Britain is experiencing a pilgrimage revival |
When Sarah Mullally started her pilgrimage this week, travelling from London to Canterbury, she wasn’t just embracing a tradition in England that once stretched back thousands of years, but speaking to a wider trend: the resurgent popularity of pilgrimage. The Archbishop of Canterbury, due to be enthroned next week, joins an estimated 250,000 Britons who will take part in a pilgrimage this year.
British experiences with pilgrimage have tended to focus on trips abroad: to holy sites like Lourdes or on treks such as the Camino de Santiago – which stretches from southern France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Trips aren’t confined to Christians either – until the Covid pandemic, 25,000 British Muslims took part in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Yet many Britons are unaware that the country once had thriving domestic pilgrimage routes. The most famous example is the pilgrimage to Canterbury, exemplified in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which began following the canonisation of the murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket. Known as the ‘Pilgrim’s Way’, most take the route travelling eastwards from Winchester in Hampshire.
Mullally’s 87-mile route has taken an alternate route, from Southwark, which is believed to be the same route Becket took to travel between London and Canterbury. Thousands were estimated to take part in the pilgrimage each year in medieval times. This changed with Henry VIII, with pilgrimage banned in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell as part of Britain’s........