Pictures

I've finally gotten around to creating a picture website for all my photos. You can check them out here:

http://thisoxfordianlife.shutterfly.com/

Unfortunately the upload time is slow, but I really do promise to upload pictures soon after my travels. The backlogged ones just might take a while...

Happy browsing!

My Canterbury Tales

And God said, “Lo, let there be a place where History Nerds shall rejoice in the greatness and goodness of the Lord.” And so it was that Canterbury Cathedral came to be. And the History Nerds saw that the Cathedral was good. And seeing it so, they lifted their voices up to the Lord saying, “O Lord, who has made all history and shall make all history to cometh, we thank thee for Canterbury Cathedral. And we shall ever praise your name and spend money in your Holiest of gift shops.” Thus the Lord came to smile upon his creation and the History Nerds rejoiced and spent £27.43 in the Cathedral gift shop.

I went to Canterbury last Thursday and Friday for an abbreviated pilgrimage. Why Canterbury you ask? For many reasons, but namely because I am a History Nerd and this sort of trip is just what we’re supposed to do. What’s in it for me you ask? Well, a long awaited blog post, photos of my pilgrimage, and a (mostly) historically accurate summary of Canterbury Cathedral. Let the recitation of my pilgrimage begin! (Note: This blog is an edited excerpt of my journal, so some of it may have made more sense in its original form. But you don’t get to see that.)

Canterbury Cathedral is impressive. But that doesn’t do it justice. It doesn’t have a particularly long walk up, like Winchester Cathedral, where you get to stare at the building for a while before you enter. With Canterbury, it kind of takes you by surprise. You go in the gates and BOOM, cathedral right in front of you. The inside of the Cathedral is even more astounding than the outside. The immediate entrance, or the nave, is the oldest part of the Cathedral (but oddly it’s finished in the newest style. The nave was redone in Perpendicular style the 15^th century).

The Cathedral has existed in some form or another since 597 when St. Augustine founded a cathedral and abbey in Canterbury under the Anglo-Saxon King of Kent, Ethelbert. While the Anglo-Saxons were pagans, Ethelbert’s wife, Queen Bertha, was a Christian. With Bertha’s help, and her husband’s permission, St. Augustine brought Christianity to Canterbury. In 1070, the Norman conquerors rebuilt the Cathedral in the Norman, or Romanesque style. During this phase, the Cathedral was only as long as the existing nave and the underlying crypt, or undercroft. Soon after its completion, there was a fire that destroyed the front of the nave. While it was a loss, it wasn’t too bad because they had built the Cathedral too small. They expanded the Cathedral to include a new quire, or the section of the Cathedral where the choir, monks, and priests sit. 100 years after the Normans took over and 573 years after St. Augustine founded the place, the Cathedral’s history takes a turn, for better or worse.

For in 1170, Thomas Becket enters the picture. Thus a crash course in Becket’s story is needed to understand the next 900 years of the Cathedral’s history. So here we go: In 1155 Becket was appointed Lord Chancellor by the King of England, Henry II. Not only did Becket become Henry’s right hand man, but the two men also became good friends. During this time, the Roman Catholic Church and the State of England were in constant tension, especially when it came to dealing with issues of money and power. As the Chancellor, Becket favored his buddy Henry over the authority of the Pope, so Henry had Becket appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, thinking that Becket would continue to carry out the will of the State over the Church. However, once Becket became Archbishop, he pulled a 180 on Henry and started vehemently defending the rights of the Church. This caused so much tension between the two men that Becket had to live in exile for six years to avoid Henry’s wrath. Becket eventually returned to Canterbury in 1170, but continued to be a thorn in Henry’s side. One evening, after being particularly exasperated by Becket’s decisions, Henry cried out, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!?” (Historical side note: Accounts vary as to whether Henry said “meddlesome priest,” “lowborn priest” or “turbulent priest” but I think “meddlesome” has the best ring to it).

