make allusions to pilgrims. Sometimes the life of pilgrimage is ridiculed. Thus William of Langland speaks of the “crowd of hermits with hooked staves, who wend to Walsingham and their wenches after them, boobies who are unable to labour, clothe themselves in cloaks to be known from the others, and become hermits for their ease.” Sometimes the tales of the pilgrims are derided.

“Pylgrimis and palmers plyghten hem to-gederes, To seche saint Jame and seyntys of Rome, Wenten forth in hure way with many un-wyse tales, And heven leve to lye al hure lyf-tyme.”

Thorpe (Skeat’s _Notes to Chaucer_, p. 49), when examined by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1407, complains of the pilgrims, saying: “They will ordain to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs: and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town that they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the King came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a moneth in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after, great jangelers, tale-tellers, and lyers.”

But the Archbishop said, “Leude Losell, Thou seest not ferre ynough in this matter, for thou considerest not the great trauel of pilgremys, therefore thou blamest the thing that is praisable. I say to thee that it is right well done that pilgremys have with them both syngers and also pypers, that whan one of them that goeth barfoote striketh his toe upon a stone and hurteth hym sore, and makyth him to blede; it is well done that he or his felow begyn then a songe, or else take out of his bosom a baggepipe for to drive away with suche myrthe the hurt of his felow. For with soche solace the trauel and weeriness of pilgremys is lightely and merily broughte forth.”

Sometimes the people invented saints and shrines for themselves, as when they flocked to the tomb of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a man far removed from the saintly life, or to that of Simon de Montfort. In 1338 a grocer of London sold a mazer ornamented with the image of St. Thomas of Lancaster. And a few years later the people made a saint of the preacher and hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole. All these popular but ephemeral saints worked miracles abundantly while the faith in their power lasted. Would that some poet had depicted the swarm of pilgrims who, in the year when the grocer sold that mazer, rode out of London on a pilgrimage to Pontefract where St. Thomas of Lancaster was buried!

Not only must men get a license to go on a pilgrimage: the shipmen who carried them were also licensed. Pilgrims to foreign parts went either to Calais and thence by land, or, if they were going to Compostella, they went all the way by sea. Thus, the ship called _La Charité de Paynton_, Peter Cok, Captain, was licensed to carry a hundred pilgrims. “Le Petre de Dartemouth” was licensed for sixty, “La Marie de Southampton” for one hundred, “Le Thomas de Saltash” for sixty, and so on.

In the narrative of Felix Fabri (A.D. 1484) pilgrims to the Holy Land (see _Palestine Pilgrims Text Society_, vols. vii.-x.) we can read how the long pilgrimages were conducted on board ship. Felix sailed from Venice. The methods were much the same for pilgrims from every country, except that the ships which had to cross the Bay of Biscay, and to sail round the headlands of Portugal, were probably stouter than those which sailed in the Mediterranean alone.

The pilgrim paid so much for the voyage there and back: he was also taken to the Holy Places under escort. A special contract was entered into with each party. Thus, that of Felix consisted of twelve, viz. four noble Lords and eight attendants, viz. a kind of general manager or courier, a barber and musician, an old soldier for a manservant, a bourgeois for manciple, a cook, an ex-trader who had been a galley slave and acted as interpreter, a “man of peace,” who was a schoolmaster by profession, and Felix himself, Priest of the Order of Preaching Friars. The articles of the contract were, in brief, these—the party were to be conveyed from Venice to Joppa and back again. They were to receive two full meals a day, with a cup of malvoisie every morning before breakfast; they were to be protected from ill-usage by the galley slaves; they were to be taken to see all the Holy places; and they were to pay forty ducats a head. The value of the ducat at this time I cannot pretend to estimate. There were gold ducats and silver ducats; ducats of Hungary, Austria, Hamburg and Italy.

On the weighing of the anchors, the Germans sang together the Pilgrims’ Hymn:—

“In Gottes Namen fahren wir: Seiner Gnaden begehren wir: Nun helff uns die Gottliche Kraft und das Heilige Geist: Kyrie Eleison!”

It would be pleasant to know the words of the English Pilgrims’ Hymn on arrival within sight of Joppa, when they all sang together, led by two priests. There were many nations represented on board the ship, Italians, Lombards, Gauls, Franks, Germans, English, Irish, Scots, Hungarians, Dacians, Bohemians, Spaniards, and they joined together in the “Hymn of Ambrose and Augustine,” _i.e._ the _Te Deum Laudamus_.

As for the life on board, the inconveniences, the insects, the turbulent slaves, the sea-sickness, Felix spares us nothing. The earliest of our sea songs, belonging to nearly the same date, is an account of a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Saint Iago of Compostella. It is evidently the work of one who writes from experience. The ship is filled with pilgrims, and they are all sea-sick together:—

“Men may leve all gamys, That saylen to Saint James’s; For many a man hilt gramys; When they begin to sayle. For when they have take the sea, At Sandwyche or at Wynchylsea, At Bristow, or where that hyt bee, Theyr hertes begin to fayle.

