All this makes for entertaining reading, and helps one to understand the zeal of the Protestant iconoclasts. However, it is not the whole picture. Freeman writes in his preface of getting within the mind of the Middle Ages. He succeeds in so far as fears of Hell and sometimes desperate recourse to relics are concerned. But Christianity is a religion of love revealed by an incarnate God whose earthly life was a supreme example of sacrifice. A loving, personal relationship with the divine infused the mind of the medieval Christian as well as fear and political calculation. And this would tend to negate Freeman's assertion that religion in pre-Reformation Europe was polytheistic. Saints were regarded as efficacious intercessors with God, not replacements for him.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, veneration of Mary, as the sharer in Christ's sufferings, became more prominent, particularly in England. A replica of the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation had taken place was built in Walsingham in 1061. This year is thus the 950th anniversary of what became the greatest Marian shrine in this country and is so again today.

To mark the occasion, Michael Rear, who lived and worked in the village for nearly 20 years as both an Anglican and a Catholic priest, has written Walsingham: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage, an engaging, handsomely-illustrated book for the general reader. He draws on the findings of modern archaeology which suggest that Mary's house in Nazareth, abutting a grotto, would have had the rectangular shape of the Holy Houses in both Walsingham and Loreto in Italy. He traces the royal patronage of the shrine, from Henry III to Henry VIII, the latter having visited Walsingham two or three times and paid for the glazing of the windows of the chapel which surrounded the Holy House. The same monarch would in 1538 have the shrine and the great Augustinian priory destroyed and the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham smashed.

The revival of pilgrimage to this remote Norfolk village is a remarkable story. It has its origins in the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism. As a girl, Charlotte Pearson Boyd had dedicated herself to restoring ruined shrines. She acquired Malling Abbey in Kent in 1883 and the Slipper Chapel in Houghton St Giles, the last station on the pilgrim's way to Walsingham, in 1896, by which time she had become a Roman Catholic. However, opposition from the Bishop of Northampton prevented her from turning it into a shrine before her death in 1906.

The task of restoring Walsingham as a pilgrimage centre fell to Fr Alfred Hope Patten, the vicar, who in 1931 opened a new Holy House in the village, which forms the core of the Anglican shrine today. Doubtless stimulated by this development, the Roman Catholic church declared the Slipper Chapel to be its national shrine in 1934.

Today it is estimated that well over 100,000 pilgrims visit Walsingham each year. A centre of ecumenism, the village has Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches and a Methodist chapel. Richeldis de Faverches, the lady of the manor who was granted a vision of the Holy House 950 years ago, has been vindicated.