The Book of Margery Kempe (36 page)

1
.   Margery is describing the situation in Lynn, with its parish church of St Margaret, and its two chapels-of-ease, St Nicholas and St James. By virtue of his office, the Prior of Lynn was parson and curate of the parish of St Margaret's.

2
.   The Red Register of Lynn records that an earlier attempt had been made in Margery's childhood, during the second mayoralty of her father, to secure privileges for the administration of the sacraments of baptism, matrimony and purification, for the chapel of St. Nicholas. A papal bull was obtained in October 1378, which granted privileges, provided there was no derogation to St Margaret's. The attempt was opposed by, among others, John Brunham, Margery's father, and one John Kempe, probably her father-in-law. A further attempt is recorded in 1431-2.

3
.   The Prior at this period was John Derham.

4
.   William of Alnwick (d. 1449), Bishop of Norwich 1426-36; ‘a relentless persecutor of the Lollards in his diocese' (DNB).

5
.   A noble was worth six shillings and eight pence.

1
.   The season would seem to be the autumn of 1413: after her agreement with her husband at Midsummer (chapter 11), Margery visits the Bishop of Lincoln (where she has a three-week wait), and then visits Archbishop Arundel at Lambeth, who receives her in his garden, which suggests the summer months.

2
.   Probably Master Robert Spryngolde. The offer to settle her debts may well have been underwritten by a legacy following her father's death sometime between December 1412 and October 1413.

3
.   i.e. Margery offered at the high altar of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity at Norwich, and perhaps in the Chapel of the Virgin at St Nicholas's, Yarmouth.

4
.   i.e. since the instruction received in chapter 5.

1
.   By contemporary standards, Margery would seem to have set off from Lynn quite well provided with money for her expenses on the journey, but she would have had to think ahead to such necessary outlays as the purchase in Venice of articles for use on the voyage to Jaffa.

2
.    From the accounts of other late medieval English travellers, it is a reasonable surmise that margery took between six and eight weeks
to travel from Lynn to Venice. She would thus have arrived in late 1413 or early 1414, and then waited thirteen weeks for one of the pilgrim galleys, which usually left Venice in spring or early summer. The ‘Venetian Process' for the canonization of St Catherine of Siena (1411-13) would have been very recent news.

1
.   Pilgrims should buy for the voyage in Venice ‘a feather bed, a mattress, two pillows, two pairs of sheets and a quilt,' as well as various provisions and utensils, medicines and laxatives, a chest with a good lock, even a cage of hens… cf. the fifteenth-century guide by William Wey,
Itineraries to Jerusalem,
1458 (Roxburghe Club, 1857).

2
.   The galley's month-long voyage was along the Dalmatian coast, through the Greek islands, to Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Jaffa, with frequent stops for provisioning. There was a general cabin for pilgrims in the hold; a berth consisted of a space big enough to lie down on, chalked on the boards, where one spread one's mattress and belongings.

3
.   The port for Jerusalem was Jaffa, then in ruins, where pilgrims were processed on disembarking by Moslem officials, for pilgrimage was strictly controlled. Pilgrims were accommodated at Jaffa in some noxious caves, before being escorted on donkeys to Jerusalem under guard, with a stop at the town of Ramleh (mentioned by Margery on her return journey, chapter 30).

4
.    Margery calls this the ‘Temple'. She would have seen both the round church containing the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, and also another part of the building which enclosed under its roof the mound of Calvary, rising fifteen feet above the floor with another chapel on its summit, the northern part of which rested on the rock itself, while the southern part (revered as the site of the nailing of Christ to the cross) was supported on arches.

5
.   The door to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was guarded by Moslem officials, who controlled admission, charged the pilgrims entrance fees, and locked them into the church for the duration of their vigils. Margery's stay seems to have been longer than the usual vigil in her day, which lasted from evening until the following morning.

6
.   
The Franciscans had a convent adjoining the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and had been granted important rights at various sites in the Holy Land, including the Chapels of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Apparition, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

7
.   For Margery this experience is the culmination of all her preceding absorption in hearing and practising meditation upon the Passion. St Bridget, in her
Revelations,
had described her visions on the life of Christ and Mary received during her own pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

8
.    Margery's ‘cries' – by which she seems to mean a crying out, a scream – start at this moment, and she was to be subject to them for some ten years. Her
Book
makes a careful distinction in its terminology over this, and Margery does not use the term ‘cry' about her fits of weeping before her visit to Jerusalem, or later in life.

9
.   In the margin of the MS here is a fifteenth-century note that Richard Methley and John Norton, both Mount Grace mystics, also experienced this weakness in association with the Passion.

10
. cf. Richard Rolle's
Meditations on the Passion:
‘Sweet Jesu, thy body is like unto a dovecote. For as a dove-cote is full of holes, so is thy body full of wounds. And as a dove pursued by a hawk, if she may reach a hole of her house, is safe enough, so sweet Jesu, in temptation thy wounds are the best refuge for us' (modernized from Allen,
English Writings,
p. 35). Behind Rolle is the Song of Songs, ii, 14, and St Bernard's
Sermons on the Song of Songs,
61.

11
. cf. Blessed Angela of Foligno: ‘Then I reached so much greater a fire of love that, if I heard anybody talking of God, I screamed. And even if somebody had stood over me with an axe to kill me, I would not have been able to stop …' cf.
Le Livre de la Bienheureuse Angèle de Foligno,
ed. P. Doncoeur (Paris, 1926), p. 15.

1
.   i.e. the Franciscans conduct them over the Via Dolorosa.

2
.    The Franciscan convent on Mount Zion was believed to contain the holy places of the Last Supper, and of the Holy Spirit's descent upon the apostles.

