Tag: Norwich

This artwork is of St. Laurence’s Church in Norwich and was painted by David Hodgson (1798-1864) in 1863. This is one of the churches that was nearly demolished in the 1960s and I made reference to that when wittering on about a defaced statue found there. This artwork would have been painted from Westwick Street, but that area has changed too much to be able to put up a before and after photo. George Plunkett does though link to a watercolour which was painted in a similar place.

As usual, I’ve had AI try and bring back some of the original colours to the painting. Quaint as the building might look, it’s not entirely clear to me that it was actually structurally sound and pleasant inside.

Friends of mine know that I like books, especially when they come in their thousands at a time, but this is a rather special one published at some stage in the 1400s. I say published, but perhaps more written laboriously out might be more appropriate.

I let ChatGPT have a go at transcribing this and it didn’t cope with it. However, Google Gemini had a lovely time with it, describing it as text by John Wycliffe (c.1328-1384) that was likely published in the fifteenth century. I know this is correct as the museum stated that it is a book of tracts by John Wycliffe and was published between 1400 and 1500.

Google Gemini goes further and notes that the general thrust of this is that “it critiques those who hold great benefices and use their positions for worldly gain rather than spiritual care” and this does feel like the sort of text Wycliffe would have written. It’s yet another experiment in the incredible power of AI and I’ve established that it can read Middle English.

Wycliffe wanted a bit of modernisation in the Catholic Church, ending the abuses and bringing the message of the Bible closer to the people. Pope Gregory XI, who was broadly incompetent for various reasons, condemned that arrangement straight away. There’s a relevance to Norfolk with all of this, as Wycliffe stirred up the Peasant’s Revolt, a national uprising which gained traction in the area. And the Lollards were sort of led by Wycliffe and they had a strong presence in East Anglia.

There’s something a little tacky about this fascinating item in the collections of Norwich Castle Museum. It’s a special piece, it’s the pre-cut mould for pilgrim badges that were sold at Walsingham’s shrine before the Reformation.

This is obviously how they were made, but perhaps the pilgrims who went there didn’t realise just how mass produced this whole arrangement was. Or, maybe they did, but even the museum notes that this method was designed to be “quick and cheap” rather than something produced to a high standard. And maybe there was a choice of pilgrim badges, from rather more decadent ones to cheap and cheerful. It seems though that some pilgrimage sites were selling over 100,000 badges a year, this truly was the Great Yarmouth of its day.

King Henry III made a pilgrimage to Walsingham and the shrine of the Virgin Mary in the thirteenth century and then King Edward I, King Edward II, King Henry IV, King Henry VII and King Henry VIII all went afterwards during their reigns. That’s some destination and it’s clear why it also became desirable to pilgrims. King Henry VIII couldn’t have been entirely surprised and delighted by his visit as he later approved it being pulled down during the Reformation.

I haven’t been able to find any badges in museums or for sale that look similar to this, I had hoped to see what one would have looked like.