Patrick Comerford
During my three or four days in Walsingham, where I was speaking at the Ecumenical Pilgrimage last week, I visited at least ten churches and chapels in Walsingham, including two visits to Saint Mary and All Saints’ Church, the Church of England parish church in the small Norfolk village.
The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham was destroyed at the Dissolution of the monastic houses during the Tudor reformations, but was revived in 1922 by Alfred Hope Patten, the Vicar of Little Walsingham, who also placed an image of Our Lady of Walsingham in parish church until he was forced to move it to a new shrine in 1931. I also described some of the modern art in the church, including Naomi Blake’s sculpture ‘Genesis’, in a blog posting yesterday.
Saint Mary and All Saints’ Church dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, and is built from flint with stone dressings. In addition to nave and chancel, there are north and south aisles and north and south transepts. The west tower has a lead needle spire. The church was destroyed in aa major fire in 1961; although the original tower and north porch survived. The rest of the church was rebuilt and it is a Grade I listed, building, while the churchyard walls and gates are separately listed Grade II.
The original dedication of the church was to All Saints. When Father Patten was appointed the Vicar in 1921, he changed the dedication to the present double dedication of Saint Mary and All Saints.
The memorials in the church include an elaborate memorial to Henry Sydney and his wife Jane. It was formerly in the north transept but is now at the west end.
The Lee-Warner family memorial in the north transept is a grand edifice with a tall canopy, crocketed and cusped with carved figures. John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, acquired the grounds of the ruined priory, in 1637. When he died in 1666, they passed to his nephew, John Lee, Archdeacon of Rochester, who assumed the name Warner.
The church has a 15th-century font that illustrate the Seven Sacraments and the Crucifixion. The font survived the fire in 1961, but the 17th-century font cover did not, and the 1964 font cover is a replica of the original.
In one period, members of the Lee-Warner family were both patrons and incumbents, and in the 81 years between 1807 and 1888, four members of the family were incumbents for all but 11 years: the Revd James Lee-Warner (1807-1834); his son, the Revd James Lee-Warner (1834-1859); his cousin, the Revd Septimus Henry Lee-Warner (1859-1870), and then the Revd George Ratcliffe Woodward (1882−1888), a son-in-law of Septimus Lee-Warner.
The Revd Septimus Henry Lee-Warner installed a new organ built by Mark Noble of Norwich in 1862. The organ made the church band redundant. The band leader Miles Brown was a local farmer, builder and demolitions expert. After four years of ill-feeling, there was an explosion in the south transept on Bonfire Night in 1866. Brown had placed a charge of gunpowder beneath the organ and set it off. The organ was scattered to pieces and the south transept window was destroyed.
Brown was never charged after the explosion, but he was later charged when he displayed an image in this cottage window of an upright coffin with a photograph of Lee-Warner on the lid.
A subsequent vicar, the Revd George Ratcliffe Woodward, was a renowned musician and the author of a number of hymns, including ‘This joyful Eastertide’ and ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’. A new organ by the Welsh organ-builder Thomas Casson was installed in 1890, but it too was destroyed in the fire in 1961.
Before Woodward became the vicar in 1882, Holy Communion was celebrated in the church only fortnightly. From his first Sunday, Woodward introduced a weekly Communion, and he also introduced a robed choir, plainsong at daily, choral evensong, vestments, lighted candles and frequent weekday Holy Communion.
Father Edgar Reeves, who was the incumbent in 1904-1920, introduced incense and a statue of Our Lady. Reeves was a son-in-law of the Revd Richard William Enraght (1837-1898), an Irish-born Anglican priest who was prosecuted and was jailed in 1880 in the ‘Bordesley Wafer Case’.
The Church Times described the church in Little Walsingham in 1919 as ‘the famous pilgrimage church of Our Lady’. At the end of his time as incumbent in 1920, Reeves hosted a pilgrimage for the feast of Corpus Christi, when the Eucharist was celebrated with a procession and incense.
Reeves was succeeded in 1921 by Father Alfred Hope Patten (1885-1958), who was singularly responsible for making Walsingham the centre of pilgrimage it is today.
Patten caught the fervour for Anglo-Catholicism as an altar server at Saint Michael’s Church, Brighton. He studied at Lichfield Theological College in 1911, and then had a number of curacies.
During his first curacy at Holy Cross, Cromer Street, St Pancras, in London (1913-1915), he was presented with an image of the Holy House of Nazareth by Father Arthur Henry Stanton (1839-1913) of Saint Alban’s Church, Holborn. A later curacy (1919-1920) was at Saint Mary the Virgin, Buxted, where Father Arthur Wagner had built a new church with a chapel built to the supposed dimensions of the Holy House at Nazareth. Both experiences had a profound influence on Patten’s designs for the shrine in Walsingham.
