Walsingham and the English Imagination

Gary Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317000600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Drawing on history, art history, literary criticism and theory, gender studies, theology and psychoanalysis, this interdisciplinary study analyzes the cultural significance of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, medieval England's most significant pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary, which was revived in the twentieth century, and in 2006 voted Britain's favorite religious site. Covering Walsingham's origins, destruction, and transformations from the Middle Ages to the present, Gary Waller pursues his investigation not through a standard history but by analyzing the "invented traditions" and varied re-creations of Walsingham by the "English imagination"- poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends, solemn devotional writings and hostile satire which Walsingham has inspired, by Protestants, Catholics, and religious skeptics alike. They include, in early modern England, Erasmus, Ralegh, Sidney, and Shakespeare; then, during Walsingham's long "protestantization" from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, ballad revivals, archeological investigations, and writings by Agnes Strickland, Edmund Waterton, and Hopkins; and in the modern period, writers like Eliot, Charles Williams, Robert Lowell, and A.N. Wilson. The concluding chapter uses contemporary feminist theology to view Walsingham not just as a symbol of nostalgia but a place inviting spiritual change through its potential sexual and gender transformation.

Chapter 1
Historical Imagination: The Invented Tradition of Our Lady of Walsingham

In the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, is the only known copy of a printed tract, consisting of just four leaves, without title page or authorial ascription. Published by the prominent Tudor printer, Richard Pynson, whose characteristic mark—described ecstatically by Thomas Waterton, the nineteenth-century antiquarian and Mariologist as “the monogram of our Blessed Ladye,”1—appears on the first and last pages. It consists of a poem of 27-line ballad stanzas with a four-line introduction. The type and printing devices suggest the poem was printed between 1496 and 1499, although from internal references its composition is usually dated around 30 years earlier. Conventionally referred to as the “Pynson Ballad,” no other copy, printed or in manuscript, is known to exist—although it has been reprinted many times since the nineteenth-century revival of interest in its subject. It purports to tell the origins of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin and known later as the “Holy House,” built, the ballad asserts, by orders of an aristocratic lady in Walsingham, Norfolk, Richeldis de Faverches, with the help of angels (and at least initially by local East Anglian craftsmen) in obedience to a thrice-repeated vision or dream of the Virgin Mary:

A noble wydowe, somtyme lady of this towne,

Called Rychold, in lyvynge full vertuous,

Desyred of Oure Lady a petycyowne

Hir to honoure with some werke bountyous,

This blyssed Virgyn and Lady most gracyous

Graunted hir petycyon, as I shall after tell,

Unto hir worschyp to edefye this chapell.2

Today, sitting at one’s desk and zooming rapidly on GoogleEarth into the village of Little Walsingham in north-west Norfolk perhaps provides an experience akin to what medieval men and women might have envisioned as an angel’s eye view. If Walsingham’s Holy House, like its sister santa casa at Loreto, in Italy—‘older’ or ‘younger’ sister has been a matter of occasional but sometimes intense debate—had not been constructed on the site but had been flown to Norfolk by angels, the angelic transport of delight would have seen a landscape not unlike that which we get today from our computer, or from a low-flying plane, or even (presumably) the patrolling stealth bombers that every few hours regularly disturb the tranquility of surrounding villages. As we approach on whatever our transport, virtual or physical—perhaps coming north-east from London, east over the fens from Cambridge and Ely, or west from Norwich—we can see a spoke of A and B roads and (as we get closer) by-roads and paths, all converging on this remote village. Walsingham seems to draw these multiple pathways towards itself as if, because of its very isolation, it had been chosen as the tantalizing end of many, perhaps difficult, but certainly deliberate, even obsessive, journeys. For Googlevoyager or angel, such a journey may not involve a huge effort, but for a visitor on foot (or today even by car) it can seem to take a surprising amount of time. The Walsinghams—Great and Little, named not for size or importance but date of settlement—are still relatively isolated. The nearest large towns are Kings Lynn (25 miles away), Norwich (40) and Cambridge (70), with London about 120. The nearest bank and supermarket are in Fakenham, six miles away, reached by navigating narrow lanes and one B-road before reaching the A148 and heading into the Fakenham roundabout. One of the Village websites tells us pointedly under the heading “Banks” that “there is no bank in Walsingham,” and under “Petrol” warns that the nearest source is at the roundabout.3

