We have three English narratives of Erasmus’ period:  by William Wey, Fellow of Eton, who went to Jerusalem in 1458 and again in 1462; by Sir Richard Guilford, a Court official who made the journey in 1506; and by Sir Richard Torkington, a parish priest from Norfolk, who went in 1517.  But besides these some Baedekers of the time survive; one entitled ’Information for Pilgrims unto the Holy Land’[35] which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde at Westminster in 1498, and again by him in London in 1515 and 1524; another written by Hermann Kunig of Vach in 1495 and several times printed before 1521, ’Die Walfart und Strass zu sant Jacob’[36] which gives the distance of each stage and notes inns and hospitals at which shelter might be found.

     [35] It has been reproduced with an introduction by Mr. E.G. 
          Duff, London, 1893.
     [36] It has been reproduced with an introduction by Professor
          K. Haebler, Strasburg, 1899.

The Compostella pilgrimage was popular for many reasons, and no doubt began long before St. James had ousted St. Vincent from being patron-saint of Spain.  The spot was remote, literally then at the end of the earth, ‘beyond which’, as another pilgrim says, ’there is no land any more, only water’.  There was a great stone, too, in which later piety found the boat that had borne the saint’s body from Jerusalem.  And there were islands to be visited, one a St. Michael’s Mount, round the shores of which should be gathered the cockle shells that were the emblems of pilgrimage duly performed:  though the less active bought them at stalls high-heaped outside the cathedral doors, and the rich had them copied in silver and gold.

To the ‘end of the earth’ Northern Europe went most easily by sea, all others by land.  Convoys gathered in Dartmouth in the lengthening days of spring, and crept along Slapton sands and round the unlighted Start, until there was no land any more, and summoning their courage they must steer out into the Bay of Biscay.  This way went John of Gaunt to St. James in 1386, to be crowned King of Castile in the great Romanesque cathedral; and so, too, Chaucer must have pictured the Wyf of Bath visiting ‘Galice’.

But Kunig’s route lay overland:  from Einsiedeln to Romans and Valence; over the Rhone by the famed bridge of the Holy Spirit, which even kings must cross on foot, to Uzes, Nimes and Beziers; and then westwards into the sandy scant-populated lands where the track was scarcely to be found, except for the pilgrims’ graves, often nameless, sometimes perhaps marked with such simple inscriptions as may still be seen on trees and crosses among the forests of the Alps.  A Pyrenean pass led him to Roncesvalles; at Logrono the ancient bridge brought him over the Ebro, and so by Burgos and Leon to his journey’s end, blessing the patrons—­Kings of France and England and Navarre, Dukes of Burgundy—­who had raised shelters for poor pilgrims on the way, and above all the Catholic Kings whose munificence had built a huge serai to welcome them in Santiago itself.