THE CATHEDRAL OF CANTERBURY.W. H FREMANTLE.
Thefoundation of St. Martin’s Church and the lower part of its walls, which are Roman, stood in 598 as they stand to-day; and they were the walls of the little church which had been given to the Christian Queen Bertha and her chaplain Bishop Luithart, by her pagan husband King Ethelbert. When Augustine passed towards the city, as described by the Venerable Bede, with his little procession headed by the monk carrying a board on which was a rough picture of Christ, and a chorister bearing a silver cross, his heart, no doubt, beat high with hope: but his hope would have grown into exultation could he have looked forward through the centuries, and beheld the magnificent Cathedral which was to spring up where his episcopal throne was fixed, and the energetic and varied Christian life which has issued from this first home of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. To us the scene is full of historical recollections. Between the place where we are standing and the Cathedral are the city walls, on the very site which they occupied in the days of Ethelbert, and the postern-gate through which Queen Bertha came every day to her prayers; in the nearer distance, a little to the right of the Cathedral, are the remains of the greatabbey which Augustine founded; to our left is the Pilgrims’ Way, by which, after Becket’s canonization, those who landed at Dover made their way to the shrine of St. Thomas.
THE CATHEDRAL OF CANTERBURY.
THE CATHEDRAL OF CANTERBURY.
The eye glances over the valley of the Stour, enclosed between the hill on which we are placed and that of St. Thomas, crowned by the fine buildings of the Clergy Orphan School; and ranges from Harbledown (Chaucer’s “little town under the Blean ycleped Bob-up-and-down”) on the left to the Jesuit College at Hale’s Place farther to the right; and thence down the valley to Fordwich, where formerly the waters of the Stour joined those of the Wantsome, the estuary separating Thanet from the mainland. This town at the Domesday epoch was a port with flourishing mills and fisheries. There the Caen stone was landed to build the Cathedral, and the tuns of wine from the monks’ vineyards in France were lifted out of the ships by the mayor’s crane....
But it is time that we go into the Cathedral precincts. Making use of a canon’s key, we pass, by Queen Bertha’s Postern, through the old city walls, along a piece of the ancient Queningate lane—a reserved space between the walls of the city and the precincts, along which the citizens and troops could pass freely for purposes of defence: through the Bowling Green, where the tower of Prior Chillenden is seen to have been used as a pigeon-house, into the Cathedral Yard. In so doing we pass under a Norman archway of the date of Lanfranc and the Conqueror, which formerly stood in a wall separating the cemetery of the monks from that of the laity; then alongthe south side of the Cathedral, passing Anselm’s chapel, and the beautiful Norman tower attached to the south-eastern transept, with its elaborate tracery, which shows how delicate Norman work could be; past the south porch, over which is a bas-relief of the altar where the sword of Becket’s murderer was preserved; and round, past the western door, into the cloister.
The cloister occupies the same space as the Norman cloister built by Lanfranc, but of the Norman work only a doorway remains at the north-east corner; there is some Early English arcading on the north side, but the present tracery and fan-worked roof belong to the end of the Fourteenth Century, when Archbishops Sudbury, Arundell, and Courtenay, and Prior Chillenden (1390–1411) rebuilt the nave, the cloister and the chapter-house. The later work cuts across the older in the most unceremonious way, as is seen especially in the square doorway by which we shall presently enter the “Martyrdom,” which cuts into a far more beautiful portal of the decorated period....
If from the place at which we have in imagination been standing, at the north-west corner of the cloister, we look for a moment behind us, we see in the wall a blocked-up door, with a curious door at the side of it. The hole is said to have been made in order to pass bottles and other articles through from the cellarer’s lodgings, which were on the other side of the wall. The doorway was the entrance from the Archbishop’s Palace, which occupied the space a little further to the west; and through it Becket passed out to his death, on the 29th of December, 1170....
Henry had to do penance, and practically to concede the clerical immunities for which Becket had contended; and Becket became a saint, “the holy, blissful martyr,” himself the worker of a thousand miracles, and his shrine the goal of pilgrimages from all parts of England and of Europe. But, whatever we may think of this, his death was certainly the making of Canterbury and its Cathedral. Four years after Becket’s death the choir was burned down (1174): but the treasure which was poured into the martyr’s church enabled the monks to rebuild it in its present grander proportions; and the city, which before was insignificant, became wealthy, populous, and renowned.
