In this chapter, Margery Kempe begins her travels by traveling from Norwich to Yarmouth. In these places, the reader does not get much information about the landscape or inhabitants of the towns – Kempe’s focus is her religious action, describing praying and offering at the Trinity and the Image of Our Lady, respectively. Before even beginning her journey, she prepared to leave for a significant amount of time by settling her debts and keeping in mind the advice/premonition that she received from an “anchorite,” describing events that had yet to occur.

The first location that Kempe describes in detail is Zierikzee, a city in the Netherlands. It is described as a large town, and Kempe is overcome with a deep sense of religious humility. She begins to explain, in detail, how she is wrought with “tears of compassion” at the thought of Jesus’s Resurrection. More than anything, Margery Kempe describes her emotions and near-constant tears at each place she visits on her journey towards the Holy Land. Her struggles begin to affect her, though, when her travel companions begin to reproach her for her annoying state of exultation and overt emotion. They begin to speak negatively towards her, saying things like “I pray God that the devil’s death may overtake you soon and quickly.” In addition to her religious emotion, she also ate no meat and drank no alcohol, except for a short time when one of her companions convinced her to eat meat and drink wine. After denying and asking if she could return to her vegetarian way of life, her companions grew even more annoyed at her constant state of religious superiority and piety. She would constantly speak of God and her love of the Lord, and her companions grew so annoyed that they began to act rashly towards her in addition to their previous negative statements.

At one point, they cut her dress and made her wear a sack so she “looked like a fool.” They demoted her to sitting below the table so they could be less annoyed by her religious conversation. Despite all these attempts at silencing Kempe’s religious belief, she states that she was still held in higher regard than her companions in every place they went. It is this high regard and Kempe’s conversations with the Lord that ensure she is on the right path. Kempe describes that she has conversations with God multiple times throughout her journey, and at this point (on the road to Constance from Zierikzee), He assures her that her and her companions will be safe on their journey as long as they stay together.

Kempe is stingy on her descriptors of location-specific details like terrain, length of stay, and even the culture/buildings/environment. In this section, Kempe’s focus is on the struggles she has with her travel companions, and sets up how her relationship with the Catholic God protects her and keeps her company in times of hardship. As with the other places she visits, and her descriptions of those places, we learn more about Kempe’s (and women in general) struggles with traveling, and how traveling with companions is not without its struggle, especially as someone as enthusiastically, outwardly devout. It is Kempe’s religious zeal that is the root of her distress with her companions, but it is her unwavering faith that keeps her focused on her journey and purpose: to see the Holy Land.