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.

Don't eat the whitebait and other life lessons from my trip to the RUSI

All right, I realize it’s been a while since my last post, so here’s a long story in an attempt to correct this travesty. I have quite a few more stories to tell, including tales about the Mansfield College Ball, Halloween, and Oxford urban legends, but for now, this will have to suffice. So without further ado, I give you…

My Trip to the RUSI: The RUSI, or the Royal United Services Institute, is a non-profit organization located in London that describes itself as, “the Professional Forum in the UK for those concerned with National and International Defence and Security.” This is code for, “We have a lot of really interesting books on World War II.” And as such, my tutor has been pushing me to take a trip down to the RUSI library since day one.

I need to back up slightly and explain that, first of all, one of my tutorials for this term is Winston Churchill and the Second World War. It’s my primary tutorial, so I meet once a week with my tutor, Professor Neville Brown, for about three hours every Friday evening. Side note: this is an extremely long time for a tutorial. Most only last an hour, and even two hours is pretty rare. But three hours, which is how long Neville’s prone to lecture, is unheard of.

Now I need to give you a quick run down of Neville Brown. Neville’s in his mid-seventies with a classically kind English old man face: slightly droopy eyes, a broad smile, wispy, wavy, white hair, rosacea on his nose, and permanently flaky skin. He’s a good tutor, but he has a propensity to talk a lot, and he’s a slow talker. He tends to take about ten minutes to make a point he could have made in two because he goes off on tangents in the middle of his stories. He has a lower voice, not booming or too deep, but very serious, and he can relay the gravity of any situation with ease. He does laugh quite a bit at himself and our subject, and our tutorials are interesting if nothing else. I’ll leave it at that for now because Neville really could be his own blog entry, and I might have to add a full post just about him at some point.

One last thing you should know about Neville as it’s pertinent to our story: when Neville settles on an idea for something he wants you to do, he will hound you on it until you do it. I’m not sure if that’s just his nature, or if he forgets that he’s brought it up a hundred times before, but that’s that. So when Neville decided I should go to the RUSI to do research for one of my papers, there was really no way I was going to avoid the trip to London.

Last Friday, Nov. 13, it was settled that I would travel to the RUSI on Tuesday, Nov. 17 to do research for my upcoming paper on the Bomber Offensive. I’d get there as early as I could, do some research and meet with Neville for lunch.

Tuesday finally rolled around and I woke up bright an early at 6:40 am to get ready. With my current sleeping plan, this was waaaaay to early for me to be up. I haven’t seen the sun rise in about six months and that’s the way I like it, thank you very much. So after dragging myself out of bed and showering while I was still mostly asleep, I packed my bag for the day. The bus was set to leave at 8:00 am from a bus stop very close to my dorm, but I was three pounds short for the bus fare, and I needed to get down to an ATM before heading to the bus stop. Of course, the ATMs are in the opposite direction from where I needed to be, but there was no avoiding it. I set out for my favorite ATM, the one inside Costcutters, at about 7:35. I got down to the store only to find that Costcutters doesn’t open to 8:00. Crap. Fortunately the next line of ATMs were just down the street by Tesco’s. Unfortunately, this meant I was going to have to book it to get to the bus on time and I was wearing a nice wool sweater. Oh well, they’re called sweaters for a reason I suppose. I picked up the pace, rushed to ATM and made it back to the bus stop with two minutes to spare. Phew! But as with all stories when you rush to some place to be on time, the bus, of course, was late.

I hopped on the Oxford Express to London at about 8:15. The ride is about an hour and forty minutes long, so I settled in to eat my packed breakfast and read my current Jane Austen novel. Yet as is the norm with me riding public transportation, I fell asleep. I work up about two hours later to find we were just getting to London. Thanks to some traffic problems, we arrived at Victoria Coach Station around 10:50. Feeling as though I’d already lost a ton of research time, I hoped on another bus to head to Whitehall, the home of the RUSI.

