This was sent from Rome and placed in the Holy House Chapel at the newly built Catholic parish church of King's Lynn (the village of Walsingham was within the parish) on 19 August 1897 and on the following day the first post-Reformation pilgrimage took place to the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham, which was purchased by Charlotte Boyd(e) in 1895 and restored for Catholic use.

Pope Pius XII granted a canonical coronation to the Catholic image via the Papal Nuncio, Bishop Gerald O'Hara, on 15 August 1954 with a gold crown funded by her female devotees, now venerated in the Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The historian J. C. Dickinson argues that the chapel was founded in the time of Edward the Confessor, about 1053, the earliest deeds naming Richeldis, the mother of Geoffrey of Favraches, as the founder.

Flint supports the earlier date of 1061 given in the Pynson Ballad and claims that in this year, Queen Edith the Fair, Lady of the Manor, was the likely Walsingham visionary.

By the time of its destruction in 1538 during the reign of Henry VIII, the shrine had become one of the greatest religious centres in England and Europe, together with Glastonbury and Canterbury.

It had been a place of pilgrimage during medieval times, when due to wars and political upheaval, travel to Rome and Santiago de Compostela was time-consuming difficult.

On the pretext of discovering any irregularities in their life, Thomas Cromwell organised a series of visitations, the results of which led to the report Valor Ecclesiasticus and the enactment of the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535, under which some smaller foundations (which did not include Walsingham) were extinguished in 1536.

In 1537, two lay choristers organised "the most serious plot hatched anywhere south of the Trent",[11] intended to resist what the monks feared, rightly as it turned out, would happen to their foundation.

The sub-prior, Nicholas Milcham, was charged with conspiring to rebel against the suppression of the lesser monasteries, and on flimsy evidence was convicted of high treason and hanged outside the priory walls.

Sir Roger wrote to Cromwell that a woman of nearby Wells (now called Wells-next-the-Sea) had declared that a miracle had been done by the statue after it had been carried away to London.

He had the woman put in the stocks on market day to be abused by the village folk but concluded "I cannot perceyve but the seyd image is not yett out of the sum of ther heddes.

As early as 1931, the leading Anglo-Papalist priest Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton suggested that the Langham Madonna could be the original image from Walsingham.

[17] There is frequently an ecumenical dimension to pilgrimages to Walsingham, with many pilgrims arriving at the Slipper Chapel and then walking to the Holy House at the Anglican shrine.

Student Cross is the longest continuous walking pilgrimage in Britain to Walsingham which takes place over Holy Week and Easter.

The Catholic national shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is a separate chapel that belongs to the parish of St. Bede's Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.