Canterbury Cathedral is the cathedral of the archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Located in Canterbury, Kent, it is on the site of one of the oldest Christian structures in England and forms part of a World Heritage Site. Its formal title is the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury.
The cathedral was founded in 597 but was completely rebuilt between 1070 and 1077. The east end was greatly enlarged at the beginning of the 12th century, and largely rebuilt in the Gothic style following a fire in 1174, with significant eastward extensions to accommodate the flow of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop who was murdered in the cathedral in 1170. The Norman nave and transepts survived until the late 14th century, when they were demolished to make way for the present structures.
Before the English Reformation, the cathedral was part of a Benedictine monastic community known as the Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, as well as being the seat of the archbishop.
History
Roman
Christianity in Britain is referred to by Tertullian as early as 208 AD and Origen mentions it in 238 AD. In 314 three Bishops from Britain attended the Council of Arles. Following the end of Roman life in Britain, during the first three decades of the fifth century, and the subsequent arrival of the heathen Anglo-Saxons, Christian life in the east of the island was disrupted. Textual sources however suggest that the Christian communities established in the Roman province survived in Western Britain during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. This Western British Christianity proceeded to develop on its own terms.
In 596, Pope Gregory I ordered Augustine, the abbot of St Andrew's Benedictine Abbey in Rome, to lead the Gregorian Mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. According to the writings of the later monk Bede, these Augustinian missionaries gained permission from the Kentish king to restore several pre-existing churches. Augustine then founded Canterbury cathedral in 597 and dedicated it to Jesus Christ, the Holy Saviour. When other dioceses were founded in England, Augustine of Canterbury was made archbishop.
Augustine also founded the Abbey of St Peter and Paul outside the Canterbury city walls. This was later rededicated to St Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. The abbey is part of the World Heritage Site of Canterbury, along with the cathedral and the ancient Church of St Martin.
Early Medieval
Bede recorded that Augustine reused a former Roman church. The oldest remains found during excavations beneath the present nave in 1993 were, however, parts of the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building, which had been constructed across a Roman road. They indicate that the original church consisted of a nave, possibly with a narthex, and side-chapels to the north and south. A smaller subsidiary building was found to the south-west of these foundations. During the 9th or 10th century this church was replaced by a larger structure (161 by 75 ft, 49 by 23 m) with a squared west end. It appears to have had a square central tower. The 11th-century chronicler Eadmer, who had known the Saxon cathedral as a boy, wrote that, in its arrangement, it resembled St Peter's in Rome, indicating that it was of basilican form, with an eastern apse.
During the reforms of Dunstan, archbishop from 960 until his death in 988, a Benedictine abbey named Christ Church Priory was added to the cathedral. But the formal establishment as a monastery seems to date only to c. 997 and the community only became fully monastic from Lanfranc's time onwards (with monastic constitutions addressed by him to Prior Henry). Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar.
Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred the Unready and Norman-born Emma of Normandy were married at Canterbury Cathedral in the Spring of 1002, and Emma was consecrated "Queen Ælfgifu".
The cathedral was badly damaged during Danish raids on Canterbury in 1011. The archbishop, Ælfheah, was taken hostage by the raiders and eventually killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012, the first of Canterbury's five martyred archbishops. After this a western apse was added as an oratory of Saint Mary, probably during the archbishopric of Lyfing (1013–1020) or Aethelnoth (1020–1038).
The 1993 excavations revealed that the new western apse was polygonal, and flanked by hexagonal towers, forming a westwork. It housed the archbishop's throne, with the altar of St Mary just to the east. At about the same time that the westwork was built, the arcade walls were strengthened and towers added to the eastern corners of the church.
Norman
The cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest. Rebuilding began in 1070 under the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc (1070–1077). He cleared the ruins and reconstructed the cathedral to a design based closely on that of the Abbey of Saint-Étienne in Caen, where he had previously been abbot, using stone brought from France. The new church, its central axis about 5 m south of that of its predecessor, was a cruciform building, with an aisled nave of nine bays, a pair of towers at the west end, aisleless transepts with apsidal chapels, a low crossing tower, and a short quire ending in three apses. It was dedicated in 1077.
Under Lanfranc's successor Anselm, who was twice exiled from England, the responsibility for the rebuilding or improvement of the cathedral's fabric was largely left in the hands of the priors. Following the election of Prior Ernulf in 1096, Lanfranc's inadequate east end was demolished, and replaced with an eastern arm 198 feet long, doubling the length of the cathedral. It was raised above a large and elaborately decorated crypt. Ernulf was succeeded in 1107 by Conrad, who completed the work by 1126. The new quire took the form of a complete church in itself, with its own transepts; the east end was semicircular in plan, with three chapels opening off an ambulatory. A free-standing campanile was built on a mound in the cathedral precinct in about 1160.
As with many Gothic church buildings, the interior of the quire was richly embellished. William of Malmesbury wrote: "Nothing like it could be seen in England either for the light of its glass windows, the gleaming of its marble pavements, or the many-coloured paintings which led the eyes to the panelled ceiling above."
