Abstract
This article aims to discuss the importance of Walsingham to the medieval Christians who once flocked there and why, in the sixteenth century English Reformation, local people would probably have wanted to protect and preserve their precious statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. The article argues that the medieval statue in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London may be the actual statue of Our Lady of Walsingham as described by Erasmus in 1513. It certainly dates from the thirteenth century, and it is strikingly similar to the image found today in the Slipper Chapel near Walsingham which is based on the medieval seal of the priory. The idea that the actual statue from the Holy House at Walsingham, visited by kings and queens over centuries may seem far-fetched but new research suggests that this surviving statue could be the famous image of Our Lady. The damaged thirteenth century English statue of the Madonna and Child is in the collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and is known as the ‘Langham Madonna’, is a unique survival of its kind. The statue’s striking resemblance to the image of Our Lady of Walsingham on the priory’s seal has long been recognised. However, a probable error in the provenance given when the statue was first donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum has hitherto prevented art historians from pursuing the possibility that the Langham Madonna is medieval England’s holiest image. “The Virgin, wearing a low crown, sits frontally on a backless throne, with the Christ-Child on her left knee. There are several losses: the Virgin’s right hand, the head and left arm of the child (he originally held a book). The present colour scheme is approximately that of the earliest layer: the Virgin’s over-mantle is red (perhaps over-patterned with white) and her under-gown is blue, while the Christ-Child’s tunic is yellowish white. There are the remains of pinkish flesh tones on the face and the neck of the Virgin, and the sides of the throne are yellow or gold”. (1) A Victoria and Albert Museum spokesman said that the sculpture was, “a rare survival of English medieval sculpture that was a typical product of the early thirteenth century. Although we cannot completely exclude the possibility that it was the cult image once venerated as Our Lady of Walsingham, the lack of material evidence means that it may never be possible to know this sculpture’s precise origins. At present, the V and A is not intending to undertake carbon-dating.” (2)
It is said that the simple wooden statue of Our Lady of Walsingham that stood beside the altar of Walsingham’s Holy House situated next to Walsingham Priory, which was venerated by kings, queens, princes, cardinals and generations of faithful pilgrims, was torn down in 1539 and carted off to London and burned, either in Chelsea or at Smithfield. This is the traditional account of what happened to the image of Our Lady of Walsingham. Yet contemporary accounts are vague, with the chroniclers unable to agree even on the location of the burning. Could it be that the statue was not, in fact, destroyed at all?
In 2020, England was rededicated as Our Lady’s Dowry by the Bishops of England and Wales. This traditional title goes back to the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066) but it was King Richard II, at the height of a national emergency, who after praying at the shrine of Our Lady of Pew in Westminster Abbey on the feast of Corpus Christi, reputedly decided to formally dedicate the country to the Virgin Mary. The title ‘Our Lady’s Dowry’ was set to be attached to England forever. Henry VIII did his best to stamp out much of the devotion of the people at the various shrines to her up and down the country.
The issue of images and the role they played in worship, was central to the sixteenth century English Reformation. Some Reformers feared that people were adoring and venerating statues and other images instead of God by praying to them, making offerings, kneeling before them, and kissing them. This was the very definition of the sin of idolatry as far as some English Reformers in the sixteenth century interpreted the Bible. Removing images, or idols, as some of them saw it, would remove the temptations and dangers they posed, or so they thought. Under Henry VIII church images were mostly still permitted but the government of Edward VI in the mid-sixteenth century was more radical. A regime of systematic iconoclasm was implemented. Orders were given to ‘utterly extinct and destroy’ images ‘so that there remain no memory of the same.’ (3) Religious images were accordingly removed, defaced, whitewashed or obliterated to prevent people’s engagement with them. The turbulent religious changes which occurred during the period 1535 to 1555, were marked by successive waves of iconoclasm in English churches and cathedrals. Statues, screens, wall paintings, and windows were among the ‘idols’ targeted by fanatics of the new state church. While some objects and artworks were destroyed, others remained, but bearing the marks of iconoclastic violence.