The crypt was the first place of Becket’s interment, and into the crypt we now pass.... The pavement in the centre of the Trinity Chapel (the part east of the screen) is very rough, being composed of the stones which formed the steps and pavement of the shrine; but the marble pavement around it is still as it was when the shrine was standing, and a perceptible line marks the impress of the pilgrims’ feet as they stood in a row to see the treasures. The shrine stood upon a platform approached by three marble steps, some stones of which, grooved by the pilgrims’ knees, are still seen in the flooring. The platform was paved with mosaic and medallions, specimens of which may still be seen in the present pavement. Above this platform was the chased and gilded coffin of the saint, supported by three arches, which were hung with votive offerings of extreme richness, and between two of which sick persons were allowed to pass, so that by rubbingthemselves against the stones they might draw forth virtue from the relics of the saint. The whole was covered with an oaken case richly decorated, which at a given signal from the monk whom Erasmus styles the mystagogus, or master of the mysteries, was drawn up and revealed the riches within to the wondering gaze of the pilgrims. In the painted windows of the chapel are the records of the miracles wrought by the intercession of St. Thomas: here, a dead man being carried out to burial is raised; there, the parents of a boy who has been drowned in the attempt to catch frogs in the river are informed of their loss by his companions with eager gestures, and he too is restored to life; and in each case offerings of gold and silver are poured upon the shrine; the madman is seen coming back in his right mind; “Amens accedit, sanus recedit:” and on several occasions the saint himself comes on the scene to heal the sick man on his bed, in one case flying forth from the shrine in his episcopal robes. The worship of Becket was the favourite cultus of the unreformed Church of England; yet, strange to tell, from the day when Henry gave orders to demolish the shrine, and to expunge his name from all the service books and his memorials from all the churches, no one seems to have thought anything more about him. The blow which, to adapt the language of the Old Testament, “destroyed Becket out of Israel,” though violent, was timely.
The Black Prince, whose wife was the Fair Maid of Kent, was especially attached to Canterbury, and founded two chantries in the crypt or undercroft. These now form the entrance to the French Church, where the descendantsof the Walloon and Huguenot refugees still worship in the forms of their ancestors. The Prince had desired to be buried below; but, partly from the special devotion which he had to the Trinity, partly that so great a man might have the place of honour, his tomb was erected at the side of Becket’s shrine. He left to the Church of Canterbury his velvet coat embroidered with lions and lilies, his ornamental shield, his lion-crested helmet, his sword and his gauntlets, all of which still hang above his bronze effigy, except the sword, which is said to have been removed by Cromwell, and of which only part of the scabbard remains. The effigy is believed to be a good likeness. It was placed upon the tomb where the body lies soon after his death, which occurred on the 8th of June, 1376, the feast of the Trinity, as recorded in the inscription in the French of his own Aquitaine. The Prince of Wales’s feathers and the lions and lilies, with the Prince’s two mottoes, “Ich diene,” (I serve), and “Houmout,” (High Courage), form the ornaments of the tomb, which is also surrounded by some French verses chosen by the Prince himself, and describing the vanity of earthly glory....
And now we leave the Cathedral, and pass out of the precincts by the Christ Church Gate, still beautiful even in its defacement, and through the narrow Mercery Lane, where stood in old times the booths for the sellers of relics and of the little leaden bottles supposed to contain in their water some drops of St. Thomas’s blood; where also stood the Chequers of the Hope, at which Chaucer’s pilgrims regaled themselves, and of which one fragment, marked bythe Black Prince’s emblem of the lion with protruding tongue, may still be seen at the corner of the lane; down the High Street, where we pass the old East Bridge Hospital, founded by Lanfranc, endowed by Becket, and saved from confiscation by Cranmer, with its low Norman doorway and the crypt under its hall; and leave the city by the West Gate, which was erected by Archbishop Sudbury on the line where the eastern wall ran along the Stour; and past the Falstaff Inn, where the sign of the roystering old knight hangs out on some beautiful ancient iron-work, and welcomes the cyclists who specially affect his inn; and so on to the South Eastern Railway Station.
We entered Canterbury on foot with Augustine, we leave it by a modern railway.
Farrar,Our English Minsters(London, 1893).
Farrar,Our English Minsters(London, 1893).