Making It Count: Pilgrimage and the Enumeration of Publics

Abstract

An activity that is widespread but rarely closely examined in studies of pilgrimage is the enumeration of pilgrims (and related visitors) to shrines and their environs. Such “biopolitics of hosting” can play a significant role in mobilising the religious imagination of shrine administrators, especially in contexts of apparently growing secularity. Number can be deployed by professional hosts to represent undifferentiated visiting publics in terms of spiritual possibility. In these terms, precision in statistics is likely to be less useful than figures that can be viewed through a distanced lens of potentiality. These ideas are developed through an examination of the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham, in eastern England.

1. Introduction

Pilgrimage shrines are places for amassing collections—of relics, of narratives but also of visitors. While popular depictions and narratives often emphasise the lone pilgrim who travels in search of the solitary and spiritual gaze (cf. Urry 1990), administrators of holy sites are usually more interested in attracting, accommodating, and registering the attendance of large gatherings of people. From the pious visitor’s perspective, a pilgrimage gaze might therefore be constituted not only by focusing on an icon or a landscape but also by surveying—with approval—the co-presence of numerous others. From the perspective of shrine managers, the arrival of crowds highlights the drawing power of the relevant saint, relic, or miracle but also the effectiveness of their own management of the shrine space and rituals.

In the following, I examine pilgrimage as an activity mobilised around the registration and enumeration of publics who come to visit sacred places. While much has been written on the vexed topic of how to distinguish between pilgrims and tourists to shrines, with the former often assumed to have greater “authenticity” than the latter (cf. MacCannell 1976), I suggest ways in which such valorisations might be recalibrated—reframed through different criteria of assessment. In my argument, and for the contexts I examine, non-committed or even “touristic” visitors may take on more than economic importance for administrators, most notably in connection with debates over the continued salience of religion in the public spheres of supposedly secularising societies. Furthermore, while it is true that much attention has recently been paid to the importance of the journey rather than of the destination in studies of Western pilgrimage (Bailey 2023), my interest here is in those who can be assumed definitively to have reached at least the environs of sacred sites, even if their precise modes of engagement with such sites are left unclear.

Put another way, my concern is with what I call the biopolitics of hosting, by which I mean the visualisation and quantification of pilgrims or those who can, however broadly, be counted as occupying such a role.1 Both shrines and scholars are usually keen to characterise sacred sites in terms of number, recording as far as is possible (and plausible) the bodies that flow to, through, and around the sacred location, sometimes differentiating them demographically or theologically but almost always presenting them in terms of annual and, for administrators, often anxiously anticipated, figures. Such aggregative labour might seem obvious and necessary from a practical standpoint, but I argue that it contributes to a specific ethics of enumeration that relates to the mobilisation of the “religious imagination”, constituted less by theological reflections than by attempts to discern evidence for continued interest in the sacred on the part of general populations. In considering what such an ethics might consist of and how it might be realised, we need to consider how number is deployed by shrine staff, what semiotic forms it takes, and what it might say about the necessarily ambiguous boundaries between shrines and their visitors.

I shall be considering these questions in due course by considering how they play out at the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham, in eastern England—a place where I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork at various points since the 1990s. First, however, I need to say more about enumeration itself, especially in relation to practices of religious hosting.

2. Number and the Religious Imagination

An influential work on the tracking of mobile populations is James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998), published in 1998 but still much discussed (e.g., Scott 2021). A political scientist as well as an ethnographer, Scott’s Foucauldian inclinations are clear as he argues that the recording and representation of nomads, pastoralists, and other itinerants (as well, ultimately, as all citizens) are most fundamentally about legibility—about mapping social terrains and attempting “to ‘translate’ [such knowledge] into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view” (Scott 1998, p. 2). Scott says that, historically, state measures have taken many forms, including most obviously the establishment of population registers, in the cause of linking legibility to governmental processes of standardisation and simplification. The point is not that these measures necessarily achieve statistical accuracy, since such may not be the case at all, often with disastrous practical consequences, but rather that they represent and seem to render manoeuvrable “that slice of [a population] that interest[s] the official observer” (ibid., p. 3). So, the making (we might even say the fabrication) of such knowledge is inevitably associated with “a narrowing of vision” (ibid., p. 11), though not one that automatically achieves precision. Important to Scott’s argument, therefore, is the idea that looking is linked to overlooking; seeing like a state entails, indeed requires, a degree of myopia and is often practised from a position of significant detachment from that which is surveilled.

