The Cathedral of Canterbury by Esther Singleton

W. H FREMANTLE.

The foundation 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 great abbey 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 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 along the 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.