England's Nazareth

The Sunday Pilgrimage #2

The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Little Walsingham, Norfolk, England

For the next couple of months we’re going to be in England, digging into some of the country’s ancient Christian heritage. England has been a Christian land for well over a thousand years, and the Romano-British population were Christianised even before the Anglo-Saxon pagans arrived in the fifth century to break up the party. This country has a very long Christian history indeed: I wrote about some of it on St George’s Day last year. There is much to explore in my homeland, and I can only touch on a fragment of it here.

England is still, at least technically, a Christian nation. It has its own established church, whose bishops sit in the House of Lords and whose titular head is the king. But as with so many other things in England today, the official structure is hollowed out. The Church of England is in a sorry state these days for all sorts of reasons, as is Christian England more broadly. Less than one per cent of the population attends church every Sunday, and those numbers are still going down. The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, less than half of the UK’s population was Christian. The fastest-growing religion in the country is Islam, and one in twelve schoolchildren in England is now Muslim. According to a Gallup poll from a few years ago, 69% of people across Britain have no religious affiliation of any kind, making the UK the fourth-least religious country on Earth.

But there is still one small village in England which is - very literally indeed - keeping the faith, and we’re going to spend the next four weeks wandering in and around it:

Little Walsingham, a tiny village in North Norfolk, speaks to me of the England I still feel an attachment to, even as much of what the country and culture has become leaves me cold. It doesn’t look like a great deal has changed here since the 1950s. You can still find old black-beamed pubs full of horse brasses and good ale, little cafes run by local women which sell tea and scones, a village lockup (sadly no longer in use), cobbled paths, small quiet bookshops, footpaths across the quiet fields. John Betjeman would have liked it, and so do I. If I ever move back to England, I found myself thinking as I wandered the quiet streets, it will need to be to somewhere like this. And given that there isn’t anywhere else like this, that means it will probably have to be here.

Because it’s not just the olde-worlde charm that makes this place interesting to us pilgrims. You can get a clue as to what makes the village unique by looking at what its shops sell. At least half of them seem to be dedicated to selling Christian icons, statues, candles and prayer books. Even the newsagent has Christian kitsch nestled between the Lucozade, papers and crisps. Little Walsingham is a deeply strange and alien thing in the consumer desert of modern England: it is a Christian village.

Even the street signs give it away:

That’s two shrines and an Orthodox Church within a mile of the village centre. What on Earth is going on here?

To get the answer to that question we have to go back in time nearly a thousand years, to 1061 AD, five years before the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England. Here we meet Richeldis de Faverches, a noblewoman married to the Lord of the Manor of Walsingham Parva. Richeldis was a very devout woman, with a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary. One day her devotion was rewarded with a vision, in which Mary appeared to her with a request. Richeldis was asked to build, in Walsingham, a replica of the house in which the Angel Gabriel had announced to Mary that she was to bear the son of God: the event which Christians know as the Annunciation. In case she was in any doubt about the matter, the vision occurred three more times, and Richeldis was even given the precise dimensions of the building.

So, construct it she did - or rather, according to legend, didn’t. The story goes that Richeldis gathered all the materials together to make the house. Then, one night while she was keeping a prayer vigil, it was miraculously constructed without her, by unseen hands. However it happened, it got built, and it came to be known as ‘England’s Nazareth’. Richeldis’s husband Geoffrey had a priory built around the miraculous house, the remains of which can still seen at the centre of the village today. This is the gatehouse:

This story was just the beginning of an astonishing journey for this little English village. Over the next five hundred years, the ‘holy house’ at Walsingham developed into one of the three greatest pilgrimage sites in the Christian world, the other two being Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. People would travel from across the continent to visit the shrine of ‘Our Lady of Walsingham.’ Veneration of the Virgin Mary was central to medieval Christianity, and many miracles were attested at the Walsingham shrine. It was visited by knights, monks, endless streams of international pilgrims and many of England’s monarchs, including Henry III, Edward II, Edward III, Henry IV, Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII.

The last of these, though, was to prove a fateful visit. While the young Henry was a pious Catholic, the older Henry was medieval England’s equivalent of Stalin. It was Henry VIII who unleashed the destruction of England’s monasteries, holy wells, shrines, statues, icons, frescoes, pilgrimage trails, churches and much more. Under the guise of the ‘Reformation’ of the Church, the Tudor Taliban set about ripping up and burning down the entire spiritual landscape of medieval English Christianity. It has never recovered. You want to know why England is one of the most disenchanted and irreligious countries on Earth, despite its beautiful and ancient spiritual history? I’m putting Henry right on top of the list of villains responsible.

The shrine at Walsingham, along with the ‘holy house’ itself, was destroyed in 1538 (take a look at the empty niches where statues should be on the photo above, and the smashed remains of the heads of saints). But there is a twist to this tale, for we know - do we not? - that the power of earthly kings is limited, and that God gets things done in his own good time.

And so it is at Walsingham where, with Henry Tudor long dead, the shrine has been reborn:

In the late nineteenth century, the Catholic church restored the nearby ‘Slipper Chapel’, the last resting place on the pilgrimage route to the shrine, which we’ll be visiting next week. The first pilgrimage since the sixteenth century was triumphantly held in 1897. Then, in the 1920s, the new Anglican vicar of Walsingham, Fr Hope Patten, decided to reconstruct the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham which had originally stood inside the medieval shrine. Patton was a ‘High Anglican’, or ‘Anglo-Catholic’, who believed, as did many Anglicans of his generation, that the heritage of medieval Catholic England should come to the fore again in the Church of England.

The statue, based on the seal of the medieval priory, was duly built, and placed in the parish church. Here it is today, in all of its Anglo-Catholic glory:

Due to all this new activity, the restored pilgrimage route to Walsingham began flourishing. A railway branch line, known as ‘the pilgrim line’, with its very own station (we’ll be visiting this in a fortnight) began to overflow with visitors. By the 1930s, it was time to construct a new shrine to house the visitors. Today, the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham offers something unique in England, and perhaps even in Europe: a Christian shrine in which Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox Christians regularly come together to venerate the Virgin Mary.

Pride of place within the shrine is given to a reconstructed holy house, built to the same dimensions as the original and containing fragments of the stonework from the demolished medieval shrine. The statue of Our Lady of Walsingham is now inside the holy house. If you’re the sort of person who likes virtual tours, you can see inside the shrine and the house on this one.

Here is the exterior of the house last Christmas when I visited, complete with nativity scene:

Outside the house, but inside the shrine, is the tomb of Fr Patten, who made it all possible:

Perhaps most exciting of all for us Abbeyites, I came across a surprise in the shrine that I had not expected: a holy well! It was discovered during the construction of the shrine in the 1930s, and water from it is now incorporated into the services that are regularly held here:

Pilgrimages to Walsingham are now in full swing again. Next week and the week after we’ll explore two more of the sites that are part of its rejuvenated pilgrimage trail. Henry VIII must be turning in his grave. At least, we can hope so.