More on the rural London shrines of Our Lady

Since writing about the shrines of Our Lady at Islington, Muswell and Willesden I came across an article online from The Tablet about these late medieval pilgrimages by Michael Carter from about a year ago. I thought I would republish some of it as it adds to what I had and adds another such shrine - Our Lady of Crome’s Hill at Greenwich. So our hypothetical late medieval pilgrims as they zig-zag across the country on the Stevenson itinerary could call in there on his way back from Kent yesterday.

The Crome’s Hill shrine appears to have been somewhere near the site of the Royal Observatory on the hill above the palace at Greenwich - Crome’s Hill Road marks the western boundary of the Royal Park.

Carter cites a pamphlet printed about 1520 which singles out four such shrines - Crome’s Hill at Greenwich, Muswell, “Our Lady that standers in the oke” between Highgate and Islington, and Willesden.

His coverage of Willesden is similar to mine but adds to it and is as follows:

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’.

Our Lady of Willesden, of Crome’s Hill, of Muswell and of Islington Pray for us