Apart from pilgrimages, in fashion but for a time, English people usually went to Durham to visit the tomb of the holy Confessor Cuthbert, and the place where was kept his ever-victorious banner; to the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in Westminster; to St. Albans, St. Edmund’s Bury, St. David’s, on account of the saints after whom these towns are named; to Chichester, to worship the body of St. Richard the Bishop; to Glastonbury, with its holy thorn-tree, and its church founded {347} by St. Joseph of Arimathea; to Waltham, where a cross of black marble had been miraculously found in the time of King Knut. Lincoln, York, Peterborough, Hayles with its Holy Blood, Winchester (for St. Swithin, who, among other merits, had had that of being a bridge builder), Holywell, Beverley with its St. John, and a number of other places,[479] shrines and miraculous and wishing wells had also attractions for the pilgrim; but none could stand comparison with Walsingham and Canterbury. At Walsingham there were a church and a chapel, now destroyed, the latter with a miraculous bejewelled statue of the Virgin, and some of her milk, the chapel being exactly similar, it was said, to the Santa Casa of Loretto, which was a wonder in itself, for the English copy had been built in the eleventh century, long before the Casa was heard of. Owing to innumerable gifts the place was resplendent with gold and precious stones. Visiting Cologne and the famous shrine of the wise men of the East, Roger Ascham writes: “The three kings be not so rich, I believe, as was the Lady of Walsingham.”[480] People came in crowds; many among the British kings came too;[481] the road leading to Walsingham was called the palmers’ way, and chapels were built along its line. The town was full of inns, hospitals, and religious buildings, as was usually the case with the more famous of these places. The milk and the image, as most of the pilgrimage statues, were destroyed at the Reformation, some of the wooden ones being burnt like the heretics, or with them, at Smithfield, as happened when Friar Forest died at {348} the stake.[482] The gold and silver ones were turned to more practical uses. “I have pullyd down,” Dr. London, one of the Visitors of religious houses, writes to Thomas Cromwell, “the image of our Lady at Caversham, wherunto wasse great pilgremage. The image ys platyd over with sylver, and I have putte yt in a cheste fast lackyd (locked) and naylyd uppe, and by the next bardge that commyth from Redyng to London yt shall be browght to your Lordeschippe. I have also pullyd down the place she stode in with all other ceremonyes, as lights, schrds (shrouds), crowchys (crosses), and imagies of wex hangyng about the chapel, and have defacyed the same thorowly in exchuyng of any farther resortt thedyr. . . . At Caversham ys a propre lodginge wher the chanon lay, with a fayer garden and an orchard mete to be bestowed upon som frynde of your lordeschip’s in thees parties.”[483]