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HISTORY OF THE IPSWICH SHRINE

Before King John awarded Ipswich its first royal charter in 1200, the history of Ipswich is one which the local people can rightly be proud of. For, it is not known by many today that Ipswich once had a magnificent shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was a widely renowned place of pilgrimage where yearly thousands of pilgrims paid honour and veneration. Towards the end of the 11th Century many towns and cities in England had a Marian shrine and most were named after one of her virtues, thus the Ipswich shrine was called, Our Lady of GRACE. The Shrine became extremely popular as it was a building of such excellent architecture and reports of many miracles took place there. From the early Medieval Ages to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Marian shrine at Ipswich was second in the country only to that of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk which was dedicated earlier in 1061.  Uncertainty remains as to the actual date as to when the original shrine was first built. However, comparing the dates to other shrines built around England at the same time, the date of 1152 seems very plausible. But we do have a precise date of when the original shrine moved to the site of the previous All Saints chapel, thanks to the story of miracles happening which reached the Pope on 29th March 1327. The contribution of monies from Pope John XXII to complete the new Our Lady of Grace shrine and its new chapel, is one of the earliest of such grants to a Marian shrine in Europe. Working with these calculations of the dates, the completion of the newer shrine and chapel takes us to around the end of the 14th century. 
There was a wedding in Ipswich in 1297 of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward I to the Count of Holland. An account mentions that the wedding took place in ‘the King’s Chapel’. Disputes between modern historians continue as to whether the venue was at the Priory of SS Peter and Paul, Ipswich or at the Our Lady of Grace shrine. Since we do not know of which religious site had a ‘King’s chapel’, we are not certain where the wedding took place. However, surely the royal family would have attended the shrine particularly the newlyweds, as pilgrims often asked in prayer that the Virgin Mary would bless their marriage bed and make it fertile (as would have been the plea by Catherine of Aragon during her visit to the shrine in 1517, in order to give Henry VIII a son to carry on the Tudor dynasty). In 1502, King Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York donated half of a golden angel coin (3s 4d) to the shrine. Other visitors to the shrine included Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Abbot John Reeve of the Priory at (Beodericsworth), Bury St Edmunds.The statue of Our Lady of Grace may have survived the demolishing of the shrine during the English Reformation. On the west coast of Italy, with equal distances from Rome and Naples, lies the little fishing town of Nettuno. There is a statue there known since 1550 as 'the English Lady' from the Ipswich shrine. It is today kept in the town’s largest church, the Basilica. The statue is commonly known as ‘Nostra Signora delle Grazie’ – Our Lady of Grace.  Stories of a shipwreck in 1550, that the image had been washed ashore and had been a figurehead of a ship – all versions tell of English sailors who had sailed from Ipswich and that the image had been saved from Thomas Cromwell's burning of idols. It is beyond belief that the Ipswich connection should have been invented. Why should the English sailors have made that up? There was no advantage to be gained.