The Archive Room at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is contained within the College. Here is kept a wide range of important documents and material from the last 80 years. These include complete sets of The Walsingham Review and its predecessors (including the early Mirror), photographs, documents relating to the Master of the College and the Guardians, Priests Associate and The Society of Our Lady of Walsingham, recordings and videos.

The archives were professionally organised and catalogued in the 1980’s. The present archivist is currently working on expanding and developing the range of material – including sound and video records. As the archive is developed, appeals will be made for material – to fill in gaps and for help with identification, particularly with photographs.

The archive is not open to the general public but the archivist is happy to deal with inquiries. More information can be found in the Walsingham Archives pages (see below), including an outline catalogue, lists and dates of Masters and Guardians of the Shrine, dates of the various Shrine buildings.

Above: Sir William Milner with Our Lady of Walsingham, October 15th, 1931
Right: The Golden Book containing the names of the earliest donors to the Shrine

Click here to visit the Walsingham Archives pages

The Church Times

 (Leader comment - 2nd June, 2006)

Nazareth in Norfolk

This year's National Pilgrimage to Walsingham, nearly coinciding with the feast of the Visitation, recalls another visitation - a former Bishop of Norwich's to the Parish Church when the Revd (Alfred) Hope Patten was the vicar. The story is told in Colin Stephenson's Walsingham Way (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970). The Bishop averted his eyes from a shrine in the church; "but Hope pulled at his coat tails so that he stepped back into a box of votive candles, scattering them in all directions. This placed him at a disadvantage and Hope was able to say: ' You must see this because it is a reproduction of the image which stood in Walsingham from 1061 to 1538.' The bishop was not impressed. 'Do you teach your people to worship the virgin, Mr Patten?' he asked. 'Only in the sense that they worship their earthly mothers' was the reply, which only drew a grunt from the bishop as he made his escape from the Lady Chapel before it could be suspected that he was making any devotions there."

In contrast, Bishop Pollock's successor, in full pontificals, took part in the great services and outdoor procession on Monday, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did two years ago, Over the past 75 years, since the translation of the image from the Parish Church to the reconstructed Holy House in the new Anglican Shrine, "Walsingham" has become, and remains, mainstream in the Church of England to a degree unimaginable in 1931, when it was thought advisable to move the Shrine to private property. It betokens the extent to which Anglicans have, in respect of the Blessed Virgin at least, reconnected with the religious experience of the greater part of the historic Church. The Shrine, though still (as pilgrims at the National know well) disapproved of in some quarters, has quietly discovered a gift, in its everyday ministry to visitors and school parties, for drawing in those who may not yet consciously be pilgrims. Its warm relations with the RC Shrine (and now with Nettuno in Italy) suggest that spiritual bridge-building is the more effective embodied in physical facts.

It is an anniversary year at the Norfolk Shrine, with special celebrations to come. But it has often been remarked by visitors recently, during testing times for all who call themselves Catholic in the C of E, that, despite all the history, it is not a backward-looking place. Its far-flung friends respond gladly to its appeals (one is on the go now) because they love a house devoted to prayer, actually and often prayed in, and so arranged as to enable even hesitant visitors almost to stumble into joining in. England's "Nazareth" will not convince all sceptics. But those who take a pride in being neither eccentric nor exotic can be given pause by the tremendous development of Fr Patten's revival of the vision of an England where the Mother of Jesus invites everyone to be at home with her Son.