And here, before we follow the pilgrims across the county from Farnham
to the lane by which they leave it east of Titsey, I want to make a
point clear. The pilgrims did not all travel to Canterbury by the same
road, along the selfsame track so many feet wide, as the Ordnance map
and some of those who have written on the Pilgrims' Way would argue.
There is not one single, separate path along which every pilgrim who set
out from Winchester to Canterbury travelled through Surrey. All that the
pilgrims did was to journey forward either on, or near, the old Way from
west to east and east to west, and it has happened that they used, more
than any other track besides the Way itself, one particular road. This
road can be followed parallel to the old Way for a long distance,
running from church to church under the chalk ridge; and it is this road
which is marked in the maps as the Pilgrims' Way. Perhaps that is
convenient, but it should be understood that not all the pilgrims went
by it. For pilgrims, after all, were as human then as walkers along
country roads are to-day. They would not all want to do the same thing
in the same way. Some of them would set out to do one thing and some
another. Some would prefer to walk alone high up on the ridge; others
would choose a bevy of companions and chatter along the road under the
hill. Some would be thin, ascetic persons, who liked to stride along and
see how far they could go without eating or drinking; some would be
pleasant, good-tempered creatures, who would amble by dusty places and
be thankful for cool beer; some would eat or drink mechanically, filled
with a single thought of prayer and pilgrimage to a shrine. Some would
be always perverse, and because most people travelled by one path, or
halted at an easy spot, would choose deliberately another path, and halt
where others passed on. Some would determine, come what might of wind or
rain or sun, to sleep at a certain village at nightfall; others would
let the weather decide for them. The weather would decide much, and it
would choose differently for different travellers. One of the writers
who has discussed the problems of the Pilgrims' Way suggests that the
main route would vary with varying degrees of heat and cold. If the
weather were cold and wet, the pilgrims would travel on the chalk ridge;
and if it were hot, they would go by the leafy woodland path below. But
if I Were a pilgrim and the weather were hot, I should go by the top of
the ridge, so as to get the air and the view; probably I would go by the
ridge in any case, whatever the weather was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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