Another motive for pilgrimages, and, more than any other, characteristic of the times, was to annoy the king. Thus in the fourteenth century English people flocked to the tomb of the selfish, narrow-minded and vengeful Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, of whom popular prejudice had made a saint.[464] The crowd hastened through a spirit of opposition to Pontefract, where the rebel had been decapitated, by order of his relative, King Edward II, and the pilgrims became every year more numerous, to the great scandal of the sovereign and of the Archbishop of York. A letter of this prelate shows the uselessness of the {340} prohibitions: the idea of a semblance of persecution of believers devised by an archbishop only excited zeal and devotion; men hoped to please the martyr by allowing themselves to be slightly martyred. Thus, while awaiting a canonization that never came, though insisted upon by the next king, crowds collected near the tomb, so numerous and tumultuous that there happened “homicides and mortal wounds, . . . and that greater dangers yet and doubtless most imminent are to be feared.”[465] All this began the very year after the execution of the “saint.” The official was enjoined to hinder these meetings by any means, and to disperse them until the Pope should pronounce. But the gatherings continued, and Henry of Lancaster wrote in 1327 to the Archbishop of York asking him to refer the matter to the Sovereign Pontiff, and “bear witness to the fame of the miracles which God works by our very dear lord and brother.”[466] The same year the Commons took the question in hand and petitioned for the canonization of the same Thomas, which was scarcely parliamentary business.[467] In 1338, a London pepperer had for sale a mazer bowl ornamented with an “image of St. Thomas of Lancester.”[468] Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, who died in 1361, bequeathed money for pious men to make a variety of pilgrimages on his behalf, and he specially recommended that “a good man and true” should be {341} hired and charged to go to “Pountfreyt and to offer there, at the tomb of Thomas, late earl of Lancaster, 40s.”[469] To make a saint of a rebel was the most energetic means of protesting against the king, and the people would not miss this opportunity under some of their sovereigns. Henry III, in 1266, had been obliged to forbid Simon de Montfort being considered as a saint, although Simon having died under excommunication, as was represented to the king by the bishops and barons, authors of the petitions comprised in the “Dictum de Kenilworth,”[470] had little chance of ever being canonized. Latin hymns were nevertheless composed in his honour, as for a saint.[471]