Canterbury Cathedral

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Canterbury Cathedral is the cathedral church of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the senior church of the Church of England and the symbolic mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its foundation is traditionally dated to 597, when Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, established a see at Canterbury and began the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The present building, raised over the Norman and later medieval centuries, replaced a sequence of earlier churches on the same ground; worship has continued on the site, with interruptions, for more than fourteen hundred years.

The cathedral’s wider fame rests on a single night. In December 1170 the archbishop Thomas Becket, in bitter conflict with King Henry II over the liberties of the church, was cut down by four knights in the north transept. The killing of a prelate at his own altar shocked Latin Christendom; Becket was canonized within three years, and a cult formed with extraordinary speed. A shrine behind the high altar held his relics, and the place where he fell — soon called the Martyrdom — became one of the principal pilgrimage destinations of medieval Europe, the goal of the travelers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Pilgrims came for what the relics were believed to do: to heal, to intercede, to bring the suffering near to a holiness made present in bone and blood. The miracle collections kept by the monks record those expectations in detail.

That cult was deliberately ended. In 1538, during the English Reformation, Henry VIII had the shrine demolished and its treasure carried off, and Becket’s name struck from the liturgical calendars; the relic veneration the cathedral had been built around was now condemned as superstition. The empty bay where the shrine stood remains. The episode marks, concretely, the Reformation’s broader assault on the cult of saints — the conviction, held on one side, that sanctity could be localized in objects and places, and the contrary conviction that drove its destruction.

Scholarship treats Canterbury as a primary witness to medieval pilgrimage and relic devotion: the documented miracles, the routes, the economy of a great shrine and the political uses of a saint are unusually well preserved here. The cathedral has functioned, by turns, as a Benedictine monastery, a pilgrimage center, and a cathedral of the reformed church, and it remains in daily use as the last of these.

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