Although the nineteenth century saw many churches and religious art works ‘restored’ and repaired, many were left untouched. Even today, many English churches contain numerous examples of defaced images which have suffered beheading or scoring of the face and hands yet have been neither repaired nor removed. For around 480 years, most of their existence, many of these statues, images and objects have been as they were left by those who chose to damage and deface them. One could contrast the craftsmanship and skill of their creation with the desecration and violent destructiveness of the iconoclasts. In 2013, an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London entitled, ‘Art under Attack’, showed some objects which had been damaged or defaced throughout history. (4) One of the most striking of these was a statue of Christ. The centrepiece of the show was a damaged sculpture of Christ that lay hidden for hundreds of years beneath a floor of a London chapel. The Statue of the Dead Christ (circa. 1500 – 1520) is missing its crown of thorns, arms and lower legs. It is thought by some art historians to be the result of an attack by religious reformers in the sixteenth century. The statue was discovered beneath the chapel floor of the Mercers’ Hall in central London in 1954. The BBC News reported that it may have been buried to protect it from further damage. Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, said the national collections had been shaped by historical waves of destruction that other European collections had escaped: ‘We know about the dissolution of the monasteries, the wars of religion and the civil war, but we don’t often make the connections with what that means for the collections we have in our museums – why so little survives and so much was destroyed,’ she said. (5) Tate curator Tabitha Barber was said to be delighted that the Mercers’ Company had loaned the sculpture to the exhibition. Confronted by the statue today, its emotional impact is still such that we can only imagine the fear and loathing in the mind of Sixteenth Century reformers, the confusion between the real and the represented, or the concept of sinful worship of an image instead of God. Either way, the image was defaced and later hidden during that turbulent century. What anger, violent thoughts or hatred could have caused such wanton vandalism of a supposedly sacred image of the Redeemer?
Medieval craftsmanship was famous throughout Europe, that the medieval church was a place of vibrant colour, imagery, and active faith. The senses were used by the medieval Catholic church to teach and nurture the Christian faith. This imagery and sensual experience is a vital part of Catholic architecture and worship. Much of this symbolism and imagery was deliberately altered and damaged by fanatical reformers in the Sixteenth Century. By attempting to destroy imagery and sensual experience, the reformers aimed to rid England of the Catholic faith they thought was reflected in and represented by these images and sensual worship.
In 2020, the medieval English title of Our Lady’s Dowry was renewed and affirmed at the only place it could be in England, at Walsingham in Norfolk. At the start of the sixteenth century, pilgrimages were part of the traditional faith of England and central to everyone’s lives. This was an experience which was extremely common in the medieval period right up to the reign of Henry VIII after which it was strongly discouraged by acts of parliament and the new regulations brought about by the religious reformers who had the king’s ear at that time. A pilgrimage is a devotional practice consisting of a prolonged journey, often undertaken on foot or on horseback, toward a specific destination of significance. It is a short-term experience, removing the participant from his or her home environment and identity. The means or motivations in undertaking a pilgrimage might vary, but the act, however performed, blends the physical and the spiritual into a unified experience. In 1061, so the story goes, the lady of the manor of Little Walsingham in Norfolk, a widow named Richeldis, prayed to our Lady asking how she could honour her in some special way. In answer to this prayer Mary led Richeldis in spirit to Nazareth and showed her the house in which she had first received the angel’s message. Mary told Richeldis to take the measurements of this house and build another one just like it in Walsingham. It would be a place where people could come to honour her and her Son, remembering especially the mystery of the Annunciation and Mary’s joyful ‘yes’ to conceiving the Saviour. The late eleventh century and all through the twelfth and thirteenth century was the era of the crusades, which saw a growing interest in the sites consecrated by the human presence of Jesus in the Holy Land. But now pilgrims need not go so far; in England itself there was a ‘new Nazareth’ built by one of their own country women. After some time, Augustinian canons took over the care of the holy house and enshrined it in a special chapel within a much larger church. Pilgrims began to come from all over England and even abroad. From the time of Henry III nearly all the kings and queens of the realm visited Walsingham, as well as hundreds of ordinary people seeking help, healing and inner peace. Walsingham ranked with Rome, Jerusalem and Compostella in importance as a pilgrimage destination. However, the Shrine was destroyed at the time of the English Reformation in the 1530s, and only rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century, mainly due to the inspired leadership of the Anglican vicar of Walsingham, Fr Hope Patten. He revived devotion to Our Lady under this title and built a new shrine Church and Holy House in the village, together with a statue modelled on that depicted on the ancient priory seal. It shows a seated Mary with her Son on her lap holding a book of the gospels. Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, visited Walsingham in 1513 and was impressed by the splendor of the shrine there. He wrote: ‘There is a small chapel, which admits by a small narrow little door, on either side, those who come to salute our Layde ; the light is feeble, in fact scarcely any, excepting from wax candles. A most delightful fragrance gladdens one’s nose.’ Of the statue in the chapel, he said: ‘When you look in you would say it is the abode of saints, so brilliantly does it shine with gems, gold and silver … Our Lady stands in the dark at the right side of the altar … a little image, remarkable neither for its size, material or workmanship.’ (6)
