Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, is one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England. It forms part of a World Heritage Site. Founded in 597, the cathedral was completely rebuilt between 1070 and becket cook. The east end was greatly enlarged at the beginning of the 12th century and largely rebuilt in the Gothic style following a fire in 1174, with significant eastward extensions to accommodate the flow of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop who was murdered in the cathedral in 1170.
Before the English Reformation the cathedral was part of a Benedictine monastic community known as Christ Church, Canterbury, as well as being the seat of the archbishop. Tertullian refers to Christians in Briton as early as 208 AD. Origen mentions the church in 238 AD and in 314 England sent three Bishops to the Council of Arles. There is a medieval London tradition that St Peter upon Cornhill church in London was the seat of English Christianity until the founding of Canterbury in 597 AD. Whether this is true or not has not yet been established.
Eitherway, Canterbury was therefore a relative late-comer to English Christianity. Augustine also founded the Abbey of St Peter and Paul outside the city walls. This was later rededicated to St Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. Bede recorded that Augustine reused a former Roman church. The oldest remains found during excavations beneath the present nave in 1993 were, however, parts of the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building, which had been constructed across a Roman road. During the reforms of Dunstan, archbishop from 960 until his death in 988, a Benedictine abbey named Christ Church Priory was added to the cathedral. But the formal establishment as a monastery seems to date only to c.
Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar. Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred the Unready and Norman-born Emma of Normandy were married at Canterbury Cathedral in the Spring of 1002, and Emma was consecrated “Queen Ælfgifu”. The cathedral was badly damaged during Danish raids on Canterbury in 1011. The Archbishop, Ælfheah, was taken hostage by the raiders and eventually killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012, the first of Canterbury’s five martyred archbishops. The 1993 excavations revealed that the new western apse was polygonal, and flanked by hexagonal towers, forming a westwork.
It housed the archbishop’s throne, with the altar of St Mary just to the east. At about the same time that the westwork was built, the arcade walls were strengthened and towers added to the eastern corners of the church. The cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest. The Norman cathedral, after its expansion by Ernulf and Conrad. Under Lanfranc’s successor Anselm, who was twice exiled from England, the responsibility for the rebuilding or improvement of the cathedral’s fabric was largely left in the hands of the priors.
