Pilgrims

"This book is set in the 13th century. It’s called Pilgrims , so we immediately think of Christianity and a Christian pilgrimage, which is indeed crucial to the structure of the book. But the religion that matters at least as much, and possibly more, in this book is Judaism . It focuses on the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish community from England in the 13th century. I found that particularly powerful and important. We were just talking about something similar with Ishiguro. Matthew Kneale also moves us away from the idea of a monolithic sense of medieval English or British culture. Instead, he shows us all kinds of issues relating to what we would think of as colonialism, invasion, different kinds of immigrants and takeovers. Another part of the book is fundamentally rooted in what’s going on in Wales. It’s about the English incursion into Wales, and the different atrocities and accommodations that are going on between England and Wales at this time. But the Jewish experience is really at the heart of this book, because in the late 13th century very important Jewish communities were expelled from England, not to return for hundreds of years. That’s one of the most crucial aspects of this book. “The medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1,000 years” In terms of religion more broadly, there are many different aspects. You’ve got the doctrine, which most ordinary people wouldn’t have thought very much about, or not in detail. You’ve got popular piety, which might be more about feast days and going on pilgrimages. Pilgrimage was a very important part of medieval Christianity, little local trips—not going all way to Rome, which is what this book is about. Today we know lots of people who are atheist and agnostic: that wasn’t really an option in the medieval period. For European Christians at this time, being religious wasn’t a choice. Religion was a constant part of life and the church was crucial. From almost the day of your birth—you might well be baptized on the day of your birth or the next—you were part of a parish, part of a community. People heard church bells ringing to structure their day. There were lots of monks and friars. There were periodic heresies, people challenging the church. There are also lots of moments when you see people have more individual relationships with God, trying to think about God for themselves. And, of course, at the end of the medieval period, we get the Reformation. But before that, there were other movements that tried to reform the church in various ways. So the church is different at different times across this long period. I think I would say there wasn’t a choice between either doing it as a performance or believing it. It’s fairly indisputable that everyone did basically believe in their religion at this time. There was a general level of belief. That isn’t to say that people wanted to go to church all the time. A lot of people would go on pilgrimages in order to have fun. Some of them were going because they believed, because they wanted to get a cure for an illness. But other people went for a bit of a change, a bit of a holiday. There was a lot of criticism of pilgrimage because people were doing it as a way to travel and do something different. So yes, people would buy badges displaying where they’d been to show other people back home. One of the other things that I really liked about Matthew Kneale’s book, Pilgrims, is that he does have quite a few really interesting female characters. His characters are very varied and one thing he’s very good at is different voices. He did this in his earlier book, English Passengers , as well, he told it through lots of different voices. Here again we have different characters, different stories feeding in, that are in some ways based on The Canterbury Tales , though it’s a very different kind of text. He’s not just interested in the experiences of Christian English men, but also in the experiences of different kinds of women and, as I’ve already mentioned, of Jewish characters and of Welsh characters, too. He really gives us this texture of medieval English life as something which is diverse in lots of ways. Certainly, the ordinary plowman at this time was not likely to travel far beyond their own immediate vicinity, but people of slightly higher classes might well have opportunities to travel. When you get into the educated classes, lots of those people travelled. There was a huge amount of traffic between France or the so-called Low Countries (what we would think of as the Netherlands and Belgium) and England at this time. Also, people such as Chaucer, who was not a hugely important person (although he was a diplomat and went on royal trade missions) would indeed go further afield, to places such as Italy and Spain. Kneale’s book is about a pilgrimage to Rome. There are records of lots and lots of English people in Rome. There was an English hospice there, where English people would go and stay and lots of interesting examples of English people who went there. Some English people went all the way to Jerusalem . They got boats to the Holy Land, whether on pilgrimages or, at other times, to fight on crusades. So there was a lot more travel at this time than people often imagine. People think that everyone just stayed at home in the medieval era and are often surprised when they hear that someone like Chaucer was riding to Italy and Spain and very frequently crossing the channel, and that products were coming to England from as far away as Indonesia."