Canterbury Part 2

The next monument eastward of the Black Prince's is Archbishop Courtenay's (1396); and beyond this a mean brick mound without inscription but not without a history. Here lies Odet de Coligny, brother of the great admiral. Though a prince, a cardinal, an inquisitor, and a bishop, his sympathies were with the Huguenots, and he undertook a mission on their behalf to Queen Elizabeth. In the canonical house, formerly known as Master Omer's, at the southeast corner of the Precincts, he was poisoned by his servants, whether or not by foreign instigation is not known. Those were days when the murderer's hand reached far and freely, especially in causes political and religious. He was laid here and rudely bricked over, in expectation of his removal to France; but the French wars of religion left men no leisure to care for their dead. Against the south wall is a tomb without inscription and long unidentified. When opened in 1889 there was found, in full pomp of episcopal vestments, pastoral staff, chalice and paten, wearing a ring graven with strange Egyptian symbols, Hubert Walter, acclaimed archbishop on the field of Acre and afterwards the faithful chancellor who kept the kingdom and raised the ransom for Coeur de Lion. Beside him was a collecting box, perhaps for Peter's Pence, or for the King's ransom. These relics are kept under gla.s.s in Henry IV's chantry.

East of Trinity Chapel is the circular s.p.a.ce called the Corona, or Becket's Crown, either as the head or crown of Becket's church, or, as Dr. c.o.x thinks, because here by the altar to the Trinity was a silver bust of Becket containing the fragment of his skull cut off by Richard the Breton's sword. The three most famous objects in the Cathedral are the site of the shrine, the Black Prince's monument, and the chair of St. Augustine; and here is the last of the three. In this seat of Purbeck or Bethersden marble have been enthroned from time immemorial the Archbishops of Canterbury. If some critics say that it is no older than the thirteenth century, others say that it was in existence in the sixth century, when Augustine arrived, and that Kentish kings were crowned on it. It has always a place in the triple enthronement of an Archbishop of Canterbury. He is seated on the throne in the choir as Diocesan Bishop, in the chapter house as t.i.tular Abbot, and in St.

Augustine's chair as Primate of All England.

The pilgrims were conducted from Trinity Chapel back to the nave, along the south choir aisle, where the steps still show the marks of the two iron gates which divided the ascending from the descending stream. We, however, will take the north choir aisle, which was strictly reserved for monks, clerics, and officials, and find our way into the choir. The pavement is still that of Lanfranc or Anselm, for, when any part of it is taken up, bits of lead are found which fell melted from the roof, in the great fire of 1174. Facing east by the archbishop's throne we see the monuments of six archbishops. Nearest on our right is Cardinal Kemp, who was with Henry V at Agincourt; then Stratford, the opponent of Edward III; and lastly Simon Sudbury, who built Westgate and lost his head. Nearest on our left is the gorgeous tomb of Chicheley, who, in old age, was stricken with remorse for having instigated Henry V's French campaigns in order to distract attention from Lollard schemes for confiscating Church property. He founded All Souls College, Oxford, to pray for the souls of those who fell in the wars, and the Warden still renews, when needed, the colour-decoration of his monument. Then Howley, who crowned Queen Victoria, and finally Bourchier, who crowned Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII, and, by wedding the latter to Elizabeth of York, terminated the Wars of the Roses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTGATE

(_Page 13_)]

In Canterbury Cathedral have been buried some fifty archbishops, the Black Prince, Henry IV, two queens, and many others of royalty or distinction. Of the old monuments only about eighteen are left. The great fires of 1067 and 1174, the violence of men, and the ravages of time have all taken their toll.

Of the architectural history of the Cathedral, deeply interesting as it is, little can here be said. It may be summed up as a happy alternation of destructive fires and vigorous priors, aided by munificent archbishops and master masons of genius. There is no history of the first Christian settlement in these islands; but we dimly descry a Roman, and on its foundations a Saxon building which lasted till the Conquest Then came a fire, and with it Lanfranc's opportunity. He had driving power, and in the brief period of seven years (1070-7) built a stone Cathedral over the Roman and Saxon ground plans, adding a short choir and western towers of which one remained till 1834.

