A PROVINCIAL museum has reopened after a £5.1-million refurbishment, with a central display dedicated to pilgrimage.
The exhibition at Salisbury Museum reveals how the people of medieval Salisbury made pilgrimages to not less than 15 English shrines and not less than eight Continental ones.
Around 100 pilgrim badges from those locations were present in Salisbury within the late twentieth century; the ten best-preserved examples form a part of the display. The exhibition gives information in regards to the saints venerated, the pilgrimage routes, and estimates of how long the journeys would have taken. The museum believes that pilgrims from Salisbury would, on average, have needed to put aside about three weeks for every domestic pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage phenomenon was the medieval equivalent of mass tourism. It is estimated that, between the years 1300 and 1450, not less than ten million English people made a pilgrimage.
All the pilgrim badges on display were present in Salisbury, and are more likely to have been discarded by pilgrims or their descendants. Many are broken.
Of the badges found, there have been 27 from the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, ten from that of Our Lady of Walsingham, six from that of St Edward the Confessor, in Westminster, and five each from those of Richard Caister in Norwich and King Henry VI in Windsor. Other destinations for Salisbury pilgrims included Bury St Edmunds (St Edmund), Ely (St Etheldreda), Chester (St Werburga), Wiltshire (St Edith at Wilton), St Albans, London (St Bridget at Isleworth and St Anthony), and Kent (the Virgin Mary in Eton, and Poulton), besides the “Rood of Grace” — a rare, now not extant mechanised crucifix — in Boxley, Kent.
Of Continental pilgrimages, Salisbury residents went to venerate the Virgin Mary at Aachen (eight badges) and St James at Santiago de Compostela (three badges). Other shrines included the Virgin at Tombelaine (northern France), St John the Baptist in Amiens, St Michael at Mont Saint Michel, St Josse in northern France, and St Quirinus near Cologne. Only one badge has to this point been discovered from St Peter’s in Rome.
Also included within the display is a series of tiny pewter bottles, for holy water. Decorated stonework, including a Christ’s Head sculpture, which had been utilized in the development of Old Sarum Cathedral, can also be on display.
