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In a blustery May night in the early thirteenth century, an old priest registered as a guest at Juan de la Cruz’s inn in Castile. Juan wasn’t surprised at the priest’s age—a large number of pilgrims who came through Silos were elderly. But he was surprised with this priest’s curiosity.

The priest, Pierre, had traveled enough to know that different areas of Christendom had different customs, and he always inquired about such wherever he went. Pierre had heard that, because of centuries of Moorish occupation, the Spains (Spain was not yet spoken of in the singular) had many eccentric religious practices.

The year was 1225 (though Juan did not know this; anno Domini was a system of dating unknown to him). Juan was the third in his family to run the inn at Santo Domingo de Silos. Juan’s ancestors had worked as day-laborers in the monks’ fields and as “carters,” transporting agricultural products, mostly wine, to Silos and elsewhere. Over time the village became economically diverse and independent.

Although on Sundays many villagers attended the monastic church, two other village parishes had been established, one with a secular priest (a priest under obedience to a bishop), and one with a priest from the monastery. Though the order, the Cistercians, had originally forbidden its monks to serve as parish priests—to keep themselves from the world—over time some monks had softened their views.

Though not on the direct pilgrimage route to the popular Santiago de Compostela, Santo Domingo was still a favorite detour for pilgrims. The saint after whom Santo Domingo de Silos, monastery and village, was named was widely known in Castile—Silos had been destroyed in the war against the Moors and had been rebuilt by a holy monk named Domingo. Traffic had grown sufficiently to encourage Juan’s grandfather to build a modest inn. So every year, especially from April through October, the pilgrims brought their offerings and spent their money for food and shelter.

Juan, like most of his friends, did not know how to read or write (though he had developed a rough-and-ready system of bookkeeping for his inn). Juan’s priest, more than many priests, valued letters and had made a standing offer to village boys to teach them how to read and write Latin. Juan’s parents had not seen the point of this, so they had not sent him to the priest’s makeshift schoolroom.

Juan’s religious education was therefore spotty. It was for laymen like him that many priests wrote popular biographies of local saints. They wrote in the common tongue, that is, a form of street-Latin-become-Spanish, to tell saints’ lives, stories of the miraculous, and to praise Our Lady in her joys and sorrows.

Villagers told or summarized such stories to each other, some of which were put in verse form. Often the writing was a churchly version of the popular love songs of the wandering minstrels. The writers hoped that what of the faith a person like Juan did not pick up in church, he would learn on the street from these ballads.

Juan picked up much of his Christian education in the village’s rhythms, from the ringing of the bells calling people to worship, to the celebration of the feasts of the church year. On the many annual feast days, statues of Christ or Mary were carried in procession through the village, stopping in each neighborhood. Hymns were sung, prayers prayed, and Juan with the others dropped to his knees in the open street.

In the evenings of feast days, singing and dancing mixed sacred and secular themes in a way that was hard to separate.

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