into the sea; whereupon the miraculous ship stopped in its voyage, and presently the bridegroom emerged, horse and man, close beside it. A conversation ensued between the knight and the saint's disciples on board, in which they apprised him that it was the saint who saved him from a watery grave, and explained the Christian religion to him. He believed, and was baptized there and then, and immediately the ship resumed its voyage, and the knight came galloping back over the sea to rejoin his astonished friends. He told them all that had happened, and they, too, were converted, and the knight baptized his bride with his own hands. Now, when the knight emerged from the sea, both his dress and the trappings of his horse were covered with scallop shells; and therefore the Galicians took the scallop shell as the sign of St. James."[1]
This mythical story will be even less acceptable to modern thinkers as an explanation of the custom than the more prosaic one which preceded it. The scallop was used on the armorial bearings of many noble houses, but this was because of some connection with a pilgrimage to this or some other shrine; it was also the badge of Cluny, but it seems more likely that Cluny borrowed it from Compostella, than that the reverse process took place.
It is an interesting fact that scallop shells have been found occasionally in leaden coffins of Roman date, especially in this country,[2] but no reason has been advanced, as far as I can ascertain, to account for this custom.
Such shells, or those of the cockle, which closely resemble them, appear on the coins of many Greek cities; none, however, occur in the Greek colonies in Spain, and the great majority come from Italy and Sicily. Now of
- ↑ Cutts (E. L. ), "Pilgrims of the Middle Ages," in Art Journal, 1861, 309; Hartwell Jones (G.), op. cit. 256 fn.
- ↑ Lovell (M. S.), The Edible Mollusks of Great Britain and Ireland, 106; Roach Smith (C.), "Leaden Coffins," Journ. Arch. Ass. ii.