Though named after the 6th-century founding archbishop, the Chair of St Augustine, the ceremonial enthronement chair of the Archbishop of Canterbury, may date from the Norman period. Its first recorded use is in 1205.
Plantagenet period
Martyrdom of Thomas Becket
A pivotal moment in the history of the cathedral was the murder of the archbishop, Thomas Becket, in the north-west transept (also known as the Martyrdom) on Tuesday 29 December 1170, by knights of King Henry II. The king had frequent conflicts with the strong-willed Becket and is said to have exclaimed in frustration, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights took it literally and murdered Becket in his own cathedral. After the Anglo-Saxon Ælfheah in 1012, Becket was the second Archbishop of Canterbury to be murdered.
The posthumous veneration of Becket transformed the cathedral into a place of pilgrimage, necessitating both expansion of the building and an increase in wealth, via revenues from pilgrims, in order to make expansion possible.
Rebuilding of the quire
In September 1174 the quire was severely damaged by fire, necessitating a major reconstruction, the progress of which was recorded in detail by a monk named Gervase. The crypt survived the fire intact, and it was found possible to retain the outer walls of the quire, which were increased in height by 12 feet (3.7 m) in the course of the rebuilding, but with the round-headed form of their windows left unchanged. Everything else was replaced in the new Gothic style, with pointed arches, rib vaulting, and flying buttresses. The limestone used was imported from Caen in Normandy, and Purbeck marble was used for the shafting. The quire was back in use by 1180 and in that year the remains of Dunstan and Ælfheah were moved there from the crypt.
The master-mason appointed to rebuild the quire was a Frenchman, William of Sens. Following his injury in a fall from the scaffolding in 1179 he was replaced by one of his former assistants, known as William the Englishman.
Trinity Chapel and Shrine of Thomas Becket
In 1180–1184, in place of the old, square-ended, eastern chapel, the present Trinity Chapel was constructed, a broad extension with an ambulatory, designed to house the shrine of St Thomas Becket. A further chapel, circular in plan, was added beyond that, which housed further relics of Becket, widely believed to have included the top of his skull, struck off in the course of his assassination. This latter chapel became known as the "Corona" or "Becket's Crown". These new parts east of the quire transepts were raised on a higher crypt than Ernulf's quire, necessitating flights of steps between the two levels. Work on the chapel was completed in 1184, but Becket's remains were not moved from his tomb in the crypt until 1220. Further significant interments in the Trinity Chapel included those of Edward Plantagenet (The "Black Prince") and King Henry IV.
The shrine in the Trinity Chapel was placed directly above Becket's original tomb in the crypt. A marble plinth, raised on columns, supported what an early visitor, Walter of Coventry, described as "a coffin wonderfully wrought of gold and silver, and marvellously adorned with precious gems". Other accounts make clear that the gold was laid over a wooden chest, which in turn contained an iron-bound box holding Becket's remains. Further votive treasures were added to the adornments of the chest over the years, while others were placed on pedestals or beams nearby, or attached to hanging drapery. For much of the time, the chest (or "feretory") was kept concealed by a wooden cover, which would be theatrically raised by ropes once a crowd of pilgrims had gathered. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who visited in 1512–1514, recorded that, once the cover was raised, "the Prior ... pointed out each jewel, telling its name in French, its value, and the name of its donor; for the principal of them were offerings sent by sovereign princes."
The income from pilgrims (such as those portrayed in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) who visited Becket's shrine, which was regarded as a place of healing, largely paid for the subsequent rebuilding of the cathedral and its associated buildings. This revenue included the profits from the sale of pilgrim badges depicting Becket, his martyrdom, or his shrine.
The shrine was removed in 1538. King Henry VIII allegedly summoned the dead saint to court to face charges of treason. Having failed to appear, he was found guilty in his absence and the treasures of his shrine were confiscated, carried away in two coffers and 26 carts.
Monastic buildings
A bird's-eye view of the cathedral and its monastic buildings, made in about 1165 and known as the "waterworks plan" is preserved in the Eadwine Psalter in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. A detailed description of the plan can be found in the classic paper by Willis. It shows that Canterbury employed the same general principles of arrangement common to all Benedictine monasteries, although, unusually, the cloister and monastic buildings were to the north, rather than the south of the church. There was a separate chapter-house which still exists, said to be "the largest of its kind in all of England". Stained glass here depicts the history of Canterbury.
The buildings formed separate groups around the church. Adjoining it, on the north side, stood the cloister and the buildings devoted to the monastic life. To the east and west of these were those devoted to the exercise of hospitality. Also to the east was the infirmary, with its own chapel. To the north, a large open court divided the monastic buildings from menial ones, such as the stables, granaries, barn, bakehouse, brewhouse, and laundries, inhabited by the lay servants of the establishment. At the greatest possible distance from the church, beyond the precinct of the monastery, was the eleemosynary department. The almonry for the relief of the poor, with a great hall annexed, formed the paupers' hospitium.