Canterbury Cathedral

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In 597 a party of monks sent from Rome reached the kingdom of Kent, and the mission they carried fixed a church on the ground where one still stands. Augustine of Canterbury — dispatched by Pope Gregory the Great to bring the Latin faith to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms — was given a site within the old Roman walls of Canterbury by King Æthelberht, whose Frankish queen Bertha was already a Christian. There Augustine established his see and dedicated his church to Christ. The cathedral that bears the formal name of the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury descends in unbroken institutional line from that act. Worship has continued on the spot, through fire, conquest, and the breaking of altars, for more than fourteen hundred years; it is the oldest see in England and the senior church of the whole later structure of English Christianity. The Archbishop of Canterbury remains the senior bishop of the Church of England and, by a tie of communion rather than command, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The building in stone

The visible fabric is a record of successive ambitions laid one over another. The Anglo-Saxon cathedral, enlarged across five centuries, was gutted by fire in 1067, the year after the Norman Conquest. The first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc — a Lombard scholar brought from the abbey of Bec — rebuilt it between roughly 1070 and 1077 in the massive Romanesque manner, in Caen stone shipped from Normandy, as the church of a community of some seventy monks. His successors extended it eastward; the great choir raised under the priors Ernulf and Conrad in the early twelfth century was famous in its day for its painted glory.

That choir burned in 1174 — four years after Becket’s killing, and at the worst possible moment for a church now drawing pilgrims by the thousand. The disaster and its repair are described, year by year, by the monk Gervase of Canterbury, whose account is one of the most precise records of a medieval building campaign in existence. The chapter brought over a master mason, William of Sens, who rebuilt the choir in the new pointed style arriving from France, introducing ribbed and sexpartite vaulting and slender columns of dark Purbeck marble set against pale stone. When William fell from the scaffolding in 1177 and was crippled, the work passed to a second master remembered only as William the Englishman, who completed the eastern arm: the soaring Trinity Chapel raised expressly to receive Becket’s shrine, and beyond it the round chapel called the Corona, or Becket’s Crown, finished by about 1184. The result is among the earliest and purest works of Gothic in England — what later builders would name the Early English style. The central tower, Bell Harry, rose much later, between 1490 and 1510, its Perpendicular fan vault a final flourish of the Middle Ages above a building that had by then been worshipped in for nine centuries. Canterbury thus stands beside the other great English cathedrals — Salisbury, Lincoln, and, far younger, St Paul’s in London — not as one style but as a chronicle of them.

A monastery first

For most of its history the cathedral was also an abbey. The community attached to it, the Benedictine priory of Christ Church, lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict, and the great cloister, chapter house, and water works on the north side belong to that monastic life as much as the nave belongs to worship. The arrangement was peculiar to England: a monastery whose church was at the same time a bishop’s seat, the monks forming the cathedral’s chapter. The shape of Western monasticism is written into the plan — the choir for the monks’ eight daily offices, the precinct walled against the town. Among the priory’s archbishops was Anselm, the Bec-trained theologian who held the see from 1093 and whose feast and relics the monks kept; the school of thought he opened gave the cathedral a place in the intellectual history of Latin Christendom quite apart from its later fame as a shrine.

The Martyrdom

The cathedral’s wider renown rests on a single night. Thomas Becket had risen from London merchant stock to be chancellor and intimate of King Henry II, and then, on his elevation to Canterbury in 1162, had turned from the king’s servant into the church’s fiercest defender. The quarrel that followed was over the liberties of the church — chiefly whether clergy accused of crimes answered to the king’s courts or to ecclesiastical ones, and whether appeals could run to Rome without royal leave. Henry sought to fix the old customs in writing as the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164; Becket first assented and then repudiated them, and the breach drove him into six years of exile in France under the protection of the French king and the pope. He returned to England late in 1170 under a fragile reconciliation, and at once excommunicated the bishops who had crowned the king’s son in his absence — the act that, carried to Henry in Normandy, drew from the king the furious words that sent the knights across the Channel. On the evening of 29 December 1170, four knights of the king’s household — Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton — came to the cathedral and cut the archbishop down in the north-west transept as the monks sang vespers. The killing of a prelate at his own altar, with the crown’s hand all but visibly behind it, shocked Latin Christendom as few acts of the century did. An eyewitness, the clerk Edward Grim, who took a sword-cut on his own arm shielding the archbishop, left a description of the blows that spread across Europe with the news.

The site of the killing, soon called simply the Martyrdom, became the first station of a cult that formed with extraordinary speed. Within days the monks were gathering reports of cures worked at the tomb in the crypt; within weeks the blood swept from the transept floor, mixed with water and sold in small lead ampullae as the Water of Saint Thomas, was being carried across England. Pope Alexander III canonized Becket on 21 February 1173, scarcely two years after the murder — an unusually swift elevation. In July 1174 King Henry II, seeking to disarm the saint his servants had made, came barefoot through the city in a penitent’s smock and was scourged at the tomb by the assembled bishops and the whole convent of monks, then kept vigil through the night on the cathedral floor. The penance of a king before the relics of the man he had driven to death fixed the saint’s authority beyond argument.

