Barn Elms replaced the earlier one occupied by Sir Francis Walsingham, "Elizabeth's Spymaster". Queen Elizabeth I would visit Barn Elms to see her Spymaster. Barn Elms features in English literary history from the time the royalist poet Abraham Cowley moved to the house belonging to John Cartwright in 1663. In the 1660s Barn Elms became a fashionable destination for boating picnics. Samuel Pepys, who arranged many a Sunday afternoon or moonlit evening boating party to Barn Elms himself, recorded that on 26 May 1667: "I walked the length of the Elmes, and with great pleasure saw some gallant ladies and people come
Walsingham (music) Walsingham (music) Walsingham was a popular Elizabethan ballad tune. There are various versions of the lyrics, which relate to a pilgrimage site, suppressed during the English Reformation. The tune provided inspiration for Elizabethan composers, notably William Byrd. Byrd wrote a set of keyboard variations called Have with Yow to Walsingame ("Be off to Walsingham"). In some sources it is called "As I went to Walsingham", the first line of the following quatrain. <poem style="margin-left:2em;">As I went to Walsingham, To the shrine with speed, Met I with a jolly palmer In a pilgrim's weed.</poem> Walsingham is a pilgrimage site in Norfolk,