Of course, a shrine is not a state—not least because it lacks the latter’s scale, ambition, and resources. What interests me, though, is Scott’s link between cartographic and enumerative seeing and administrative action, or in my case, the different ways in which a shrine renders visitors decipherable in ways that appear to promote processes of planning and, perhaps even more importantly, self-perception. We shall see that, however counter-intuitively, such planning may involve conscious forms of inaction as much as action and similarly, as noted, how deployment of number may be a technique of concealing as much as one of revealing. In the historian of science Theodore Porter’s phrase, taken from his book Trust in Numbers (Porter 1995), enumeration can become a “technology of distance”—not only in the sense of producing metrics that can be deployed across different intellectual, political, and cultural contexts but also because it might aid the maintenance of separation between parties as a significant gap is created between numbers and that which they purport to measure.2

Maintaining such a gap could appear odd, even counter-productive, in the context of a pilgrimage shrine, where one might expect an inherent administrative and/or ritual push toward creating deep engagement between hosts and visitors. Certainly, such aims remain significant at a site such as Walsingham. Nonetheless, they co-exist with more subtle ways of viewing visitors and discerning their varied presences. I am not referring here to older tropes taken from the tourism literature that refer to the need to “cope” with massed ranks of insensitive and intrusive visitors (e.g., Boissevain 1996). Rather, I point to the ethical possibilities inherent in the numerical grasping of those who come from the outside world to inhabit, however briefly, the spatial and ritual centres or penumbras (Coleman 2023) of pilgrimage shrines. In the sense of attempting to track—or at times simply to glimpse—visitors, seeing like a shrine actually differs in certain respects from seeing like a state: the latter typically expresses considerable anxieties over the continuous surveillance and consequent governance of those who are already located within its borders, usually for long periods of time; the former seeks a suggestive awareness of those who enter from without, often for only a very brief duration.3

In reflecting on how locating the numerical traces of those who have visited might be important to the construction of a certain kind of religious imagination, I find it useful to draw on a perspective developed by anthropologists Candea and da Col (2012) in their investigation of hosting within various ethnographic contexts where aspects of “the outside” are regarded as forms of alterity that should be welcomed, given that they can contribute positively to self-constitution. Among the more recent anthropologists whom they draw on, this idea is most clearly elaborated by Marshall Sahlins (1997) in his well-known ethno-historical work on the British explorer Captain Cook’s encounter with Hawaii in the eighteenth century. In Sahlins’s analysis, Cook becomes viewed by Hawaiians—without his own awareness of the fact—as a royal stranger and source of fertile powers (even if the encounter ultimately ends badly for the British explorer). Emergent from the historical and ethnographic details provided by Sahlins and others is a broader principle, albeit expressed in local forms: that of the recognition and subsequent absorption of a vitality that is esteemed and desired precisely because it derives from a putative outside. In reflecting on an obviously very different context and era,4 my broadly analogous question becomes: How might those who tend pilgrimage shrines derive value not from regal visitors but from an even more complex external entity that comes to visit: the general public in a secular, democratic society? And how might such administrators productively visualise and operationalise such a public through the medium of number?5 As phrased so far, these questions are very broad. I shall therefore present some specific examples of what I mean before I apply my analysis to Walsingham itself, providing my observations of the observers, as it were.