The shrine and the road to it

On 7 July 1220 the relics were lifted from the crypt and translated, in a ceremony of immense solemnity in the presence of the boy-king Henry III and Archbishop Stephen Langton, into a jeweled shrine in the new Trinity Chapel behind the high altar. There they lay for three centuries. The shrine was sheathed in gold and so thickly studded with offered jewels that, by the end, the most famous of them — the Régale of France, a great ruby given by King Louis VII — was pointed out to every visitor. The translation gained its own feast, kept on 7 July, and the road to Canterbury became one of the principal pilgrimage routes of medieval Europe — set, in the cult’s first century, beside Santiago de Compostela and Rome as a goal worth the journey. From London the pilgrims went out along the old Roman line of Watling Street through Rochester; from the south and west the ancient ridgeway later called the Pilgrims’ Way ran across the downs of Surrey and Kent to converge on the city. They returned wearing the pewter badge of Saint Thomas — a sword, an ampulla, the mitred head — stamped out by the thousand and pinned to hat or cloak as proof of the journey made; the lead-alloy ampullae of the holy Water of Saint Thomas turn up in riverbeds and excavations from Kent to Scandinavia, the surviving small change of the whole economy. It is this destination, and these travelers, that frame the great unfinished poem of Geoffrey Chaucer: his company rides out from Southwark toward the holy blissful martyr, and the whole machinery of the Canterbury Tales turns on a journey to Becket’s tomb.

What the pilgrims came for was what the relics were held to do. To stand near the saint’s bones, to touch the shrine, to drink the diluted blood, was to bring the sick and the desperate close to a holiness made present in matter — bone, blood, cloth, the very stone where the man had fallen. This is the logic of the cult of the saints in its medieval fullness: heaven was not only distant but locatable, and a particular place could be more charged with it than the ground a mile away. The monks recorded the results. Two of their number, Benedict of Peterborough and his successor William of Canterbury, compiled between them the largest collection of miracle stories surviving from the high Middle Ages — well over four hundred cures, rescues, and wonders, set down with the names, towns, and ailments of the petitioners. Those books, more than the gold, are what make Canterbury a primary witness for the historian: a great shrine documenting, in detail it had no idea would outlast it, exactly what ordinary people asked of a saint and how the keepers of a cult organized belief into pilgrimage, offering, and account.

The same windows that lit the Trinity Chapel told the story in glass. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century Miracle Windows, ranged around the shrine, depict scenes from Benedict’s and William’s collections — the leper, the drowned child, the blind restored — so that the illiterate pilgrim circling the shrine read the cult’s evidence in colored light. Several of these windows survive, the most complete cycle of miracle imagery left anywhere from the period.

The cult deliberately ended

That whole apparatus was undone in a few months. In September 1538, in the course of the English Reformation, commissioners acting for King Henry VIII broke open the shrine, prised off the gold and the jewels, and carried the treasure away — the spoil, by one account, filled more than twenty carts. What became of the bones is unknown; a report soon circulated that they had been burned. In November 1538 a royal proclamation declared that Becket had been no true saint but a rebel against his lawful king, struck his name and feast from the liturgical calendars, and ordered his images and the word saint beside his name effaced wherever they appeared. Two years later the priory of Christ Church was dissolved with the rest of England’s monasteries, and the cathedral was refounded as a secular establishment of dean and canons — the form it keeps still.

The episode marks, in one place and in concrete terms, the Reformation’s wider assault on the cult of saints. Two convictions met over the broken shrine, and neither can be reduced to the other. On one side stood the belief that sanctity could be localized — that grace gathered in particular bones and particular ground, and that a pilgrim’s journey toward them was a real movement toward God. On the other stood the conviction that drove the demolition: that to seek God in gold and bone was to mistake the creature for the creator, and that the wealth heaped on a dead archbishop was an offense to be stripped away. The empty bay in the Trinity Chapel where the shrine once stood — worn, now, by the feet of those who came for centuries to kneel there — remains as the residue of that argument, a marked absence rather than a monument.

Scholarship and sources

Canterbury is one of the best-documented religious sites of medieval Europe, and the modern study of it rests on an unusually rich body of contemporary writing. The rebuilding after 1174 is known in extraordinary detail from the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury, a monk of Christ Church, whose narrative of the fire and the work of the two master masons is a foundational text for the history of Gothic construction. The cult itself is reconstructed chiefly from the two great miracle collections; the standard study of how such collections were made and used is Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), which takes the Becket corpus as its central case (publisher record). The manuscripts, dating, and authorship of Benedict’s and William’s collections are treated in detail in the volume of studies issued by Brepols, William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections (Brepols Online), and the contemporary biographies and passion-narratives — Edward Grim’s among them — are gathered in the Rolls Series Materials for the History of Thomas Becket. The liturgical afterlife of the saint, the offices and hymns sung at Canterbury, is edited and studied by Kay Brainerd Slocum, The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries (Routledge, 2018) (publisher page). Taken together this material supports a continuous scholarly conversation on pilgrimage, relic devotion, and the political uses of sanctity, for which Canterbury serves as the textbook example.

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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