Walsingham is one of several holy places in England which were virtually destroyed at the Reformation but which have again become places of pilgrimage in the twentieth century. It was by far the oldest and most popular shrine in the country, of national importance, visited by every monarch from Henry III (1216-72) to Henry VIII (1509-47) and even by foreign nobles, dignitaries and scholars like Erasmus. The traditional date of its foundation is 1061, which is the date given in a ballad printed by Richard Pynson about 1496, although the earliest surviving documentary evidence points to a date in the quarter of a century before 1153 when Geoffrey de Fervaques (who was possibly one of the knights who captured Lisbon from the Moors in 1147) founded an Augustinian priory to care for the chapel erected by his mother. The ballad tells how the widowed lady of the manor, Richeldis, had a vision of Our Lady who showed her the house at Nazareth where Gabriel had appeared to her, and told her to build a replica of it ‘where shall be had in remembrance the great joy of my salutation, the ground and root of mankind’s redemption’.

The wooden house which Richeldis built was held in such veneration that it survived intact, protected by a later stone chapel, until the destruction of the shrine in 1538. There were other objects in the chapel which were venerated, particularly a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, a representation of which is almost certainly preserved on the seal of the priory and certain pilgrim badges. The statue is of the twelfth century type of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, rather similar to that of Our Lady of Rocamadour. There was a statue of Gabriel, and the Annunciation scene was depicted on some of the pilgrim badges. The shrine was obviously the focus of the medieval pilgrimage but the whole village and area were regarded as sacred. Walsingham was called England’s Nazareth and the Holy Land of Walsingham.

The statue of Our Lady was taken and burnt with certain other famous statues of Our Lady in July 1538, and the following month on 4 August the prior and canons signed a deed surrendering their house and all their possessions to the crown. They were pensioned off and the buildings and site were bought by a local gentleman, who demolished much of it and sold off the stone.

It was, however, more difficult to erase the memory of Walsingham. A local magistrate, Sir Roger Townsend, reported to Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry VIIl’s ministers, that he had punished a poor woman for claiming that the statue was working healing miracles, but added prophetically ‘yet I cannot but perceive the said Image is not yet out of some of their heads’. The image was gone but the place continued to draw people. Two former nuns whose convent at Dartford had been dissolved went to live in Walsingham, according to a document drawn up by the Exchequer in 1555. Later in the century a Catholic, possibly Philip, Earl of Arundel, or more likely his tutor, Gregory Martin, wrote a heart-breaking poem:

Bitter, bitter, oh, to behold the grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham so stately did show
Such were the works of Walsingham while she did stand,
Such were the wrecks as now do show of that holy land . . . . .

In an early road book, Holinshed’s Itinerary, written fifty years after the dissolution of the monasteries, the first road, described as if it were the most important in England, is the road from London to Walsingham, and according to a book published in 1879, it was still known as the Palmers’ Way or the Walsingham Green Way. Even the stars were thought to point to Walsingham: Blomfield in his monumental history of Norfolk, written in the eighteenth century, said that the common people .... believed....what is called in the sky the Milky Way was appointed by providence to point out the particular residence of the Virgin beyond all other places, and was on that account generally .... called Walsingham Way; and I have heard old people in this country so call and distinguish it some years past.

Another rather distorted memory of the sacredness of Walsingham is connected with the surviving two wells in the priory grounds. ‘Twin wells’ and miraculous healings are both mentioned in the Pynson ballad but they are not explicitly connected but Erasmus was told that the water of the wells was ‘efficacious in curing pains of the head and stomach’. A sceptical antiquarian, who had read Erasmus’ account, visited ‘the once celebrated seat of superstitious devotion’ in the 1770s and found the wells were regarded as wishing wells. Visitors had to kneel, put their hands into the water up to the wrists, wish, and then drink the water. If they did not disclose their wishes to anyone, they would be granted within twelve months.

The nineteenth century was greatly influenced by the Romantic Movement which popularised and romanticised the Middle Ages. This led to an antiquarian interest in surviving medieval buildings, cathedrals and churches, and the ruins of the dispoiled religious houses, but also, in the Church of England, to the Oxford Movement with its concern for holiness and revived interest in its Catholic heritage.