Thys menewhyle the pylgryms lye, And have theyr bowlys fast them by, And cry afthyr hote malvesy, ‘Thou helpe for to restore.’ And soon sold have a saltyd tost, For they myght ete neyther sode ne rost, A man might sone pay for theyr cost, As for one day or twayne. Some layd their bookys on theyr kne, And rad so long they myght nat se: Alas! myne hede will cleve on thre! Thus sayeth another certayne.”

The itinerary of two pilgrimages made by one English traveller still remains, and has been published by the Roxburghe Club. His name was William Wey, Bachelor of Divinity, formerly fellow of the Royal College of the most Blessed Mary at Eton beside Windsor. He travelled twice to Jerusalem, in 1458 and in 1462, and once to St. James of Compostella in 1465. He was “consecratus ad modum peregrinorum,” set apart by the special service: he received the license of the King, so that he was not to lose his fellowship by unauthorised absence; he left Eton to join the Augustines of Hedington, or Edinton; he made his last pilgrimage in the seventieth year of his age; and he died in the monastery in the year 1476 aged eighty-six. Evidently a strong man. He bequeathed, or gave, to the Brethren of Hedington, a great collection of valuable relics and curiosities from the Holy Land.

Unfortunately he tells nothing of the start or the return, beginning his pilgrimage at Venice. Here there was a regular service of ships, where captains undertook to do the “round trip”—to Jerusalem and back—for so much.

When he went to St. James of Compostella, there was a pilgrim fleet of six ships which sailed from Plymouth, viz. from Portsmouth, Bristol, Weymouth, Lymington, Plymouth—called the _Mary White_, and others—was this the annual pilgrim fleet? or was it only one of many such fleets?

The itineraries of Wey illustrate the comparative ease with which people travelled at that time. It was a long way to Palestine, but not too long for a man of seventy to undertake. The traveller relates stories of purses cut and jewels stolen, but there is no sense of other dangers or of any terrors: the pilgrims were taken on board; they were carried to the port; they were landed; they were conducted under escort to their shrines; and they were brought home again. It is noticeable that Wey’s two companions on his first pilgrimage were priests like himself. In Chaucer’s time, as is well known, all who could afford the time and money went on pilgrimage. Thus the wife of Bath:—

“Thrice hadde sche ben at Jerusalem: Sche hadde passed many a strange stream: At Rome she hadde been and at Bologne: In Galice at Seynt James and at Cologne.”

One imagines that the long civil wars and the widespread Lollardy, which was only silenced, not killed, interfered with the practice of pilgrimage in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, Erasmus shows us that the pilgrims to English shrines, at least, were numerous in his time. The regular service of personally conducted pilgrimages to Venice and back proves that pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not diverted or interrupted, in spite of war raging all around.

At every shrine the pilgrim bought or was presented with a sign to show that he had been there. These signs were cast in pewter or in lead. A pilgrim who had been to many shrines came home with his cap or his coat covered with these emblems. Thus Chaucer says (_Archæologia_, xxxviii. p. 130):—

“Then as manere and custom is, signes there they bought, For men of contre should know whome they had sought: Eche man set his silver in such thing as they liked, And in the meen while the miller had y-piked His bosom ful of signs of Canterbury brochis.”

Afterwards

“They set their signys upon their hedes, and some upon their capp, And sith to the dynerward they gan for to stapp.”

Erasmus makes Menedemus ask, “What kind of attire is this that thou wearest? Thou art bedizened with semicircular shells, each full of images of tin and lead, and adorned with straw chains, and thy arm is girt with a bracelet of beads.” The reply is that he has been to certain shrines on pilgrimage.

Besides the ordinary insignia of pilgrimage (see Skeat’s Notes to _Piers Plowman_), every pilgrimage had its special signs, which the pilgrim on his return wore conspicuously upon his hat or his scrip, or hanging round his neck, in token that he had accomplished that particular pilgrimage. Thus the ampullæ were the special signs of the Canterbury pilgrimage; the scallop-shell was the sign of the pilgrimage to Compostella (shrine of St. James in Galicia); whilst the signs of the Roman pilgrimage were a badge with the effigies of St. Peter and St. Paul, the cross-keys (keys-of-Rome) and the vernicle. The vernicle was a copy of the handkerchief of St. Veronica, which was miraculously impressed with the features of our Lord.

The late Dr. Hugo communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a paper on this subject, accompanied by several specimens found on the banks of the Thames. Remember, in examining these, that the greater number of people went about the streets adorned with these emblems. (_Archæologia_, xxxviii.)

