1834, England.
From the old, stone church came a disorderly chorus of voices singing an Anglican hymn of praise to the accompaniment of a bad-sounding old organ. It was vespers. The village of Walsingham never missed a divine mass.
The village, forgotten by God and decaying for hundreds of years, had long ago become a "rotten place," as it was called in the Parliament of England. The inhabitants of this "rotten place" were one hundred and fifty-one people, mostly women and children. Here lived the most ordinary peasants, differing from the rest of the English peasantry in one feature only: they were hideously poor, but in this poverty they cherished their lives, families, and souls as the apple of their eye. Poverty did not embarrass them, for their Anglican faith and veneration of the Virgin Mary of Walsingham gave them strength and meaning to their lives even in the midst of this terrible, repulsive poverty. The landlord of the part of the county of Norfolk in which Walsingham was situated seemed to have forgotten, or perhaps simply did not know, that this isolated society of deeply religious and pure-hearted peasants was nestled on his land.
– Now, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray to our Father.
The parishioners offered their prayers diligently and sincerely to God, then the pastor blessed the people, they got up from the cracked, black wooden pews and went home.
It had been like this for centuries: as soon as the service was over, the peasants hurried to their stone houses to milk the horned cattle, feed the poultry, and tidy up their miserable dwellings, and only after these labours to feed themselves and their children. Before going to bed, the head of each family read the Holy Scriptures in syllables, and when the small light of the tallow candle died out, the families prayed and went to bed on old straw-stuffed bunks on the dirt floor to ward off the voracious bedbugs all night long.
But tonight was no usual evening: in the morning a rumour had spread among the people of Walsingham that they had a new landlord, but no one knew who he was, but they were happy to share their speculations with their neighbours and savour the news like a treat. People passed on to each other their own expectations of how the new lord would tidy up the village and the church, which was the centre of this little universe, for he, the new lord, would undoubtedly be an honest fellow and deeply interested in the fate of his peasants. The new aspirations and hope for change became food for the peasants' minds, who had almost forgotten to dream, even though the venerable Pastor Glowford urged them not to dream too soon: for if the Lord is to do good through the new landlord, it will happen, and if not, it is His will. At vespers it was announced to the peasants that the new landlord himself would be arriving for Sunday service tomorrow morning, so many were unable to sleep that night, wondering about the future.
