For the rest the choir of Canterbury, as we know it, the choir began in 1174 by William of Sens, is as French as its predecessor, but in all else very different. In order perhaps to provide a great space for the shrine of the newly canonised St Thomas of Canterbury, to whose tomb already half Europe was flocking, the choir was built even longer than its predecessor. The great space provided for the shrine in the Trinity Chapel behind the choir and high altar opened on the east into a circular chapel known, perhaps on account of the relic it held, as Becket's Crown. Till 1220 when all was ready, the body of St Thomas lay in an iron coffin in the crypt, and the great feast and day of pilgrimage in his honour was the day of his martyrdom, December 29, so incredibly honourable as being within the octave of the Nativity of Our Lord. But in 1220 it was decided to translate the body from the crypt to the new shrine in the Trinity Chapel in July, for the winter pilgrimage was irksome. From that year a new feast was established, the feast of the Translation of St Thomas upon July 7th, and thus in England down to our own day, St Thomas has two feasts, that of his Martyrdom on December 29, when still his relics are exposed in the great Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, and in the little church of St Thomas, the Catholic sanctuary in Canterbury, and that of his Translation upon July 7th.
Of that first summer pilgrimage to the new shrine of St Thomas we have very full accounts. It was the most glorious and the most extraordinary assemblage that had perhaps ever been seen in England. The Archbishop had given two years' notice of the event, and this had been circulated not only in all England, but throughout Europe. "Orders had been issued for maintenance to be provided for the vast multitude not only in the city of Canterbury itself, but on the various roads by which the pilgrims would approach. During the whole celebration along the whole way from London to Canterbury, hay and provender were given to all who asked, and at each gate of Canterbury in the four quarters of the city and in the four licensed cellars, were placed tuns of wine to be distributed gratis, and on the day of the festival, wine ran freely through the gutters of the streets." In the presence of the young Henry III., too young himself to bear a part, the coffin in which lay the relics of St Thomas was borne on the shoulders of the Papal Legate, the Archbishop Stephen Langton, the Grand Justiciary Hubert de Burgh, and the Archbishop of Rheims, from the crypt up to the Trinity Chapel in the presence of every Bishop and Abbot of England, of the great officials of the kingdom and of the special ambassadors of every state in Europe.
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Of bishops and abbots, prior and parsons, Of earls and of barons and of many knights thereto, Of sergeants and of squires and of his husbandmen enow, And of simple men eke of the land—so thick hither drew. |
So was St Thomas vindicated and God avenged. And St Thomas reigned as was thought for ever on high, in the new sanctuary of his Cathedral Church.
I say he reigned on high. The choir and sanctuary of Canterbury had even in St Anselm's time as we have seen, been high above the nave. William of Sens designed the new choir, as high as the old, but very nobly raised still higher, the great altar, and higher yet the Chapel of the Trinity in which stood the shrine. St Thomas had an especial devotion to the Holy Trinity. It was in a former Trinity Chapel that he had said his first Mass, and whether on this account or another, his devotion was such that it was he who first established that Feast, till then merely the octave of Whitsunday. His shrine then was well placed in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity.
In examining the church to-day one can well understand the beauty of William of Sens' idea, and see, too, where, and perhaps understand why, it really fails or at least comes short of perfection.
William of Sens trained in Latin traditions had, and rightly, little respect, we may think, for the work of the past. He would have had all new. But by 1174, unlike Anselm in 1096, and still more unlike Lanfranc in 1070, he had in all probability a genuine English and national prejudice to meet, an English dislike of destruction and an English hatred of anything new.
It has been said that the failure of William of Sens' design was due to the meanness of the monks of Christ Church. But meanness is not an English failing; on the contrary, our great fault is the very opposite, extravagance. It was surely not meanness and at such a time and in such a cause that forced the monastery to deny William of Sens the free hand he desired; it was prejudice and a fear, almost barbaric; of destruction. The monks forced their builder to accommodate the new choir to what remained of the old work. They refused to sacrifice St Anselm's tower on the south or the tower of St Andrew on the north, therefore the wide choir of Canterbury, already wider than the nave and growing wider still as it went eastward, had to be strangled between them, and to open again as well as it could into the Trinity Chapel and the Corona. All that was old, too, and that they loved they used; the old piers of the crypt were to remain and still to support the pillars of the choir, which were thus, no doubt to William's disgust, unequally placed so that here the arches are pointed but there round. In many ways William must have considered his employers barbarians, and in the true sense of that much abused term, he was right. No man brought up in the Greek and Latin traditions would have hesitated to destroy in order to build anew. The English cannot do that; they patch and make do, and what must be new they cannot love until it is old; their buildings are not so much works of art as growths, and there is much to be said for them. Only here at Canterbury their prejudice has been a misfortune. Not even the most convinced Englishman can look upon the twisted and constricted choir of Canterbury and rejoice.
William of Sens, however, hampered though he was, is responsible for the work we see. It is true he died after some four years of work at Canterbury, falling one day from a scaffold, but William the Englishman who followed him only completed what was really already finished. The design, the idea, and the genius of Canterbury choir are
French, spoiled by English prejudice, but undoubtedly French for all that.