Walsingham Shrine

A pilgrim town in Norfolk

Little Walsingham is a small village in Norfolk, in the East of England, a few miles from the North Sea coast. Nothing in the landscape suggests that it was in the Middle Ages one of the most frequented holy places in Europe: no great city, no river, no cathedral dominating the plain. The shrine did not spring from a political or episcopal power, but from a devotion born on the spot, around a story of a vision and a humble reconstructed house.^[3]

In the 14th and 15th centuries the town was known as "little Nazareth", even as "England's Holy Land": people came to Walsingham as they would have gone to Galilee, to set eyes on the house of the Annunciation without having to cross the Mediterranean and lands held by Islam.^[4] It is this devotional substitution — the Nazareth of Galilee made accessible in the heart of England — that explains the scale the place assumed.

The chequerboard plan of a village designed for pilgrims

Walsingham still bears, in its urban fabric, the mark of its calling. The village has a chequerboard street plan unusual for an English town, regarded as an early example of town planning designed to receive crowds of visitors: regular lanes, inns, timber-framed houses later refashioned in Georgian style.^[5] The priory's former hostelry, the Shirehall, now houses a museum of the place.^[6]

The shrine proper is not to be confused with a single building: it is a whole sacred landscape — the enclosure of the old priory, the Slipper Chapel a mile to the south, the wells, and, since the 20th century, two distinct shrines. To understand this place, we must go back to a night in 1061.

Richeldis de Faverches and the dream of the Holy House

Tradition traces the origin of Walsingham to the year 1061, under the reign of Saint Edward the Confessor, even before the Norman conquest. A noble Anglo-Saxon widow, Richeldis de Faverches, lady of the manor, is said to have received a series of visions of the Virgin Mary.^[7] According to the account, Mary led Richeldis in spirit to Nazareth, showed her the house of the Annunciation — where the angel Gabriel greeted the Virgin and where the Word became flesh — and asked her to build an exact replica of it in England, as a perpetual memorial of the joy of the Annunciation.^[8]

The oldest source for this account is the Pynson Ballad, a poem printed by Richard Pynson around 1495, the oldest known written testimony of the foundation legend.^[9] In it the Virgin gives Richeldis a precise instruction, which makes Walsingham a matter of measurements as much as of devotion: take the measurements of the house of Nazareth and raise a similar one at Walsingham, as a perpetual memorial of the joy of the Annunciation.^[10]

The Holy House, a replica of Nazareth

The heart of the shrine was thus a wooden house, conceived as a faithful copy of the dwelling of Nazareth. The dimensions handed down by tradition are precise: about 23 feet 6 inches long by 12 feet 10 inches wide (≈ 7.2 metres by 3.9), with a narrow door on each side.^[11] This little house was not left in the open: it was later encased in a larger stone building, so that the Holy House remained dark inside, lit only by candles — the gold, silver and jewels of the offerings shining in the gloom.^[12]

The legend adds a wondrous trait, common to several shrine-casings: the workmen are said to have failed to raise the house on the chosen spot; after a night of prayer by Richeldis, the house was said to have been completed overnight on the second site indicated by the vision, as if by angelic hands.^[13] A Catholic account must not dismiss such a detail out of reflex: prudence requires distinguishing the historical core — the ancient existence of a wooden Holy House at Walsingham, attested by the medieval pilgrimage — from the legendary wrapper handed down by the Pynson Ballad, without treating the supernatural as necessarily fabulous.

The two wells and the dew-covered meadow

Tradition closely links the foundation with water. According to the account, the Virgin gave a sign: a meadow entirely covered with dew in the morning, except for two patches left dry; Richeldis built the Holy House near two wells.^[14] These wells, and later an immersion pool, became an integral part of the holy place: people sought healing there, and they can still be seen on the site today.^[15] The pairing of a spring with a Marian shrine, familiar to pilgrims of Lourdes or La Salette, is here present from the very legendary origin of the place.

