Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Gillingham and Our Lady of Chatham

These two shrines are an addition to the original itinerary, and also a further deviation from what was planned for this year. However, to my good fortune, I came across the website of avereginamaria.info This had material which I had seen before but had forgotten.  

This concerns two parochial shrines on the banks of the Medway, just outside Rochester in Kent, at Gillingham and Chatham.

I have slightly edited and amended the account which comes from Fr J.S.Northcote Celebrated Sanctuaries of the Madonna  1868 

The niche in which stood the famous statue of Our Lady of Gillingham may still be seen over the west door of the ancient parish church which likewise contained a cross which was held to be miraculous. 

Gillingham Church

The niche for the statue can still be seen on the west face of the tower

 

Image: Geograph - David Martin 

Even  more celebrated was the neighbouring sanctuary of Chatham, an ancient Norman church, now destroyed, in which existed many singular and beautiful remains of ancient architecture. Under the entrance arch to the north porch appeared an empty niche and bracket with figures of angels at the sides extending their wings as if over the head of the figure of Our Lady that formerly occupied it, and other angels bending prostrate towards Her. In this niche the famous image is believed to have stood, ….. [W]hen the old church was pulled down in 1788…. fragments of sculpture richly painted and gilt were discovered among the materials with  

which the east window had been built up. Among these fragments were headless figures of the Blessed Virgin and Her Divine Child. The figure of Our Lady was dressed in a mantle fastened across the breast by a fibula in which still remained some pieces of coloured glass in imitation of precious stones.  This was in all probability the ancient and much-honoured statue of Our Lady of Chatham, desecrated at the time of the reformation, and broken up with other building rubbish for the purpose of yet further defacing the church in which it had been honoured for centuries, by blocking its window.

A mid-sixteenth century map of the Medway below Rochester, with north at the bottom 

Chatham church can be seen on the left

Image: Alamy 

 

Mention of both these last-named sanctuaries occurs in a legend preserved by William Lambarde in his pioneering county history A Perambulation of Kent, published in 1576. 

It happened on a certain day, he says, that the corpse of some unknown man was cast on shore somewhere within the parish of Chatham, and was by charitable persons given burial in the church-yard. That night, however, as the parish clerk of Chatham slept, he was aroused by a voice at his window, and asking who was there, it was answered that Our Lady of Chatham willed him to know that the person lately buried near unto the place where She was honored was a sinner, “which so offended Her eye with his ghastly grinning, that unless he were removed, She could not but (to the great grief of good people) withdraw Herself from that place, and cease Her wonted miraculous working among them,” and therefore She willed him to take up the corpse and cast it back into the river. The clerk accordingly arose, and going to the church yard disinterred the body, and conveyed it to the spot where it was first found. Being carried away by the waters it was again taken out by some of the parishioners of Gillingham, who did as those of Chatham had done before them, and buried it in their church-yard. “But see what followed: not only the Cross of Gillingham, that a while before bestowed many miracles, was now deprived of its virtue, but even the very earth where the carcass was laid did continually forever after sink and settle downwards.” 

May Our Lady of Gillingham and Our Lady of Chatham intercede for us and our intentions

Jesu mercy, Mary pray