This was all soon to end abruptly. Henry VIII, annoyed by the church’s refusal to grant him the divorce he wanted and short of money to fight foreign wars, ordered the dissolution of the monasteries and in 1538 the Priory of Walsingham was closed, the ‘Holy House’ which was made of wood and dating from the founding of the shrine, burned to the ground. The holy statue of Our Lady taken to London to be destroyed, or so the story went. However, in recent years, the Catholic Herald has published an article casting new light on the matter of the supposed destruction of the holy image from Walsingham. Two writers, Fr. Michael Rear, a retired East Anglian Catholic priest, and Frances Young, a writer on religious topics, proposed just such a scenario in their article in the Catholic Herald on twenty sixth of July 2019. Their theory is that a statue known as the Langham Madonna, a battered thirteenth century English statue to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, could be the original statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the most sacred image of medieval England and the very one which was at the heart of the shrine there. But equally well, it could be a very near copy of medieval origin. (see fig. 1). The great seal of the priory shows the figure of the Virgin Mary on a chair which may indicate what the image at the priory looked like. (see fig.2)
The official story was that the simple wood statue of the Madonna and Child that stood beside the shrine’s main altar was hauled away and destroyed in 1539, when the Priory Church at Walsingham was torn down and its religious community dispersed by order of King Henry VIII after they had hanged the sub-prior but pensioned off the Prior of Walsingham. Contemporary accounts of the statue’s fate, though, are notably vague. So, what really happened? Records list two different locations for the statue’s burning, one at the ‘heretics’ pyre’ at Smithfield and the second location in the court of Thomas Cromwell’s house at Chelsea. There appear to be no eyewitness accounts of the event. Rear and Young proposed instead that a substitution was made and that the genuine statue was hidden by local recusant Catholics. Similar defiant acts have been described by Professor Duffy in his book The Stripping of the Altars. A recusant was someone who defied the law that everyone attends the churches of the newly proclaimed Church of England. The first laws in which the term ‘Popish Recusants’ was used dates from1593. ‘An Act for restraining Popish Recusants to some certain place of abode’. The statute’s definition of a recusant is a person ‘convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service’.
Rear and Young have suggested that Sir John Grigby, the vicar of Langham, Norfolk, a small village six miles from Walsingham could be the instigator of this plot to hide the holy statue of Walsingham. Grigby had been arrested in 1537 as part of the ‘Walsingham Conspiracy,’ a brave but futile, armed plot to defend the shrine’s looming destruction. This had been hatched among the peasants of the surrounding villages by Ralph Rogerson, a yeoman farmer who was also a lay chorister in the priory church. Unlike the principal conspirators, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered, Grigby was somehow allowed to return to his parish to continue his ministry. (7)
Grigby’s most notable parishioners at Langham were the Calthorpes of Langham Hall, who resisted pressure to accept the new Church of England, remaining recusants, that is, those who would not attend the Anglican services. One could imagine that the local Catholic gentry, possibly the Calthorpe’s, could have come to the Holy House shortly before the king’s men arrived at Walsingham and perhaps, in the dead of night, hastily removed the famous statue and substituted another one instead. There is a precedent for hiding a sacred object when the statue of Our Lady of Grace from Ipswich was thought to have been destroyed but is almost certainly the one now on display in a church at Netunno in southern Italy.
Another recusant family, the Rookwoods of Euston in Suffolk, inherited Langham Hall a few years later, in 1555. The family was believed to have attempted to hide at least one other image of Our Lady in the decades after the English Reformation. In 1578, whilst hosting a visit by Queen Elizabeth, Edward Rookwood was arrested when a statue of Our Lady of Euston was found in his possession, hidden in a haystack on their farm. The statue, we are told, was burned, and Rookwood was imprisoned for ten years for this crime. One theory is that the statue was hidden at Langham Hall and not discovered by the authorities. Evidence for the statue’s destruction is unreliable, Dr Young has said. His view was that the sixteenth century Commissioners knew that it had been hidden and substituted it for another one in the ritual burning to fulfil their orders.
