History Schmistory

There's not a whole lot of space for things in England, and that goes double for Canterbury. If people didn't constantly build on top of things that were hundreds of years older, they'd have to cordon off the whole town and charge admission to walk through and see buildings partitioned off with Plexiglas dividers and all that other fun stuff one might see at Old World Wisconsin.

Stephen King wrote an entire book about what can go wrong when one builds on top of a grave site. That turned into a very popular movie. But in Canterbury, you're lucky to kick a stone and not have it ricochet off the graves of eight saints, none of whom would be very amused with the incident, and three of whom would be Thomas Becket. You can't help but build on someone's grave here. So, in the interest of saving space, they restore what they can, cordon off just a little bit, and keep the rest in motion in whatever way seems appropriate, ghosts and homicidal psychosis be damned.


Saint Martin's Priory is perhaps one of the few exceptions to this rule - it is the oldest standing church in England, having been converted into a church just as the Christians started turning up; history actually says that King Aethelbert and Queen Bertha of Kent met up with St. Augustine at this church, or at least near it - call it about 597 AD, at which point the building was already in used for other purposes, but was converted into a church. You'd like proof of this, and the British are happy to oblige.


Clears that right up. A lot of time is spent on plaques embedded in walls around here, as it's one of the few ways they can make a note of the historic and ancient past without forbidding the construction of a new coffee shop or requiring admission fees. The tour guide made the argument that the building has some very strong Roman influence in it's architecture, and suggested that the building's foundation could have been present as early as 300 AD or before.

At any rate, this church is a bare minimum of 1,400 years old. Sunday masses at 8am, 10am, Noon, and 6:30pm. No, seriously. There's no space for a new one, this one is still standing, what's the problem?

It's a hard place to get a shot at from the outside because it's crowded in among pine trees and very, very old graves like these.


The guide didn't give us a date for these stones, but they know these are the oldest. The priory is surrounded by a fairly large, fairly old graveyard on the side of a hill with an amazing view. "If," said our tour guide, "those bloody hippies would let us tear down those damn pine trees."


The smaller size of this photo doesn't really do the scale much justice, but I'm finding that this is a typical problem; its hard to relay just how big some of this stuff is with only two dimensions.

While we're on the subject of hard things to explain, most of the graves are of a simple, classic headstone shape or a cross...


But apparently, some folks used to be much more cavalier about this whole "death" business.


Moving on from St. Martin's Priory, we went to see St. Augustin's Abbey, which served as the burial site of several different saints as well as the second burial site of St. Thomas Becket (buried once in the Cathedral crypt, another time at St. Augustin's, and finally in a major hall of the Cathedral, before Henry VIII ordered him to be disinterred yet again, so his bones could be scattered to the four winds - nice guy).

While St. Augustin's Abbey is now a ruin, it would have been massive in its day. It wouldn't have rivaled the Cathedral, but it would have easily been the second biggest religious structure in Canterbury.
The most that is left of this "Norman monstrosity" - our tour guide was an entertaining figure - is a chunk of the abbey wall, and the now-excavated grave sites of all sorts of bishops, abbots, and even two or three saints.

What's most surprising is that the entire area hasn't been populated or capitalized on in some way; this is easily the largest patch of green grass inside the Ring Road.

And by "largest", I mean a pack of people can walk on it without colliding with one another by default. But there's an admission fee.

We also visited the Cathedral today, but it's so expansive, and there's so much to talk about there that it's going to need its own post to do it any justice. But for the record, I will say that the cathedral is not strictly preserved as historic; it's a living cathedral. It bears the marks of new additions and modifications since it was first burned down and rebuilt all the way up until last year.

But it needs its own posting; there's so much history involved that It'd be really cruel of me to tack it on to this one.

And I need to write it, and that's just not happening today.