nt by St. Martha's on their way east. The
Prior specially framed the terms of his indulgence to attract more
pilgrims.

In Mr. Hilaire Belloc's admirably interesting book _The Old Road_, in
which he describes the way in which he, sometimes with one companion and
sometimes with two, sought out the exact track of a single Pilgrims' Way
from Winchester to Canterbury, I find him writing of the compulsions of
the pilgrimage--"The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by
that well,' he heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb
that isolated hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it
and were banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.'
... 'It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone,
whose virtue saved our fathers and the great battle.' ... 'The church
you will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch
sunward by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since
custom began.' From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the
oldest of paths." Well, some of the pilgrims, perhaps most of them,
since human nature imitates more often than it contradicts, may have
been so compelled. But not all. I should like to set next to Mr.
Belloc's passage a passage from the book of another pilgrim. Bunyan,
when he wrote _Pilgrim's Progress_, may not have referred directly to
the Way from Winchester to Canterbury, though his 'Vanity Fair' has been
guessed to correspond with Shalford Fair, and other details of the
progress have been fitted in with other happenings, as we shall see at
Shalford. But unquestionably he reproduces the state of mind with which
a pilgrim would undertake a journey, wherever his pilgrimage would take
him. He was born only ninety years after the last pilgrim had paid his
vows; he would have talked to men whose fathers had made the pilgrimage,
and as he writes of it the keynote is voluntary choosing of the road.
Here is the passage:--

"I beheld, then, that they all went on till they came to the foot of the
hill Difficulty, at the bottom of which was a spring. There were also in
the same place two other ways, besides that which came straight from the
gate: one turned to the left hand, and the other to the right, at the
bottom of the hill; but the narrow way lay right up the hill; and the
name of that going up the side of the hill, is called Difficulty.
Christian now went to the spring and drank thereof to refre