There are certainly not more than one or two cities in the kingdom
which rival Canterbury in interest, or bring back to us more vividly
"the days that are no more". Here is the work of pre-historic man in
the Dane John (variant of Donjon or stronghold) and long earthen
rampart which guarded the ford of the Stour. Here are the bastions and
parapet of the city wall, with which the soldiers of the Middle Ages
faced and fortified the British earthwork. Here is Saxon building with
Roman materials, as in the churches of St. Pancras and St. Martin,
where Roman bricks abound, and Roman columns, perhaps of some
forgotten heathen temple, are not wanting. In the Roman cemeteries
outside the walls have been found bracelets, pins, mirrors,
horse-bits, coins, even rouge-pots. Hither converged the Roman roads
from the military ports of Richborough, Dover, and Lympne (now high
and dry). Along these roads for some four hundred years tramped the
Roman legionaries under their centurions, entering and leaving the
city respectively by the streets now known as Burgate, Watling Street,
and Wincheap. Here dwelt, in the sixth century, Queen Bertha,
foster-mother of English Christianity, with her heathen husband
Ethelbert, King of Kent; and here, in the new era which dated from the
arrival of Augustine's monkish procession with its silver cross and
painted Christ (as told once for all by Dean Stanley), these three
laboured at that "building without hands" of which the Cathedral is an
outward type and embodiment. Hither converged in mediæval times the
Pilgrims' Ways, still partly traceable on the ordnance map, from
London, as in Chaucer's Tales, from Southampton, and from Sandwich.
On July 7, the feast of the Translation of Becket's bones from the
Crypt to the Trinity Chapel, and especially at the Great Pardons or
Jubilees of the Feast every fifty years, from 1220 to 1520, these ways
were crowded with pilgrims, English or foreign, on foot or on
horseback, sick or whole, sad or merry, intent on paying homage and
receiving a blessing, above all of winning the promised plenary
indulgence at the miracle-working shrine. From the offerings of these
pilgrims came in great measure the huge sums of money which enabled
the monks to extend and exalt their church to its present
magnificence. In 1220, the first of the Great Pardons, it has been
estimated that 100,000 pilgrims offered £20,000 of our money; and this
did not include the stream of worshippers and gifts that flowed on
other days of the year. If we add to these "devotions of the people"
the splendid generosity of the monks and clergy, we begin to
understand how the Cathedral was paid for. Lanfranc gave the whole
revenues of the manor of East Peckham, bestowed on him by William the
Conqueror; and he was but the first of a series of munificent
archbishops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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