And Did Those Feet

Did Jesus come to Britain? Almost certainly not. That hasn't stopped people believing he did - or that he came back, or that they were him.Taking William Blake's famous question as his starting point, the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie sets out to find every place Jesus is said to have turned up on this rainy island. The trail leads from Glastonbury to a plaque on the back of a double garage in Burnham-on-Sea and from a holy well on the twelfth hole of a Cornish golf course to a face in the grease of a Penzance pizza box.Along the way he meets the prophets, pilgrims, cranks and true believers who claimed to have seen Jesus, heard from him or, in a surprising number of cases, actually be him. Among them are Margery Kempe, the most annoying woman in medieval England; a clergyman who announced he was the Messiah in Upper Clapton but wouldn't prove it by walking across the pond; a former Coventry City goalkeeper who broke the news to Terry Wogan; and a sock-hating Welsh druid whose baby son, Jesus Christ, changed the law on cremation. The search ends in the present day, on a trading estate in Catford and in the ordinary parish church.Irreverent, deeply researched and unexpectedly moving, And Did Those Feet? is a book about faith, Britain and the wonderfully strange things people will believe.