My first illustration comes from a 2012 policy report, commissioned by The Association of English Cathedrals and The Foundation for Church Leadership. For my purposes, part of the interest of Spiritual Capital: The Present and Future of English Cathedrals (Theos and The Grubb Institute 2012) is its central concern with what to make of populations who—however ambiguously, hesitantly, or indeed unknowingly—encounter spaces of potential pilgrimage. The report takes note of the fact that, in contrast to the emptying out of parish churches in many parts of the country, larger and older cathedrals have proven to be highly popular leisure destinations in recent decades. For instance, from the perspective of 2012 (and the general trend continues to the present, COVID-19 aside), we learn that over a quarter of the resident adult population of England had visited a Church of England cathedral at least once in the previous 12 months, though of course the character of such visits is likely to have varied considerably.

One interpretation of these figures might be that they chart the spiritual decline of religious spaces into “merely” heritage locations, with the specifically Christian character of cathedrals perhaps being pushed to the back of the minds of ideologically heterogenous groups of visitors. On the other hand, and as seems largely to occur in the report, they could be taken as evidence that the ecclesiastical landscape contains future possibilities in attempts to combat falling memberships of congregations. Of course, the gathering of statistics is itself now a relatively routine activity for many Church staff or their proxies. Ecclesiology is made to resonate with, or at least speak to, sociology—not necessarily to chart evidence of decline but to provide statistical representations of the public that point towards realms of possibility, most notably of the continuing salience of the Church within civic realms. In this way, the apparent objectivity of number provides a particularly productive kind of medium: a standardised language that can bridge sacred and secular means of representing populations (Porter 1995, p. 4; compare Schyberg 2024, p. 164).

My second example comes from the work of the anthropologist Mattthew Engelke on the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). In his work on both the historical and the current activities of the Society, Engelke argues that its deployment of statistics has contributed to a “materialist semiotics” that has tracked advances in the provision of Bibles to peoples across the globe (Engelke 2010, p. 818). A key dimension of such enumeration is that it acts as a medium not only of description but also of mobilisation, since it highlights the work that still needs to be performed.

These two cases refer to the strategies of very different Christian stakeholders but are united by their highlighting of faith in the role of number in positing the presence of potentially productive publics. Admittedly, such effects are hardly restricted to religious institutions. What is more interesting is the way both organisations combine urgency of aim, as prompted by statistical “evidence”, with indirectness of associated strategy. Founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the BFBS has eschewed direct conversionary mission in favour of attempts to make scripture better known across diverse populations. The BFBS’s contemporary “culture-facing” activities involve promotion of the Bible’s relevance to the general public while seeking to avoid accusations of religious compulsion.

Similarly, Spiritual Capital talks not of direct missionary work but rather of making cathedrals and associated pilgrimage shrines “open spaces of spiritual possibility” (Theos and The Grubb Institute 2012, p. 55). In support of this end, the report supports what it terms a “Benedictine tradition of hospitality” (ibid., p. 39), whereby everybody is given welcome. The aim is precisely to extend the borders of accessibility so that all who come might be acknowledged—and ideally registered—as somehow present within sacred space. In one sense, such liturgical indirectness might imply a distancing and lack of direct engagement. Nonetheless, it retains the assumption that the cultural capital provided by cathedrals has at least the capacity to create a promising spiritual alchemy when combined with the social capital provided by varied visitors.

Numbers therefore provide both cathedrals and the BFBS with a degree of evidence that their past work has been worthwhile, but even more, they mobilise the religious imagination by suggesting that there is a purpose to continuing to labour, however indirectly, in practices of enumeration that are significant for the continued existence of their institutions and which thereby might contribute, in the long run, to the saving of souls. In these terms, the figures examined and indeed publicised by the Spiritual Capital report are especially suggestive, for they point to publics who are already choosing to make their way into the portals of Christian buildings. Even if they are paying rather than praying guests, such visitors might also be regarded as recipients of a welcome that points to a monastic past and hints that entering a cathedral retains, however distantly, the character of entering a sacred zone of hospitality. Registering the presence of visitors without appearing to pressure them is therefore important, but so is retaining the hope—the imaginative possibility—that some of the latter might be more than merely culturally curious. Indeed, the report states the following (Theos and The Grubb Institute 2012, p. 14): “The data … suggests that the distinction between tourists and pilgrims is ‘fuzzy’. Those that appear to be secular tourists nevertheless understand that cathedrals hold ‘spiritual capital’, and even look to tap into it for themselves”. With such considerations in mind, we are now ready to turn to Walsingham.

3. Walsingham by Numbers

According to a fifteenth-century century ballad, pilgrimage to Walsingham was established in 1061, after the Virgin had appeared in a vision to a local aristocratic woman named Richeldis, telling her to construct a precise replica of the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation had occurred. Subsequently, Walsingham benefitted by providing an echo of (and substitute for) the Holy Land during the late Middle Ages when Palestine was closed off to Christian pilgrims, and the site was frequented by English Monarchs. However, the shrine’s growing prominence and considerable wealth made it a prime target for dissolution, and the Reformers of the sixteenth century razed much of the medieval site to the ground. Pilgrimage then remained relatively dormant in the village, but during the first decades of the twentieth century Walsingham began to attract increasing amounts of both Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic attention.6

For both branches of Catholicism, Walsingham offered the possibility of “restoration” (Rear [2011] 2019, p. 177), even if the meaning of the term differed slightly for the two constituencies. Roman Catholicism had benefited for many decades from the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1832, which permitted dioceses to be re-established in the country and members of the faith to take a greater role in public life. Such measures were boosted not only by converts from the Church of England but also by patterns of migration, including the inflow of populations from Ireland (ibid., p. 170). Westminster Cathedral, completed in 1903, provided a highly visible if ambivalent manifestation of Roman Catholic presence in the middle of London. Jenkins and Harris (2019, p. 48) interpret it as a “repository” of consciously English heritage, and one that could deploy “medieval signs and rituals to lay claim to a history that stretched back to the original conversion of England in the late 6th century”. Yet, as both symbol of identity and ecclesiastical centre of administration, the Cathedral needed to steer a course between loyalty to nation and fealty to Rome (ibid.). In the context of such complexities over asserting historically and nationally resonant spaces for Roman Catholicism in England—and ones that both claimed a long inheritance and still felt the need to combat a minority status—Walsingham could also play a significant role, despite its apparent remote location in rural Norfolk. The site pointed back to a period of Catholic flourishing in pre-Reformation time, to episodes of still painful martyrdom and destruction, but also to a special connection between England and Mary that had been lost. A medieval chapel closely associated with the original pilgrimage situated a mile or so outside of the village had been donated to Downside Abbey in 1897 and eventually came into the control of the local diocese. In 1934, the restored building became the public face of a reinstituted Roman Catholic pilgrimage tradition. The refoundation of the pilgrimage became not only a means of claiming a stake in the history of Walsingham but also an assertion of significant numerical presence that could reverberate more widely: Cardinal Bourne led around 12,000 people in a “Pilgrimage of Reparation” and declared the chapel the National Shrine of Our Lady in England (Rear [2011] 2019, pp. 191–92). Administration of the shrine was handed over to a former Anglican priest, Father Bruno Scott James (1962, p. 122),7 and it is worth quoting some of the latter’s reflections on the pre-war years:

“At first the pilgrims came in dribs and drabs. Not until the middle of my second year at Walsingham did they begin to come in real crowds …. They came from all over the country and sometimes from France, Italy and Belgium. By the outbreak of the war a conservative estimate of the numbers was fifty thousand a year, but they were difficult to assess because so very many came on their own and went away without leaving any record. Private cars were arriving all day”.

In these observations, we discern themes that have remained significant up to the present: the numerical tracking of the growing “crowds”, involving populations derived from a Roman Catholic landscape operating at different scales, but also the sense that even the figure of “fifty thousand” leaves something to the religious imagination, given the probability of others coming to the shrine and then leaving without trace.

The 1920s and 1930s also saw the gradual emergence at Walsingham of Anglo-Catholic pilgrimage as “restoration”. These developments were led by Father Hope Patten, the village vicar since 1921. The branch of Anglicanism that he represented found its most immediate roots in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century, which had sought to re-emphasise certain practices of the pre-Reformation Church—religious foundations, regular Masses, Marianism, pilgrimage—while looking back not to Roman Catholicism but to a vision of the Church as established in England by St. Augustine in the sixth and seventh centuries (Rear [2011] 2019, p. 198). This view regarded the Reformation as a fundamental misstep for the Church, and so for Patten, Walsingham—where many of the ruins left by the Dissolution were still above ground—represented a potentially powerful feature of the national Christian landscape that might look to the future and not only the past. One of his biographers, Michael Yelton (2006, p. 83), argues that by the early 1930s Patten “was beginning to develop the concept of Walsingham as spiritual powerhouse for the Church of England”. Within the village itself, the local vicar—eccentric and charismatic—was able to mobilise many of the local inhabitants to support his plans to re-establish the medieval pilgrimage, and he found funds to build his own replica of the original shrine in the village during the 1930s. Gradually, pilgrimages to the Anglican site grew, numbering around 30,000 annually in the pre-war years, and a few Walsingham shrines were established overseas in places such as Nassau and Canada (ibid., p. 105). However, Anglo-Catholicism remained just one wing—and often a controversial wing—of the Church of England, and although Patten sought inspiration from Roman Catholic aesthetics and liturgy in Belgium and Austria, he maintained no contact with Roman Catholics in England itself (ibid., p. 118).

By the end of the 1930s, then, the various efforts of those keen to efface the results of the Reformation had resulted in the village and its environs containing two shrines and two parallel pilgrimage traditions. Neither engaged in the aggressive and direct missionizing that was typical of evangelicals, but both sought to attract constituencies whose presence through pilgrimage might acts as a form of cumulative witness, challenging minority statuses within English Christianity. Despite their liturgical and aesthetic similarities, the two shrines were, to a large degree, seeking to attract different publics: members of an established Church in the case of the Anglicans, and a complex amalgam of long-standing members of the faith, converts from the Church of England, and “migrant” populations in the case of the Roman Catholics. During the early years of the revival of pilgrimage, tourism itself would not have played an especially significant role in the village, although a train line had run through the village since the mid-nineteenth century and was used by many pilgrims.

Predictably, the “Romans” and the “Anglos” were rivals to begin with, but such relations began to change in post-war years, especially after the death of Patten in 1958 and the reforms of Vatican II from the mid-1960s. Facing increased levels of religious pluralism and apparent secularisation, the shrines have now publicly embraced ecumenism—itself a means of presenting a common numerical front in the face of dwindling numbers of committed Christians, and a move that makes it easier to appeal to wider publics. In 2003, a BBC Radio Poll named Walsingham Britain’s “most popular spiritual place”,8 with over a quarter of a million visitors a year, though under the surface amity there persists for some pilgrims and local residents a good deal of ambiguity over exactly who the legitimate representatives of English Catholicism should be. Walsingham now resembles many cathedrals in England and indeed northern Europe in the sense that it constitutes a hybrid spiritual–secular context, but unlike the larger cathedrals it represents a space where the multiple engagements of the “general public” cannot easily be observed or enumerated.9 No single portal or closely monitored entrance into the village exists, and pilgrimage-related sites range from ruins, to open-air as well as enclosed shrines, to fields and streets. One might still tour various local attractions for hours without leaving any trace, and shrines currently have relatively few resources for the gathering and representation of reliable and comprehensive statistical data. When I visited offices of staff responsible for hosting pilgrims, I was shown a range of demographic records of varying degrees of sophistication—national maps on walls with pins indicating significant concentrations of parishes likely to visit, index cards listing “cell groups” of shrine supporters around the country, and computerised data input systems containing information about what one administrator at the Anglican shrine called the “commercial ethnography”10 of pilgrimage. The latter seemed to be made up of subscriptions to newsletters or membership of affiliated groups, such as The Society of Our Lady of Walsingham (Anglican), which currently has around 5000 members. These assorted prompts to, and measures of, engagement provide a composite, fragmented overview of interest in Walsingham pilgrimage but may also point for much of the time to a demographic of the religiously committed that is relatively fixed or diminishing in number—particularly though not exclusively for Anglicans. In characterising the potential for expansion contained within such “ethnography”, the administrator added that “membership in itself won’t change, but what could change is our offering”, by which he meant the various strategies the shrines could take to appeal to a broader public. His remark contained a veiled reference to unresolved debates evident within both shrines as to how commercial such reaching out should be—ranging from offering tours to schools to the selling of shrine goods online.

To be sure, the shrines are dedicated to enticing constituencies of conventionally religious visitors to continue to come back to the village, ideally fitting in with the annual rhythms of parish or diocesan pilgrimages or national feast days. Maintaining repeat visits is crucial to identity as well as to planning and finances, and the larger examples of such pilgrimages stand out in sharper relief in either shrine than they would do in a cathedral, where so many other events are regularly staged. At the same time, the choreography of these routinised gatherings plays out slightly differently in accordance with where shrines are situated in relation to wider Christian landscapes, with certain parallels to the 1930s still being evident. Walsingham serves as a significant rallying point for what are generally perceived to be highly traditional forms of Anglo-Catholicism. Its “national” pilgrimage, held every Late Spring Bank Holiday, provides an ongoing measure of support and is therefore an event where numbers of participants, now running to perhaps a couple of thousand or so a year, are monitored through such measures as accommodation booked by parish groups and even programmes sold to those wishing to enter the original shrine grounds during the services that are held there. Walsingham represents a more “mainstream” part of the Roman Catholic landscape at large and is a member of the European Marian Network—a collection of sanctuaries established in 2003 and approved by the Pope. For some more engaged Roman Catholics, it still embodies an interrupted but now revived presence in England of a faith that had been unjustly removed at the time of the Reformation, but in fact the largest pilgrimage events nowadays involve diasporic groups, pointing to much wider frames of Roman Catholic cultural, historical, and geographical reference and in fact suggesting continuing possibilities of expansion that exceed those of Anglicanism. Examples include around 6000 people coming from the Tamil community each May, and again up to 15,000 Tamil pilgrims arriving every July, drawn from around the country and usually staying for a just a day each time.11 Such developments, to deploy Valentina Napolitano’s (2015, p. 6) resonant phrase referring to another diasporic context, both welcome and advertise “new possibilities of … Catholic presence”. The “problem” they pose for Walsingham is how Roman Catholics with such radically different backgrounds might be accommodated within such an English setting. Here, for instance, are the words of a sometime employee of the shrine, referring to the shift away from pilgrims coming on the annual trip from Westminster Cathedral to a tendency for pilgrims to come from more dispersed, diasporic locations in the country:

And the other thing about Walsingham, it is difficult, because a lot of the pilgrims that come are the immigrants from all the different countries, and it has become a focus point for them to come but for them to understand the message of Walsingham … the actual message is not easy to transmit to them because it’s complicated.

These words are spoken not to criticize such populations but to reflect on the challenge of presenting the theological and historical significance of the shrine to them. The administrator adds, in fact, that the deficit in knowledge may often be mutual: “I’m not convinced, myself, that we really understand what is going on”. What is being described here is not exactly a “general” public but one whose “externality” takes on an ambivalent aspect: welcomed for what it represents about Roman Catholic presence but viewed as somewhat hazy in terms of its precise character and motivation. Despite such difficulties, as with the Spiritual Capital report that I reflected on earlier, the numerical recording and representation of the presence of these visitors by shrines perform double rhetorical duty, revealing and recirculating within denominational and occasionally secular national presses the size and/or character of the pilgrimage publics being attracted. In this regard, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an unexpected and yet resonant occasion of mediated publicity for the Roman Catholic shrine. The plan in the Spring of 2020 was to rededicate Walsingham as “Mary’s Dowry”, but the service had to be carried out online when physical gathering became impossible. When administrators tried to livestream services to parishes and churches beyond Norfolk, its website crashed as an estimated over half a million people attempted to watch. The event was therefore marked by a major glitch, but one that provided a literally graphic illustration of an excess, an overflowing, and an enthusiastic Roman Catholic public, and one that touched on the constant anxiety over number.

Staff at both shrines are acutely aware of fluctuations in attendance at official events as well as in occupation of their dedicated accommodation, but they have far less of a sense of the actual size of so-called secular or uncommitted visitors to their respective locations. The total number of people who visit the village each year, COVID-19 era excluded, is often said to be 250,000–300,000, but the exact provenance of this summarising figure is not agreed upon by those administrators who deploy it. Indeed, it most likely comes from past tourism literature.12 In any case, the number creates its own kind of urgency, for it reveals intriguing gaps between those who can readily be identified as pilgrims and those who cannot (yet) be firmly classified as such.

Amid debates over the appropriateness or otherwise of the commercialisation of shrines, over the need to secure return visits but also over the motivations of those who come, one activity has clearly increased across the village in recent decades and been taken up eagerly by both Anglican and Roman Catholic sites: that of providing accommodation for varied visitors. As an ethically as well as logistically complex enterprise, it is of particular interest because of the way it navigates the perils of overtly reaching out to the public in a way that retains a medieval sense of offering a welcome to those who choose for whatever reason to come to Walsingham and stay there for a brief time. Indeed, we might see the shifting cultures of hosting in the village as telling a significant story not only about Walsingham as destination but also about transformations in how visitors are both received and seen—literally, metaphorically, and numerically—by shrine administrators. Some historical context is useful here. In the pre-war years, the spartan and haphazard hosting of pilgrims was frequently justified not only by the lack of facilities but also by assertions that a certain degree of asceticism fitted in with appropriately pious attitudes towards the place. Since that time, the village has become marked by a distinct professionalisation of Christian hospitality, and one that has accelerated over the past quarter of a century. Both shrines now offer in-house accommodation for hundreds of pilgrims at a time.

The number of people who actually stay at the Anglican shrine each year might reach around 10,000, and priority is still given to pilgrim groups coming from known parishes. Establishing the Roman Catholic figures is currently a more complex process. It may be that up to 150,000 people visit the Slipper Chapel each year, but the majority of those leave the same day.13 In either case, there is plenty of statistical space left to posit the presence of a general public that has not yet been fully incorporated into shrine activities, and the assumption—a broadly welcomed assumption, echoing the words of Father James on the pre-war years—is that they may well be engaging in unobserved ways, including coming to stay in shrine accommodation. Indeed, the latter is now designed to offer multiple frames of reception and is marketed to the public at large. As a result, just as ecclesiastical hosts may not be able to discern the religious motivations of their guests, so facilities may risk being misrecognised by visitors unaware of Walsingham’s status as a famous pilgrimage site. One of the Anglican staff noted to me of the online profile of what is put on offer: “It’s down as the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. There’s a lot of pictures of the Shrine … So, on Booking.com we are a … hostel with a church”. Such signals of identity may not be enough, however. In spring 2024, for instance, I asked a middle-aged man sitting alone at breakfast in the Roman Catholic accommodation if I could join him. After we had discussed the wildlife photos that he was busy taking along the Norfolk coast, he told me that he might stay a second night at the “hostel” as it was both comfortable and cheap. He did, however, register genuine surprise when I told him that we were in accommodation run by a Church, and that Walsingham was a famous place of pilgrimage, despite the fact that we were perhaps two minutes’ walk away from the centre of the village.

In one sense, these confusions point back to the idea of the unaware or insensitive guest as “threat” in Boissevain’s (1996) terms. How to manage the routine, professionalised provision of shrine lodgings to visitors who have little initial interest in Walsingham’s religious significance remains an open question and would not have been a significant issue for an earlier generation of administrators. However, such troubling possibilities tell only part of the story of the ambiguous enumerative ethics, varied visibilities, and calibrated stances entailed in such hospitality. Another, highly senior, member of the Anglican shrine staff noted to me that the current aim was “to encourage people who might not come otherwise to come and find the shrine …. And in some cases, we have had people staying through Booking.com who have absolutely loved it and have returned as pilgrims”.

These reflections contain an acknowledgement that the religiously uncommitted outsider may unknowingly become enmeshed in pilgrimage space (as well as numerical registers), especially if they book through an apparently secular portal. Under such circumstances, the hope is that a “return” might signal transformation into fully fledged pilgrimage, and this sentiment provides a parallel with the ways in which Spiritual Capital highlights the very fuzziness of pilgrim–tourist distinctions as an area of future possibility for the Church. Nonetheless, as with cathedrals, the assumption at Walsingham’s shrines is that whatever engagements with ritual spaces may emerge, they should not generally be the result of direct prompting. What is being described by these administrators is not the end of pilgrimage per se or its contemporary “dissolution” into tourism but more of a recognition of shifts in its shape, its character, its sociality, and the ways in which it can be seen by a shrine as well as by visitors. Aggregates of more obviously pious Catholics centred around either Anglo- or Roman Catholic locations are vital, but the presence of such relatively firmly defined publics is not sufficient to fuel either the logistical requirements or the religious imaginations of shrine staff who wish also to offer wider realms of spiritual potentiality to others who are not yet committed. To pursue the latter aim, shrines must provide the ritual and browsable space for a wider, only partially traceable, and presumably highly diverse, yet still imaginable, public. What we might think of as the ideal type of the parish pilgrim embodies principles of regular return and therefore of predictable circulation, of bureaucratic knowability, and a kind of behavioural tightness that is not only relatively easy to measure but also in alignment with official forms of ritual. Beyond that there exists a looser and highly variegated public, less predictable though still subject to hazier forms of enumeration, rendered immune from forms of direct address and therefore kept at some liturgical distance, yet constituting an assumed presence and potentiality that, if anything, is gaining in importance in increasingly fragmented manifestations of contemporary pilgrimage.

4. Concluding Reflections

Shrine staff and residents view visitors through multiple media in efforts to make them legible—and thereby often enumerable—in the context of shrine planning and self-representation. For both cathedrals and the shrines at Walsingham, the varied publics who arrive represent valued “externalities”, but externalities that embody different kinds of value. One kind of obviously devotional public remains key to ideas of Catholic identity, whether Anglo- or Roman, though in its frequent measurability such a public runs the risk of indexing gradual reductions in popularity and status with all too much exactitude. Another, much more loosely articulated form of “general” public may or may not be precisely measurable in terms of numbers and is certainly unpredictable and unschooled, but that does not mean that it is devalued or necessarily downgraded as “mere” tourism. Rather, it can be discerned or estimated or imagined through a distanced lens of potentiality—revealing the fuzzy outline of secular, apathetic, or unknowing members of the public who have been given the opportunity to make their own way toward, or in the environs of, the offerings of religious rituals that are unapologetically Christian in form.

Catholic pilgrimage sites are well known for their highlighting of the bodies of saints—fragmented, diffused, multiplied, amassed into items of display, and made powerful attractors of those wishing to benefit from their powers. In my argument, however, it is the bodies of visitors themselves that come to the fore and carry with them a different kind of force: not in death but in biopolitical life, and not framed by reliquaries but enumerated through spreadsheets. Furthermore, I have shown that to the statistics of the faithful can be added figures derived from other “guests”—less known but still capable of being interpreted as containers of spiritual potential, drawn from the outside world. In these senses, what unites relics with still moving bodies is the fact that both become subject to strategies of accumulation on the part of shrines and their administrators.14 In considering how such accrual occurs, I have shown how strategic indirectness thus becomes not only a necessity but also a virtue in apparently secular, liberal times, enshrining the ideal of a voluntary move by the visitor toward the signs and practices of faith. At least until techniques of measurement become more sophisticated, the very fact that spaces of ritual adjacency (cf. Coleman 2023) remain relatively resistant to surveillance by religious authorities may even be advantageous to the mobilisation of both pilgrims and hosts: the former because they feel free to negotiate their own relationships to ritualisable contexts; the latter because they remain free to hope that their labours of staging and watching over sacred hospitality might reap rewards where the presences and powers of the as-yet unknown guest will help to animate the future and not just the present workings of the shrine.