During the Middle Ages, the promptings of the English church were spoken by the very voice of God. The Church encouraged pilgrimages to various holy places, or shrines, in search of spiritual enlightenment and penance from sin . This ideology says that if you prayed at a shrine, you could be forgiven of your sins, thus increasing your chances of going to Heaven after an earthly death. Those suffering from a myriad of aliments and other illnesses might also make a pilgrimage in the hope of being healed. Whatever the reason, pilgrims went to the various sanctuaries; they were influenced, in part, by promoting their faith through religious relics. Pilgrims searched for relics and saw these pieces of material as much more than mere trifles; rather, these objects were a means to achieve salvation. Pilgrims ventured to shrines, often paying money or other forms of patronage, in the hope of being able to look at or perhaps even kiss the religious relics displayed in the shrine. Much like a modern traveler to the United States collecting stickers from various states to place on a suitcase, pilgrims were given a metal badge after their visit to a shrine; they wore these badges on their hats, signifying that they had visited a particular shrine: pilgrims had their own in the form of postcards from their travels. Pilgrims normally traveled in larger groups on their journeys, as making a pilgrimage was a dangerous business. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some people wanted to go on pilgrimage without actually undertaking the journey itself. A rich person might pay another to make the journey for him to a particular shrine. A notable shrine in England is the tomb of Thomas Becket. Becket was once... middle of paper... nothing more than trinkets, many saw them as rare reminders of their faith, adding great, divine comfort to their quest. Whether it is the shrine of Thomas Becket or a place containing a baby tooth of the Savior in the Christian faith, pilgrims flocked to these places on their pilgrimages in much the same way that someone might want to flock for an acceptance heavenly. Over time, figures such as King Henry VIII and others have sought to halt the progress of religious shrines and the relics within them, but stopping a pillar of any faith is not a task fit for a mortal. Some relics, people of the time believed, had the power to cure foods that not even earthly medicine could do. Thanks, in part, to the relics and the journeys necessary to find them, the Christian faith and conviction of the people transcended all earthly authority and bordered on something divine..