Only twenty years after Lanfranc, Anselm, greatly daring, pulled down most of his choir, and with his prior, Ernulf, began a slightly wider and much longer choir, extending about as far as the present Holy Table. This came to be known as "the glorious choir of Conrad", from the name of the prior who completed it. Anselm's or Ernulf's work still remains as part of the present crypt. In 1174, a hundred years later, the year of Henry II's penance at Becket's tomb, the whole church was ruined by the most devastating fire in its annals. How severe was the blow, both to monks and people, we may learn from Gervase, who was an eyewitness and one of the fraternity. The people "tore their hair and beat the walls and pavement of the church with their heads and hands, blaspheming the Lord and his Saints"; the monks "wailed and howled rather than sang their daily and nightly services"

in the roofless nave.

French William, the designer of the Cathedral at Sens in Normandy, was chosen for the restoration; and the mark of his handiwork is plainly to be seen in the resemblances between the two churches. Genius transforms hindrances into triumphs. French William's difficulty was that the side chapels of St. Andrew and St. Anselm, built on the arc of the old apse, were too near together to admit of the full width of his new and longer choir. He kept the chapels, contracted the choir at their nearest points and then expanded it into the Trinity Chapel, with the remarkable effect which strikes every observer.

When his work was partly accomplished, and he was on the scaffolding to prepare for the turning of the vault, he fell with a ma.s.s of timber and stone from a height of 50 feet, and was disabled for life. He chose for his successor another man of genius, known as English William, one of his staff, "small of body, but in many kinds of workmanship acute and honest", who added to his master's design the great uplift of the floor of the Trinity Chapel and completed that and the Corona or Becket's Crown. Since 1185 no substantial alteration has been made in the eastern half of the Cathedral.

If the reader desires to know the chief sources of our information about the early history of Canterbury Cathedral, the reply is in itself a picture of the times. Eadmer was a boy in the convent school before the Conquest, and singer or precentor in Lanfranc's choir of monks. He also lived through the rule of Anselm.

Gervase was a monk of Christ Church when Becket died in the Martyrdom.

He witnessed the fire of 1174, the desolation it left behind, and the immortal achievements of French William and of his English namesake.

Eadmer and Gervase have both left us narratives, not umixed with monkish legend, but faithful and full of curious information.

It is not easy for us to understand the veneration paid to relics; yet from that veneration sprang all the glories of the Cathedral. And when we read in these old chronicles, translated from Latin in Willis'

_Architectural History_, of the desperate, almost agonized labours of the monks to save from fire, weather, or dishonour the remains of their buried saints, we shall withhold our scorn for their superst.i.tion, and find less surprising the immense sums paid in the Middle Age for the arm or skull of a dead man.

The earlier Saxon archbishops were laid in the ground of St.

Augustine's Abbey, which thus acc.u.mulated a store of sanct.i.ty which roused the sore jealousy of their Christ Church brethren. Accordingly in the eighth century Cuthbert obtained a secret permission from the Pope to be buried in the Cathedral. His death was not divulged until he was safely interred, and when the monks of St. Augustine's came to demand as usual the body of the dead archbishop, they were met with derisive shouts, and the brandishing of the Papal decree. Thus Gervase records that Cuthbert, "being endowed with great wisdom, procured for Christ Church the right of free sepulture".

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GATEWAY, ST. AUGUSTINE'S ABBEY

(_Page 51_)]

There is at least one "secret chamber" in the Cathedral for the hiding away of relics or of treasures. This is the Chapel of St. Gabriel in the crypt. The entrance was through a hole which was entirely concealed by an outside altar. This chapel was so successfully hidden that the monk Gervase was evidently ignorant of its existence in the twelfth century; and its roof is covered with very curious painting of that date, which the darkness (for there is no window) has kept in remarkable preservation. There is also a room, over the Treasury, accessible only by a door opening 6 feet above the floor of St.

Andrew's Chapel, requiring therefore a ladder as means of approach.

But it was never a really secret chamber, and was probably at one time entered by an ordinary stone stairway.

