What Is a Pilgrim Badge? Mass-Produced Souvenirs From Medieval Shrines

Badges were cast in a lead and tin alloy in stone or metal moulds, which allowed rapid production of identical copies at very low cost, and they were sold at or near the shrine by licensed traders or by the institution itself. Each carried an image identifying the site, generally the saint concerned with a recognisable attribute, so a badge announced where the wearer had been to anyone who knew the iconography. They were fitted with pins or loops for attachment to clothing and were worn visibly. Most are small, a few centimetres across, and the metal is soft and easily damaged, which is why complete examples are less common than fragments. Variants included ampullae, small flasks intended to carry water or oil from the site, and larger or finer versions for wealthier buyers.

The functions were several and they overlapped:

• •Proof of the journey, since pilgrimage was sometimes undertaken as a penance imposed by a court or a confessor and completion had to be demonstrated
• •Protection, with the badge understood to carry something of the shrine's power and worn accordingly
• •Identification on the road, since pilgrims received certain protections and hospitality that a visible badge claimed
• •Devotion, as a continuing connection to the place after leaving it
• •Status, since a collection of badges from many shrines advertised a substantial investment of time and money
• •Souvenir, in the straightforward modern sense, which contemporary writers already complained about

The surviving numbers are large and the reason is a specific and slightly odd practice. Badges are recovered in quantity from rivers, particularly from the foreshore of the Thames in London and from waterways in the Low Countries, in numbers far exceeding what accidental loss would explain. The favoured interpretation is deliberate deposition, with returning pilgrims throwing badges into water as an offering at the end of a journey, which fits a much older European habit of depositing metal objects in rivers and wet places that is documented from prehistory onward. Mudlarking on tidal foreshores has recovered thousands, and the anaerobic mud preserves the soft alloy well. That accidental archive is why these objects are known in such detail, and it also means the distribution of finds reflects where deposition happened rather than where pilgrims travelled.

The badges map a network of destinations that ranged from international to entirely local. The major sites drew visitors from across Europe and required months of travel, with routes, hospices and their own infrastructure, and badges from them turn up far from their origin. Regional shrines drew from a few days journey and were visited far more often by far more people, which is the pattern the surviving numbers show. Very local sites, a holy well or a parish relic, were visited in a day and produced their own badges. The distribution reflects cost and time rather than devotion, since most people could never have afforded a long journey, and the historical attention paid to the famous long-distance pilgrimages considerably overstates their share of the practice. Badges therefore correct a picture drawn from written accounts, which were produced overwhelmingly by the sort of people who travelled far.

Their value to historians comes from being cheap, common and datable. They document which shrines were popular and when, since the volume of badges from a site tracks its fortunes and shows sites rising and declining over decades. They record the images ordinary people encountered, which is a corrective to a picture of medieval visual culture built from cathedral art and manuscripts that most people never saw. They demonstrate mass production and distribution networks well before printing. They include a category of secular and obscene badges alongside the devotional ones, whose purpose is debated and which at minimum complicates any tidy account of medieval piety. And they are among the few surviving objects that were owned by the poor, since almost everything else that survives from the period belonged to institutions or to the wealthy.

Cast cheaply in lead and tin at the shrine and worn visibly, they proved a completed journey, claimed the protections owed to pilgrims and carried something of the site's power. Thousands are recovered from rivers, apparently thrown in deliberately at the end of a journey. They are among the few surviving objects that belonged to poor people rather than to institutions.