In post-Reformation times there are biographies of holy women which show that the idea of consecrated widowhood was still living in the minds of the people. Probably the dress commonly worn by widows throughout their widowhood is a remnant of the mediæval custom. THE PILGRIMS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. CHAPTER I. The fashion of going on pilgrimage seems to have sprung up in the fourth century. The first object of pilgrimage was the Holy Land. Jerome said, at the outset, the most powerful thing which can be said against it; viz., that the way to heaven is as short from Britain as from Jerusalem--a consolatory reflection to those who were obliged, or who preferred, to stay at home; but it did not succeed in quenching the zeal of those many thousands who desired to see, with their own eyes, the places which had been hallowed by the presence and the deeds of their Lord--to tread, with their own footsteps, "Those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which "eighteen" hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter cross;"[167] to kneel down and pray for pardon for their sins upon that very spot where the Great Sacrifice for sin was actually offered up; to stand upon the summit of Mount Olivet, and gaze up into that very pathway through the sky by which He ascended to His kingdom in Heaven. We should, however, open up too wide a field if we were to enter into the subject of the early pilgrims to the Holy Land;[168] to trace their route from Britain, usually _viâ_ Rome, by sea and land; to describe how a pilgrim passenger-traffic sprung up, of which adventurous ship-owners took advantage; how hospitals[169] were founded here and there along the road, to give refuge to the weary pilgrims, until they reached the Hospital _par excellence_, which stood beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; how Saxon kings made treaties to secure their safe conduct through foreign countries;[170] how the Order of the Knights of the Temple was founded to escort the caravans of pilgrims from one to another of the holy places, and protect them from marauding Saracens and Arabs; how the Crusades were organised partly, no doubt, to stem the course of Mahommedan conquest, but ostensibly to wrest the holy places from the hands of the infidel: this part of the subject of pilgrimage would occupy too much of our space here. Our design is to give a sketch of the less known portion of the subject, which relates to the pilgrimages which sprung up in after-times, when the veneration for the holy places had extended to the shrines of saints; and when, still later, veneration had run wild into the grossest superstition, and crowds of sane men and women flocked to relic-worships, which would be ludicrous if they were not so pitiable and humiliating. This part of the subject forms a chapter in the history of the manners of the Middle Ages, which is little known to any but the antiquarian student; but it is an