Part 7

We turn back as we go out of the picturesque gate and across the road to the high footpath, and see that still the banks on either side are steep and abrupt. We pass the parish church of St Mildred, and then, descending the hill, there bursts upon us another grand view of Canterbury, the Cathedral domineering over the city. “There are two vast towers that seem to salute the visitor from afar, and make the surrounding country far and wide resound with the wonderful booming of their brazen bells,” so says Erasmus. The towers have changed since his day, but to his eyesight as to ours the view must have been wonderfully impressive; the more so in that as he stood there in this roadway, he could realise as we never can what the sight of those towers meant to the pilgrims who passed him by. He had been to that shrine, and his broad mind, while contemplating some folly which he could not praise, understood that beneath all this to which his companion so strongly objected there lay much of good, and that a ruthless destruction of the tares might prove disastrous also to the wheat.

We soon pass by the opening--or rather the close--of the Pilgrims’ Way, and stopping at the sexton’s house in London Road, obtain his guidance to the church of St Dunstan, where there is much to see of interest. Immediately inside the western porch, a door admits us to the ancient lepers’ chapel, now used as a vestry, where those outcast folk could join in the worship of the congregation by using the squint, now blocked up with a cupboard. Here is an ancient chest, once on a time used for the collection of Peter’s Pence; and the table, a fine piece of cabinet work, is the old sounding-board. At the east end of the church is the Roper Chapel, in the vault beneath lying buried Margaret Roper and the head of Sir Thomas More, her father. To this chapel pilgrims still come, and another form of reverence has been paid to the “martyr” by the offers more than once made to purchase this unpleasant relic. When the vault was opened in 1879, during the restoration of the church, the head was found to be in a state of perfect preservation.

On the opposite side of the roadway, a short distance farther on toward the city, built into a brewery, is the red brick gateway of Roper House--or Rooper, as it is spelled on the monument in the church--where Margaret preserved the sad relic, which had first been exhibited on London Bridge.

And so back again to Canterbury.

ENVOI

Back again to Canterbury, where it is to be hoped our leisure will permit us to loiter, or which our good fortune may allow us to visit again and yet again.

Canterbury sits between History and Romance, the chief city of one of the most delightful and most interesting of English counties. Her streets are thronged with memories, crowded with historic figures. Romance and History mingle inextricably--Chaucer, Marlowe, Dickens; Augustine, Becket, Cranmer. In these pages an endeavour has been made to depict Canterbury and some of the surrounding country not with the pen of the historian or of the archæologist, but to set forth rather the personal impressions of a lover of old times, old ways and old books. Christ Church Cathedral is to him no mere record in cold stone of a dead past, but a living memorial of a living past. It is meant to be a book for those who share with the writer his delight in calling up to the mind’s eye ghosts of men and women dead and gone.

At first, as has been said, Canterbury strikes disappointingly on those who go thither thinking to step back straightway from the present into the past. But gradually and surely the past overpowers the present as we linger in its narrow streets and loiter in its ancient buildings. It is no city of the dead. The life of to-day throbs in its veins; but its to-day is dull, dim and uneventful compared with its stirring, many-coloured past.

These pages have touched upon many matters concerning which many volumes have been, and will be, written; but no attempt has been made at completeness. This book is not a guide, but rather aims at being a sign-post--pointing to the past. For many years yet pilgrims will come to Canterbury, and if this little work helps any of them to see and to hear there what has been so vivid and so clear to the writer of it, the object with which it is set forth will have been gained.

INDEX

The Illustrations are printed in italics.

PAGE

Aldhelm, Abbot, 100

Aldon, Thomas of, 29

Alford, Dean, 19, 37

Alfroin, 11

Alphege, 9

Angel Tower, 1

Anselm, 12

Arthur, Catherine, 90

Arundel, 43

Arundel, Archbishop, 17

Athol, Countess of, 40

Augustine, 97

Austin Canons’ priory of St Gregory, 68

Auxerre, Henry of, 47

Baptistry, 45

Barton, Elizabeth, 80

Beale, Henry, 94

Beaufort, John, 38

Becket’s Murder, 46

Bell Harry Tower, 1

Bertha, 97

Bigberry Wood, 111

Bigge, Thomas, 109

Bocking, 86

Boehm, Sir Edgar, 37

Bourchier, Archbishop, 32

Boys, Sir John, 22

Bregwin, Archbishop, 100

Bret, 49

Broc, Robert de, 46

Butterfield, Mr, 101

Canterbury College, Oxford, 68

Canterbury Pilgrims, 54

Canterbury, St Thomas of, 51

_Canterbury Weavers, The_, _92_

Canute, 99

Cathedral, The-- _Baptistry, The_, _46_ _Chapel of “Our Lady” in the Undercroft, The_, _18_ _Christ Church Gate_, _4_ _Edward the Black Prince’s Tomb_, _38_ _Infirmary, The Ruins of_, _44_ _Nave, The_, _22_ _North Side, The_, _Frontispiece_ _St Martin’s Church Tower and Harbledown_, _110_ _Warrior’s Chapel, The_, _38_ _West Towers and South-West Entrance, The_, _42_ Exterior of, 41 Interior of, 18 The Story of, 7

