Church of St Mary and All Saints

St Mary and All Saints is the parish church of Little Walsingham in Norfolk, the village made famous by the medieval shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, destroyed at the Dissolution, and it was within this Grade I listed flint church that the Anglican shrine was reborn: here in 1922 Fr Alfred Hope Patten unveiled the new image of Our Lady of Walsingham, which stood in the church until its great procession to the new Holy House in 1931. The church carries other singular claims to fame besides: a fifteenth-century Seven Sacrament font reckoned among the finest in England, a Victorian organ blown up with gunpowder by a disgruntled parishioner, and a catastrophic fire of 1961 from which the building rose rebuilt.

The church is of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, flint with stone dressings, with nave, chancel, north and south aisles and transepts, and a west tower carrying a lead needle spire, replaced in the 1920s when the old one grew crooked. Its original dedication was to All Saints alone; when Fr Patten became vicar in 1921 he added St Mary to make the present double dedication. The memorials include the elaborate monument of Henry Sydney and his wife Jane, and the grand canopied, crocketed Lee-Warner memorial in the north transept, commemorating the family descended from John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, who acquired the grounds of the ruined priory in 1637 and whose heirs were both patrons and incumbents of the parish through the nineteenth century. The renowned font, depicting the Seven Sacraments and the Crucifixion, was painted by William James Müller in a picture now at Birmingham Art Gallery, a plaster cast of it was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and a copy stands in St Joseph's Catholic Church at Sheringham.

The church's most explosive episode came on Bonfire Night 1866. The Reverend Septimus Lee-Warner had installed an organ in 1862, making the old church band redundant; its leader, Miles Brown, a local farmer, builder and demolitions expert, nursed his grievance for four years until, minutes after the eight o'clock curfew bell, a charge of gunpowder placed beneath the organ exploded, scattering the instrument to pieces, all but the swell organ, and destroying the south transept window. Brown escaped charges for the explosion, though he was prosecuted soon after for displaying in a cottage window an upright coffin bearing a photograph of Lee-Warner on its lid, taken as a public threat against the clergyman's life; the tale was retold in the Eastern Angles Theatre Company's 2002 play The Walsingham Organ. The next-but-one vicar, George Ratcliffe Woodward, author of "Ding Dong Merrily on High" and "This Joyful Eastertide", played the euphonium during processions in the apparent absence of any organ, until the Welsh builder Thomas Casson supplied one of his earliest instruments in 1890.

It was Woodward who brought the Catholic Revival to Walsingham from 1882, introducing weekly Communion, a surpliced choir, daily choral evensong with plainsong, vestments and lighted candles; Fr Edgar Reeves added incense and a statue of Our Lady, and by 1919 the Church Times could call it "the famous pilgrimage church of our Lady". Then came Hope Patten, formed as an Anglo-Catholic altar server at St Michael's, Brighton, given an image of the Holy House of Nazareth by the legendary Fr Stanton of Holborn, and steeped at Buxted in a chapel built to the dimensions of the Holy House reproduced in Walsingham's medieval shrine. Arriving as vicar in 1921 a convinced Anglican Papalist, he unveiled the copy of the throned and crowned medieval image of Our Lady of Walsingham in a side chapel on 6 July 1922, with great ceremony and the ringing of bells, processing it past the Seven Sacrament font. The first Whitsuntide pilgrimage followed in 1923, setting out from St Magnus-the-Martyr in London. The Bishop of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, unimpressed by the revival of Marian devotion, ordered the image removed from the church in 1930, whereupon Patten, backed by Sir William Milner, bought land elsewhere in the village, beyond the bishop's control, and built a new Holy House replicating the shrine destroyed by Henry VIII. On 15 October 1931 the statue was translated in a procession half a mile long, after High Mass sung by Mowbray O'Rorke, former Bishop of Accra. Patten served until the evening of 11 August 1958, when, after the first ever episcopal pilgrimage to his shrine, he replaced the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle, collapsed, and died that night.

On 14 July 1961 the church was gutted by fire, probably arson; only the tower and north porch, with its Powell windows of the Annunciation of 1890, survived, along with the church plate, Fr Reeves's statue of Our Lady, the medieval font and five of the six bells, two cast by John Brend in 1569, one by Edward Tooke in 1675 and two by James Bartlet of Whitechapel in 1691, joined by a new treble in 1987. The vicar, Fr Roe, appealed in the Church Times for "unwanted vestments of all kinds, cassocks, cottas, hassocks, and copies of the English Hymnal", and the church was rebuilt by Laurence King in Ancaster stone, largely as faithful reproduction. The south transept became the Chapel of St Catherine, echoing the chapel at Houghton St Giles where medieval pilgrims removed their shoes to walk the last "Holy Mile" barefoot, and the north transept became the Guilds' Chapel, recalling the sixteenth-century guild chapel on the site, with a Bodley reredos of the Virgin and Child. The east window took a modern approach: made by John Hayward, who also made the replica font cover, it incorporates surviving fragments and depicts the Trinity, the saints of the church's altars around Our Lady of Walsingham, and the story of shrine and church. A new organ by Cedric Arnold, Williamson and Hyatt completed the restoration, revised in 1999.

The parish, united with St Peter's, Great Walsingham, and St Giles', Houghton St Giles, forms the Benefice of Walsingham, Houghton and Barsham. From 1944 to 1956 the church even ran its own preparatory school, the Sanctuary School, descended from Quainton Hall School in Harrow and boarding in the vicarage, whose masters included the veteran first-class cricketer Albert Peatfield and whose pupils included a future Bishop of Carpentaria. The roll of modern vicars is studded with notable names, two of whom later converted to Roman Catholicism, and includes Norman Banks, later Bishop of Richborough. Through fire, gunpowder and episcopal displeasure, the church where England's Nazareth was reborn remains the parish heart of its pilgrim village.