In a good honest place, "to have your ease
in the galey and also to be cherysshed." Still more unchristian are the
injunctions to run ahead of one's fellows, on landing, in order to get
the best quarters at the inn, and first turn at the dinner provided; and
above all, at Port Jaffa, to secure the best ass, "for ye shall paye no
more for the best than for the worste."
But while this book was being published, new forces were at hand which
were to strip the thin disguise of piety from pilgrims of this sort. The
Colloquies of Erasmus appeared before the third edition of Informacon
for Pylgrymes, and exploded the idea that it was the height of piety to
have seen Jerusalem. It was nothing but the love of change, Erasmus
declared, that made old bishops run over huge spaces of sea and land to
reach Jerusalem. The noblemen who flocked thither had better be looking
after their estates, and married men after their wives. Young men and
women travelled "non sine gravi discrimine morum et integritatis."
Pilgrimages were a dissipation. Some people went again and again and did
nothing else all their lives long.[6] The only satisfaction they looked
for or received was entertainment to themselves and their friends by
their remarkable adventures, and ability to shine at dinner-tables by
recounting their travels.[7] There was no harm in going sometimes, but
it was not pious. And people could spend their time, money and pains on
something which was truly pious.[8]
It was only a few years after this that that pupil of Erasmus and his
friends, King Henry the Eighth, who startled Europe by the way he not
only received new ideas but acted upon them, swept away the shrines,
burned our Lady of Walsingham and prosecuted "the holy blisful martyr"
Thomas a Becket for fraudulent pretensions.[9]
But a new object for travel was springing up and filling the leading
minds of the sixteenth century - the desire of learning, at first hand,
the best that was being thought and said in the world. Humanism was the
new power, the new channel into which men were turning in the days when
"our naturell, yong, lusty and coragious prynce and sovrayne lord King
Herre the Eighth entered into the flower of pleasaunt youthe."[10] And
as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the
permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion
for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage.
All through the fifteenth century the universities of Italy, pre-eminent
since their foundation for secular studies, had been gaining reputation
by their offer of a wider education than the threadbare discussions of
the schoolmen.
