Wyclyf, William of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, all the mediæval writers, continually make allusions to pilgrims. Sometimes the life of pilgrimage is ridiculed. Thus William of Langland speaks of the “crowd of hermits with hooked staves, who wend to Walsingham and their wenches after them, boobies who are unable to labour, clothe themselves in cloaks to be known from the others, and become hermits for their ease.” Sometimes the tales of the pilgrims are derided. “Pylgrimis and palmers plyghten hem to-gederes, To seche saint Jame and seyntys of Rome, Wenten forth in hure way with many un-wyse tales, And heven leve to lye al hure lyf-tyme.” Thorpe (Skeat’s _Notes to Chaucer_, p. 49), when examined by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1407, complains of the pilgrims, saying: “They will ordain to have with them both men and women that can well sing wanton songs: and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes: so that every town that they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the King came there away, with all his clarions and many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a moneth in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after, great jangelers, tale-tellers, and lyers.” But the Archbishop said, “Leude Losell, Thou seest not ferre ynough in this matter, for thou considerest not the great trauel of pilgremys, therefore thou blamest the thing that is praisable. I say to thee that it is right well done that pilgremys have with them both syngers and also pypers, that whan one of them that goeth barfoote striketh his toe upon a stone and hurteth hym sore, and makyth him to blede; it is well done that he or his felow begyn then a songe, or else take out of his bosom a baggepipe for to drive away with suche myrthe the hurt of his felow. For with soche solace the trauel and weeriness of pilgremys is lightely and merily broughte forth.” Sometimes the people invented saints and shrines for themselves, as when they flocked to the tomb of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a man far removed from the saintly life, or to that of Simon de Montfort. In 1338 a grocer of London sold a mazer ornamented with the image of St. Thomas of Lancaster. And a few years later the people made a saint of the preacher and hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole. All these popular but ephemeral saints worked miracles abundantly while the faith in their power lasted. Would that some poet had depicted the swarm of pilgrims who, in the year when the grocer sold that mazer, rode out of London on a pilgrimage to Pontefract where St. Thomas of Lancaster was buried!