Becket's Cathedral

I should mention before I start that the Canterbury Cathedral is massive. I mean, it's really, very big. None of the pictures capture just how large this thing really is. To really understand the size of it, you'd have to see it for yourself. And to make it more impressive, its original foundations were commissioned by St. Augustine - the same one who arrived in 597 AD, who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.


Since it's founding, it's been added onto fairly regularly ever few hundred years, as each succeeding archbishop thought the one who came before him was a slacker with no taste at all whose dire mistakes in church construction needed to be corrected (in Thy mercy).


Someone made it longer, someone built a tower, the next guy knocked the tower down, another guy put it back up two hundred years later, some idiot burned the whole mess down and had to start more or less from scratch with a different style, and another one tacked on an extra 75 feet of tower. He'd just been promoted and wanted to celebrate - that's not a joke.

The cathedral is also undergoing a modern-era restoration project to the tune of 50 Million GBP. In some places this has already started, and scaffolding is blocking some of the older portions of it. Here especially, the conflict of design over the last thousand years or more becomes a matter of observation.


As impressive and diverse as the cathedral is from the outside, every scrap of the inside was very carefully built to inspire solemnity as well as to be flat-out jawdropping for visiting religious pilgrims.

And it does a very good job. At least it would if the pictures could be posted full-size.


I can't talk about the cathedral though without telling the story of Thomas Becket, a man whose sainthood was achieved due in no small part to his being martyred in the cathedral, purportedly at the spot marked by this modern sculpture - apparently someone stole the old one.


The story of the actual assassination is every bit as horrifying as this pointy bit of post-modernism suggests, so I'll tell the story and occasionally break it with some more cheery photos of the cathedral grounds to distract from the mind-bending terror.

First off, Becket was at the time the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most powerful church seat in England. He and King Henry II are said to have actually been good friends - not just peers, but honest comrades.


However, Becket constantly opposed Henry II's bids to expand the power of the English monarchy over the church, something that deeply frustrated the King, and one particularly bad day, as the Pope was considering damning the entirety of England to hell over Henry's grabs (seriously), Henry vented by wondering aloud why his men allowed Becket to keep living when it frustrated him so.


Nobody in their right minds would have thought that Henry II was serious about
killing his old friend. Unfortunately for Becket and Henry II, sound minds did not prevail in this instance. Four of Henry's knights - all eyepoppingly crazy - heard this rant and actually set off to go kill Becket to win Henry's favor.


The knights arrived in Canterbury, tracked Becket to the cathedral, where they slapped him around, tried to drag him out, and eventually just started hacking at him. The Victorians, bless their naive hearts, didn't think it looked any worse than this (left window):


Sadly, they were extremely mistaken. Becket was hacked repeatedly, and once he was dead, one of the knights delivered a sideways chop to the head that both cut the top of Becket's head off and broke his sword. Cripes.


But that's not it. A monk's first-hand account of this event also goes on to state that one of those knights put their foot into Becket's head and smeared his brains around the floor before they ran off and went back to France to tell Henry the good news.


Henry did not find this to be good news. He was completely horrified that his knights had even for a second thought that he wanted them to kill Becket, and probably wondered if the knights had ever heard of the phrase "I was just ranting to myself, you barbarous crazies!" History is silent on the matter, so we can only assume that he said this.


Anyway, while it couldn't have turned out any worse for Henry or Becket, it was Becket's murder and later canonization that turned Canterbury into a pilgrimage site; at one time there was a massive, awe-inspiring shrine to the fallen saint in the cathedral. But that was before Henry VIII showed up, and he is widely regarded by history as a complete butthead.


Next Post: Dover, and various attractions thereof.