‘England’s Nazareth’: Walsingham, Norfolk, England

December 01, 2024

‘England’s Nazareth’: Walsingham, Norfolk, England

The latest adapted instalment of Hilary Mantel’s epic Tudor trilogy, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, has recently aired on our screens in the UK. Watching it put me in mind of my visit to Walsingham, since it was during the period covered in the TV show that the shrine there, once a foremost place of pilgrimage in England, was destroyed by a combination of Protestant zealotry and royal covetousness.

The Walsingham shrine was established in 1061 after Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches was led in spirit by the Virgin Mary to the House of the Annunciation and inspired to create a replica in Walsingham. This supposed facsimile of the holy place where the Archangel Gabriel had told Mary she was to be the Mother of God became known as ‘England’s Nazareth’. A religious community was founded and flourished there, particularly after Augustinian Canons built a priory on the site in the mid-twelfth century. Walsingham enjoyed royal patronage from various medieval kings so that its prestige and wealth grew. In England, the shrine became second only in importance to Becket’s shrine in Canterbury as a pilgrimage destination. However, this was not to last. After Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England in the 1530s, the religious houses that had for so long been part of the fabric of English society were swiftly dissolved, their lands and riches plundered and taken by the king so that he could reward those loyal to the new way of things with the spoils and spend the remaining considerable wealth on ultimately pointless foreign wars. Well done, Henry. I know he’s our most famous king, but I don’t like him much: he was an arrogant, egocentric cretin who, in my opinion, did pretty much nothing good for the country, acting at all times out of pure self-interest whilst claiming it was all for the good of the realm (not that I’d have told him that to his face, of course, since I value my head). Walsingham Priory was dissolved in 1538, and the formerly revered statue of Our Lady was taken to London and burned.

But Walsingham’s days as a place of pilgrimage weren’t over forever. Various Acts of Parliament were passed in the eighteenth century allowing Catholics to acquire property and to practice their religion freely in the United Kingdom. In 1829 came the Catholic Emancipation Act, granting Roman Catholics the right to hold parliamentary positions and public office, and in 1871 another Act permitted them to attend English universities. In 1896, a private buyer acquired and restored the Slipper Chapel in Walsingham, which dated from the fourteenth century. The chapel was designated the National Shrine of Our Lady for Roman Catholics in England in 1934, and pilgrimages began again thereafter. Today, over 150,000 pilgrims visit the site each year. The Anglicans joined in as well, as in 1922, an Anglican priest decided to set up a new statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in the Parish Church of St. Mary. Pilgrimages began, and in 1938 the church was expanded. Both the Roman Catholic and Anglican shrines in Walsingham now offer accommodation and restaurant facilities for the many pilgrims they welcome each year.

As for the once magnificent medieval priory, its remains can still be seen and visited, with the East Window the only recognisable part indicating its size and splendour before its destruction in the Reformation. There’s something forlorn yet defiant about this vestige of a lost age and a lost world. Quite apart from the religious side of things and the social role played by the monasteries, I can’t help thinking about what was lost in terms of art, architecture, and literature (the monastic library fell victim to the dissolution). What gorgeous things we can never see because someone decided it was for our own good that we should not (and much in the interests of a megalomaniac monarch that they should be destroyed). It was interesting to see the modern pilgrimage sites and the continuation of the practice after so many centuries during which it was interrupted. Ironic, too, that the site is now an ecumenical one, shared between Catholics and Protestants after so much hatred and bloodshed in the past. However, for myself, I would just love, for a moment, to be able to see the abbey’s interior as it was 500 years ago—no doubt full of colour and gaudiness, an assault on the senses (in a good way) represented by soaring Gothic arches, beautiful statuary, stained glass, and painted walls, all swathed in the sweet scents wafting from swinging thuribles. Sadly, unlike the visions of Richeldis de Faverches, this is an image that can never again materialise.