66 A MEDIAEVAL CITY

and Charles Reade depicted in the peripatetic
"cripples" of "The Cloister and the Hearth."
Chaucer wrote in the true spirit of comedy mores
corrigere ridendo, but Langland, his contemporary,
who described similar types of men of State as well
as of Church, did so from the point of view of a moral
reformer whose satire is a trenchant weapon.

There were many other types of religious men,
but it must suffice to refer to Pardoners, who by
virtue of papal bulls gave pardons, expecting,
exacting if necessary, a reward in return, and to
mention only palmers and pilgrims, who were seen
in York when they came to visit the shrine of St.
William in the Minster. The palmers were pilgrims
who had visited the Holy Land. They liked to wear
a scallop-shell in their broad-brimmed hats as a
sign of their extensive travels. Journeying from
shrine to shrine was a favourite occupation, a
professional one, of those pilgrims who loved a
wandering and easy life, seeing the sights and living
at the expense of the monastic hospitality. Some
pilgrimages were done by proxy, through the
employment of professional pilgrims. A pilgrimage
to a shrine celebrated for miraculous cures or the
efficacy of the spiritual benefit derived from worship-
ping at it and invoking the help of the saint, was for
many an exercise of deep religious devotion. There
is no doubt, moreover, that at the shrines of the
saints the Church proved itself a great healer. It
was in fact the popular physician. Apart from
surgery, the medical practice of the twentieth
century is in some ways the successor of that of the
Church of the fifteenth.

When very popular religious men died, or when,
if they were already dead as in the case of William,
Archbishop of York (who died in 1153 and was