Saturday’s Post – or it would have been had it been finished

When talking about Pilgrimages you are talking about people traveling great distances to pray at the shrines that house relics of a Saint. We were looking at Medieval England, which was from the 7th to the 12th century, give or take a score of years on either side.

During this time pilgrims traveled to several different shrines from Spain to England, and various places in France. They tended to travel in groups because there was safety in numbers. This was a rugged period of time and travelers had to deal with hard travel conditions not to mention highwaymen.

You, of course, remember Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” where a group of travelers got together and rode off to Canterbury to visit the Shrine. The evening tales around the campfire may have predated TV, but it amounted to the same thing.

What grew up was a rather nice support system. The road to the shrines soon developed Inns, markets and guides to help the pilgrim along the road. Small towns that had no other real outside income soon had a steady income flowing through on the way to the bigger marketplace at the Shrines.

And of course the larger Shrines were raking in the dough. There were the large markets, Shrine Guides and don’t even begin to think about the offerings. The Cathedral’s grew rich, tall and architectural wonders.

Not unlike Christ Church and Harry Potter. It seems like teenagers who ascend the Great Staircase to see the Great Hall are very close to the pilgrims who flocked to Tours or Santiago de Compostela.

One lady in our class suggested that American go on Pilgrimages all the time. We get in groups, go to the airport grab a plane and we’re off to some foreign location. There we find the tour guide who leads us through all the proper things we should see, they feed us and put us up for the night. Her suggestion was that the religious Pilgrimage has turned into a cultural Pilgrimage.

I find that hard to argue with.

What do we do but go places and buy souvenir t-shirts that we take home, wear proudly so our friends will know where we have been. What is interesting about that is that you never see a native in one of those shirts. You see a cheap looking t-shirt with large garish letters proclaiming some location, and you know without question you are looking at a tourist.

Even better are the small silver spoons engraved with the logo from the current location. Then we go to another location where we buy another small silver spoon complete with engraved logo. These we take home and either put them in a drawer where we forget them forever, or we display them on a shelf where dust soon covers the engraved logo.

If it makes you feel any better, this is not new. In class we saw small trinkets from various Shrines that the pilgrims acquired and then took home to show their neighbors. It wasn’t engraved, “My Dad went to Toulouse and all I got was this crummy lead cross,” but it could have been.

So I guess that I can’t fault Christ Church for making a profit on Potter, after all there is precedent. They charge £4.50 to see the Great Hogwarts Hall, not the real hall of course just the model. The real hall is in a sound stage somewhere and is bigger in every way. Perhaps if this had been the real hall they would have charged the full five pounds.