Walsingham (music)

Walsingham is a pilgrimage site in Norfolk, England, where, according to Catholic belief, a Saxon noblewoman, Richeldis de Faverches, had a vision of the Virgin Mary.

The ballad literature includes on the one hand laments for the lost shrine and, on the other, suggestions that, as alleged by religious reformers, pilgrims were looking for encounters of a sexual nature.

In these variations, which Byrd wrote in the 1570s or 1580s, he shows his mastery of the keyboard, but also includes elements more characteristic of his vocal music.

Musicologist Margaret Gynn described how Byrd had taken what was originally "a love-song of the road" and transformed it by giving it the "serious religious character of a pilgrimage".

[3] According to Bradley Brookshire, the variations form a sort of "covert speech" addressed to Catholic recusants in Elizabethan culture.