Forgotten Shrines / Bede Camm

An Account of Some Old Catholic Halls and Families in England and of Relics and Memorials of the English Martyrs

Forgotten Shrines was first published in 1910. Its author, Dom Bede Camm, was a significant figure in the late Victorian and Edwardian rediscovery of ‘Heritage’ which showed itself in the appearance of many similar books and in the foundation of both the National Trust (1895) and Country Life magazine (1897). Heir to the English Benedictine tradition of historical writing, which south a revisionist interpretation of the English past, Camm has an assured place among the great figures of the Catholic revival in English literature which spanned the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.

In this book we are introduced to some of the most romantic ancient homes of the great recusant families, and the lives of the people who lived in them. It chronicles the principal relics and memorials of the martyrs linked to these sites. Through the buildings we encounter a history of heroic witness, integrity, fidelity and courage in the face of centuries of persecution. Camm probably thought that he was recording a world that was on the brink of extinction and that many of the sites he visited would soon fall into terminal decau. What makes this book so attractive today is that many of his ‘shrines’ are still recognisable and much more accessible than a century ago.

“In evoking a lost Catholic England of ‘ancient manor houses’ which provided the ‘last refuges of the ancient faith’ the book presented the reading public with a portrait of an alternative pre-industrial England, another country, concealed for centuries by the implications of the great disruption of the Reformation. This other England, of priests’ hiding places, martyrs executed for treason who espoused a truer nationalism, and of relics and times rather than more tangible remains, was to leave a permanent mark on the popular perception of the Catholic past and helped to construct a recusant ideal and identity which remains potent. Above all else, however, is a celebration of Catholic life and witness in England intended to educate and hearten”. Dom Aidan Bellenger, OSB.