THE MONASTIC BUILDINGS

It must be remembered that Canterbury Cathedral was originally the church or chapel of the monastery. The people were admitted to the nave, but only monks and clergy took any official part in the services, or entered the choir, which was the sanctuary of the Brotherhood. Indeed the entire Precincts belonged to them; and though they allowed the ground near the Christ Church Gate to be used as a general churchyard, or "exterior cemetery", entrance to the inner Precincts was only by permission or invitation. The present boundary of this monkish domain on the south and east is the old fortified wall of the city, but formerly the monastery had an interior wall of its own, running parallel to it, and leaving a s.p.a.ce or lane about 14 feet wide, for the carrying of munitions and provisions to the defenders of the outer wall, and of materials for its repair.

The unique remnant of this lane is known as Quenengate or Queeningate Lane, and if we can borrow a canon's key and pa.s.s through the Norman archway of the Bowling Green, near the east end of the Cathedral, we may see not only Queeningate Lane but also the postern door in the outer wall through which Queen Bertha, in the sixth century, went to her daily prayer at St. Martin's. Nay, as we open that door we are face to face with the turreted fourteenth-century gateway of St.

Augustine's, founded by and named after the great man, and once ranking second only to Subiaco among the Benedictine monasteries of Europe. Time was when St. Augustine's looked down upon Christ Church, as upon a little brother who should not presume. When, at the invitation of Edward I, Archbishop Peckham went to the Abbey to dine, he was refused admission, unless he would lower his cross or crozier on entering. He declined this indignity, and was absent from the royal dinner-party. Ethelbert's Tower, a splendid remnant of the Norman abbey church, stood till 1822, when it was battered down by the Philistines to provide cheap building material and make room for a tea-garden. In Bede's time this church had a tomb inscribed: "Here resteth the Lord Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury A.D. 605".

To share the sanct.i.ty of a spot so consecrated, saints, n.o.bles, and kings were brought hither on their last journey. Cuthbert turned the tide when he so cunningly gained the right of sepulture for Christ Church, and eventually, as we know, Becket's shrine quite eclipsed St.

Augustine's. After the dissolution the abbey became for a time a royal lodge, and Queen Elizabeth and the First and Second Charles have occupied the guest-chamber over the gateway.

Returning to the Precincts, we are again reminded that the makers of Canterbury were the pilgrims and the monks. Of the three houses on our right, the first is Master Omer's, the guest-house for pilgrims where Odet de Coligny was murdered; the second incorporates part of the infirmary; the third was its frater and kitchen; while the long arcade of ruins, still reddened with the fire of 700 years ago, and stretching along the north side of the choir to the Dark Entry, was the monks' hospital.

So vast an infirmary as this, with its chapel at one end and cloister at the other, for a community of 100 to 150 monks, seems at first unaccountable. This and some other things we shall understand better when we have walked through the infirmary cloister, and along Lanfranc's vaulted pa.s.sage to the great or main Cloister of the convent. This was the centre of the whole monastic life, in which the monks spent the greater part of the day, and from which doors gave access to every part of the building, dining hall or frater, dormitories, cellarer's stores and lodging, deportum or recreation room, chapter house for business and discipline, Cathedral choir for worship, infirmary for the sick or weary. Here they read and wrote, here they learned and taught, here were chronicles completed, missals illuminated, and various tasks of hand or head performed under the direction of the superiors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GATEWAY OF ST. JOHN'S HOSPITAL

(_Page 56_)]

Yet with all its splendour of traceried arch it is a comfortless place. Not until a few years before the fall of the monastery was it glazed even on one side. In the long summers and hot sunshine of Italy, where the Benedictine order took its rise, it was natural enough to build for coolness and air; hence not only the open alleys of the cloister, but also its situation on the north side of the church. It is possible that at Canterbury there was some difficulty about s.p.a.ce on the south side; certainly in a chilly climate open cloisters hidden from the sun by a mountain of masonry must have inflicted much hardship on the monks, and added to the austerities of their ascetic life. They were a delicate and short-lived race, usually failing to attain forty years of age, and compelled by statute to spend three days of each month in the infirmary, independently of occasional recourse thither for ailments and for being bled, which was regarded as periodically necessary. Ordericus Vitalis, a monkish historian living in Normandy, says several times in his chronicle: "The winter has now come, and my fingers are so numbed by the cold that I can write no more till the spring". Visiting members of other convents were not asked to share the full discipline, but were hospitably lodged in the infirmary as the most comfortable quarters.

