The Nomadic Alternative – Page 209

says Gregory of Tours, naked as Adam but bound with links of iron, his hair and nails allowed to grow naturally. Sodomy among priests, the rape of nuns, bestiality, incest, murder of a priest or close relative, and theft from a church were crimes demanding the fakirism of a perpetual tramp's round. Rags, chains, the penitent's hat with its shell badge, baton and begging bowl served as the "mark of Cain", and divorced him from normal life. His equipment resembled that of his Buddhist counterpart, who wandered, not to dissolve his own personal sin, but the sins of the whole world. The pilgrim resembled the Wandering Jew, the apocryphal shoemaker of Jerusalem who mocked Christ on his way to Calvary, and who was condemned to wander till the Return.

The Church optimistically intended the sinner to wander alone to contemplate the enormity of his sin. But the most hardened sinners were the most hardened travellers and the most likely to sin again. The penitential pilgrimage simply injected onto the roads and streets groups of men already predisposed to predatory brigandage. They resembled the Bengali gangas, the original gangsters and forerunners of the Naxalites of today - well organized yet leaderless bands, half-religious and half-criminal, with the anarchic ideology of the leveller.

Mendicants, pilgrims, palmers, dancers, druggists, magicians, actors, bear-keepers, flagellants, knights-errant, students, tramps and tourists of evert sort crammed the roads of Mediaeval Europe, and as early as the 8th Century St. Boniface complained that no town in France or Italy lacked its complement of Anglo-Saxon whores, the pioneers of a great tradition. Non-conformist preachers, directly inspired by God and sometimes even claiming to be God, denounced the fattened prelates of the established Church. The wandering life of Christ and his apostles was proof in itself of a truly inspired preacher, not his ordination.

Fearful for its stability, the Church reacted to the 'virus of restlessness' by applying double standards. It required the monk to stay put in his monastery. "Sit in thy cell", St. Anthony had commanded, "a monk out of his cell is like a fish out of water."