We might expect that, as was the custom with one of the duties required of the faithful, so it would happen with others. Thus, since the soul was saved by means of prayer and praise, it mattered little who sang or said those prayers, and a rich man could endow a priest in perpetuity to say prayers for his soul every day. In the same way, since a pilgrimage was in itself a most meritorious action, and equal to many masses, a man might pay others to go on a pilgrimage for him. This, in fact, was done. We find bequests of money for pilgrimages. One merchant of London bequeathed sixty gold scudi to be given to some one who would undertake, in the name of the testator, and for the good of the testator’s soul, to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre and the sacred places of Jerusalem. Another left money with the object of getting credit for going to the convent of Mount Sinai: while many left smaller sums for pilgrimages to Santiago di Compostella and the Blessed Virgin of Walsingham. Were there, one asks, professional pilgrims? Did men painfully work through the exercises at shrine after shrine, all for the good of souls stranger to themselves? Was there no way by which they might divert the intention of the testator and reap for the benefit of their own souls these accumulations of merits and good deeds?

When we think of a London pilgrim, one of two pictures presents itself. We either see the companies assembling at the Tabard Inn bound for the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, or we see the smaller and more serious party bound for the Holy Sepulchre and the sacred places of Jerusalem. All our views of the mediæval life are curiously narrowed by the influence of Chaucer. So strong and fine is the light thrown upon the Canterbury Pilgrims and those to Palestine that we have forgotten the many other shrines to which the pilgrim fared in search of a blessing and the remission of his sins.

But besides the English shrines already mentioned, there were other local ones for the Londoner. There was the shrine of Our Lady of Crome’s Hill, Greenwich, or that of the Holy Rood of Bermondsey, or that of Our Lady of Willesden, or that of Our Lady of Muswell, or that of “Our Lady that standeth in the Oke.” The last-named place of pilgrimage was somewhere between Highgate and Islington. May its name be supposed to linger in the modern form of Gospel Oak? The whole country, in fact, was studded all over with shrines of local celebrity. Outside London, no one, for instance, knew or cared about Our Lady of Muswell: but to Londoners she was a very real saint, to whom multitudes paid pilgrimage. Of these minor shrines, concerning which Chaucer is silent, which Erasmus never visited, there are very few historical notices extant. When they were suppressed and the images themselves burned, there was no one left to care about the records and the papers connected with them, so they, too, were burned, or they were left to moulder in the muniment chest.

Or, if the Londoner wanted a pilgrimage with little personal exertion, which might be performed in a single day, he could choose between the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, a place of the greatest sanctity: that of St. Erkenwald in St. Paul’s, also regarded as most powerful and efficacious: there were two feasts of St. Erkenwald: on these days all the clergy of the diocese repaired to the shrine robed in their copes: special indulgences were granted to those who visited this shrine.

The three shrines north of London, now so completely forgotten, all lay in the heart of the great Middlesex Forest. Each of the miraculous images was probably a Lady of the Oak: there was Our Lady of the Oak all over Europe. The miraculous figure is always found in an oak, and is always, it is said, _black_. Thus, Our Lady of Puy in France, supposed to be the most ancient of these figures, is described as being carved out of cedar, swathed round and round with fine linen like a mummy, deep black, the face and features extremely long, the eyes small and formed of glass, the look haggard and wild (_L. and M. Archæological Trans._ iv. 178); and there is a Black Virgin at Marseilles.

These shrines were near enough for a single day’s journey: a pleasant summer’s ride through the gardens and orchards of Islington where the Forest began, and so over the greensward and under the branches of the wood to the clearing on the top of Muswell Hill, where now stands the Alexandra Palace, and then stood the chapel containing the black image swathed with linen, crowned, decked with gold and jewels, before which stood the altar and burned the lamp day and night. Every day through the summer came the penitents, the sick, the jovial pilgrims, who only wanted to put in a plea for indulgence. Outside the chapel there were taverns and merry-making places. First the pilgrim knelt at the shrine; sometimes he went round it on his knees; and prayed, with simple belief, if not with fervour; faith made the sick man whole; faith absolved the penitent; faith made the most careless happy in the belief that Our Lady of Muswell had knocked off many—he knew not how many—years of purgatory. The religious act finished, no one objected to pleasure and merriment. There are indications that the merriment was not always seemly, nor was the pleasure always sinless. Yet pilgrimage continued because the sick who had been healed spread abroad the story of their miraculous cures, and because everybody wanted to get out of purgatory as quickly as possible, and because it was a most delightful form of holiday and recreation.

