Free Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman Page A

consideration unto his blessed purpose,” wrote the King, do license “our well-beloved clerc, Maister William Wey … to passe over the see on peregrimage as to Rome, to Jerusalem and to other Holy Places.” Possibly Wey was commissioned to undertake the pilgrimage for the very purpose of writing a guidebook, for he certainly took great pains. He provides a table of distances, a glossary of useful words and phrases in transliterated Greek, the spoken language of the Levant, a list of indulgences to be attained at various shrines, an enumeration of all the holy places that can be visited in a thirteen days’ tour in and around Jerusalem (ten between Jaffa and Jerusalem, twenty-two in Jerusalem, thirteen in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, seven in Bethlehem, eight on the Jordan, and so on to a total of one hundred and ten), and a few remarks on the rulers of the country and the laws and regulations affecting Christian travelers. He even supplies ten reasons for undertaking the pilgrimageto begin with, which include the exhortations of St. Jerome, the remission of sins, and the opportunity to acquire relics. Wey’s care with dates of arrival and departure gives us an accurate picture of the time required for such a journey in the later Middle Ages. He spent less than three weeks in Palestine on his first trip and less than two on the second, but was away from England altogether nine months each time. The journey from England to Venice took nearly two months the second time because of a detour necessitated by a local war in Germany; otherwise it required a month to six weeks. A month was spent in Venice waiting for a ship, and the sea voyage itself took him one month the first time and nearly seven weeks the second. Comparing this with an itinerary of a pilgrimage made in the last decade of the tenth century by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, we can see that there was little change over a period of five hundred years. It took the Archbishop nearly three months from Rome back to England, the part of the journey covered by the itinerary, but he was slowed by rainy weather. His record shows that a day’s march on foot or horseback varied from five to twenty-five miles according to weather, food, and available hostels. A good day’s average was fifteen or twenty miles in four or five hours.
    By the year in which Wey compiled his careful guidebook the time of the pilgrim was already running out; the end of the Middle Ages was close at hand. Palestine, dominated since the death of Saladin in 1193 by the Mamelukes of Egypt, whose wars with the Crusaders, the Tartars, the Mongols, and various other barbarian hordes had kept the land bloodsoaked for three centuries, now faced a new conqueror. The Ottoman Turks in 1453 had captured Constantinople, with echoes that were heard around the world. Now they were advancing down upon Syria, and by 1517 they had conquered the Mamelukes, absorbed the Egyptian Caliphate into the Turkish Empire, and were masters in Jerusalem and Palestine. Within a few years Englandunderwent an equally momentous change with the secession from Roman Catholicism.
    Two voyagers of the early sixteenth century have left us a picture of conditions at the end of the pilgrim era. Sir Richard Guildford, privy councilor to the first Tudor king, Henry VII, with his companion John Whitby, Prior of Guisborough, left England in April 1506 and arrived at Jaffa in August. According to an account of Guildford’s ill-fated pilgrimage written by the chaplain who accompanied him, the party was first detained in the ship for seven days off Jaffa. Then they were “received by ye Mamelukes and Saracyns and put into an old cave by name and tale, and there scryven ever wrytyng oure names man by man as we entered in the presence of the sayd Lordes and there we lay in the same grotto or cave Fridaye all day upon bare stynkynge stable grounde, as well nyght as day, right evyll intreated by ye Maures.” After this ordeal “bothe