Have With Yow to Walsingame ("Be off to Walsingham") is a keyboard composition by William Byrd in G minor, based on a popular Elizabethan tune. In this work Byrd set the tune into 22 variations on the words of this song:
As I went to Walsingham,
In a pilgrim's weed.
To the shrine with speed,
Met I with a jolly palmer
The song is based on the pilgrimage to Walsingham, where a shrine is dedicated to the Virgin Mary that became a popular pilgrimage centre for Christians around the area. "Palmer" meant a pilgrim in those days, since pilgrims returning from the Holy Land traditionally brought back a palm branch.
In these variations, which Byrd wrote in the late 1550s, he shows his mastery of the keyboard. The work is usually played on a harpsichord or piano and takes 9 to 10 minutes.
The composition is included in two of the most important collections of keyboard music of the Renaissance, My Ladye Nevells Booke and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.
Musicologist Margaret Gynn described how Byrd had taken what was originally a "a love-song of the road" and transformed it by giving it the "serious religious character of a pilgrimage".[1]
According to Bradley Brookshire, the variations form a sort of "covert speech" addressed to Catholic recusants in Elizabethan culture. He argues that it includes "musically encoded symbols of Catholic veneration and lament."[1]
Byrd's main rival John Bull also made a set of variations on the tune.