The Lollards preached against pilgrimages continually; a fact charged against them by the Church time after time. Thus, when a Lollard named William Dynet had to abjure his Lollardy in the year 1395, he swore that thenceforth he would worship images and that he would never more despise pilgrimages. A hundred and forty years more the worship of images had to continue in the land. Piers Plowman speaks with contempt of the sham holiness of pilgrims in words already quoted:

“Heremytes in an heep with hoked staves, Wenten to Walsingham and their wenches after.”

Later on, one Father Donald, a Scotch Friar, said, preaching, “Ye men of London, gang on yourself with your wives to Willesden, or else keep them at home with you in sorrow.”

In the year 1509, when there occurred a fire in Willesden Church, which damaged the sacred image, one Elizabeth, wife of John Sampson, citizen, got into trouble for expressing a not unnatural doubt of the power of the image to help others when she could not help herself. “If Our Lady of Willesden might have holpen men and women which go to her of pilgrimage, she would not have suffered her own tayle (taille) to have been burnt.”

She had to abjure these sentiments publicly. But if the ordinary citizens’ wives commonly talked in this manner, the way was surely rapidly being prepared for the Reformation. In 1530—very shortly before the end—one Dr. Crown, being questioned as to heresy, said, “I will say again, do your duty and then your devotion ... when thou comest at the Day of Judgment, He will not say unto thee ‘why wentest thou not to Wilsdon a pilgrimage?’ He will say unto thee ‘I was an hungred and thou gavest me no meat: I was nakyd and thou gavest me no clothys’: and soche lyke.”

In September 1538 all the images—those of Walsingham, Ipswich, Worcester, the Lady of Willesden, the Lady of Muswell, the Lady “that standeth in the Oak,” and many others—were brought up to London and publicly burned at Chelsea. Then the Fair, which went on all through the summer, with noisy taverns, drunken men, disorderly women, music, dancing, singing, tumblers, and minstrels, at Willesden, Muswell, and other unknown places “in the Oake,” came to a sudden end. Silence set in, and Willesden Church became the church of a little secluded village in the midst of the Forest; the road to Muswell through the woods became overgrown and forgotten, and nobody in the next generation knew where stood the oak with its sacred image, which had attracted so many thousands every year.

Besides these shrines of London, with their miraculous Virgins, there were the Holy and wonder-working Roods, of which the most important seems to have been that of Bermondsey Abbey. There were, also, objects of pilgrimage, of votive offering, and of prayer, the Holy Wells of which some 500 have been enumerated in England, and round London no fewer than sixteen. The origin of Holy Wells is a subject that belongs to archæology and scholarship; nor indeed is this the place for an examination into the subject. Streams, rivers, fountains, springs, have all been accounted holy, and possessed each its nymph or its god, who demanded sacrifice. Wells were dressed with flowers: they were used for divination; long before Christianity newly-born children were passed through water; coins have been found by the hundred in wells where they were thrown in order to read an oracle from the troubling of the waters; there were superstitions about the springs; there were superstitions about water drawn on certain nights; there were wishing wells; there were wakes of the well; it was in some places held necessary that converts should be baptized in clear running water. Wells cured different diseases: one was good for the eye, and one for the ear. Wells sprung up miraculously to mark the site of a martyrdom, and so on.

The holy wells of London were as follows:—

1. Clerkenwell. This well, where the parish clerks held their plays, was situated at the edge of Clerkenwell Green and on the south-east corner of Ray Street. The Green stretched north-west of St. John’s Priory Church.

2. St. Chad’s Well. The site of this well, which had medicinal qualities, was just south of the present King’s Cross Station on the Metropolitan Line.

3. St. Clement’s Well was north of St. Clement’s Church, close to Clement’s Inn.

4. Islington. Here was a very holy spring, greatly believed in for its restorative qualities. It was on the site of Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

5. Hampstead. The Holy Well of Hampstead was that called afterwards the Shepherd’s Well, which is now represented by a drinking fountain in Fitzjohn’s Avenue.

6. Muswell Hill. Besides the wonder-working Virgin of Muswell Hill, there was the Well of St. Lazarus. The name implies that it was used by lepers. Robert Bruce tried to cure his leprosy by bathing in its waters.

7. Kensington Gardens. Here was the Well of St. Gover, where, until a few years ago, an attendant still dispensed the waters of the well.

8. St. Pancras Well was on the north side of St. Pancras Church.

9. At Tottenham there were two wells—that of St. Loy or St. Eloy, and that called the Bishops’ Well.

10. Skinner’s Well was not far from Clerks’ Well, which is all the information one has about it. The same may be said of Todwell, Faggeswell, Loders Well, and Radwell, all now filled up and forgotten. The site of the Holy Well was preserved until recently in the street of that name.

11. At Shoreditch there was the Well of St. John; not far from Shoreditch in Old Street, north of Tabernacle Square, was the spring of St. Agnes le Clair, called also Dame Annice, the Clear and Anniseed Clere.