By the time Patten arrived in Walsingham as vicar in 1921, he was convinced of the need to restore pre-Reformation devotions, including those honouring Our Lady of Walsingham. A copy of the mediaeval image of Our Lady of Walsingham was revealed in a side chapel with great ceremony and bell-ringing on 6 July 1922, having processed in from the south porch and past the font.
The first Whitsuntide pilgrimage took place the following year, 1923, beginning at the Anglo-Catholic church of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr in London.
The Bishop of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, insisted in 1930 that Patten remove the image from the church. Undeterred, and with the financial support from a leading Anglo-Catholic layman Sir William Milner, Patten bought a plot of land in another location in the village to build a new Holy House enclosed in a small church.
The land was not owned by the Church of England and was outside episcopal control. The new Holy House was built as a replica of the original shrine, destroyed at the Reformation, and opened in 1931. The statue was moved to the new shrine on 15 October 1931, with a High Mass sung by Mowbray O’Rorke, formerly the Bishop of Accra. After Benediction, the statue was carried in procession to the new shrine in a procession that was half a mile long.
Patten died on 11 August 1958. After Benediction, he had placed the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle of the gallery chapel and then collapsed, dying later that evening.
The church was destroyed in a fire on 14 July 1961, probably arson. The porch, tower and spire survived, as well as the church plate and Father Reeves’s statue of Our Lady, but everything else was lost. The then vicar, Father Alan Arthur Roe (1958-1977), appealed in the Church Times for ‘unwanted vestments of all kinds, cassocks, cottas, hassocks, and copies of the English Hymnal’.
The church was rebuilt by the church architect Laurence King (1907–1981), whose work is characterised by his engagement with 1960s liturgical reforms, which often emphasised a central altar and light, open spaces. His work is considered a significant part of post-war English church architecture, and he worked closely with artists such as John Hayward for glass and sculpture.
The south transept of the church became a chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine, recalling the chapel in Houghton Saint Giles where mediaeval pilgrims removed their shoes before walking the last mile to Walsingham barefoot. The north transept became a chapel named after the guilds who built a chapel in that location in the 16th century. The Guild Chapel has a reredos by George Frederick Bodley depicting the Virgin and Child and angels.
Most of the stained glass was lost in the fire in 1961. The new East Window is by John Hayward, who also designed the new font cover. The window depicts the Trinity in the tracery; all the saints who have altars in the church, with an image of Our Lady of Walsingham in the centre of the middle section; and, in the lower section, the story of the shrine and the church. Hayward’s window was installed for the re-consecration of the church in 1964.
Hayward is known for his distinctive stained glass windows such as the Great West Window in Sherborne Abbey, Dorset, and the Millennium Windows in Norwich Cathedral. He was inspired by the Liturgical Movement, believing that art could be the ‘handmaid of liturgy’.
As part of the restoration, a new two-manual organ was built by Cedric Arnold, Williamson and Hyatt. This was restored and modified by Holmes & Swift in 1999.
The church has a ring of six bells, including two cast by John I Brend in 1569, one by Edward Tooke in 1675, a further two by James Bartlet of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1691, and a treble bell by Alan Hughes of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1987.
The two parishes of Little Walsingham and Great Walsingham were consolidated when the Revd Edgar Lee Reeves was the incumbent (1904-1920).
Among Patten’s successors, the Revd John Edgar Barnes (1977-1989) and the Revd Michael John Rear, became Roman Catholics in 1995 and 1996. Later incumbents included the Revd Norman Banks (2000-2012), later Bishop of Richborough, and the Revd Harri Alan McClelland Williams (2018-2025), now the Principal of Saint Stephen’s House, Oxford.
Today, Saint Mary and All Saints Church, Little Walsingham, forms a single parish with the churches of Saint Peter's, Great Walsingham, and Saint Giles’s in Houghton Saint Giles. The adjacent parish of Barsham consists of three churches: All Saints, East Barsham, All Saints, North Barsham, and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, West Barsham. Seven worshipping communities form the Benefice of Walsingham, Houghton, the Barshams and Hempton with Pudding Norton.
• The services and liturgies in Saint Mary and All Saints Church, Little Walsingham, include the Parish Mass at 11 am every Sunday; Mass at 12 noon every Tuesday; and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at 6:15 pm every Thursday, followed by Mass at 7 pm.
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