In the Court of Venus, a mid-sixteenth-century miscellany, mainly consisting of poems and anecdotes, occurs a poem, attributed to Chaucer but clearly written in the 1530s, entitled The Pilgrim's Tale. It was likely written by Robert Singleton, at one time chaplain to Anne Boleyn and a convert to the reformist cause. In enthusiastic ballad stanzas that occasionally rise above doggerel, it expresses a common reformist attitude to pilgrimages. The pilgrim of the poem's title is setting out from Lincolnshire – the origins of one of the strongest protests against the process of dissolution of the religious houses in the late 1530s – “toward Walsingham apon my pelgrymage.” On the way, he undergoes a conversion experience and realizes that pilgrimages are “sprong owt of Antichrist” and in the past have deceived many pilgrims who “have put trust in suche fablis vayn.” Whereas the reformers scorned all “feign'd miracles,” a phrase repeated throughout the period so often as to become a cliché, pre-Reformation Christians had expected what Ethan Shagan terms “frequent spontaneous eruptions of the divine,” and to reap earthly, heavenly (or at least purgatorial) rewards for completing their pilgrimages “for religion's sake,” as Erasmus put it. In 1455, to take merely two instances, the pope confirmed the awarding of indulgences offered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York “having regard to the devotion of people who flock” to a Marian shrine in Liverpool; at Stainar, and Hemingbrough, near Selby Abbey, indulgences were granted by the pope for the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin for the miracles worked there “by the merits of the said Virgin.”