Unfortunately for Henry and Becket, four of Henry’s Knights took him seriously and set out on a mission to kill Becket. On 29 December 1170, the Knights confronted Becket in his private chambers and had a vicious argument with him. While the Knights went outside in order to put on their armor so they could go back in and kill him, Becket took the advise of his Monks and fled to the Cathedral. While preparing for Vespers, or Evensong, the Knights charged into the Cathedral, calling out for Becket in the darkness. Not wanting to kill Becket in the Cathedral, the Knights tried to drag Becket outside. After wrestling with the Knights for several minutes, Becket suddenly knelt in prayer, saying, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.” As Becket prayed, the Knights hacked him to bits. The deathblow shattered his skull and removed the crown of his head. The force of the blow was so strong that the tip of the sword snapped off when it hit the ground.

Almost as soon as Becket was murdered, miracles were reported at the Cathedral. His blood was reported to heal the sick, cure the blind, and even raise the dead. Once word of miracles got out, Becket’s tomb in the crypt became something of a pilgrimage sensation, with hundreds of thousands of people traveling to touch Becket’s grave in hopes of a miracle. Remember Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? The pilgrims were traveling from London to touch Becket’s coffin (and I staid in their hotel!). One of the chaplains told me that the Kent Road, which was the path the pilgrims took from London, became so popular that the pilgrims wore down the wooden bridge leading out of town. That bridge was London Bridge (London Bridge is falling down…), and it became the first bridge in the city to be made of stone thanks to the number of pilgrims who traversed it to get to Canterbury.

The journey to Canterbury took about a week. You can tell the number of days it took based on the number of Bishop’s houses between Canterbury and London. There are six, and each are placed approximately twenty miles apart, i.e. the average number of miles a person could walk in a day. It really makes me appreciate the fact that it only took three hours by train to get Canterbury from Oxford. That’s one long walk!

But it would have been even longer barefoot. Once he discovered what his Knights had done, Henry II walked from London to Canterbury barefoot as penitence for his role in Becket’s death. When he arrived, he knelt before Becket’s tomb and wept while all the monks and priests (that’s 80 some men) whipped him with switches (those are thin branches of wood for those spoiled, unbeaten children reading at home).

Becket was made a saint only three years after his death. But four years after his demise, another fire ravaged the Cathedral, destroying the quire. Yet thanks to the rip roaring Becket-based tourist industry, the Cathedral was reaping in loads of money, for you see, every pilgrim was supposed to leave “whatever they could” in a green collection box atop Becket’s tomb. It was said that those who skimped on their payment were punished instead of experiencing their requested miracle. In fact, in one of the stained glass “miracle windows” depicting Becket’s Saintly works, once scene shows Becket flying over some pilgrims who presumably didn’t dish out enough dough. As he’s suspended over the family, he’s scolding them instead of granting their miracle (and judging by the state of the bed ridden man in the center, they were praying that papa would recover enough to earn back the money they did spend at Becket’s tomb. Talk about harsh).

Anywho, with all their spare moolah, the Cathedral leaders decided they would rebuild the quire bigger and better than before. In addition to that, they decided to build a full-on shrine to their most Saintly breadwinner, just behind the quire. For the tons of new stone to rest safely on the foundation, the builders had to add massive stone pillars to the Romanesque crypt. After a few new pillars and 12 years hard work, the new quire and the shrine were finished in the Gothic Style.

This was probably my favorite part of the Cathedral. While Perpendicular style of the nave is impressive and beautifully detailed, I prefer the Gothic style quire. The arches are at once simplistic and ornate. I’ll attach some pictures so you can see what I’m talking about. Plus, it seems to me the stone just glows with all of that beautifully high placed stained glass. It’s a gorgeous sight. Just past the quire is where Tommy B’s shrine used to be. That’s right, used to, but we’ll get to those details in a second.

After Becket’s shrine was completed, his body was moved up from the crypt and placed directly over the spot where it originally rested. The top of the coffin was ridiculously ornate. It was covered in gold and encrusted with jewels, but all this wealth was hidden from the common riff-raff. When Kings and wealthy dignitaries came to visit, the lid covering the coffin could be hoisted up via a pulley on the ceiling, so that the wealthy could gaze at the precious stones they donated to the shrine. While the average peasant didn’t get to see all the bling, they could kneel by the tomb and reach through openings in the stone to touch the wooden box holding Becket’s saintly remains.

