When sensitive, religiously disposed boys left pious homes, they could not fail to come in contact with a very different kind of religion. Many did not need to quit the family circle in order to meet it. Near Mansfeld, Luther’s home, were noted pilgrimage places. Pilgrims, singly or in great bands, passed to make their devotions before the wooden cross at Kyffhäuser, which was supposed to effect miraculous cures. The Bruno Quertfort Chapel and the old chapel at Welfesholz were pilgrimage places. Sick people were carried to spots near the cloister church at Wimmelberg, where they could best hear the sound of the cloister bells, which were believed to have a healing virtue. The latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a great and widespreading religious revival, which prolonged itself into the earlier decades of the sixteenth, though the year 1475 may perhaps be taken as its high-water mark. Its most characteristic feature was the impulse to make pilgrimages to favoured shrines; and these pilgrimages were always considered to be something in the nature of satisfactions made to God for sins. With some of the earlier phenomena we have nothing here to do. The impetus to pilgrimages given after the great Schism by the celebration in 1456 of the first Jubilee “after healing the wounds of the Church”; the relation of these pilgrimages to the doctrines of Indulgences which, formulated by the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century, had changed the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, must be passed over; the curious socialist, anti-clerical, and yet deeply superstitious movement led by the cowherd and village piper, Hans Böhm, has been described. But one movement is so characteristic of the times, that it must be noticed. In the years 1455-1459 all the chroniclers describe great gatherings of children from every part of Germany, from town and village, who, with crosses and banners, went on pilgrimage to St. Michael in Normandy. The chronicler of Lübeck compares the spread of the movement to the advance of the plague, and wonders whether the prompting arose from the inspiration of God or from the instigation of the devil. When a band of these child-pilgrims reached a town, carrying aloft crosses and banners blazoned with a rude image of St. Michael, singing their special pilgrim song,(78) the town’s children were impelled to join them. How this strange epidemic arose, and what put an end to it, seems altogether doubtful; but the chronicles of almost every important town in Germany attest the facts, and the contemporary records of North France describe the bands of youthful pilgrims who traversed the country to go to St. Michael’s Mount.