Briefly, the people had degraded their singers, just as to-day they degrade those Sunday newspapers which have the widest circulation; yet Stubbes believed that the people could be saved from themselves if their victims were condemned to everlasting punishment by “the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus.” In like manner the people were to be improved somehow by the destruction of old votive shrines, or by the desecration of the bridge chapels in which for ages the pilgrims of England had solaced their long journeys. Henry VIII himself, in 1510, is said to have made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham, barefooted, and carrying a rich necklace--a light but expensive gift that did not add to his fatigue. Erasmus visited the same great shrine and kissed the relics, and all at once the Virgin nodded at him, owing to the indiscretion of a priest who pulled some strings. In the fourteenth century thirty-eight shrines drew pilgrims to Norfolk; for illness rambled from place to place, feeding a superstitious piety, and praying for that relief which doctors in their wild ignorance could not give. The shrines of Europe were the only physicians that the sick dared to trust. [Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE WITH SHRINES AT ELCHE IN SPAIN] Many a pilgrim visited the Pont St. Bénézet at Avignon, and legend speaks also of miracles; the good friar was buried in his bridge chapel, and during his life he healed the sick and the maimed. I know not why legend should say these things, since Bénézet did quite enough good work by building his noble structure over the Rhône, a terrible river. A Roman bridge had occupied the same spot, so that Bénézet may have used some of the Roman foundations. His work, in any case, was done with unusual rapidity, being finished in eight years (1177-1185).[98] In Brangwyn’s glorious picture of the Pont St. Bénézet one romantic feature is the friar-architect’s tomb, the venerable Chapel of St. Nicholas; and historians dwell upon the fact that never once has the chapel been injured by floods or by wars. All has been wrecked except the four arches dominated by the shrine of St. Bénézet. Pope Clement VI (1342-1352) had to rebuild four arches; in 1395, during a fierce attack on the palace of the Popes, the bridge was cut by the Catalans and Aragonese, who destroyed an arch; and this breach was not repaired with stone till the year 1418. The masonry was not good, for in 1602 the arch gave way and caused the loss of three others. Disaster followed disaster, two arches falling in 1633 and two in the winter of 1670. Turn to the Sieur Tassin’s “Plans et Profils des principales Villes et Lieux considérables de France,” issued in 1652, and you will find a view of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, with two arches missing on Barthelasse Island, and three on the great arm of the Rhône. As a rule such gaps were bridged with timber, because a French bridge cut in war could not be repaired until permission had been gained from the foe who had done the damage.