The pilgrim’s badge: Water, air, and the flow of sacred matter

Abstract

In the 1970s, thousands of medieval pilgrims’ badges were dredged from London’s River Thames. Further excavations in France and Germany revealed this was not an isolated case. Though no contemporary accounts directly attest the phenomenon, scholars have suggested that pilgrims tossed their badges into the river after pilgrimage as propitiatory or votive offerings. This essay expands on those theories by adopting a comparative approach focused on notions of flow and sacred materiality. It connects the practice of tossing badges into rivers with a similar post-pilgrimage tradition: the casting of badges onto church bells. Reading these badge practices into one another elicits richer understandings of both and helps to contextualize the river badges within broader discourses of purification ritual and fluid mechanics. Ultimately, this essay speculates that, for the medieval person, river badges comprised a communal deposit of sacred matter perceived to enact a flow of purifying blessings throughout the environment.