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canterbury |
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One of England's most venerable cities, CANTERBURY offers a rich
slice through two thousand years of history, with Roman and early
Christian ruins, a Norman castle, and a famous cathedral that dominates
a medieval warren of time-skewed Tudor dwellings. The city began as a
Belgic settlement that was overrun by the Romans and renamed Durovernum
, from where they proceeded to establish a garrison, supply base and
system of roads that was to reach as far as the Scottish borders. With
the Roman Empire's collapse came the Saxons, who renamed the town
Cantwarabyrig ; it was a Saxon king, Ethelbert, who in 597 welcomed
Augustine, dispatched by the pope to convert the British Isles to
Christianity. By the time of his death, Augustine had founded two
Benedictine monasteries, one of which - Christ Church, raised on the
site of the Roman basilica - was to become the first cathedral in
England.
At the turn of the first millennium, Canterbury suffered repeated
sackings by the Danes until Canute, a recent Christian convert, restored
the ruined Christ Church, only for it to be destroyed by fire a year
before the Norman invasion. As the new religion became a tool of
control, a struggle for power developed between the archbishops, the
abbots from the nearby Benedictine abbey and King Henry II, culminating
in the assassination of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in 1170, a martyrdom
that effectively established the autonomy of the archbishops and made
this one of Christendom's greatest shrines. Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales , written towards the end of the fourteenth century,
portrays the unexpectedly festive nature of pilgrimages to Becket's tomb,
which was plundered and destroyed at the orders of Henry VIII.
In 1830, a pioneering passenger railway service linked Canterbury to the
sea and prosperity grew until the city suffered extensive German bombing
in the notorious Baedeker Raids , when Hitler ordered the destruction of
the most treasured historic sites described in the Baedeker travel guide
series. The cathedral and compact town centre, however, survived,
enclosed on three sides by medieval walls, and today remain the focus
for leisure-motivated pilgrims from across the globe.
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