Feeding the Hungry by Emma Rose Barber

… and savoury steams of hot dinners salute the

nostrils of the hungry wayfarer, as he plods wearily

by the area railings.

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, The Streets –

Night (1836)

Medieval Wayfaring

I clock up a record number of steps in the city at the year’s end. The bellied shadows hang low in the narrow, dark streets of Madrid, while New Year revellers walk past the man without any legs in a wheelchair. This is his ill-abode. He is bound to his fate. The dark makes it hard to tell if people look at him as they pass on by. Scantily dressed, he shakes a white plastic cup from his mouth. This is his only glint of light. He is waiting. Waiting for the coins to drop in, one by one; or better, two by two. Gathering them in to save him. But the people are the twos, or even the threes; he is the one – and anyway, they do not have many coins on them. They will not throw him a plastic cash-card. Even before pandemic pleas for help. They do not need to be saved. But at this moment, nobody knows yet that soon we will not be travelling and walking in the streets, but that we will all want to be saved.

Everything above the wheelchair-bound man is bright, light and right. All around him people walk along the clutch of festive streets, holding colourful New Year celebratory sparkles on sticks. These are like the bright fragments scattered from a dropped kaleidoscope, as if they are the answer to a new decade of hope. We are in the European south, where late afternoon winter sun lingers long. Soon, though, that butter-pat light becomes the artificial and brittle glow of a waiting world, a modern fairy world of portable neon lights and the streetlamps we take for granted. Soon, the midnight hour will strike.

Would people in the Middle Ages have ignored the man? They knew all too well then that to give food or money to others would be a way to save themselves from the indefinite pains of Hell. And one of the ways in which repentance could be found. After all, they would have known the liturgical instructions on how to be a good Christian from ‘the Seven Works of Mercy’ (The Gospel of St Matthew, 25: 35–46), often found in wall paintings in churches, such as at St Andrew, Wickhampton, Norfolk.

In 1215, a decree at The Fourth Lateran Council stated that ‘… parish priests must make provision both for the reception of pilgrims and wayfarers and for the relief of the local poor.’ From the beginning, to be a good Christian was to prepare for a good death through a good life. And that good life was determined by your goodness to others. Doing by others was one way to safeguard your passage to Heaven. That walk through the heavenly gates was an either–or situation. The wall paintings of ‘the Seven Works of Mercy’ were a form of instruction to the seven things you could do to help the poor and needy – offering and extending yourself. You were not a good Christian if you insisted on social distancing then. There were no exemptions for whether you could perform the ‘Works’ or not.

Through number-rich to-do lists your moral integrity was exposed, exercised and stretched. You were responsible for your own salvation in accordance with the Church’s instructions. The fourteenth-century lay folks’ Catechism also reminded you of your duty to the poor: ‘Furst men schuld wilfully fede pore hungry men and ƥrusty / Forin ƥat ƥey fede Ieus Crist he hym self sayƥ in ƥe gospel.’

Words and images consistently reminded those who could read and see that concern for the poor and vulnerable was a Christian imperative. To be a good Christian was to remember those who were not far from your door. Being charitable was, too, a way to bind rich and poor. The problem is that seeing and reading about doing good by the poor was one thing. Doing was another.

The man in Madrid sits in a big square, a place where he knows there will be people. This is close to the narrow Calle Pelegrin (meaning pilgrim). It is a street lateral to two main roads, which at night is a shadowy channel to get from one urban hum and hub to the other. It is not obvious today it is a pilgrim’s route. Groups are walking in both directions, as we do in every street, everywhere, all hours, all the time. To the eye, figures are blurred and dark-coated in the quickening black of the evening, like the buildings that surround them. The pavements hold a dim hue from the odd shaft of streetlight on either side. People walk right in the middle of the pavement, rather than near the steps and entrance ways where gloom hangs and lingers. Around that thick dark, our sight is impeded; we could fall into the glass, brick or stone of a building, the gutter of the street, or an unprotected hole. As I go, I am barriered and I respect the lines and logical movement dictated by the buildings’ margins. As if a spin of the dice has determined an equal flow of people, some going in one direction, some in another. This is an understated exercise in the act of the anonymous body, moving along an ordinary street. Even so, at a less than ordinary time.

