[Illustration: THE TABARD INN, BOROUGH From a drawing by Philip Norman, F.S.A.] But besides the English shrines already mentioned, there were other local ones for the Londoner. There was the shrine of Our Lady of Crome’s Hill, Greenwich, or that of the Holy Rood of Bermondsey, or that of Our Lady of Willesden, or that of Our Lady of Muswell, or that of “Our Lady that standeth in the Oke.” The last-named place of pilgrimage was somewhere between Highgate and Islington. May its name be supposed to linger in the modern form of Gospel Oak? The whole country, in fact, was studded all over with shrines of local celebrity. Outside London, no one, for instance, knew or cared about Our Lady of Muswell: but to Londoners she was a very real saint, to whom multitudes paid pilgrimage. Of these minor shrines, concerning which Chaucer is silent, which Erasmus never visited, there are very few historical notices extant. When they were suppressed and the images themselves burned, there was no one left to care about the records and the papers connected with them, so they, too, were burned, or they were left to moulder in the muniment chest. Or, if the Londoner wanted a pilgrimage with little personal exertion, which might be performed in a single day, he could choose between the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, a place of the greatest sanctity: that of St. Erkenwald in St. Paul’s, also regarded as most powerful and efficacious: there were two feasts of St. Erkenwald: on these days all the clergy of the diocese repaired to the shrine robed in their copes: special indulgences were granted to those who visited this shrine. The three shrines north of London, now so completely forgotten, all lay in the heart of the great Middlesex Forest. Each of the miraculous images was probably a Lady of the Oak: there was Our Lady of the Oak all over Europe. The miraculous figure is always found in an oak, and is always, it is said, _black_. Thus, Our Lady of Puy in France, supposed to be the most ancient of these figures, is described as being carved out of cedar, swathed round and round with fine linen like a mummy, deep black, the face and features extremely long, the eyes small and formed of glass, the look haggard and wild (_L. and M. Archæological Trans._ iv. 178); and there is a Black Virgin at Marseilles.