Canons of Saint Augustine as guardians of the place

On the death of Richeldis, her son Geoffrey de Faverches inherited the estate and provided for the establishment of a stable religious community. The priory of Walsingham, entrusted to the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, was established in the course of the 12th century — the date generally accepted is around 1153.^[16] As at Manoppello later for the Capuchins, it is the entry of the place into the care of a religious order that turns it from a private devotion into a shrine of the Church, endowed, organised and lasting.

The Augustinian canons kept custody of the shrine for nearly four centuries, from the foundation of the priory until its suppression in 1538. It was under their guard that Walsingham reached its peak.

The stone casing: the priory church

Around the Holy House, the canons raised a vast stone priory church. The whole conventual complex reached considerable proportions: local tradition speaks of a complex about 250 feet long by 80 wide (≈ 76 × 24 m), built of stone brought by sea from another region of England, Norfolk being poor in good building stone.^[17] Of this church, only one spectacular witness survives today: the great arch of the east wall (the East Window) of the 14th century, which stands alone in the park and still gives an idea of the scale and magnificence of the building.^[18]

The Franciscan friary of 1347

Walsingham housed more than the Augustinians. In 1347, a friary of Franciscan Friars Minor was founded there under the patronage of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Clare.^[19] Its presence, in the immediate vicinity of the great priory, testifies to the crowds drawn to the place: a shrine of this importance attracted several religious families, as will be seen in other great pilgrimages. Remains of this Franciscan friary also survive in the village.

The relics and the treasures

Besides the Holy House and the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the shrine kept a treasure of relics and offerings accumulated over the centuries. The most famous — because Erasmus would mock it — was a phial presented as the Virgin's milk.^[20] The material wealth of the place was such that at the beginning of the 16th century Walsingham was regarded, in England, as a shrine of an opulence comparable to the greatest: "the abode of saints", in an expression of the time.^[21]

The Slipper Chapel and the "Holy Mile"

About a mile to the south of the priory, on the road of arrival, still stands the Slipper Chapel, that is the chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, built around 1340, at a time when Walsingham was surpassed in importance, among English pilgrimages, only by Canterbury.^[22] Its name lends itself to two explanations: according to the most widespread, it is there that pilgrims took off their shoes (slippers) to walk barefoot the last mile — the Holy Mile — in a spirit of penance; another etymology connects it with the Old English slype, "passage", the chapel marking the threshold between ordinary life and the shrine.^[23]

This practice of the last mile walked unshod gives the Walsingham pilgrimage its own character: it is not only a point of arrival, it is a penitential way of which the Slipper Chapel is the last stage before the Holy House. It is this detail that would make the chapel so precious at the rebirth of the shrine in the 20th century.

The royal pilgrimages, from Henry III to Henry VIII

For three centuries, Walsingham was a pilgrimage of kings. Almost every English sovereign, from the 13th to the 16th century, came there: Henry III, the first royal pilgrim of the place, Edward I (1280, 1296), Edward II (1315), Henry VI (1455), Henry VII (1487), and finally Henry VIII himself.^[24] In 1511, the future destroyer of the shrine came to Walsingham on foot, unshod over the last mile, and offered a candle before the image of Our Lady: the same hand that burns the effigy in 1538 had honoured it less than thirty years earlier.^[25] This historical irony alone sums up the destiny of the place.

Erasmus at Walsingham (1511)

The most precious testimony on the medieval shrine comes to us from a famous and critical visitor: Erasmus of Rotterdam. In 1511, while teaching at Cambridge, the humanist made the pilgrimage to Walsingham in fulfilment of a vow, and left as an offering a poem in Greek verse.^[26] Thirteen years later, in his colloquy Peregrinatio religionis ergo ("Pilgrimage for religion's sake", c. 1524), he described the riches and magnificence of the place — not without an irony that already heralded the Reformed criticism of pilgrimages and relics.^[27] His description of the encased Holy House and its treasures remains one of the rare ones we have from before the Reformation. Here is how Ogygius — Erasmus' double in the dialogue — describes the Walsingham chapel to Menedemus^[28]:

"In that unfinish'd Church, that I spoke of, there is a little boarded Chapel, with a little Door on each Side to receive Visitors. There's but a little Light to it, but what comes from the Tapers; but the Scent is very grateful. [...] Nay, Menedemus, if you saw the Inside of it, you would say it was the Seat of the Saints, it is all so glittering with Jewels, Gold and Silver." — Erasmus, Pilgrimage for religion's sake (words of Ogygius to Menedemus)

The irony of Erasmus — who would cast doubt on the authenticity of the Virgin's milk and on the meaning of so many offerings — heralds the storm that would, a few years later, sweep the shrine away. Humanist criticism prepares the ground for the Dissolution. Catholic doctrine answers this irony without embarrassment: a relic is not venerated for the material certainty of its authenticity, but to honour the saint — and God through him (see Why venerate relics?); and as for the Walsingham phial, the Church never asked the faithful to hold its contents as certainly authentic: it was only presented as the Virgin's milk.^[29]

The Dissolution of the Monasteries and the fall of the shrine

The turning point came with the break of Henry VIII with Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In July 1538, the prior of Walsingham, Richard Vowell, consented to the destruction of the priory and lent a hand to the royal commissioners: the statue of Our Lady was removed, and the shrine was stripped of its ornaments of gold and silver, sent to London.^[30] The site was sold by the king's order to Thomas Sidney for 90 pounds — a paltry sum for what had been one of the richest places in the kingdom.^[31]

The image burned at Chelsea

The most meaningful act was the destruction of the statue. The image of Our Lady of Walsingham was carried to London and burned — tradition places this fire at Chelsea, in the residence of Thomas Cromwell, the architect of the Dissolution.^[32] The destruction of the effigy venerated by generations of kings and pilgrims was meant to signify the end of a world: that of medieval shrines, relics and pilgrimages. A part of English Catholic devotion died with that flame.

Four centuries of ruins

After 1538, the shrine disappeared. The priory church fell into ruin, leaving only the great east arch standing; the wooden Holy House was annihilated; the Slipper Chapel, deconsecrated, served in turn as a poorhouse, a forge, a stable and a barn.^[33] For nearly four centuries, Walsingham was but a name in old books and a ruin in a field. "England's Nazareth" seemed dead for ever.

Charlotte Boyd and the buying back of the Slipper Chapel (1896)

The resurrection of the place owes much to a woman: Charlotte Pearson Boyd (1837–1906), a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, attentive to the monastic ruins of England. She had spotted the Slipper Chapel as early as 1863; in 1896, she bought it from the farmer who owned it, had it restored, then gave it to the Benedictine abbey of Downside for Catholic worship.^[34] The restoration was continued in 1904 under the direction of the architect Thomas Garner.^[35] By a rescript of 6 February 1897, Pope Leo XIII blessed a new statue for the restored shrine and authorised public veneration of the image again: placed on 19 August 1897 in the chapel of the new Catholic parish church of King's Lynn (on which Walsingham depended), it was not translated to the Slipper Chapel until 1934.^[36]

Charlotte Boyd did not live to see the fulfilment of her work: she died in 1906, nearly thirty years before the Slipper Chapel officially became a national shrine again. But it is her purchase of 1896 that gave Walsingham a Catholic roof again.