Thanks in part to the awesomeness of Becket’s new shrine the Pilgrims kept pouring in to Canterbury for nearly 400 years, until 1538, when the Canterbury pilgrimages abruptly ended. In 1536, Henry VIII enacted the Reformation, which declared a break from the Roman Catholic Church pronounced Henry to be the head of the new Church of England. With this proclamation came the “dissolution of the monasteries,” which is a nice way of saying Henry seized all the previously Catholic monasteries, cathedrals, and churches, took their money and land, killed anyone who disagreed with him, and destroyed anything he didn’t like. This destruction unfortunately included the shrine of Thomas Becket, especially since the shrine had come to stand as a representation of the problems between the Church and the State. So in 1538, Henry VIII’s Knights raided the Cathedral and destroyed Becket’s tomb, taking all the gold and jewels for Henry and leaving nothing but an empty space. Today, a single candle marks the spot where Becket’s glorious tomb once stood.

If you walk to the right around the Shrine, you’ll come across another tomb. This one belongs to Edward, the Black Prince of Wales. During his lifetime in the 1350s, Edward was an extremely popular hero, thanks to his bravery on the battlefield. His nifty nickname comes from the black suit of armor he wore in battle to intimidate his enemies. When Edward was making funeral arrangements, he humbly asked to have a small tomb in the crypt. But he was so popular when he died in 1376, that the monks decided it would be best to give him a much larger and more visible tomb in the side wing of Becket’s shire, that way the pilgrims could see two great tombs on one trip (and possibly leave twice as much money). Since Edwards’ tomb was one of royalty, Henry VIII did not have it destroyed along with Becket’s. The tomb’s still there today. While I’m sure it would have paled in comparison to Becket’s shrine, I can’t help thinking the Prince himself would have found the thing a bit over the top and quite against his request for a humble burial.

Past the Black Prince’s tomb there’s a beautiful piece of stained glass that was made for the Cathedral by Ervin Bossanyi, a Hungarian artists who specialized in stained glass. If you look at the faces of the people in the glass, especially the women, they look oddly Disney-esque. That’s because Walt Disney employed Hungarian artists in his studios to draw his motion pictures. I find it humorous that in an odd twist of cruel and spiteful fate, it looks like Ervin Bossanyi has copied Disney, when it was really Disney who was copying him!

If you head back toward the nave from the Black Prince’s tomb and the Disney window, you’ll have to walk down a flight of very worn steps. The deep grooves in the steps were caused by the pilgrims, who would climb the steps on their knees as they approached Becket’s tomb. I couldn’t resist kneeling on the steps and saying a quick prayer. It was just such a powerful combination of spirituality and history.

Canterbury Cathedral is just spectacular. There’s no other way to describe it. And since I came on a Thursday in January, there was basically no one else there besides me. The chaplains were so excited to see someone interested in the Cathedral’s history (instead of those god awful school groups), they wouldn’t let me go. I talked to two different chaplains for nearly 45 minutes apiece. I took so long to finish my tour that my audio guide was nearly out of battery by the time I returned it. For a history geek like me, the place was indeed manna from heaven.

I returned to the Cathedral later that night for an Evensong. It was wonderful to be able to spend the afternoon reveling in the Cathedral’s storied history and then experiencing it as an active place of worship that evening. I felt as though my day in the Cathedral was the perfect combination of past and present. It also made me think about the future, since I’m certain the Cathedral isn’t going any where for years to come. It’s comforting to me to visit these ancient monuments; to feel the greatness and power of history culminating in a single place. Canterbury Cathedral wouldn’t be the Canterbury Cathedral it is today if all those pilgrims hadn’t trudged down the Kent Road, knelt on the stone steps and crawled on their knees to ask a miracle of a Saint by touching the box holding his earthly remains.

But Canterbury would have been Canterbury even if I had never gone to see it. Even if I had never purchased a guidebook or spent the better half of a day sponging up its tales. It’s comforting to realize that even when I have been swallowed up by time, places like Canterbury Cathedral will still exist. Teaching a new generation this great story we call history.