After getting lost on Whitehall due to construction and my own idiocy to not write down the RUSI’s precise address, I found my way into the RUSI lobby. John Montgomery, the librarian came down to pick me up and escorted me on a tour of the library. It was a nice, smaller library. It reminded me of an English gentleman’s large personal library (the kind I’d like to have some day). There were big squashy leather armchairs and great, high shelves, a nice gallery with workstations, and a nifty spiral staircase to take you between the lower and upper levels. By the time I had grabbed an armful of books and set up at a workstation, it was nearly time to meet Neville for lunch. I worked diligently (i.e., I power skimmed the books looking for relevant information) until it was time to meet Neville in the lobby.

I met Neville at the appointed time and we plodded our way towards the National Liberal Club for lunch. Neville’s a member of the club (in spite of his “varying political beliefs,” as he reminded me about twenty times leading up to the trip), and he wanted to show me, among other things, a portrait of Winston Churchill as a young man. We got to the club, but we were told we could not dine there because I was wearing jeans. As Neville put it, “In spite of their name, they have very conservative standards of dress!” We were allowed, however, to go look at the portrait of Churchill. It’s a great painting of him. You can really see the melancholy in his face. Churchill used to say how the “black dog within me,” would sometimes get the better of him. It’s probably what drove him to his borderline alcoholism. Neville took a picture of Winston and me together, and we set off to find somewhere else to eat.

After ambling our way around for about ten minutes (and when I say amble, I mean inch, because Neville walks about as quick as a snail on decaf), we settled on a traditional London pub, the Clarence. I lead the way into the pub and got us a table for two. The host sent us toward a small table in the corner. It was one of those half booth tables where one side is a booth and the other is a chair, and since I was leading the way, I took the booth seat, expecting Neville to take the chair. To my surprise, Neville sat right down next to me asking, “Is there room for the two of us in here?” Not really knowing what to say, I let him squeeze in next to me, even though it was clear that we weren’t going to fit two sets of plates on this side of the table.

In the name of cleanliness (and to escape the awkwardness of the situation), I headed to the bathroom to wash my hands. When I came back, Neville made to get up to let me back into the booth. I politely declined and took the chair instead. While I was away, Neville informed me that he’d been perusing the menu.

“Now they have the usual, boring sort of sandwich fare, nothing exciting there. But on the starters, they have whitebait. Doesn’t that sound good?”

Thinking he was merely asking my opinion about his lunch selection, I said yes. It turns out, he wasn’t merely asking my opinion for his lunch. When our waiter came over, he went ahead and ordered the whitebait and a half pint of bitters for both of us. This took me by surprise, and after thinking, “well, I actually wanted a sandwich, but ok,” I resigned myself to having the whitebait.

I had no idea what whitebait was, but I was assuming it was some kind of fish. I thought it was probably going to be fish chunks, sort of a mini fish and chips, minus the chips. Our meals came and I took stock of my plate. It seemed I was right; the whitebait appeared to be strips of fried fish all piled up in a little bowl. In the name of healthiness, I dove into the side salad first (in retrospect I’m glad I did). After demolishing my salad, I tuned to the whitebait. I dipped the glorified fish stick into the Bloody Mary sauce it came with and took a bite. It was extremely fishy tasting, and I’m not a huge fish fan, so I really didn’t like it. But I thought, “Ok, Neville ordered this for you. Be polite and try and chow down a few of these then you can leave it alone.” I uncomfortably down seven or eight more with copious amounts of sauce, until I came to a whitebait wasn’t fully breaded. As I picked the piece up, I noticed a fish eye looking back up at me. Upon closer inspection, I saw the entire fish head, and I realized that I had been eating whole fried sardines. Eyes, bones, brains and all.

Have you ever gotten the chills and known it wasn’t from being cold? As I weighed the impoliteness of throwing up with the impoliteness of ordering your own meal, I made a mental note that the former was probably worse than the latter and decided that I’d be ordering my own food from then on.

