Pilgrims

Using a favorite British accent, I led my social studies class on a pilgrimage yesterday around our school. At each stop, we talked to a pilgrim (actually, each was a music stand with different paper pilgrims taped to them), who told us about Thomas Becket, killed by four knights after angering Henry II.

Among these pilgrims was a miller, whom we found assaulted by highway bandits. In fact, curious unaffiliated students began to walk away with the music stand displaying the miller as my class and I walked toward it. Alarmed, a student yelled that these boys were thieving the pilgrim, and so without preparation, my class and I gave chase. With a battle cry, all twenty-nine of us ran full speed toward these three lads, until the boys gently placed the pilgrim down and walked away.

Alas, the miller did not escape unscathed. Slightly crumpled and missing a small section of his paper, he had--in our minds--lost a leg, and we vowed to avenge him. We would, in addition, not abandon the man, and carried him to the safety of Canterbury Cathedral, where there awaited for us a memorial candle for Thomas Becket and his accompanying reliquary.

In medieval days, pilgrims did sometimes worry about highway robbery, and even hired armed guards as protection. We found that we were that protection this day, proud knights whose mournful pilgrimage ended on a note of high esteem, realizing as we did that we had saved the life of this man, whose unchanged paper countenance betrayed a toughness unbefitting of a man whose job it is to grind grain.