Moreover, epidemics occurred, as in 1348, the year of the Black Death, when Archbishop Bradwardine died of the Plague within a few weeks of his installation, and half the nation perished. So the infirmary was probably not too large after all. It must not be forgotten that silence was strictly enjoined in the Cloister, so that to the agonies of cold hands and feet was added the privation, with which we cannot fail to sympathize, of being unable to talk about the inclemency of the weather.

In the cloister garth are two graves perhaps as well worth visiting as ever Becket's was, though no miracles have yet occurred at them. They are those of Archbishop Temple and Dean Farrar.

If we retrace our way along Lanfranc's gloomy pa.s.sage to the infirmary cloister, where guests and invalid brethren took the air, and turn to the left along the Dark Entry, by the ruins of the Lord Prior's Lodging and Chequer House or Office, we emerge into the Green Court.

Here servants had their quarters, and at the great gate of the convent received guests and pilgrims. Those of distinction they conducted to Master Omer's, those of middle rank to Chillenden Chambers or the vanished New Lodging; the common wayfarers ascended that lovely and unique Norman staircase to the Great North Hall. These had to bring their own bedding and cooking utensils, like the steerage pa.s.sengers in an emigrant ship; and their hall was kitchen, parlour, and bedroom in one, so that its superb approach was no measure of the quality of its accommodation. The cowl or habit of a monk would rarely be seen in the Green Court. It belonged too much to the outside world and the secular life.

Before we ourselves return to that outside world let us turn southwards for a moment for a view that we shall not easily forget.

Below the immense ma.s.s and broken outlines of the church, and flanked by ruins of cloister and dormitory, we see across a little breadth of lawn the picturesque octagonal tower called the Baptistery. It was really a monks' lavatory, and the centre of the water supply. For, strange as it may be to our conceited modern ears, the monks had from the twelfth century an elaborate system of waterworks, and probably owed to this their comparatively small mortality during the visitations of plague. There still exists a twelfth-century plan showing the various pipes, tanks, and basins, for drinking, washing, or cooking. So the little octagonal tower, as so often happens, was useful as well as beautiful. And if the chart which indicates the path of every pipe and runnel, and the place of every layer for personal ablution, fails to indicate any laundry for the washing of clothes--why, the monks wore all-wool garments, and did not think fastidiousness a virtue. Let us hope for the best.

So we pa.s.s the Convent Gate and cross the Mintyard. This is now a "quad" of the King's School, but archbishops till Cranmer exercised here their right of coinage. From the Mintyard we step back into a rather squalid street of a modern world. But the house just opposite is old enough to have housed pilgrims, and two or three hundred yards along Northgate Street, to our right, is the fifteenth-century timbered archway of St. John's Hospital, shown in our ill.u.s.tration.

St. John's was founded before the days of the pilgrims as a nook of safety and peace for the aged poor, and this it still remains. How many wearied souls have bidden here their long farewell to Canterbury!

We, too, will bid our farewell, less solemn, and not without hope of return, but still with regret. If these pages and pictures enable you, reader, to revisit in spirit the place of your pilgrimage, they will have accomplished their end.

Beautiful England

BATH AND WELLS BOURNEMOUTH AND CHRISTCHURCH CAMBRIDGE CANTERBURY CHESTER AND THE DEE THE CORNISH RIVIERA DARTMOOR d.i.c.kENS-LAND THE DUKERIES THE ENGLISH LAKES EXETER FOLKESTONE AND DOVER HAMPTON COURT HASTINGS AND NEIGHBOURHOOD HEREFORD AND THE WYE THE ISLE OF WIGHT THE NEW FOREST NORWICH AND THE BROADS OXFORD THE PEAK DISTRICT RIPON AND HARROGATE SCARBOROUGH SHAKESPEARE-LAND SWANAGE AND NEIGHBOURHOOD THE THAMES WARWICK AND LEAMINGTON THE HEART OF WESs.e.x WINCHESTER WINDSOR CASTLE YORK

LONDON

THE HEART OF LONDON THROUGH LONDON'S HIGHWAYS IN LONDON'S BY-WAYS RAMBLES IN GREATER LONDON

Beautiful Scotland

EDINBURGH THE Sh.o.r.eS OF FIFE THE SCOTT COUNTRY LOCH LOMOND, LOCH KATRINE, AND THE TROSSACHS

Beautiful Ireland