THE TABARD INN, BOROUGH
From a drawing by Philip Norman, F.S.A.
But besides the English shrines already mentioned, there were other local ones for the Londoner. There was the shrine of Our Lady of Crome’s Hill, Greenwich, or that of the Holy Rood of Bermondsey, or that of Our Lady of Willesden, or that of Our Lady of Muswell, or that of “Our Lady that standeth in the Oke.” The last-named place of pilgrimage was somewhere between Highgate and Islington. May its name be supposed to linger in the modern form of Gospel Oak? The whole country, in fact, was studded all over with shrines of local celebrity. Outside London, no one, for instance, knew or cared about Our Lady of Muswell: but to Londoners she was a very real saint, to whom multitudes paid pilgrimage. Of these minor shrines, concerning which Chaucer is silent, which Erasmus never visited, there are very few historical notices extant. When they were suppressed and the images themselves burned, there was no one left to care about the records and the papers connected with them, so they, too, were burned, or they were left to moulder in the muniment chest.
Or, if the Londoner wanted a pilgrimage with little personal exertion, which might be performed in a single day, he could choose between the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, a place of the greatest sanctity: that of St. Erkenwald in St. Paul’s, also regarded as most powerful and efficacious: there were two feasts of St. Erkenwald: on these days all the clergy of the diocese repaired to the shrine robed in their copes: special indulgences were granted to those who visited this shrine.
The three shrines north of London, now so completely forgotten, all lay in the heart of the great Middlesex Forest. Each of the miraculous images was probably a Lady of the Oak: there was Our Lady of the Oak all over Europe. The miraculous figure is always found in an oak, and is always, it is said, black. Thus, Our Lady of Puy in France, supposed to be the most ancient of these figures, is described as being carved out of cedar, swathed round and round with fine linen like a mummy, deep black, the face and features extremely long, the eyes small and formed of glass, the look haggard and wild (L. and M. Archæological Trans. iv. 178); and there is a Black Virgin at Marseilles.
These shrines were near enough for a single day’s journey: a pleasant summer’s ride through the gardens and orchards of Islington where the Forest began, and so over the greensward and under the branches of the wood to the clearing on the top of Muswell Hill, where now stands the Alexandra Palace, and then stood the chapel containing the black image swathed with linen, crowned, decked with gold and jewels, before which stood the altar and burned the lamp day and night. Every day through the summer came the penitents, the sick, the jovial pilgrims, who only wanted to put in a plea for indulgence. Outside the chapel there were taverns and merry-making places. First the pilgrim knelt at the shrine; sometimes he went round it on his knees; and prayed, with simple belief, if not with fervour; faith made the sick man whole; faith absolved the penitent; faith made the most careless happy in the belief that Our Lady of Muswell had knocked off many—he knew not how many—years of purgatory. The religious act finished, no one objected to pleasure and merriment. There are indications that the merriment was not always seemly, nor was the pleasure always sinless. Yet pilgrimage continued because the sick who had been healed spread abroad the story of their miraculous cures, and because everybody wanted to get out of purgatory as quickly as possible, and because it was a most delightful form of holiday and recreation.
The Lollards preached against pilgrimages continually; a fact charged against them by the Church time after time. Thus, when a Lollard named William Dynet had to abjure his Lollardy in the year 1395, he swore that thenceforth he would worship images and that he would never more despise pilgrimages. A hundred and forty years more the worship of images had to continue in the land. Piers Plowman speaks with contempt of the sham holiness of pilgrims in words already quoted:
“Heremytes in an heep with hoked staves,
Wenten to Walsingham and their wenches after.”
Later on, one Father Donald, a Scotch Friar, said, preaching, “Ye men of London, gang on yourself with your wives to Willesden, or else keep them at home with you in sorrow.”
In the year 1509, when there occurred a fire in Willesden Church, which damaged the sacred image, one Elizabeth, wife of John Sampson, citizen, got into trouble for expressing a not unnatural doubt of the power of the image to help others when she could not help herself. “If Our Lady of Willesden might have holpen men and women which go to her of pilgrimage, she would not have suffered her own tayle (taille) to have been burnt.”