3
.   The Church of the Tomb of the Virgin, in the valley of Kedron, was also in Franciscan custody.

4
.   i.e. the Church of St Mary of the Nativity at Bethlehem (similarly in Franciscan custody), beneath which two grottoes were believed to be the sites of Christ's birth and of the manger.

5
.   i.e. Franciscans.

1
.   i.e. the mountain near Jericho upon which it was believed that Christ fasted forty days and was tempted by the devil. (The term ‘quarantine' originally meant a period of forty days.)

2
.   Occupied by the Church of the Franciscan monastery of St John.

3
.   i.e. the Chapel of the Apparition, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Margery evidently returned to the church after her travels in the Holy Land; pilgrims customarily visited the church more than once.

4
.   John xx, 14-15.

5
.   Pilgrims travelled about the Holy Land under Moslem escort.

1
.   i.e. ‘Jesus is my love'. Beads left by William of Wykeham to Archbishop Arundel bore the same inscription. Although made at a divine command, Margery describes the ring as her marriage ring to Jesus, which could suggest she assumed it with the mantle on making a vow of chastity. While her
Book
leaves the taking of the vow un-described (chapter 15), it is later assumed (chapter 76).

2
.   Like some recorded pilgrims, Margery had perhaps brought back a cord or other object on which the measurements of the sepulchre were marked.

3
.   Margery's attempt to record the woman's Italian.

4
.   i.e. a Franciscan.

5
.   Our Lady's veil, kept in the Lower Church of St Francis at Assisi.

6
.   Blessed Angela of Foligno had screamed and shrieked at the door of St Francis's church in Assisi, and had also received revelations in Assisi on Lammas Day (1 August).

7
.   Probably Lammas Day 1414. In Chapter 44 Margery is delayed at Bristol by the King's requisitioning of shipping (which must refer to Henry V's expedition to France in 1417), and in Whitsun week she there meets and pays back Richard, whom she says she had left in Rome two years previously.

8
.   The ‘Portiuncula Indulgence', traditionally granted to St Francis himself by Honorius III, gave plenary remission of sins to those who at Lammas visited the Portiuncula Chapel, where St Francis had worshipped.

9
.   A hospice for English pilgrims in the Via Monserrato, started in 1362, and now the English College in Rome.

1
.   i.e. the Church of Santa Caterina in Ruota.

2
.   By tradition St John acted as confessor for women who lacked access to a mortal confessor.

3
.   cf. Jeremiah ix, 1: ‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!'

1
.   The Church of the Santi Apostoli, almost completely rebuilt in the eighteenth century.

2
.   Probably 9 November 1414, the feast of the dedication of St John Lateran.

3
.   cf. Psalms xc, 11 (A.V. xci, 11).

4
.   ‘Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.'

5
.   cf. the prologue to Richard Rolle's
Incendium Amoris:
‘I cannot tell you how surprised I was the first time I felt my heart begin to warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! … It set my soul aglow as if a real fire was burning there … If we put our finger near a fire we feel the heat; in much the same way a soul on fire with love feels, I say, a genuine warmth …' (
The Fire of Love,
tr. C. Wolters, Penguin, 1972, p. 45).

1
.   Probably Christinas 1414.

2
.   See chapter 44.

1
.   The Church of San Marcello, rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

2
.   i.e. Margery attempts to recall the questions and her own response in broken Italian.

3
.   Coins current in fifteenth-century Rome.

1
.   In 1349 St Bridget had left Sweden for Rome, where she spent most of the rest of her life and died in 13 73, i.e. forty years before Margery's visit. Her canonization in 1391 was being considered by the Council of Constance while Margery was in Rome and was confirmed in 1415.

2
.   St Bridget, who was a great lady of high birth, and her daughter, St Catherine of Sweden, are known to have had three maids with them on their pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1370.

3
.   The Church of Santa Brigida in the Piazza Farnese is on the site of St Bridget's home.

4
.   This revelation occurred five days before St Bridget's death.

5
.   Probably the feast of St Bridget's canonization (7 October 1414), rather than the feast of her death (23 July) or translation (28 May), since Margery was in Assisi until after 1 August. This visit evidently preceded chronologically the experience in chapter 35, which occurred on 9 November, but Margery has grouped together in this chapter some recollections connected with St Bridget.

6
.   i.e. the paying of visits, with appropriate prayers, to certain churches of Rome.

1
.   The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

2
.   Margery may have been confused by a chapel of St Laurence within Santa Maria Maggiore; the saint's remains are buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura.

3
.   For St Jerome on tears, see chapter 18.

1
.   Probably Easter 1415.

2
.   Middelburg, in Zealand.

1
.   Probably Saturday, 18 May 1415. After her crossing (probably landing at Yarmouth), Margery proceeds straight to Norwich, where she is in the week before Trinity Sunday (chapter 44), which in 1415 fell on 26 May.

2
.   Probably one Thomas Brakleye, a Benedictine monk, of whom record survives.

3
.   Founded before 1248 as a hospital and chapel in open fields southwest of the city, ‘in a short space of time, aided by various benefactions, the foundation became a collegiate church on a noble scale …'
(Victoria County History: Norfolk
II, 1906, p. 455).

4
.   Priests were customarily addressed as ‘Sir' or ‘Master'. The will of Thomas Brakleye names a ‘Sir Edwarde Hunt' among his executors.

1
.   The year is probably 1415, when Trinity Sunday fell on 26 May.

2
.   In the MS margin here is the note: ‘so dyd prior Norton in hys excesse', referring to John Norton, Prior of Mount Grace.