Landscape and Perception: The Medieval Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela from an Archaeological Perspective

Introduction Margery Kempe of Kings Lynn, Norfolk, had a colourful life. During her lifetime, which covered the last decades of the 14 century and the first decades of the 15, she bore fourteen children, suffered bouts of ill health, and travelled to all the most important pilgrim shrines in Medieval Christendom. Driven by faith and an unswerving devotion to God, she covered thousands of miles by land and sea to visit not only Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, but countless more minor shrines along the way. The account of Margery’s life and adventures is the earliest surviving autobiography composed by an English woman, and clearly she would make a splendid subject through which to explore the culture of travel in the Middle Ages. However, this paper will consider her no more. I introduce her merely to illustrate that she is an exception: we know something about her life and experiences as a woman, a mystic, and a pilgrim. In contrast, the vast majority of the millions of pilgrims who travelled to the famous shrines of the medieval world are nameless, faceless and uncountable. We know little about them; they are anonymous, fleeting inhabitants of past landscapes who, for the most part, have vanished from history. Yet at the same time, these are the people who stand at the heart of my enquiry. I believe that the archaeology and the landscape of the pilgrim routes tell a story, and that through the perspective of current archaeological theory it is possible to trace something of the experiences and life worlds of the medieval pilgrims who made their way by foot and pack animal across Europe in search of salvation. Today, the main pilgrim route-way across northern Spain that leads