Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham

The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is a Church of England shrine church in the village of Walsingham in Norfolk, the spiritual heart of one of the oldest and most important places of pilgrimage in England. Built in the twentieth century to revive a devotion that reached back almost nine hundred years, it enshrines a replica of the medieval Holy House and the image of Our Lady of Walsingham, drawing pilgrims from across Britain and beyond to a village long known as "England's Nazareth". Its story is one of medieval glory, Reformation destruction, and a remarkable twentieth-century resurrection.

The origins of Walsingham as a holy place lie in the eleventh century. According to tradition — regarded now as pious legend rather than verified history — an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and widow named Lady Richeldis de Faverches experienced, around the year 1061, a series of visions in which the Blessed Virgin Mary showed her the house in Nazareth where the Holy Family had lived and where the Annunciation had taken place. Mary commissioned her to build a replica of that sacred dwelling in Walsingham, dedicated to the mystery of the Annunciation. This was among the earliest recorded Marian visions in England, and the resulting "Holy House" became the focus of an extraordinary cult. Lady Richeldis's son and heir, Geoffrey de Faverches, before leaving to join the Crusades, entrusted the Holy House and its grounds to his chaplain Edwy to found a religious house; this became Walsingham Priory, which passed into the care of Augustinian canons in the mid-twelfth century.

As travel to the Holy Land grew dangerous during the age of the Crusades, Walsingham rose to become one of the supreme pilgrimage destinations of Christendom, ranked alongside Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The Holy House contained a revered wooden image of Our Lady, and generations of pilgrims — kings and commoners alike — made their way along the muddy Norfolk lanes to pray before it. The great humanist Erasmus visited around 1512, when the Holy House was reputed to have been built by angels as a replica of the Virgin's house in Nazareth, and he later reflected on the practices and motives of pilgrims in his Colloquies, in the famous dialogue Peregrinatio. For four and a half centuries Walsingham was the Nazareth of England.

All of this came to an abrupt and violent end at the Reformation. In 1538, under Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Walsingham Priory was suppressed, and the celebrated statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was reportedly carried off to London and burned — some accounts pointing to Thomas Cromwell's courtyard in Chelsea, others to Smithfield, the usual place of public burnings. The shrine was destroyed, the pilgrimage ended, and for nearly four hundred years Walsingham was a place of ruins and memory. (Some historians have wondered whether the statue truly perished: the medieval Langham Madonna, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, has even been proposed as the original Walsingham image, perhaps sold or rescued rather than burned.)

The revival of the shrine in the twentieth century is bound up with one remarkable priest. Father Alfred Hope Patten, appointed Church of England vicar of Walsingham in 1921, was determined to rekindle the pre-Reformation pilgrimage. He commissioned a new statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, modelled on the image depicted on the medieval seal of Walsingham Priory, and in 1922 set it up in the parish church of St Mary. From the very first night that the statue was placed there, people gathered around it to pray, asking Mary to join her prayers with theirs, and regular pilgrimage devotion quickly followed. Through the 1920s the trickle of pilgrims swelled into a flood, and a Pilgrim Hospice was opened to receive them.

In 1931 a momentous step was taken: a new Holy House, encased within a small pilgrimage church, was dedicated, and the statue translated to it with great solemnity. Seven years later, in 1938, that church was enlarged to form the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham as it stands today; the enlarged church was blessed on Whit Monday, and from then on an annual pilgrimage has been held — a date later moved, in 1971, to the Spring bank holiday. During the Second World War Walsingham lay within a restricted military zone closed to visitors, but in May 1945 American forces organised the first Mass to be celebrated in the priory grounds since the Reformation — a moving sign of the old faith returning to the ancient site. Father Patten combined the roles of vicar and priest administrator of the shrine until his death in 1958, and since 1959 the Whit Monday gathering has been known as the National Pilgrimage. The shrine church was substantially extended again in the 1960s, and the artist Enid Chadwick contributed much of its colourful decoration.

At the heart of the shrine, within the modern church, stands the rebuilt Holy House, and nearby is a holy well long renowned for its healing properties; the receiving of water from the well is often accompanied by the laying on of hands and anointing, and pilgrims carry the water home to share with family, friends and parishioners. The shrine grounds have grown into a substantial complex serving the needs of pilgrims: gardens and chapels, a refectory, café and shop, a visitors' centre and the Pilgrim Hall, an orangery, the College that houses priests-associate, and numerous residential blocks where pilgrims may stay. In 1947 three sisters of the Society of Saint Margaret came to assist at the shrine, and the Priory of Our Lady, Walsingham, was founded in 1955, becoming an autonomous house of the order in 1994; the sisters welcome guests, work in the shrine and engage in educational work. A network of associations, chief among them the Association of Priests Associate of the Holy House founded in 1931, binds clergy and laity across the world to the life of the shrine.

The shrine stands in the pretty medieval village of Little Walsingham, in the rolling countryside of north Norfolk. The romantic ruins of the original Walsingham Priory, with its surviving east window arch, lie close by, as does the Roman Catholic shrine at the nearby Slipper Chapel in Houghton St Giles, the place where medieval pilgrims removed their shoes for the final mile; the two shrines together make Walsingham England's pre-eminent centre of Christian pilgrimage once more. The Georgian and medieval streets of the village, the North Norfolk coast with its beaches and bird reserves at Wells-next-the-Sea and Holkham, and the historic towns of Fakenham and Little Walsingham's own priory grounds are all close at hand.

From the visions of Lady Richeldis around 1061 and the building of the medieval Holy House, through Walsingham's centuries as one of the great shrines of Christendom, its destruction by Henry VIII in 1538, and its extraordinary revival under Father Hope Patten in the 1920s and 1930s, the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham gathers nine centuries of English Marian devotion into one living holy place. Built in 1938 and enriched ever since, enshrining the rebuilt Holy House, its healing well and the image of Our Lady, it remains the focus of the National Pilgrimage and the beating heart of "England's Nazareth" — a place where one of the oldest pilgrimages in England goes on to this day.