Our Lady of Walsingham??

Could the original mediaeval statue venerated as Our Lady of Walsingham still exist as the 'Madonna of Langham' in the Victoria & Albert Museum? 

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

My suspicion is that the wooden "Madonna of Langham" in the V & A is, as the former Vicar of Little Walsingham Fr Michael Rear cogently argued (Catholic Herald 15 July 2019), 'really' the actual medieval statue of our Lady of Walsingham (why on earth do 'Art Historians', a largely illiterate gang of poseurs, so love the word 'Madonna'? Are they all compulsive and incurable Italophones?).

Father's evidence was circumstantial rather than direct, but, in my judgement, it is just about as strong as 'circumstantial' can get. I will not repeat the points he makes, but offer a remark or two about background.

It is clear that very many clergy and parishioners did a great deal to ensure that the agents of the Tudor regime and other would-be despoilers found very little left to loot. In some cases they may have been motivated even more by financial gain than by piety. Not only did our Lady of Ipswich get to Nettuno in Italy, but our Lady of Aberdeen made her way to the nether lands. To this day, some of Bishop Grandison's vestments are in the Azores! And there is an inventory of Exeter Cathedral made in advance of the despoliation under Edward VI which, when compared with the inventory of 1509, reveals what a truly vast amount of marketable objects had, in that half-century, 'walked'. 

Readers of Duffy (Voices) will recall the measures taken by Parson Trickay under Edward VI to 'launder' vestments and ornaments around Morebath parish; when Good Queen Mary came to the throne, his parishioners "like good Catholic men" brought everything back. And the Lichfield relics of S Chad, now in Pugin's Cathedral at Birmingham, were whisked away and secured in a farm. So there is a high contextual probability that OLW may have been ... looked after.

I can think of a rather jolly modern example of vulnerable cultic objects being hidden and replaced by substitutes. At S Hilary in Cornwall, after the Anglican courts ordered some 'illegal ornaments' to be removed from the Parish Church, Fr Bernard Walke, who had, as we Anglo-Papalists used to say, put a lot of Good Stuff into his church, had it all replaced by cheapo plaster substitutes just in case ...

... and, indeed, Mr Kensit's Protestant Truth Society did pay a violent visit, and did smash up the plaster substitutes. After Fr Ber and his parishioners had cleared up the mess, the Good Stuff was put back in place. When the prods discovered this neat sleight of hand, they regarded it as a typical example of jesuitical dishonesty and unEnglish underhandedness and Not Playing the Game.

Fr Rear points out the evidence that something has been chiselled away from between the feet of the "Langham Madonna", and links this with the account by Erasmus that OLW had a 'toadstone' (a fossilised fish tooth believed by medieval scientists to have curative properties) in exactly that place. Near here, at Sandford on Thames, a fine late-medieval statue of the Assumpta, buried in the churchyard and now in the church, has, beneath her feet, a tiny but carefully carved repository. It is too small to have been a tabernacle and I find it difficult to see how it could have been made a safe repository for a valuable relic (such as a fragment of our Lady's girdle ...). I wonder if a Toadstone could have been fixed into it.

Might the Sandford statue be our Lady of Oseney? Or our Lady of Abendon? Either of them could easily have got to Sandford by walking on the Thames ... and the local Family at Sandford would have been sympathetic ...