Yet that didn’t take care of the current dilemma, which was dealing with the realization that I’d been eating fish heads. I needed to get the taste out of my mouth and so I reached for my bitters. Before I took a swig, I noticed something floating in the foam, and proceeded to remove a long, black hair from my beer. At this point, I didn’t care. I needed this beer, and took a big gulp. As I did, my lips landed on a huge lipstick print. I hadn’t put on lipstick that morning. Ew.

I quickly scoured the menu for something edible and settled on the apple crumble with custard. I’ve become a huge apple crumble fan and our dining hall makes the best crumble in the world. Thinking that I couldn’t go wrong with the crumble, I ordered it as soon as possible. It took forever and a day to come out. Neville commented that, “they were probably harvesting the apples.” When it finally came out, it was piping hot, but I didn’t care. I poured on the custard and dove in.

I imagine it’s difficult to screw up crumble. After all, it’s pretty much fruit, sugar and crust, but this pub managed to screw it up royally. It was not sweet at all, and there were whole chunks of nutmeg and cinnamon just sitting in the crumble. I immediately bit into a clove of nutmeg, thus combining the horrible fishy taste of sardine with the hot, raw spicy taste of a nutmeg clove in my mouth. Not a good combo. I somehow managed to eat half of my terrible crumble and spread the other half around to make it look like I had eaten more of it. That’s five pounds I wish I had back.

After splitting the bill with Neville, I was ready to go home. But I still had another couple of hours of work to do in the RUSI before I could go back. I dutifully headed to the library and churned out a few more hours of work.

The thing about the RUSI library is that while I did get some useful information, it’s nothing I couldn’t have done at Oxford. The only real difference was the photocopying was cheaper and all the books I needed were more conveniently grouped together. Since I’m not a member, I couldn’t check any of the books out, and the ones I found really helpful all have copies at Oxford (but I can’t check them out there either). Essentially, I spent a day in London that probably could have been better spent at Oxford.

I worked till 5:30 pm when the library closed and I was kicked out by John Montgomery (who’s actually from California. Go figure). I knew the next bus left at 6:00, and since I wasn’t about to risk another terrible London food experience, I decided to try and catch it. After being forced to by another bus ticket (apparently you can’t buy two way bus tickets in London), I made it to the coach station just before six. I raced down to my gate and saw that the bus was waiting, but had all of its lights off. I wasn’t sure if the driver was taking a break or not, so I hesitated at the gate. Just when I was about to go out and check on the bus, it drove away. Crap.

Extremely hungry and sick of the day, I purchased a croissant to soothe my soul and stomach. The next bus wasn’t set to leave until 6:30, but fortunately, the bus came early and we left at 6:17. The ensuing ride home was uneventful, excepting the fact that I had a rather large woman as a seat partner who grunted loudly from time to time. I turned up my iPod and tried to forget about the day and the rumbling in my stomach.

When I got home, I raced over to a local pub, The Cape of Good Hope, for a good bite to eat. Steering away from anything that might be reminiscent of fish, I had a nice steak with peppercorn and excellent chips. The best part of the night was that it was trivia night, or quiz night as they call it here. I was eating by myself until the table next to me invited me over to join their team. I did and we had a great time guessing on most of the bizarre questions and getting to know each other. They said they come pretty much every week and they wanted me to come join their team on a regular basis. I think I will. Overall, the Cape of Good Hope gave me a nice end to an otherwise crappy day.

So what can you, the patient reader, learn from this experience? I’ll break it down into a few simple lessons:

1) Public transportation is a surefire sleep aid.

2) Always order for yourself.

3) Whitebait is gross and it is possible to screw up apple crumble.

4) The RUSI library is nice, but not really worth the hassle unless you’re researching for some obscure military defense project and/or live in London.

5) To salvage a bad day, go to quiz night at a pub and either bring or make friends.

Trust me on these ones kids, I lived ‘em all a day.