Pilgrimage Now and Then

By The Rev. Dr. Thomas N. Buchan, III 

Associate Professor of Church History at Nashotah House

The first real sign that my pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham wasn’t going to happen came in mid-March 2020. At the beginning of the second week of the month, I had received word from the Shrine that accommodations were available for dates in the end of June and beginning of July. By the beginning of the third week of March, however, the Shrine was unable to confirm my booking pending a decision as to whether it would remain open in response to the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic. For a few weeks, I nursed some slender hope of making my way to “England’s Nazareth” in the summer of 2020, but it steadily became clear that this would not be possible. For the present, it seemed my pilgrim intentions would have to remain just that: intentions.

In an attempt to lessen the disappointment of a canceled trip and to fortify my intentions to try again sometime in the future, I did what scholars tend to do: I made a visit to the library. I came away with a couple of familiar titles bearing on the Shrine at Walsingham, as well as a few newer works on other English shrines and some additional aspects of pilgrimage now and then. Through reading and thinking about pilgrimage when I could not travel, I found myself in the strange company of medieval Christians who, for whatever reasons unable to make their own physical journeys to Jerusalem or Rome, resorted instead to maps and guidebooks written for the purposes of interior or “allegorical,” moral or spiritual, pilgrimages. And so I began—somewhat inadvertently—another kind of pilgrimage, noetic and literal.

In England’s Nazareth: A History of the Holy Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, first published in 1939, the modest self-proclaimed “Compiler,” the Rev. Donald Hole, “lays claim to no original research,” his task having been “the comparatively simple one of making selection from the printed matter supplied to him, and weaving it into a consecutive narrative” (Preface). Fr. Hole’s eclectic source materials—some dating back to the fifteenth century, and others nearly as recent as his own “compilation”—were well known at the time of his writing, and generally have remained so. With Fr. Hole, there are very few surprises, but an accessible introduction to a way of thinking about the history of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham from the perspective of one who (also not surprisingly) held a particular kind of twentieth-century hope for the reunion “between the Church of England and the Holy See” (112). Events in the 81 years since Fr. Hole’s writing (had he lived to see them) might have dimmed his sort of optimism, but this need not obscure the fact that his perspective offers us perspective. (For the exposition of Fr. Hole’s sense of Walsingham as a bellwether for the Church of England and “Catholic Re-Union,” see his final and—at the time of his writing—forward-looking chapter, “Ut Omnes Unum Sint.”)

In another short work on The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, published in 1956, J. C. Dickinson (Fellow and Chaplain of Pembroke College, Cambridge) set himself at once a less speculative and a more critical task. As an account of the history and archaeology of the medieval shrine, Fr. Dickinson’s essay casts a more critical eye upon several of the same source materials accepted at something closer to face value by Fr. Hole. As a result, some devotees might be disappointed by Dickinson’s dating of the founding of the original chapel and Holy House by Richeldis de Faverches as well as her son Geoffrey’s subsequent establishment of a small priory of Austin (or Augustinian) canons which would later tend and serve what was at the time still on its way to becoming more than a place of private or familial devotion. Far from seeking to diminish Walsingham’s significance, Dickinson hoped his essay would “provide a useful outline of a topic worthy of a good deal more attention than that which ecclesiastical historians have conceded it in the last hundred years” (Preface).

Whether one prefers to follow Hole or Dickinson on matters of dating, both authors make it clear that from its founding the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham would go on to attain a considerable degree of prominence as a place of English pilgrimage. In this, it was helped along the way by the devotional exercises of King Henry III (r. 1216-1272) and those of his son King Edward I (r. 1272-1307). Both of these monarchs conferred upon the site considerable gifts of wealth and privilege, but perhaps more importantly their pious attention and numerous visits contributed to putting Walsingham “on the map” for subsequent generations of English pilgrims. By the late Middle Ages, though Walsingham would not exactly have ranked among Western Christendom’s top tier pilgrimage sites (which would have included the Holy Land, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela), it was nevertheless securely in the company of the most prominent place of pilgrimage in England (and perhaps the only English site with something like pan-European draw): the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury.

Indeed, at the twilight of the Middle Ages, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham would be coupled with that of St. Thomas at Canterbury in a satirical colloquy authored by one of early sixteenth-century England’s most famous visitors, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. In The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion, which was first published in 1526—predating any official English promulgation of the dismantling of medieval modes of piety (including pilgrimages) which were already well under way among Continental reformers—Erasmus presented a fictionalized, but based-in-fact, account of his own visits to Walsingham and Canterbury taken in 1512 and 1514.

Erasmus’ critical opinions of pilgrimage and its trappings were not formed by his experiences at Walsingham and Canterbury; these English shrines merely presented opportunities too good to pass up for giving vent to his considerable wit and to the prejudices he shared with other renaissance humanists. Though it is difficult to say with certainty whether Erasmus should be seen as especially influential in the matter, it is altogether clear that, by the late 1530s King Henry VIII and several of the officials closest to him were taking steps not only to curtail pilgrimage and its attendant “superstitions” and “excesses,” but also to dissolve (and to appropriate to the crown the considerable wealth of) English shrines.

Can the disruptions to my plans in the first few months of 2020 be compared to the dissolution of Walsingham and many other “lesser” shrines and the curtailment of pilgrimages in the late 1530s? I suppose that is what I have been doing, mindful, I hope, of the discontinuities and disimilarities between them. At the time of the Reformation, what was envisioned was no mere interruption of service or temporary closure, but a comprehensive alteration of the practices and character of English religion, an eradication of centuries of devotional exercises and the muscle memories they had formed in the bodies—ecclesiastical, social, physical—of Christian Europe. As disappointing as this year has been, I still have reason to hope that I might make a pilgrimage to Walsingham; men and women living in Tudor England generally did not.

The post above is Part 1 in a series entitled “Pilgrimage Now and Then.” For Part 2, please visit this link. Called to ordained ministry in his teens, Fr. Thomas Buchan began an undergraduate degree in biblical studies with the intention of going on to seminary and the pastorate. Somewhat unexpectedly, a required course in historical theology awakened interests in the history of Christianity that would not abate. While completing his bachelor’s degree in biblical studies he also began work on a master’s degree in church history. Later, as a doctoral student at Drew University, Fr. Buchan read widely in church history East and West, ancient and modern. He also contributed to several volumes of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (IVP), edited by Dr. Thomas C. Oden. Fr. Buchan’s wide-ranging interests in church history were focused during his research at Drew, taking him on a journey through Latin, Greek, and finally Syriac Christianity.

He was ordained deacon and priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida in 2009. He began teaching in Nashotah House’s Distance Learning program in 2010 and was invited to join the residential faculty in the Spring of 2012. Fr. Buchan’s academic interests include historiography, ancient Christian martyrdom and asceticism, the history of doctrines and practices of sanctification and holiness, Trinitarian theology, Christology, and the history of exegesis.