Children's Pilgrimage
In Schwäbisch-Hall on the Thursday following Pentecost in the year 1484 it happend that the town's boys suddenly were overcome with an obsession to make a pilgrimage to Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. Against the will of their parents two hundred of them were thus inflamed and could not be restrained, even by their mothers. The few who were held back by force soon died.
"Verily," in the words of an old chronicler, "it was a rare and miraculous frenzy."
As the boys could not be held back, a schoolmaster and a donkey were provided for their well-being. They appear to have made the long journey and pilgrimage without mishap.
After they left Schwäbisch-Hall a great plague struck their homeland, so it was perhaps the hand of God that prompted the boys to leave. It was a great mystery why the boys wanted to go so far away into a foreign land, for many of the best-known pilgrimage sites were in Swabia as well as in neighboring Franconia and Bavaria.