I walk on. In that excited city, there is a group of people queuing to get near the firework display. Part of me is drawn to them, imagining I could try and speak Spanish. I am pulled away by the motivation to keep moving. The queue gives me disquiet. The bodies are there now, they were not there before, soon they will not be there at all. All that coming and going makes me uncomfortable. I do not know why but walking and moving away removes that discomfort. I hear little as my wandering eyes are too preoccupied with the paradisical New Year’s Eve. But I wonder about the walking. Some participate in the revels of the new decade. But for some, walking in solitary fashion away from the excitement is preferable. There is a man ahead, walking in the other direction from the illusionary colourful heat and heart. There is a sense of sadness too, as this excitement is temporary and for each step we take, something is lost. And the people are only transitory walkers – as soon they will return home, where their possessions are taken for granted. I wonder where the man in the wheelchair might go.

In ‘A Ten O’Clock Lecture’ (1885), James Abbott McNeill Whistler, the painter of mood, water and mist with murky, inky, iridescent colours and tones, alludes to the pleasure of returning home for those who can:

…and when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil – and the poor buildings lose them-selves in the dim sky –  and the tall chimneys become campanile – and the warehouses are palaces in the night – and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland [sic] is before us – then the wayfarer hastens home – the working man and the cultured one – the wise man and the one of pleasure – cease to understand – as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the Artist alone, her son and her master – her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.

To be a wayfarer in the Middle Ages is often to be endlessly on foot, which is to have your own form of transport, but to be a wayfarer out of need or hunger knows no boundaries between night and day. Rather, there are impediments to destination, place and fortune. Following light to dark and shadow to illumination shows up itinerancy in a somewhere setting; not home. This is merely a string of passing habitats which you might not return to. After all, after the dark, light is what we crave. There have always been home goers and home leavers as well as all those in between.

In the wide street neighbourhoods of outer Madrid where the land is higher, the roads wider, pigeons perch on overhead cables. There are one, or two to three together, occasionally hopping onto another branch, or darting to the side. They are aware of one another, but they do not appear to care what is going on down below. There is no doubt about their precarious position, but they balance, touch, jump and land with perfect precision. Whether it is day or night. And somehow, they find their food. Pigeon power high up there. All together, all at ease with life on a cable.

As in all cities, the traffic lights go from red to green. And the driver waits impatiently for amber. For the pedestrian in Madrid though, a bell that sounds like an alarm indicates that it is time to move and cross the street and a sign is illuminated of two people walking together hand in hand. Street life and the passing through it can be communal. It offers solidarity but can also be solitary. Something of these passing perambulating scenes makes me think of the medieval walking destitute, for whom life on the roads was a perilous norm, and where the shadows of a city gate, wayside shrine or church provided actual or illusionary shelter. To be received without scorn. And hope.

The ninth-century monastic Alcuin of York wrote, ‘What is speech? The betrayer of the soul. What is a man? The slave of a death, the guest of an inn, a wayfarer passing.’ The means by which this ‘universal’ man travelled is not discernible. But Anglo-Saxon poetry also uses the theme of travel in the sense that it could be expansive. The Old English poem ‘Widsith’ (meaning Far Journey) known as well as the Traveller’s Song (from The Exeter Book, tenth century) is a list of the battles for lands fought by the Goths and Huns, encompassing Scandinavian and Baltic territories. We do not know who Widsith is, except that he is, he does, he is Widsith, he is the third person, and he could be the poem’s voice. He. Widsith. He, a personification?

Never mind his identity. Widsith is a man journeying far:

Widsith spake,
He unlocked his treasure of words.
He who among men
Had travelled most in the world,
Through people and nations.

***

This is an extract from Emma Rose Barber’s new book Finding the Wayfarer, published by Tandem.

Emma Rose Barber is an art historian, writer and tutor. Her first book was 111 Churches in London that you Shouldn’t Miss and she has written articles for ROSA magazine, Art and Christianity and Selvedge.  She loves looking at quirky images from all periods in art and walking in both town and country.

The photographs are by Peter Gaskell.