Font at St. Julian's Shrine

Today, Friday, we headed back to Norwich. Meisha had the day carefully planned out, with all stops marked on the map. Our first stop was to be St. Julian’s Church because it was opened earliest and by luck we discovered a car park (parking lot) right across the street where we could leave the car for the day. St. Julian’s is not medieval because the original church was destroyed during World War II. Because Julian (born in 1342), an anchoress who wrote The Revelation of Divine Love, is such an important figure in Norwich and because people wanted to continue using the site as a pilgrimage destination, a shrine to Julian (who was never canonized as a saint) was built on the site. Margery Kempe visited Julian many times. This font is a treasure which originally belonged to All Saints Westlegate. Unlike most of the fonts (c. 1420) we have seen that had the figures of saints on them, the faces were not desecrated during the English Civil War (1640s) by chipping them off. There were two phases of destruction: first the Reformation when Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church in the 1530s and then when the Puritans wanted to eradicate the iconography in the next century.