Canterbury, Walsingham…and Willesden?

Chaucer knew a thing or two about human nature. Spring, as he explains in the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales, is the season of itchy feet. The soft winds, blossoming of nature and bird song were the stimuli to leave home and get on the road to Canterbury and the shrine of St Thomas Becket, the greatest of all pilgrimage destinations in medieval England. 

By mid-May, the pilgrimage season would be in full swing. This year the effects of Covid-19 mean that none of us can embark on the long-distance walk (or more likely, drive) to Canterbury or indeed any of the notable pilgrim destinations of the Middle Ages: the holy places in Jerusalem, Rome and its multitude of relics, the feretory of St James at Compostela in northern Spain, or closer to home, the shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham.

But without transgressing the restrictions of Stay Alert/Stay Safe/Stay Home (or whatever new slogan the government has come up with), many of us still have the opportunity to emulate our medieval forebears by undertaking a local pilgrimage. 

In the Middle Ages, as now, not everyone had the time or inclination to trudge over hill and dale, spend weeks under canvas and tell bawdy tales by the campfire. Instead, they experienced the sacred, communed with nature, and had a break from backbreaking toil by setting out on a day pilgrimage. Especially popular destinations were chapels and parish churches that housed a miracle-working image of the Virgin. 

Such statues were found across the land and their veneration proliferated from the years around 1300 until the Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century. Good examples were the images residing in the gatehouse chapels of the Cistercian monasteries of Furness (Cumbria) and Kingswood (Gloucestershire). Pilgrims visiting the former were granted remission from penances and the sick and lame were said to be cured after visiting the latter. 

Medieval Londoners were spoilt for choice. The well-heeled headed to Westminster Abbey and the chapel of St Mary of the Pew. Within feet of the shrine of St Edward the Confessor, devotees of its image included King Richard II (reigned, 1377-99). 

Of broader social appeal were the images that stood on the altars of churches in the villages encircling the capital. A pamphlet printed in around 1520 singled out four for special mention: Cromes Hill, Greenwich; Muswell Hill; ‘Our Lady that standeth in the oke’ between Highgate and Islington; and Willesden. 

Only the last of these attracted a significant following. Sculpted images of the Virgin at Willesden parish church (now enveloped by a suburb of northwest London) are documented from the mid-thirteenth century. However, the earliest evidence for the pilgrimage dates to the early years of the sixteenth century, a manifestation of the last flowering of popular, traditional religion in medieval England. 

In 1502, Queen Elizabeth, the wife of Henry VII, ranked the shrine as equal in status to Our Lady of the Pew at Westminster. A year later the pregnant queen sought the protection of Our Lady of Willesden, paying a pilgrim to visit the image on her behalf. Alas, her prayers were to be unanswered, Elizabeth dying in childbirth a few days after. 

The statue attracted offerings and bequests.  In 1517, William Litchfield, vicar of Willesden and chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, was buried before it, leaving his parish a silver chalice to be used in honour of the Blessed Virgin forever. 

Other pilgrims to the shrine included Thomas More, who paid homage to the image a few weeks before his arrest in 1534. Some years before this visit, More had written of his concern that the eight-mile excursion from London to Willesden provided pilgrims with an opportunity to loosen their morals. The shrine was especially popular among the wives of the London citizenry. He cautioned "you men of London" to accompany their womenfolk to Willesden "or keep them at home with you! Else you be sorry." 

Catholic martyr and saint, More was entirely orthodox in his religious outlook and believed in the spiritual value of religious imagery and pilgrimages. His comments here reflect his embrace of humanist (in the Renaissance sense) scholarship and a somewhat snooty attitude towards popular religion, especially if it involved anything resembling fun. 

But the shrine also attracted the ire of reformers with more malign intent. A fire at Willesden church in 1509 prompted Elizabeth Sampson, a London Lollard, to denounce the image of the Virgin in fruity terms as a "burnt arse elf and a burnt arse stock, and if she might have helpen men and women which go to her on pilgrimage, she would not have suffered her tail to have been burnt". 

In this context, ‘burnt’ refers to the symptoms of a sexually transmitted infection. Sampson was effectively comparing the Virgin of Willesden to a disease-ridden whore. Her comments led to a trial before an ecclesiastical court; given the severity of penalties for religious dissent at this time, she was lucky to escape with a penitential pilgrimage to the image she’d ridiculed. 

Willesden’s statue of the Virgin was targeted for destruction during the Reformation. In 1538, together with similar images from Ipswich, Walsingham and Worcester, it was reduced to cinders on a bonfire in Chelsea. 

Even then, Our Lady of Willesden still had devout followers. These included the Suffolk priest Sir Robert Creukehorne. He claimed that the Virgin had appeared to him in a vision, instructing him to preach that she should be venerated ‘at Willesden as she hath been in olden times’.

In modern times, the revival of veneration of Our Lady of Willesden has crossed confessional divides: both the Catholic and Anglican parish churches have shrines and images in her honour (both sadly closed at the time of writing due to the health emergency). 

The original statue has been long since destroyed. But small pewter badges depicting the Virgin and Child that were once worn by Willesden pilgrims are tangible evidence of their peregrination. People larking around on the muddy banks of the Thames have churned up several hundred of these ‘signs’ (as they were called in the Middle Ages). The sheer number points to just how popular the Willesden pilgrimage was among medieval Londoners.  I’m fortunate enough to be the proud owner of one. A walk up the A5 beckons.