The great pilgrimage of reparation (1934) and the Catholic national shrine

On 15 August 1934, on the feast of the Assumption, Bishop Laurence Youens celebrated in the Slipper Chapel the first public Mass for four hundred years.^[37] A few days later, Cardinal Francis Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster, led a great national pilgrimage of reparation gathering more than ten thousand faithful.^[38] That day, the Slipper Chapel was officially declared the National Shrine of Our Lady for England — the solemn return of English Catholicism to the place from which it had been driven in 1538. Twenty years later, on 15 August 1954, in the Marian year, Pope Pius XII granted the image a canonical coronation: the gold crown, offered from the jewels of Catholics across the country, was placed in the pope's name by the apostolic delegate, Mgr Gerald O'Hara, before some twenty thousand pilgrims gathered for the Assumption.^[39]

The Chapel of Reconciliation and the minor basilica

The growing crowds of pilgrims made a larger building than the little Slipper Chapel necessary. The Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation, completed in 1982, can hold some 350 to 400 people: it has become the place of the great liturgies of the Catholic shrine.^[40] Recognising the importance of the place, Pope Francis raised the shrine to the rank of minor basilica on 27 December 2015.^[41] "England's Nazareth" thus regained an ecclesial status worthy of its history.

The Anglican shrine: Hope Patten and the rebuilt Holy House

The rebirth of Walsingham was not Catholic only. On the Church of England side, a priest of the Anglo-Catholic movement, the Reverend Alfred Hope Patten, appointed vicar of Walsingham in 1921, set out to revive devotion on the very site of the old priory.^[42] In 1922, he had a new statue of Our Lady erected in the parish church of Saint Mary, copied from the image of the medieval seal of the priory.^[43] In 1931, a rebuilt Holy House was encased in a small pilgrimage church, to which the statue was transferred; the building was enlarged in 1938 (blessed on Whit Monday), then extended again in the 1960s.^[44] Inside, a holy well was rediscovered, where pilgrims receive the water with laying on of hands and anointing.^[45]

What the pilgrim sees: ruins, chapels, wells

The pilgrim arriving at Walsingham today does not discover a single monument, but a composite sacred landscape. In the Abbey grounds, the great arch of the East Window dominates the lawn, and a marker indicates, since the archaeological excavations of 1961, the exact site of the old Holy House.^[46] A mile to the south, the medieval Slipper Chapel and the modern Chapel of Reconciliation form the Catholic national shrine. In the heart of the village, the Anglican pilgrimage church houses its rebuilt Holy House and its well. The Shirehall museum, the remains of the Franciscan friary and the chequerboard lanes complete the picture.

Two shrines, one same holy place

Walsingham presents a rare configuration: two distinct shrines, Catholic and Anglican, a mile apart, honouring the same Our Lady on the same holy place. Far from ignoring each other, the two shrines have become a meeting point for ecumenism, where people pray for the unity of Christians precisely where the 16th-century division had inflicted its most spectacular wound. The place that saw the Virgin's image burn in 1538 has become again, within a century, the great Marian pilgrimage of England — proof that a shrine can rise again from its ruins.

Photographic references of the infographics: priory arch, Richard Humphrey; Slipper Chapel, Ashley Dace (Wikimedia Commons photographs credited above). The adaptations in the infographics of the four ages, the last mile, the royal pilgrimages, the 1538 dispersion and the rebirth are released under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Related Ignispedia articles

• Loreto Shrine — the other great Holy House of Nazareth in Christendom; the direct theological parallel to Walsingham.
• Manoppello Shrine — another shrine-casing built and kept by a religious family around a relic.
• Mount Carmel Shrine — another great Marian high place, at the crossroads of devotion and history.
• Why venerate relics? — the Catholic doctrine of veneration, useful for placing the relics of Walsingham and the criticism of Erasmus.

Principal sources

• Walsingham Priory, en.wikipedia.org — foundation, priory, Dissolution, ruins.
• Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham, en.wikipedia.org — Slipper Chapel, Charlotte Boyd, national shrine, basilica.
• Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, en.wikipedia.org — Hope Patten, rebuilt Holy House, well.
• Walsingham Priory, newadvent.org (Catholic Encyclopedia) — Erasmus, royal pilgrimages, destruction.
• The History of Our Lady of Walsingham, ewtn.co.uk — story of foundation and destruction.
• History of Walsingham, walsinghamvillage.org — site, ruins, Franciscan friary, museum.
• The Pynson Ballad (Richard Pynson, c. 1495) — oldest source of the foundation legend.