Pilgrim badge for a local saint

Mudlarks and enthusiasts with metal‑detectors sometimes turn up little scraps
of lead, fretted and bent at the edges, perhaps with a face recognisable and
not much else. These can end up in the scrap bucket, but with luck they add
to the growing scholarly knowledge of pilgrims’ badges.

We all know about pilgrims to Compostela wearing scallop shells, but those who
walked or rode to Canterbury would spare a copper or two to buy a memento of
St Thomas to pin on their coat. And so would pilgrims to the shrine of
Master John Schorne.

John Schorne, I am sure, would have been a canonised saint by now if Henry
VIII hadn’t had his marriage problems. He was called “Master” John Schorne
because he was, by the year 1273, a magister, an MA from Oxford. He left
little mark in life, becoming Rector of North Marston (halfway between
Buckingham and Aylesbury) and staying there till he died in about 1314,
making this year his 700th anniversary.

The parishioners of the village church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin
Mary (a rare but not unique dedication in the Church of England) evidently
thought their rector a holy man. He was remembered for finding a spring of
water for them during a drought.

When he was buried in the church, behind the high altar, they began to say
their prayers there, asking his intercession with God in heaven and lighting
candles. This was a cult not yet recognised by the diocese, let alone the
universal Church, but it was the sort of way that saints’ reputations were
established.

With John Schorne, things really got going a century after his death. His
prayers were sought for ague (such as malaria), toothache, for drowned
people and dead cattle, some of which were said to have been revived by his
help. A story associated with him, for no known reason, was that he once
imprisoned the Devil in a boot.

A lead-alloy pilgrim badge found in the mud near London Bridge in 1982 shows
John Schorne grasping the bat-winged Devil. Beside him, a long boot may be
made out. The back of the badge still has its pin. Perhaps it came undone
when someone was stepping into a boat on the Thames.

The badge, one of the large collection in the British Museum, is depicted in
Saints and Their Badges by Michael Lewis, who works there and heads the
Portable Antiquities Scheme, which encourages people to record voluntarily
the archaeological objects they find.

Popular saints whose pilgrim sites and badges he examines include St Alban, St
Cuthbert, St Roche, St Margaret of Antioch (whose badges are found near
Ketsby in Lincolnshire) and St George, who was revered at the chapel at
Windsor.

Oddly enough, so was John Schorne, for the Dean of Windsor in 1478 obtained
permission from the Pope himself to translate the good rector’s relics from
North Marston to St George’s Chapel, where they were housed in a prominent
shrine in the south-east corner of the south aisle of the quire (as they
spell it at Windsor). To the same chapel in 1484, were transferred the
remains of Henry VI, another reputed saint never formally canonised.

Modern-minded men like Erasmus, who didn’t think much of pilgrimage at the
best of times, scoffed at the popular devotion to Master John Schorne, whose
shrine, he suggested (no doubt satirically), drew as many pilgrims as
Walsingham. In 1538 the shrine at Windsor was despoiled and the place used
in Elizabeth’s reign for the tomb of the Earl of Lincoln.

But in North Marston, 150 yards south of the church, beneath a handsome
shelter of timber beams and local tiles, restored by the villagers in 2005,
stands the holy well (now fitted with a pump handle) that was found for them
one summer by Master John Schorne.