Pilgrimages in medieval England could take a variety of forms. They might be made either singly or in groups. They could be undertaken to a distant place or to somewhere quite close to home. They could be made as a form of penance, an act of devotion or as a last-ditch quest for a cure. The destination might be a saint’s shrine, a devotional image, a holy well or some obscure minor cult centre. The journey there and back might last weeks or it might all be over in a day. Pilgrimages could take almost as many forms as there were pilgrims either tempted or obliged to embark on such journeys. As Nicholas Orme points out in this new book, the would-be pilgrim might not even dress up for the part in the familiar pilgrim’s garb. He or she might go, as Chaucer’s pilgrims did, in their everyday clothes.

Most modern studies of pilgrimage have been concerned mainly with the experience insofar as it related to major shrines and cult centres that enjoyed a high national profile and attracted widespread popular interest. In this accessible and well-presented new study, Nicholas Orme switches the spotlight away from these familiar and much-written about sites to the many smaller, less well-known cult centres that nonetheless attracted significant pilgrim interest. Focusing his attention on the area that he knows so intimately, the south west of England, he tells us about the holy wells that figured prominently in Cornish popular piety, the hilltop chapels – most notably St Michael’s Mount – that so fascinated people in the Middle Ages, the holy and miracle-working images that swept to popularity in the late Middle Ages, such as that of the Holy Trinity at St Day, and the unofficial cults that sprang up around figures of reputedly unblemished life such as two bishops of Exeter, James Berkeley and Edmund Lacy. A number of the cult centres discussed in the book are ones that quite possibly many readers will never have heard of, among them the chapel of St Nectan in St Newlyn East (Cornwall), which was the focus of Rogation and Ascension Day processions, and the shrine at Whitchurch Canonicorum (Dorset) of the obscure St White, of whom nothing is known and whose name appears in no contemporary liturgical calendar. The only pilgrim destination in the south west of truly national or international renown was the great abbey of Glastonbury, which enjoyed high popular repute on the strength of its place in the story of Joseph of Arimathea.

Many of the cult centres discussed in the book are known to us only from chance references in wills or from popular folklore of the kind preserved in the works of such writers as Richard Carew and Nicholas Roscarrock in Cornwall. They have left hardly any physical trace, because the cults associated with them were transient and usually only of local importance, and so occasioned little substantial building. Edifices worth mentioning, however, are the impressive well chapel at St Clether on Bodmin Moor, the largest in Cornwall, and St Aldhelm’s chapel on the Dorset coast near Worth Maltravers – a strange square building, the corners of which (and not the sides) are orientated to the points of the compass. Today, cult centres of the sort discussed here are perhaps of greater interest for what they tell us about medieval popular piety than for the physical residue that they have left for the antiquary or architectural historian. Notwithstanding this, the gazetteer with which Nicholas Orme concludes his book provides a rich quarry of information for the reader curious enough to follow in the footsteps of the medieval pilgrim in seeking out some of these once much visited sites.