The Langham statue was eventually passed to a saleroom in London before being bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Rear and Young propose that there was an error in records passed on to the museum when the statue was bought on December twenty third 1925, for £2 10s. There are three villages in the east of England called Langham, in Norfolk, Essex, and Rutland. The London saleroom had claimed that the Madonna had come from Langham Hall, Essex, near Colchester, but this place lacked any association with recusant Catholics of any sort whilst Langham in Norfolk certainly did have documented connections with recusancy. Six years after the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the statue, Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, one of the founding guardians of the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, wrote in The Catholic journal the Tablet, of the discovery of an ancient carved wooden figure in an old house near Walsingham. He suggested that it could be a copy of the Walsingham image, or even the original, ‘saved perhaps as other relics and holy things, by means of substitution being made for the purposes of satisfying the desecrators.’ Rear and Young suggest that the Langham Madonna might possibly be a later copy of the Walsingham statue as devotional copies were common just as they are now. The Langham Madonna’s presumed thirteenth century origin could be confirmed through carbon dating though the Victoria and Albert Museum has no plans to do so. They date the statue to around 1220-1230. Unfortunately, the records of the London saleroom were destroyed during the London Blitz so we can never be sure of what was originally recorded about this statue.
Evidence is therefore needed if one is going to prove the provenance of this statue. The first piece of evidence is that there is a band around the Virgin’s head that was clearly intended to hold a crown (there is a gap in the back of the band allowing the crown to be seated securely under tension). A crown was recorded as being given by Henry III in 1246. If the statue were a copy, we might expect to find a carved crown of the kind often found on modern copies of the statue, rather than a band to allow the fitting of an actual crown. The second piece of evidence is the presence of a large V shape cut at the base of the statue, clearly deliberate and very smoothly incised by a sharp chisel. According to Erasmus, who visited Walsingham in 1513 and 1524, there was a toadstone beneath the Virgin’s feet. Since this was a unique feature of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the chisel marks on the surviving statue may be evidence of the removal of this toadstone. A toadstone, also known as bufonite, is a gem or fossil tooth formally supposed to have been formed in the head of a toad and credited with therapeutic or protective properties and possibly an antidote to poison. It is an idea preserved in folk-memory that it represented Our Lady’s victory over evil and sin in the same way that later statues sometimes depict her with her foot on the head of a snake, representing the serpent in the Genesis story.
Another potential piece of evidence is that the Langham statue is remarkably like the image on the seal of the Priory of Walsingham now held by King’s College, Cambridge. If one examines the statue in the museum, one can see that it is in fact hollow and has holes for dowels in the back and some dowels sticking out. The dowels and dowel holes on the back of the image could have been used to secure it to the throne shown on a medieval priory seal. More research is needed as it is yet unproven that this is a medieval East Anglian statue or even the very image of the Virgin Mary which was so revered by so many for so long in the village of Little Walsingham. “Father Rear has been doing work on this for a number of years and, to begin with, I wasn’t convinced,” said Dr Young. “Now I would say with confidence that the statue in the V&A is the original Our Lady of Walsingham.” Pilgrims to this day still visit the Slipper Chapel, the priory ruins, and the Anglican and Catholic shrines. The popularity of Our Lady of Walsingham has not waned since the shrines were re-founded in modern times. In 2020 the Bishops of England and Wales rededicated England to Our Lady as her dowry. The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, continues to attract pilgrims, penitents and tourists and the intriguing mystery of what happened to the ancient image of the Virgin has yet to be solved.
Sources
Websites
Walsingham Village.Org
Young, F, https://drfrancisyoung.com/2019/07/25/our-lady-of-walsingham-the-mystery-of-the-langham-madonna/
https://catholicherald.co.uk/was-the-original-walsingham-statue-really-destroyed-or-is-it-in-the-va/
https://spartacus-educational.com/NORwalsinghamS.htm
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/9-august/news/uk/marian-statue-may-be-medieval
https://wizzley.com/the-mystery-of-the-langham-madonnna/
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/our-lady-walsingham-victoria-and-albert-museum-1434796
http://supremacyandsurvival.blogspot.com/2019/07/cromwells-bonfire-and-our-lady-of.html
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Boldrick, Stacy and Barber, Tabitha, Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, (London: Tate Publishing, 2013)
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Figures
Fig. 1 The Langham Madonna in
the Victoria and Albert Museum
Fig. 2 Drawing based on the seal of Walsingham Priory
Courtesy of King’s College Cambridge
(1) https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O96300/virgin-and-child-statuette-unknown/
(2) https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/9-august/news/uk/marian-statue-may-be-medieval
(3) ‘Art Under Attack’: Histories of British Iconoclasm: Room 2, The Tate
(4) BBC News, 5 July 2013
(5) BBC News, 5 July 2013
(6) https://spartacus-educational.com/NORwalsinghamS.htm
(7) https://catholicherald.co.uk/was-the-original-walsingham-statue-really-destroyed-or-is-it-in-the-va/