The still perceivable pattern of multiple paths converging upon Walsingham suggests, however, that it was once a popular destination. In fact, in the sixteenth century, the route from London to Walsingham was listed first on authoritative lists of England’s main roads, and some of the road remained known as the “Walsingham Way” even after the Dissolution of England’s religious houses in the late 1530s removed any reason for most people to make the journey. Nor has access improved greatly in recent years. A railway station in the village was closed over 50 years ago and is now, with an Onion added to the roof and some other renovations, an Orthodox chapel. On the edge of the village the little Stiffkey River was, in the Middle Ages, navigable by barge, but now can in places almost be leapt across. Trains run from London Kings Cross via Cambridge to Kings Lynn, and from London Liverpool Street to Norwich. Scheduled coaches from London come only as far as Fakenham. Local buses (with at least one change) meander through the north Norfolk countryside and can, after some time, connect visitors from the train or coach to the village. A quaint narrow gauge steam open-carriage railway rattles five miles northeast and joins the village to Wells-next-the-Sea, a seaside town among the sand dunes, clogged muddy inlets, and souvenir emporiums of the north Norfolk coast (miles of golden sands, as local tourist brochures somewhat euphemistically put it). Nearby Holkham Beach does have expansive sands (and more mud) and provided the windswept setting for the final scene of the film Shakespeare in Love, in which it was meant to represent the uninhabited and not entirely welcoming coast of the New World. Walsingham, local villages, and the big-skyed countryside provide the background for some of the novels of A.N. Wilson (which are treated in some detail in Chapter 7), while Wells and other nearby towns, particularly Swaffham and Castle Acre, are strikingly glamorized in seductively attractive and (when one looks at the ‘real’ settings) highly-selective village and sea-front scenes in the popular ITV series Kingdom (2006-2009), starring Stephen Fry, and idealizing the seemingly untouched landscape of north Norfolk, which is now one of Britain’s most popular venues for second homes.

Let us cast our imaginings a little further afield to the whole area. East Anglia was England’s most prosperous region in the fifteenth century. Remnants of that affluence are seen today in the large churches in wool towns like Lavenham or Sudbury, the cathedrals of Ely, Bury St Edmunds, Norwich, and Ipswich, the apparently innumerable village churches, at least one of which seems always in sight, and the ruins, often every few miles, of medieval priories, monasteries, nunneries, chapels and other religious buildings. Facing Europe, and particularly the Low Countries, the region was open in the late Middle Ages to trade and other European influences as well as to the cold winds from the steppes, and eventually to the sharp gales of religious change. It was also from East Anglia that many Protestant exiles came to settle New England, and it was where, in the 1640s, an especially determined purging of the remaining trappings of popery occurred, overseen by the clumsy brutality of Parliament’s appointed regional iconoclast, William Dowsing.

Little Walsingham’s official population is now under 1,000—smaller than in the 1530s—although it is now annually swollen, as was the case for 400 years before the dissolution of the monasteries, by hundreds of thousands of visitors, tourists, and, most remarkably, pilgrims. This book is not a history of that transformation of a decaying village into picturesque and busy modern Walsingham, although in the final chapters, some reference is made to that striking revival in the past hundred and more years. It is rather a study of the conflicting ideologies that have attached themselves over hundreds of years to this intriguing place. I trace how the “imaginings” produced by Walsingham, especially in literature and popular culture (which includes pilgrimages and ballads in the late medieval and early modern period and collections of legends and popular fiction more recently) reveal something of the complex process by which England, on the surface, and even ambiguously below its surface (a metaphor the importance of which will become evident in later chapters), became a partly Protestant, and eventually partly secular and multi-religious, society and how remnants of many older magics (to adapt C.S. Lewis’s overused but apt cliché in Narnia) have contributed to and ambiguated that process.