In 1853-4 James Lee-Warner, the Anglican parish priest of Walsingham and nephew of the owner of the priory, or abbey as it had come to be called, carried out an excavation of the site. Very little remained above ground besides the gatehouse, only the east wall of the priory church and some parts of the refectory, but he did discover the bases of the western tower and establish the site of the Holy House. In 1875 J.G. Nicholls published a translation with notes of Erasmus’ Colloquoy on Pilgrimage with its account of his visits to the shrine, and in the same year Pynson’s Ballad was reprinted for the first time. A few years later, in 1879, a monumental volume was published by Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica, which has 65 pages on Walsingham devoted to the reproduction and discussion of most of the key documents on the history of the shrine.

Some Christians, Anglicans as well as Catholics, were not only interested in the history of holy places but wanted to buy them back so that they could be restored to the Church. One such was Charlotte Boyd who had been much affected by seeing the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey as a girl of 13. She bought West Malling Abbey in Kent and established a group of Anglican Benedictine sisters there. In 1893 she tried to buy the abbey grounds at Walsingham but Mr Lee-Warner refused, no doubt because he lived there in a splendid eighteenth century house. She then entered into negotiations with him to buy the fourteenth century Slipper Chapel, the last chapel on the pilgrim road, about a mile from the village. In the course of negotiations she was received into the Roman Catholic Church but Lee-Warner kept his word and sold it to her. It was in a ruinous condition but she had it beautifully restored and built a presbytery next to it. She made it over to the Benedictine community at Downside in 1896, envisaging it at first as a mission station though later as a restored Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The Bishop of Northampton, in which diocese Norfolk lay, was reluctant even to allow mass to be said in the chapel because plans were afoot to re-establish the shrine at King’s Lynn where the nearest Roman Catholic parish was. Fr George Wrigglesworth was building a new church there which was to contain a chapel built to the dimensions of the Holy House in Loretto. The Pope, Leo XIII, presented a statue of Our Lady, modelled on one in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmeden. It was carried in procession round the town and installed in the chapel with great ceremony on 19 August 1897. The next day there was a pilgrimage of between forty and fifty people to the Slipper Chapel, but it was not until 1934 when the Chapel was made the National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and there was a huge National Pilgrimage led by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, that mass began to be said there regularly.

This was, at least in part, a reaction to the growing success of the Anglican Shrine under the inspiration of Father Alfred Hope Patten. He had become vicar of Walsingham in 1921 and within a year had put a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, modelled on the medieval priory seal, into the parish church, before which the rosary was said publicly every day. Pilgrimages were organised by the League of Our Lady, the earliest Anglican Marian society founded in 1904, and by the Catholic League, which included visits to the Slipper Chapel and to the abbey grounds and the holy wells. The Anglican Bishop of Norwich was not happy about all this and was relieved when Fr Patten agreed to remove the statue. He was not at all prepared for what happened next. In 1931, a piece of land was bought just outside the abbey grounds and a new copy of the Holy House built there with a covering chapel, which was extended in 1938 to provide a shrine church. Fr Patten was concerned to identify the new Shrine with the hallowed site of the original. He built the Holy House and the shrine altars with stones from the ruined priory and from other holy places, mostly ruined religious houses including those on Iona and Lindisfarne and at Glastonbury. He even used water diviners to trace a connection between the water in the well, discovered when the foundations were being dug, and the wells in the abbey grounds.

Pilgrims and visitors to the two shrines have grown in numbers over the last sixty years. It is estimated that there are now 250,000 each year. Originally there was a certain rivalry between the Catholic and Anglican shrines but the sacredness of the place, England’s Nazareth, as well as the progress of the Ecumenical Movement, has led to much closer relations. In 1982, when Pope John Paul visited England, he was unable to go to Walsingham but the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham from the National Shrine was taken to London and carried into the Wembley stadium by the Director of the Catholic Shrine and the Administrator of the Anglican Shrine together, and placed on the altar where the Pope celebrated the mass. The Archbishop of York [David Hope], who is one of the Guardians of the Holy House, in his sermon at the National Pilgrimage in 1996 spoke of the prophetic nature of the situation. ‘Here in Walsingham the paradox of the one domain which encompasses the two Shrines is perhaps already a sign and foretaste of that day when the now imperfect communion which we share will be brought to the fullness of perfection through the Lord and Saviour of us all’. A Carmelite nun who lives nearby has similarly spoken of Walsingham becoming a ‘one Shrine Village with two focal points’.

In an ever increasingly secular society, Walsingham is once again widely recognised as a holy place. An Anglican bishop said, ‘No matter how we may explain Walsingham, we cannot explain it away. And I am one of the thousands to whom it has been a Jacob’s ladder, a point of meeting between heaven and earth’. More tellingly perhaps, in August this year [2003], in a radio poll, it was voted the nation’s ‘favourite spiritual place’.

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