THE ST. THOMAS Way project re-creates the route of a medieval pilgrimage as a resource for modern culture and recreation. The following discussion will offer some brief reflection on the historical phenomenon of pilgrimage, as well as on how this recreated pilgrimage, innovative in form as well as content, connects to roles of pilgrimage in spiritual, social, and economic life. This is by no means simply a matter of academic interest. Pilgrimage is once again a rapidly growing activity in England and Wales, having significant potential for regional and national economies. Wales, the nation in which the St. Thomas Way commences, has a Faith Tourism Action Plan (2013) initiated at the level of its national assembly government. “Religious tourism and pilgrimage” has its own international research group, established in 2003, which draws together academics and industry professionals. Local projects in infrastructure for pilgrimage tourism are underway in many parts of Britain. Heritage authorities increasingly include pilgrimage as a factor in the interpretation and preservation of churches. Alongside such indicators of economic significance, we can also connect pilgrimage to contemporary spiritual and social needs. Some of these reflect perennial themes, such as journeying to mark transitions in life, or to reflect on society from a liminal space. Other trends arise from more modern or postmodern circumstances. Joining pilgrimages can be a fresh expression of faith, a search for an alternative community, or it may substitute for participation in a declining model of parochial worship. Pilgrimage, being primarily a physical expression of spirituality, can be an inclusive vehicle for social as well as religious investment, as it allows people of diverse motivation to find their own meanings in the same activities.

What is Pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage is a phenomenon in many cultures worldwide. Not all cultures have a term precisely synonymous with the English term “pilgrimage,” but they still evince similar conceptions. Across cultures, pilgrimage journeys are used to re-enact significant past journeys— real or apocryphal. In many cultures, also, journeys are made that mark rites of passage into new stages of life. Journeying to a shrine or other sacred destination via “stations” (staging points, often subsidiary shrines) is also found across a range of cultures.

Vita Prima Sancti Samsonis is a text of great interest for writing the early history of the Church in Celtic Britain. It appears to be dateable to before the advent (probably in the eighth century) of contemporary records in the Welsh chronicles and to be earlier than any extant British Lives of saints; it is also, clearly, witness to older hagiographical records from Britain that are now lost. The text of the Vita Prima (hereafter VIS) having been transmitted on the Continent, its contents – and by extension older sources it may incorporate – existed independently of revisions of Welsh ecclesiastical sources that occurred in the early second millennium AD. VIS can hence act as a window on an obscure but formative period of Welsh Church history. Its anonymous author (hereafter the ‘Samson-author’), unusually among Continental hagiographers of Insular saints, was inspired to retrace personally his subject's journey back across the sea, providing us with a series of detailed descriptions of life at monasteries in different parts of Britain. In VIS he sets out a narrative of the progression of a monk into, ultimately, self-exile (peregrinatio) from his own country – a practice rarely identified with the early British Church. The detail is sometimes remarkable. There are vivid glimpses into processes of memory concerning early holy men, as well as description of sensory experiences such as listening to texts (Prol.2, I.1, I.42) and physical detail of how saints were reverenced at individual places (I.41, I.48). Although it is often challenging to interpret, there can be no doubt as to the great value of VIS as a source. Indeed, it may even be that its unusual character sometimes inspires us to ask the wrong questions and find ambiguity where clarity is actually to be found.

My focus in the following discussion will be primarily upon the witness of VIS to monasticism.

The origins of this volume lie in a series of papers delivered during two sessions of the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July 2006, supplemented by further invited contributions. The two sessions were organised under the auspices of the Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland, a project funded by a Major Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is designed to record and collate acts of dedication to saints (loosely defined to include all forms of commemoration and veneration) within the boundaries of the Scottish realm from the early medieval period to 1560.

The aim of the Leeds papers was collectively to address the way in which devotion to particular saints might transcend or cross linguistic, cultural and political boundaries. The emphasis of the papers collected here is therefore on the issue of transmission, that is, why certain saints’ cults spread beyond their original points or communities of origin to achieve a wider and more diverse following and the mechanisms by which this occurred. Many of the chapters have an Insular, and particularly north-British, focus. For this reason the volume was originally to have been entitled Saints’ Cults in the Insular World, but the wider scope of some of the essays, particularly the inclusion of material on Brittany and Breton cults, persuaded the publishers and editors to opt for the current title. The editors acknowledge that the implication that the cults examined in the volume grew and developed in a cultural, linguistic, devotional or political environment that could be described as distinctively or significantly ‘Celtic’ is potentially unhelpful.Most obviously, a number of contributions deal with societies, such as late medieval lowland Scotland and northern England, which were most assuredly not part of any wider ‘Celtic World’, if such could be said to have existed. Here, then, ‘Celtic’ is being used solely as a geographical shorthand to indicate that the studies that make up the volume concentrate on saints’ cults in a northern British context where interaction between Irish, Welsh and Scottish devotional traditions was extensive (particularly in the early medieval period).

Aside from the principal concern with tracing and explaining the spread of cults into new areas or social contexts, the collected essays have thrown up a variety of interesting sub themes.

In early Irish tradition St Brendan (feast day 16 May) is ranked among the ‘twelve apostles of Ireland’ (dá apstol decc na hÉrenn), the generation of sixth-century Irish monastic founders who followed St Finnian of Clonard. St Brendan is also immortalised as the most famous voyager to the legendary ‘Promised Land of the Saints’. Dedications to St Brendan, as we will see, are found throughout the medieval Celtic world, including Brittany, and on a more limited basis in England, while outliers of his cult in the middle ages are found as far away as the Faroe Islands and possibly north-east Germany. Brief surveys of the extent of his cult were made by John O'Hanlon in 1875, and by Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher in 1907, but these pioneers – whose fieldwork remains indispensable – saw the journeys of the saint himself as an explanation for the distribution of his cult, whereas we would now assume that the distribution of a cult has many causes and chronological strata. St Brendan became a popular symbol for the travels of Irish clergy and religious and remains so into the modern era. The wide circulation of the ninth-century tale Nauigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis (henceforth Nauigatio), especially in the high middle ages, encouraged a process by which both existing dedications and suggestively similar toponyms were drawn into the cult, no doubt in a similar process to many early Irish cults, if perhaps on a greater scale. Brendan's cult is one amongst a number of international cults of Irish saints that are case studies of how the cult on the ground is subject to more than one process of promulgation. These processes can be separated and include: travels of individual persons, travels of groups, travels of texts, and philological convergence. What Gwenaël Le Duc has said about the cult in Brittany holds true for the cult as a whole: ‘the story is rather detailed than complicated’.

The dossier of St Brendan

The dossier of an insular saint typically centres on co-ordinates such as a known feast day, resting-place, miracles and genealogy. St Brendan is recorded as being the son of Findlug of the Munster sept of Altraige. St Brendan's feast day appears in the ninth-century martyrologies as 16 May. His resting-place is recorded in hagiography as Clonfert, Co. Galway (see below).