Between the mid-twelfth century (the date of its origins is a matter of controversy, as will shortly be revealed) and 1538, when it was closed and largely wrecked, Walsingham grew in popularity as a pilgrimage site, rivaling and even at times surpassing the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury; and, before the rise in the fifteenth century of the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, it was probably the most important center for the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Europe. It was, of course, only one of hundreds of shrines and pilgrimage sites dedicated to the Virgin Mary across late medieval England—but, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, it was the best known and the most visited.4 Its mystique was centered on the Holy House, reputedly a replica of Mary’s house at Nazareth; it also possessed twin holy wells and a number of relics, including the knuckle of St Peter’s hand and a vial of the Virgin Mary’s milk. It was a site (at least according to the story in the Pynson Ballad) of both a visitation by and miracles of the Virgin. In the Holy House was erected a statue of the Madonna and child, the “Image” of Our Lady of Walsingham, which over the centuries became the primary objective of pilgrims’ veneration. The shrine accumulated a history of visits by Kings, Queens, lords, and pilgrims from all over England and Europe, along with lands, bequests, jewels and other riches. If (as the common saying, supposedly dating from before the Norman conquest, though documentable only back as far as Edward I, is true), England was described as the “dowry” of the Virgin, then by the mid-fifteenth century, when the Pynson Ballad was written, Walsingham was its most glittering jewel.5 Its great lack, then as in later centuries, was not having had a poet or grand chronicler of Chaucer’s ability to write a collection of “Walsingham Tales.” The closest Walsingham comes to having a Chaucer is Erasmus: in the 1520s, the great humanist published a witty colloquy in latin, the Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo (usually translated as A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake) based on a visit (possibly two) to Walsingham a decade earlier. As I shall show in Chapters 3 and 4, the Peregrinatio did have significant political impact when it was translated into English in the 1530s, but it never had the literary cachet of The Canterbury Tales. In the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Strickland ‘penned’ (the appropriate term for a work of such high-blown rhetoric) The Pilgrims of Walsingham; or, Tales of the Middle Ages: an Historical Romance (1835), which, as I shall suggest in Chapter 6, does capture something of the Victorians’ romanticized re-imaginations of the allure of Walsingham only a decade or two before its revival started.

Throughout its history (including its renewal in the past century), Walsingham has drawn adulation and reverence, skepticism and revulsion. In the 1530s, when Henry VIII, who had been twice a pilgrim to and remained a generous financial supporter of the shrine, decided to break from Rome and eventually to abolish all the religious foundations, Walsingham was a particular target of the reformers’ hostility. Seemingly at its zenith—when all roads on the weblike network of East Anglia seemed to lead there—it was singled out for intense verbal attack as well as physical devastation. The goal of the reformers was to get the “image” of Our Lady of Walsingham “out of … their heddes,” so that “the people should use noe more idolatrye unto” it. Even more than 20 years after the wrecking of the shrine and the Holy House, and the ceremonial burning of the statue or ‘image’ of Our Lady of Walsingham in London in 1538, the Elizabethan Homily, “Against Peril of Idolatry,” was still reminding pious Protestants that Our Lady of Walsingham had been a dangerous heathen idol.6

Today, the results of the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century and the gradual crumbling and removal of the great priory and its shrine over, now, nearly five centuries, can only be sensed from the neatly manicured lawns and well-tended walls of what since the seventeenth century—as part of what I term in Chapter 5 the “protestantization” of Walsingham—has been termed the “Abbey” and its grounds. The dominating feature is the twin-turreted arch of the east window of the priory church, dating from the late thirteenth century. To the south are some cloisters and an undercroft that abut onto the largely eighteenth-century manor house, which was a major setting for the 2009 film Glorious 39, directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Along with various outcrops of walls and paving, this is all that remains of medieval England’s greatest shrine to the Virgin Mary.

From its beginnings, Walsingham has been a repository of powerful and contradictory stories. My title, Walsingham and the English Imagination, uses an historically ambiguous term “imagination,” not to reify some metaphysical principle of “imagination” as Enlightenment and Romantic theorists like Coleridge postulated, but to point, as Aristotle does, to the imitative, palimpsestical, story-making capacity of human beings. In De Anima, Aristotle speaks of phantasia as the process by which we say an image is presented to us; in the Poetics, mimesis means, in part, the creative imagination and is associated not just with observation and understanding, but with desire—mimesis involves not merely clear and distinct mental content but risk and passion. Mimesis is therefore also associated with story; humans, says Aristotle repeatedly, are story-telling animals.7 It may in fact be, as the feminist Catholic theologian Tina Beattie argues, that “creativity is a more fundamental attribute than rationality,” with our stories acquiring our loyalty and embodying our desires more easily than rational arguments, thus becoming the means by which, argues A.N. Wilson, we persuade ourselves that our “drift through time actually has a shape.” In a world characteristically experienced as discontinuity, with change and unpredictability “at our backs,” as Andrew Marvell puts it, it is our capacity “to draw out shapes, stories, significance” that gives us something to live by.8

Even though it uses the same heavily ideology-laden key term, Peter Ackroyd’s study, Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination (2002) has a far broader scope than the present book, but it also has a more static, ahistorical conception of the imagination and the interaction of locality and story-making.9 Ackroyd sees the “English imagination” as consisting of a motley of recurring, even atemporal, paradoxes—it is at once local and yet epic, both ideal and pragmatic, tolerant and exclusive, ostensibly Protestant yet continuing a pre...