Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/101

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ORIGIN OF CY PRES. 85 emerged from the dim shades of a remote antiquity, defying the relentless touch of time, and drew crowds of credulous and adoring pilgrims to behold them. The policy of the Church early availed itself of this infatuation, and found a fruitful source of revenue in the composition for the penance of a pilgrimage to these holy shrines. As, during the Crusades, the relief of the holy city and land was the object which stimulated all Christendom to enthusiastic effort, at times amounting to frenzy, and to the most lavish expenditure of blood and treasure, so both before and after these military efforts to res- cue the sacred shrines from the dominion of the misbeliever, a pil- grimage to Jerusalem had even from the earliest day^ enured to the satisfaction or atonement for sin. Indeed the Crusades them- selves largely grew out of the interruption to these pilgrimages, which Hakim, the mad Caliph of Egypt, and later the Seljukian conquest of Jerusalem had occasioned ; and, when the extinction of the Latin kingdom had made the journey too perilous for the most adventurous, a composition was accepted in lieu thereof by the pope. Similar beneficial efforts followed, though in a less degree, from a resort to Rome or the scarcely less famous shrines of Com- postella in Spain, or, in England, of our lady of Walsingham or the tomb of the martyr Becket at Canterbury; and when the dying penitents could not themselves perform this pious duty a like benefit accrued from its vicarious performance by another, either a volunteer or one who was hired for the purpose. In the same accurate repository from which we have drawn so many illustra- tions of testamentary charity we find several instances of this prac- tice. Thus William Lord Beauchamp, by will dated January 7, A. D. 1269,^ gives "to Walter my son signed with the cross for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land on my behalf, and of Isabell, his mother, two hundred marks." Humphrey de Bohun, A. D. 1361, provides for a priest to go as pilgrim to Jerusalem ; ^ Sir Richard Arundel, July 8, A. D. 1417,* directs that "my executors find one man who for the good of my soul shall go to the court of Rome, to the Holy Land, to the Sepulture of our Lord, &c. ; " William Ponte, in A. D. 1471,^ bequeaths " to any of those who will pilgrim- 1 Conder, Syr. Stone Lore, 279-287. 2 Nicolas, Test. Vet. i. 50. 8 Nichols, Royal Wills, p. 54: also to Pontefract to the tomb of Thomas Earl of Lancaster. ♦ Nicolas, Test. Vet., i. 196. ^ lb. 326. 12