The Canterbury Cathedral: The Church Of A Church

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The Canterbury Cathedral was built first in 597AD by St. Augustine. He was sent from Rome as a missionary to introduce the bible in England where his mission was complete when he baptized the local Saxon king, Ethelbert into Christianity. By 602AD St. Augustine was then given a seat as the first Archbishop of a Church at Canterbury which had been a place of worship during Roman occupation of Brittan rehallowed by the missionary saint. This was a momentous event in the timeline of the Canterbury Cathedral as the Archbishop was the most senior religious figure in the land and was based at the Cathedral, giving a huge significance at both a religious and political level in medieval times; it became a place of peace and power.2
The Canterbury …show more content…

4 Being able to capture it in 20days, he destroyed the city; the Cathedral was set on fire and Archbishop Alphege was taken hostage on hopes of ransom. Alphege refused to allow anyone pay for him and subsequently they pelted him to death. This sacrifice made the Archbishop a martyr and saint whose story is told in one of the medieval stained glass windows in the Cathedral. By contrast Canterbury was in stable conditions for fifty years up until the Norman Conquest in 1066 where there was a degree of recovery in the economy and the great Canterbury churches. 6A year after in 1067 a second fire broke out in the Cathedral and this time it was all but destroyed. At that time Lanfranc was the Archbishop, he consecrated a temporary shelter in 1070 but immediately set about rebuilding the Cathedral.4 The construction of the Cathedral was completed in 1077 affirming Romanesque style architecture with strong Norman influences.4 It was set directly over the old Anglo Saxon building but slightly to the south to avoid old walls. The Cathedral was now very large: about 100 feet in width and up to 300 feet long, placing it amongst the biggest of the medieval churches in northern …show more content…

In his years of an Archbishop, Anselm knocked down the eastern end of the Cathedral to make way for a huge decorative crypt. Shadowing it, another extensive choir with ambulatory was then built over the crypt, this consecrated in 1130. 4 Forty years later in 1170, King Henry ll and Archbishop Thomas Becket were quarrelling over the rights and privileges of the church. Not long after was Archbishop Thomas Becket murdered inside the church on the orders of King Henry ll. While Becket was being canonized, Pope Alexandra declared the murdered priest a saint. 3 This was a pivotal event in Canterbury’s history that took place since very shortly after the Cathedrals importance as a center of pilgrimage greatly increased. Later on within a year’s period, the Cathedral was strike by fire a third time. The Romanesque choir was divested while fortunately the two eastern towers, and much of the eastern transepts, survived.

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