The itinerary is not one that I came up with originally, but one which I took over from Fr Stevenson and Fr.father Hunwicke. As I have made additions, I have tried to remain consistent with the original route but the additions emphases the meandering nature. Every every year I say, I will sit down and rationalise the Pilgrimage Into one that could actually be followed around the country, but time never seems to permit, and I must admit to having developed a quiet fondness for the sheer eccentricity of where we go.
This year‘s additions have amounted to something like an upgrade of the whole Pilgrimage, adding to my knowledge as well, I hope, of my fellow pilgrims.
Inserting pictures where possible, despite the difficulties of downloading in some instances, hopefully made it more attractive and again I learned quite a bit in doing my picture research.
Searching online these days draws one into the clutches of AI. This certainly helped on an occasion, but it also had a tendency to sketch out devotion to Our Lady in a particular place, but then, in fact have no evidence to back it up. Researchers, beware!
Looking back over the past month, one thing that strikes me is that these shrines existed, alongside the usual daily devotions of people in their own parish churches, as I tried to highlight in the examples of Flawford and Stamford, as small localised places of devotion, whilst a few miles away there may well have been a much larger and renowned place of pilgrimage. In most cases, we know very little about what actually went on in these churches and chapels, but the evidence of Marian devotion teased out by nineteenth century scholars such as Fr Bridgett and Edmund Waterton in so many forms is very considerable. Apart from the work of Martin Gillett this topic was largely ignored by mainstream historians until another Catgolic scholar Eamon Duffy shook the complacency of academe with “The Stripping of the Altars” in 1993. I was not surprised because I had spent years exploring and leading others around the medieval churches of my home area and beyond, but unless you were a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic to most people the richness and complexity of medieval elite and popular piety was blanked out, replaced by socio-economics and a confident belief in the inevitable progressive virtues of English Protestantism. Thanks to Prof. Duffy, to J.A.F. Thompson, Nicholas Orme, Jonathan Hughes, and others, including, paradoxically, Anne Hudson, we see not some Chestertonian bucolic idyll, but a complex, at times conflicted but very largely, comprehensively Catholic society.
The variety of these shrines reveals something else - Our Lady was everywhere - in the rosary Edward and Little Hours at home, be it cottage or castle, but also at the at the well, in the churchyard you passed whilst travelling, at the loo cal monastery, in the cathedral or great abbey, always in the parish church, in the city centre or the wayside shrine, and especially in some places, such as “Stiffkey’s fair vale” at Walsingham. England may have been made to reject being Mary’s Dowry in the mid-sixteenth century but it did not mean that Mary renounced her dowry.
Our Lady is still here, waiting, willing….
May Our Lady pray for us and for her Dowry
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