Joan and Margery Go for a Walk

Pilgrims are spiritual travelers, often on foot. For the next few weeks I’ll be writing about pilgrimage and some notable pilgrims. 

I don’t think of medieval women as long distance walkers, but two of my favorite “sheros” of that time, Joan of Arc and Margery Kempe, each travelled thousands and thousands of miles from home, over the course of just a few years, mostly on foot. 

Joan of ArcJoan of Arc walked close to 3000 miles in her two years of public life, 1429-31.  After hearing a call from God to save France, she left home on foot and led a growing group of followers on roads up and down her country.  After walking into a royal court to admonish the Dauphin and striding into a Poitiers university to stump the professors, she marched to Orleans to lift the siege the English had laid on the city.  It was a long walk then with the Dauphin to Reims, where she fulfilled her call from God to see him crowned King of France.  By then she had acquired a horse, but I bet the King rode in a carriage.  She walked to some more battles, but when captured in Paris she went for her last walk, a forced march to the court and prison in Rouen, where she was eventually burned at the stake, age 19.  Her admirers still retrace her thousands of miles route, walking “dans les pas” in the footsteps of the saint. 

Margery Kempe, a contemporary of Joan who lived much longer (1373-1438) was an English woman who ran a brewery with her husband in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.  Like Joan she heard a call from God to leave home and walk.   At age 40, after having 14 children, she had a vision of God “ordaining” her to a life of penitence and devotion.  After much angst and resistance from family and church, she and her husband agreed she would live a celibate life and a travelling life.  For the next 20 years she walked and sailed to visit shrines and holy people and holy lands.  Starting with English holy places (Winchester, Canterbury, Twickenham, York), she then walked and sailed to Rome, Assisi, Venice, and on to the Holy Land.  Later she traveled to the pilgrim town of Compostela in Spain, and her last trip was to the North countries, including Aachen, Bergen and Danzig.  She came home when her husband was ill and cared for him in his dying.  She then composed her spiritual memoir.  Her travels certainly exceed Joan’s 3000 miles, by boat and on foot. 

I tend to think of medieval religious women as sedentary, solitary, confined.  Julian of Norwich, the cloistered anchorite, in her cell.  The mystics, Hildegarde of Bingen and Catherine of Siena and Mechthild of Magdeburg, having ecstatic visions in the church or convent, but not out on the road.  We see so many paintings of holy women on their knees or in a chair, alone, in private. 

But I’ve learned, not just from Joan and Margery, but many other accounts, that women moved around a lot in those days, much more than our average 3 miles a day, just in farming and chores and market and going to church and visiting.  Of course people walked more then than our sedentary laziness.  

But these two women were in a different class, serious walkers, pilgrims really, walkers for a religious reason, following a call, God’s call, to get up and move. 

Both Joan and Margery were scorned and tried by the church for their unconventional actions and style.  Joan attracted enough followers and effected enough history changing results (lift siege, have king crowned) that she got away with wearing men’s clothes, riding a horse in the male style, commanding an army.  Until she didn’t. She was never able to walk back home. 

Margery was by all accounts an extremely emotional, weeping and loud woman, difficult to be with.  In her peregrinations to Rome and the Holy Land she was more than once rejected by the bands of pilgrims she traveled with for just being too much trouble.  But she always found a new group, and was often the caregiver for other travelers.  Like Joan, Margery threatened the church authorities with her independence and persistence.  On several occasions she was charged with breaking church law for teaching/preaching in public (forbidden for women.)  But she persisted, finally receiving from the church permission to receive weekly communion (rare at the time) and to wear white, clothes of a disciple pilgrim, even though she was married.  

Both Joan and Margery dressed and acted unconventionally for their time.  That’s how we know about them, the unusual women.  Well, we know about Margery because she dictated (she was illiterate) her spiritual memoirs, near the end of her life, to a priest, who had them published, the first autobiography in the English language.  Joan’s legacy is also in print; there is a transcript of her trial, with her one scratched signature, from this illiterate teen, attesting that is was accurate, although she couldn’t read it. 

I admire both these women for their unconventional faith and for their persistent pursuit of what they heard God ordaining them to do and where to go, far from home, on foot.  I’ve walked on some of their same paths in England and France, Aachen and Rome, and the Holy Land.  I could wear what I wanted, pick my own companions, speak my faith.  Their persistent faithful spirits walked beside me.

Copyright ©2016 Deborah Streeter