England of My Heart : Spring

by Edward Hutton

For though St Thomas be forgot in Canterbury, he is on high and valiant, and one day maybe he will return from exile as before, to accomplish wonderful things.

And indeed dead as she is and silent, Canterbury is worthy of resurrection if only because she is as it were a part of him and a part, too, of our origins, the well, though not the source from which the Faith was given us. For some thirteen hundred years when men have spoken of Canterbury, they have had in mind the metropolitan church of England, the great cathedral which still stands so finely there in the rather gloomy close behind Christ Church gate, rightly upon the foundations of its predecessors, Roman, Saxon, and Norman buildings. Ever since there was a civilisation in England, there has been a church in this place; it is our duty, then, as well as our pleasure to approach it to-day with reverence.

Canterbury began as we began in the swamps and the forests, a little lake village in the marshes of the Stour, holding the lowest ford, not beyond the influence of the sea nor out of reach of fresh water. When great Rome broke into England lost in mist, here certainly she established a city that was as it were the focus of all the ports of the Straits whence most easily a man might come into England from the continent. Canterbury grew because she was almost equally near to the ports we know as Lympne, Dover, Richborough and Reculvers, so that a man setting out from the continent and doubtful in which port he would land, wholly at the mercy of wind and tide as he was, would name Canterbury to his correspondent in England as a place of meeting. Thus Canterbury increased. There in the Roman times doubtless a church arose which, doubtless, too, perished in the Diocletian persecution. That it re-arose we know, for Venerable Bede describes it as still existing when, nearly two hundred years after the departure of the Roman legions, St Augustine came into England, sent by St Gregory to make us Christians. He came, as we know, first into Kent to find Canterbury the royal capital of King Ethelbert, and when, says Bede, "an episcopal see had been given to Augustine in the king's own city he regained possession (recuperavit) with the king's help, of a church there which he was informed had been built in the city long before by Roman believers. This he consecrated in the name of the Holy Saviour Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, and fixed there a home for himself and all his successors." [Footnote: Bede, Hist. Eccl., I. xxviii.] This church, rudely repaired, added to and rebuilt, stood until Lanfranc's day, when it was pulled down and destroyed to make way for the great Norman building out of which the church we have has grown.

The little church which Lanfranc destroyed and which had seen so many vicissitudes, was probably a work of the end of the fourth century, at any rate in its foundations. Eadmer indeed who tells us all we know of it says that it was built on the plan of St Peter's in Rome. "This was that very church," he writes, "which had been built by Romans as Bede witnesses in his history, and which was duly arranged in some parts in imitation of the church of the blessed Prince of the Apostles, Peter, in which his holy relics are exalted by the veneration of the whole world." We shall never know much more than Eadmer tells us, for if the foundations still exist they lie within the present church. It is recorded, however, that in the time of St Elphege the church was badly damaged by the Danes, the archbishop himself being martyred at Greenwich. No doubt as often before, the church was patched up, only to perish by fire in 1067, the year after the Battle of Hastings.

When Lanfranc then entered Canterbury, he found his Cathedral a mere ruin, but with his usual energy, though already a man of sixty-five, he set to work to re-establish not only his Cathedral but also the monastery attached to it. He did this on a great scale, providing accommodation for three times the number of monks that had served the Cathedral in the decadent days of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was done he first "destroyed utterly" the Romano-Saxon church and then "set about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070- 1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to perfection." That he worked in great haste and too quickly seems certain. In fact it must be confessed that Lanfranc's church in Canterbury was a more or less exact copy of his church of St Stephen at Caen, but, built much more quickly, was too mean for its purpose. It soon became necessary to rebuild the choir and sanctuary; the nave, however, was allowed to stand until the end of the fourteenth century; but even then its design so hampered the builders of the present nave, for it had been decided to preserve one of Lanfranc's western towers, that to this day the nave of Canterbury is too short, consisting of but eight bays.

Lanfranc's choir was of but two bays and an apse. This was too obviously inadequate to be tolerated by the monks. In 1096 it was pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the north arm and two in the south. All this was done in the time of St Anselm and finished in 1115, when Conrad was Prior of Christ Church.

It was this church with Lanfranc's short Norman nave, western façade and towers, and Conrad's glorious great choir high up over the crypt, a choir broader than the nave and longer too, and with two transepts, the western of Lanfranc's time, the eastern of St Anselm's, that St Thomas knew and that saw his martyrdom in 1170.

Materials for the life of St Thomas are so plentiful that his modern biographers are able to compose a life fuller perhaps in detail and fact than would be possible in the case of any other man of his time. But no account ever written of his martyrdom is at once so simple and so touching as that to be found in the Golden Legend. It was this account which the man of the Middle Age knew by heart, and which brought him in his thousands on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and therefore I give it here.

"When the King of France had made accord between St Thomas and King Henry, the Archbishop," Voragine tells us, "came home to Canterbury, where he was received worshipfully, and sent for them that had trespassed against him, and by the authority of the Pope's Bull openly denounced them accursed, unto the time they came to amendment. And when they heard this they came to him and would have made him assoil them by force; and sent word over to the King how he had done, whereof the King was much wroth and said: If he had men in his land that loved him they would not suffer such a traitor in his land alive.