Where Did Travellers Sleep Before Hotels? Beds Given for Nothing

Hospitality to strangers is treated as an obligation in most religious traditions, and in medieval Christianity that obligation was institutional rather than merely personal, with monasteries required by their rules to receive travellers and to treat a guest as though receiving something sacred. Pilgrimage generated enormous numbers of people moving long distances on roads with no commercial accommodation, no money for it if there had been, and considerable danger. Providing for them was regarded as a work of mercy that benefited the giver, so founding or endowing such a house was a common act of charity by the wealthy, and the endowments supported the buildings and the staff without charging anybody who arrived.

The offer was basic and consistent along the major routes:

• •A bed or a place on a floor, usually in a communal room
• •A meal, frequently bread and soup, sometimes only bread
• •Washing facilities and treatment for feet, which were the traveller's main problem
• •Care for the sick, which is how several of these institutions became hospitals
• •A stay usually limited to one or two nights unless the traveller was ill
• •Prayer and a religious routine that guests were expected to join

The funding model was gift rather than trade and that shaped everything about the arrangement. Endowments of land or rents supported the institution permanently, given by founders seeking spiritual benefit, and the largest were substantial landowners in their own right. Bequests in wills added continuously. Alms collected from travellers and locals supplemented this. Because nobody paid for a service, nobody could demand one, which is why the accommodation stayed basic and why rules about behaviour could be imposed on guests. It also meant the institutions were vulnerable to the dissolution of religious houses, to the seizure of endowments, and to the redirection of charity, which is why so many disappeared in the sixteenth century and after.

Being recognised as a pilgrim rather than as a vagrant mattered practically, and a recognised set of objects did that work. A letter from a parish priest or a bishop certified that the journey was genuine and was frequently required for admission. A distinctive staff and a broad hat marked the traveller visibly on the road. A scallop shell identified those bound for Santiago and became the emblem of the whole route. Badges bought at each shrine were sewn onto clothing and hats, accumulating into a visible record of where somebody had been, and enormous numbers of them survive, mostly recovered from rivers. A scrip, which was a small satchel, held the minimum of possessions. The equipment was as much a licence as a kit.

Several of these networks continue to operate and one has grown enormously. The route to Santiago de Compostela is served by a chain of hostels, some in buildings with a continuous history of nearly a thousand years, offering a bed for a small donation or fixed low charge to anybody carrying a credential stamped along the way, and the number of people walking it has risen from a few hundred a year in the 1980s to hundreds of thousands. Comparable arrangements serve pilgrimage routes in Japan, and enormous temporary accommodation is organised for gatherings in India and Saudi Arabia. The modern youth hostel movement, founded in Germany in 1909, took its model consciously from this tradition, and several historical buildings now serve exactly that purpose.

Religious obligation to receive strangers, combined with enormous numbers of people travelling on roads with no commercial accommodation, produced an endowed network offering a bed, a meal and foot care for nothing. Funding by gift rather than payment kept the offer basic and made the institutions vulnerable when endowments were seized. The route to Santiago still runs on the same model and now carries hundreds of thousands a year.