St Mary and All Saints, Little Walsingham
The most elaborate memorial is that to Henry Sydney (1553-1612)[4] and his wife Jane, (1565-1638)[5] [6] formerly in the north transept and now at the rear of the church.
[3] There is a family memorial in the north transept which is a grand edifice with a tall canopy, crocketed and cusped with figures carved on it.
Birmingham Art Gallery holds a picture of the font by the artist William James Müller.
[11] A few minutes after the clerk had tolled the 8 pm curfew bell, an explosion took place in the south transept.
With the exception of the swell organ, the instrument was scattered to pieces, and the window in the south transept completely destroyed.
The Vicar after next, George Ratcliffe Woodward, was a renowned musician, and played the euphonium during processions,[14] which is suggestive of an absence of an organ.
[20] Photographs of Woodward often show him wearing a black capello romano, worn only by the most Papalist of Anglican clergy.
[23] At the end of his incumbency in 1920, Reeves hosted a pilgrimage for the feast of Corpus Christi during which the Eucharist was celebrated with a procession and incense.
He caught the fervour for Anglo-Catholicism as an altar server at St Michael's Church, Brighton,[25] and, in 1911, went to Lichfield Theological College, followed by a number of curacies.
[27] [28] A later curacy (1919-20),[27] was at St Mary the Virgin, Buxted, where in 1886, the Brighton Anglo-Catholic church-builder Fr Arthur Wagner had constructed a new church with a chapel built to the supposed dimensions of the Holy House at Nazareth, which had been reproduced in the mediaeval shrine at Walsingham.
[29] [26] By the time Patten arrived in Walsingham as Vicar in 1921, he was a firm Anglican Papalist, convinced of the need to restore pre-Reformation devotions.
On 6 July 1922, with great ceremony and the ringing of church bells, a copy of the throned and crowned mediaeval image of Our Lady of Walsingham was revealed in a side chapel,[16] having processed in from the south porch, past the seven sacrament font.
[31] The Bishop of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, was unimpressed by the revival of Marianism, and, in 1930, insisted that Patten remove the image from the church.
Undeterred, and with financial support from the Anglo-Catholic layman Sir William Milner Bt, Patten bought a plot of land elsewhere in the village to build a new Holy House enclosed in a small church.
The new Holy House was opened in 1931[32] and was built as a replica of the original shrine, destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII.
It began with a High Mass sung by Mowbray O'Rorke, formerly the Bishop of Accra, and by then the Rector of St Nicholas, Blakeney.
After Benediction had been given, Patten replaced the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle of the gallery chapel and then collapsed, dying later that evening.
[38] The then Vicar, Fr Roe, issued an appeal in the Church Times for "unwanted vestments of all kinds, cassocks, cottas, hassocks, and copies of the English Hymnal".
[47] During the War, an 'Evacuation Branch' of the school, for parents who wished to keep their boys away from the risk of German bombing in London, was established in Long Marston, Hertfordshire.
In 1944 Patten was approached to accept the school, and it moved to Walsingham, together with its deputy headmaster, Alfred Batts.
The two parishes were not consolidated until the incumbency of Edgar Lee Reeves (1904-20) when the patronage had descended from the Lee-Warners to the Gurneys.
