The workmen have tents set up;
Streets have made along the roads.
Plenty there was of divers wines,
Bread and pasties, fruit and fish,
Birds, cakes, venison,
Everywhere there was for sale.
Enough he had who has the means to pay.


If you are not satisfied with this translation, any scholar of
French will easily help to make a better, for we are not studying
grammar or archaeology, and would rather be inaccurate in such
matters than not, if, at that price, a freer feeling of the art
could be caught. Better still, you can turn to Chaucer, who wrote
his Canterbury Pilgrimage two hundred years afterwards:--

Whanne that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote...
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes...
And especially, from every shires ende
Of Englelonde, to Canterbury they wende
The holy blisful martyr for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.


The passion for pilgrimages was universal among our ancestors as far
back as we can trace them. For at least a thousand years it was
their chief delight, and is not yet extinct. To feel the art of
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres we have got to become pilgrims again: