Lord Cormack’s Monthly Message
The first two months of 2014 have gone, and as we move into spring our plans for next year are taking firm and attractive shape. We have decided to declare 2015 a Year of Pilgrimage to Lincolnshire. The word ‘pilgrim’ resonates through our country’s history. After his great funeral, attended by two kings and three archbishops, St Hugh’s shrine became one of the great centres of medieval pilgrimage. Over three hundred years later Louth was the centre of the Lincolnshire Rising, part of the movement that convulsed northern England in 1536 and became known as ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’: those who took arms against Henry VIII, enraged by Thomas Cromwell’s attack on the monasteries, of which there were some forty in Lincolnshire alone.
Less than a century after that, in 1609, the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from South Killingholme on the first stage of the journey that was to take them, in 1620, to Plymouth Rock on the other side of the Atlantic. So, in 2015 as we celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, we are urging all those who have any connection with Lincolnshire, by birth or by ancestry, by education, or by occupation, or even by earlier visits, to come to Lincolnshire, to enjoy the newly re-opened Castle, Lincolnshire’s Great Exhibition, our Three Choirs Festival, and the many other events which will make 2015 a very special year. Like those early Pilgrims to St Hugh’s Shrine, they will be able to purchase a pilgrim badge, bearing an image of St Hugh and his swan.
More details will follow in subsequent months.
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