These shrines were near enough for a single day’s journey: a pleasant summer’s ride through the gardens and orchards of Islington where the Forest began, and so over the greensward and under the branches of the wood to the clearing on the top of Muswell Hill, where now stands the Alexandra Palace, and then stood the chapel containing the black image swathed with linen, crowned, decked with gold and jewels, before which stood the altar and burned the lamp day and night. Every day through the summer came the penitents, the sick, the jovial pilgrims, who only wanted to put in a plea for indulgence. Outside the chapel there were taverns and merry-making places. First the pilgrim knelt at the shrine; sometimes he went round it on his knees; and prayed, with simple belief, if not with fervour; faith made the sick man whole; faith absolved the penitent; faith made the most careless happy in the belief that Our Lady of Muswell had knocked off many—he knew not how many—years of purgatory. The religious act finished, no one objected to pleasure and merriment. There are indications that the merriment was not always seemly, nor was the pleasure always sinless. Yet pilgrimage continued because the sick who had been healed spread abroad the story of their miraculous cures, and because everybody wanted to get out of purgatory as quickly as possible, and because it was a most delightful form of holiday and recreation. The Lollards preached against pilgrimages continually; a fact charged against them by the Church time after time. Thus, when a Lollard named William Dynet had to abjure his Lollardy in the year 1395, he swore that thenceforth he would worship images and that he would never more despise pilgrimages. A hundred and forty years more the worship of images had to continue in the land. Piers Plowman speaks with contempt of the sham holiness of pilgrims in words already quoted: “Heremytes in an heep with hoked staves, Wenten to Walsingham and their wenches after.” Later on, one Father Donald, a Scotch Friar, said, preaching, “Ye men of London, gang on yourself with your wives to Willesden, or else keep them at home with you in sorrow.” In the year 1509, when there occurred a fire in Willesden Church, which damaged the sacred image, one Elizabeth, wife of John Sampson, citizen, got into trouble for expressing a not unnatural doubt of the power of the image to help others when she could not help herself. “If Our Lady of Willesden might have holpen men and women which go to her of pilgrimage, she would not have suffered her own tayle (taille) to have been burnt.”