September 24 is the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, kept in England and Wales. The shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk began in 1061, when Richeldis de Faverches, widow of the lord of the manor, was shown the house of the Annunciation at Nazareth and told to build its copy in England. The Holy House she raised was a timber structure of specific dimensions, later encased in stone and taken into the care of Augustinian canons.
It became the principal Marian pilgrimage of medieval England. Henry III came, and Edward I, and Henry VIII walked the last mile barefoot from the Slipper Chapel in 1511 to offer a necklace. In 1538 the same king's commissioners took the image to London and burned it at Chelsea, and the priory was pulled down; an Elizabethan ballad, the Lament for Walsingham, records the ruin — "Weep, weep O Walsingham, whose days are nights."
The Slipper Chapel a mile outside the village passed through use as a barn and a poorhouse before Charlotte Boyd bought and restored it in 1896. Mass was said there again in 1934 and the chapel was designated the Roman Catholic National Shrine that year. The Anglican shrine in the village, with its own reconstructed Holy House, was built by the vicar Alfred Hope Patten from 1931.
Walsingham is one of the few places where two shrines of separated communions occupy one village and share the Holy Mile between them. The Catholic image is a modern carving worked from the seal of the medieval priory, which is the only record of what the burned original looked like.
