Was the original Walsingham statue really destroyed – or is it in the V&A?

In 1539 the simple wooden statue of Our Lady of Walsingham that stood beside the altar of Walsingham’s Holy House, venerated by kings, queens, princes, cardinals and generations of faithful pilgrims, was torn down, carted off to London and burned, either in the courtyard of Thomas Cromwell’s house in Chelsea or at Smithfield. This is the traditional account of what happened to the image of Our Lady of Walsingham. Yet contemporary accounts are vague, with the chroniclers unable to agree even on the location of the burning. Could it be that the statue was not, in fact, destroyed at all? The idea that the image of Our Lady of Walsingham survived the dissolution of Walsingham Priory may sound a lot like wishful thinking, but new research suggests that a surviving statue could be the famous image of Our Lady. A damaged 13th-century English statue of the Madonna and Child in the collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, known as the ‘Langham Madonna’, is a unique survival of its kind. The statue’s striking resemblance to the image of Our Lady of Walsingham on the priory’s seal has long been recognised. However, a probable error in the provenance given when the statue was first donated to the V&A has hitherto prevented art historians from pursuing the possibility that the Langham Madonna is actually medieval England’s holiest image. On December 23, 1925, a representative of the V&A purchased the Langham statue for £2 10s from a saleroom in St James. Curator RP Bedford ordered the purchase after he learnt the statue was “an oak figure of the Virgin and Child … said to have come from Langham Hall, Colchester”. The statue’s former owner further informed the museum’s representative that “it came from the church, now I think destroyed”. The probable error occurred in the assumption that the village of Langham referred to was Langham, Essex, rather than Langham, Norfolk, and that the destroyed church the unnamed owner referred to was Langham parish church (the churches in both villages are still standing), rather than the church where the image originally stood (Walsingham Priory). Confirmation of the likely error comes in a letter to the Tablet of July 25, 1931 from the Anglican priest Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton: