Indulgences were an immense attraction; they had {384} been freely granted on a large scale to every important shrine, and popular imagination still further magnified them. The pilgrim from Rome, back in his village, exaggerated as willingly their amount as that of the marvels which he had seen, or thought he had seen. One such pilgrim, an Englishman of the fourteenth century, dazzled by his recollections, has rimed his impressions of a journey taken by him to Italy. As a poet he does not rank high, but he does not pretend to, and his only aim is to supply precise figures and definite information. His strong narrow devotion allowed him to pay attention to nothing except thousands of bodies of martyrs that he never tires of enumerating. By thousands also are reckoned the years of indulgence which he flashes in the eyes of his stay-at-home countrymen: “Gif men wuste (knew), grete and smale, The pardoun that is at grete Rome, Thei wolde tellen in heore dome (in their opinion), Hit were no neod to mon in cristiante To passe in to the holy lond over the see To Jerusalem, ne to Kateryne.”[540] His readers will have first a brief and simplified history of Rome; it is a city to which came long ago the Duchess of Troy with her two sons, Romulus and Romulon, who afterwards founded the town. The duchess thus seems to have chosen to settle in a city which did not yet exist, but Rome is a land of wonders. It was pagan, until Peter and Paul (and then the very facts inject their eloquence into our traveller’s lines): “Hit hedde i-bought, With gold ne selver, ne with no goode, Bot with heore flesch and with heore blode.” The enumeration of the churches thereupon begins, and for each of them are invariably told the amount of {385} indulgences attached to it and of relics kept there. The benefits are proportioned to the merits; thus when a man sees the _vernicle_, that is, the holy sudary which received the image of the Saviour, he gets three thousand years of pardon if he dwells in Rome, nine thousand if he comes from a neighbouring country, “And thou that passest over the see, Twelve thousend yer is graunted to the.” When you enter Sts. Vitus and Modestus, the third of your sins are remitted. Then, you descend into the catacombs: “But thou most take candel liht, Elles thou gost merk (dark) as niht, For under the eorthe most thou wende, Thou maight not see bifore ne bihynde, For thider fledde mony men For drede of deth to saven hem, And suffrede peynes harde and sore, In hevene to dwelle for ever more.” The bodies of martyrs are countless;[541] four thousand of them at Saint Prudence, thirteen hundred at Saint Prassede, seven thousand at Sts. Vitus and Modestus. From time to time a famous name brings up an historic glimpse, such as the account of the foundation of Rome, or an abridged life of Constantine; at first a pagan and a leper,