Catherine, 84

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 54

“Chequers of the Hope”, 56

Chichele, Archbishop, 31

Chichele Tower, 43

Chillenden, Prior, 17, 18, 20, 38, 45

Christ Church, 8 Gateway, 4 Priory of, 57

Colet, 113

Coligny, Odo, 34

Conrad, 12

Cooper, Sidney, 111

Courtenay, Archbishop, 34

Cranmer, 84

Dark Entry, 44

Denys of Burgundy, 71

Dunster, Lady Mohun of, 40

Durham, Rites of, 72

East Bridge Hospital, 94

Edmer, 10

Edward III., 30

Edward the Black Prince, 32, 33

Elizabeth, 90

Emperor Charles V., 53

Envoi, 117

Erasmus, 19, 64, 113

Ernulf, 12, 35, 36, 39

Estria, Prior Henry de, 25

Ethelbert, King, 97

First View of Canterbury, 1

Fitzstephen, William, 47

Fordwich, 106

Gasquet, Abbot, 72

Gerard, 71

Gervase, 12, 26

Gibbons, Orlando, 22

Goldstone, Prior, 39, 42

Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, 36

Green Court, 45

_Greyfriars’ House, The_, _64_

Grim Edward, 46

Guest House Hostry, The, 72

Hadley, 86

Harbledown, 110

Hasted, 63, 78

Henry IV., 34

Henry V., 31, 52

Henry VIII., 25, 35, 44, 52

Holland, Lady Margaret, 38

Holy Maid of Kent, 80

“Hope, Chequers of the”, 56

Hope, Mr A. J. Beresford, 101

Hospital, East Bridge, 94 St John’s, 94

Howley, William, 31

“Inglesant, John”, 74

Ingworth, Richard, 93

Kemp, Cardinal, 31

Kent, Holy Maid of, 80

King’s School, 45

Lanfranc, 10, 43, 104

Langton, Archbishop Stephen, 38

Lavatory Tower, 45

Lawrence, 99

Lindhard, 97

Louis VII., 51

Magdalen College, Oxford, 70

Marlowe, Christopher, 4, 90 John, 90

_Martyrdom, The_, _50_ _Doorway from Cloisters into Westgate Towers_, _70_, _88_

Masters, 86

Maynard, John, 106

Mepham, Archbishop Simon de, 36

Molash, Prior, 42

Montreuil, Madame de, 62

More, Sir Thomas, 116

Morton, Cardinal, 40

Navarre, Joan of, 34

_Norman Staircase, King’s School, Canterbury_, 48

Odo, Archbishop, 8

Oxford Tower, 43

Peckham, Archbishop, 39

Peter II., 32

Peter’s Pence, 116

Pole, Cardinal Archbishop, 35

Prince Consort, 32

Priory of Christ Church, 57

Queen Mary, 35

Queen Victoria, 32

Religious, The, 66

Richard Cœur de Lion, 52

Roger, 99

Roper, Margaret, 116

Roundabout, A Canterbury, 104

Ruskin, 42

St Anselm, 36, 79

St Augustine, 43

St Augustine’s College, 96

_St Augustine’s College, In the Quadrangle_, 96

St Cuthbert, 100

St Dunstan, 27

St Ethelbert, 35

St Gregory, Austin Canons’ priory of, 68

St John’s Hospital, 94, 104

St Martin, 97, 102

_St Martin’s Church_, _102_

St Martin at Dover, 68

St Mildred, 99

St Pancras, 96

St Sepulchre, 79

St Thomas of Canterbury, 51

St Wilfrid, 11

Salisbury, John of, 47

Sens, William of, 16

Shrines, Other, 87

Simon, Archbishop of Sudbury, 17, 28, 91

Somerset, Earl of, 38

_South-West Transept and St George’s Tower_, _56_

Stanley, Dean, 22, 29, 58

Stratford, Archbishop, 30

Sturry, 105

Sudbury, Archbishop Simon of, 17, 28, 91

Summer, Archbishop, 22

Tait, Archbishop, 37

Thackeray, 90

Thomas, Duke of Clarence, 38

Thwaites, 86

Tyler, Wat, 30

Walter, Prior, 79

Warham, Archbishop, 27, 39

Warrior’s Chapel, 38

West Gate, 87

Wiclif, 34

William, Archbishop, 12

William of Sens, 16, 23

William, “English”, 16, 23, 32

Willis, 24

Winchelsea, Archbishop, 37, 80

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Edmer, who was a boy in the monastic school in the time of Lanfranc, in _The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral_, by Professor R. Willis, M.A., F.R.S., a work to which all subsequent writers about Canterbury Cathedral owe a deep debt.

[2] Willis, as quoted _supra_.

[3] The curious in this affair should read Dr Edwin A. Abbot’s learned _St Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles_ (A. & C. Black, 1898), to which work the writer desires to express a deep debt of gratitude. The account of the murder here given closely follows the translation in the work mentioned.

[4] The King of France’s jewel.

[5] The _Canterbury Tales_ of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society, 1851. Vol. iii., “The Supplementary Tale.”

[6] _Canterbury in the Olden Time_, John Brent, 1879.

[7] Colet.

[8] Erasmus, _Peregrinatio Religionis ergo_; trans. J. G. Nicholls.

Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:

shryne as Sainct Thomas’s bed=> shryne as Sainct Thomas’s hed {pg 63}