River Stour

There are several branches of the Stour: it splits as it passes through Canterbury. 

The Stour is a chalk river. At the moment (early June) after nearly a month of dry weather it is very shallow. The emerald coloured long river weeds are blossoming with little white flowers. 


This very much reminded me of the picture of Ophelia painted by Sir John Everett Millais of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood which is in the Tate. The model was Lizzie Siddall who posed in a water-filled tin bath and caught a severe cold which perhaps led to the tuberculosis that killed her. Siddall, who can be seen in many pre-Raphaelite paintings, later married painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Nunnery Fields

According to Doel & Doel (2018, 25), in 1100 Anselm founded the Nunnery of the Holy Sepulchre “next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, near the junction of Oaten Hill and the Old Dover Road."

Nunnery Fields is a road that leads from this junction, south-west across a bridge over the railway line near Canterbury East station and beyond.

The Miller's Arms

Between arriving in Canterbury in January 2020 and before lockdown (which started late March 2020) when pubs were closed, I only managed to eat twice at the Miller's Arms; both meals were superb and the Shepherd Neame draught beer was excellent.

During lockdown this delightful pub and restaurant (where you could also her accommodation) displayed these wonderfully creative window paintings (the rainbow colourings are to remind us to support and thank the NHS)

After Van Gogh's starry night

After The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai

After Girl with a Pearl Earing by Jan Vermeer

Greyfriars: the Franciscans

This is the only building left of the Greyfriars Franciscan friary. According to Doel & Doel (2018, 24) it was originally established by five friars who arrived in Canterbury in September 1224 and were given land on an island in the Stour by the master of the Poor Priests' Hospital.

I suppose that the Franciscan Garden, now owned by Eastbridge Hospital, is part of that original foundation.

By 1498 the friary had 18 acres and 35 friars.

The purpose of the building is unclear: "a hospitium, infirmary or warden's residence".

The shape of the arches suggest a construction date of no earlier than the twelfth century when the form became popular in European Gothic architecture. 

The Poor Priests' Hospital

This building is now (since 2017) the Marlowe Kit, a sort of extra studio theatre for the Marlowe Theatre. It also houses collections of the works of Marlowe and of Joseph Conrad.

"The site was a tannery and a minter’s house on the banks of the Stour in the twelfth century, which were converted into almshouses in the name of the Virgin Mary for elderly and poor priests by the minter’s son, Alexander. The priests used the house as a hall, sleeping round a central fire; a solar and an undercroft were added in 1373.” (Doel & Doel 2018)

It has also been:

• a boys' home
• a house of correction
• a workhouse
• a police station

Eastbridge Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr

The Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr upon Eastbridge was founded in 1190 by Edward FitzObold, a local merchant, to provide accommodation for pilgrims visiting the tomb of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, slaughtered in the Cathedral in 1170. 

According to Doel & Doel (2018, 21), it was refounded in 1342 by Archbishop Stratford; in 1569 it became a school for twenty boys (this lasted until the 1880s); in 1584 it was reformed by Archbishop Whitgift to offer “accommodation for ten poor people of Canterbury and a dole of food for ten more.”

If you go through the door in the centre of the photograph there is a small hall with steps down to the Undercroft, where the pilgrims slept in cubicles. Over this was the Refectory, where they would be fed, and above that a chapel. The lead structure poking out of the roof is a cage for a bell. 

The hospital is now an almshouse for the elderly.

Behind the hospital is the Franciscan Garden, a secluded, walled garden which was originally part of the Franciscan Friary founded in about 1250. The only building remaining from the friary, built in about 1267, is the Greyfriars chapel. 

Pilgrim Fathers

Cafe Chambers at the southern end of Palace Street where it joins Sun Street, a cafe which promises American style breakfasts, is the building where Phillipe de la Noye, lived. He was one of the early Pilgrim fathers and he sailed to Massachusetts on the Fortune. When he arrived "de la Noye changed his name to delano. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his descendant.” (Pitkin Guide to Canterbury, p 24) He was a Walloon Huguenot who was born in Leiden in 1603. His mum, Marie de Lannoy (nee Mahieu) was born in 1580 in Canterbury. She may have been a member of the Wallon (or Strangers) Church in Canterbury.

It was in this building that Robert Cushman, "a Canterbury’s grocer’s assistant ... negotiated the charter of the Mayflower" (Pitkin Guide to Canterbury, p 24). At the age of 18, in about 1595, he was apprenticed to George Masters, a grocer who had the monopoly on making tallow candles in Canterbury. His religious beliefs were non-mainstream and he got into trouble in 1604 for printing and distributing leaflets against the Church of England. In 1605 he completed his apprenticeship and became a 'freeman' grocer. His son was baptised in 1608 and he emigrated to Leiden in 1611. He returned to England in 1617 and began to plan for the voyage to the new world. He sailed on the Speedwell in 1620 but when that got into difficulties and rendezvoused with the Mayflower in Dartmouth he didn't transfer ships as many others did. Thus he failed to become a true Mayflower Pilgrim Father, joining the nascent Plymouth Colony on the Fortune in 1621. As the Colony's London agent he was soon back in England and died in Benenden, Kent in 1625. He wrote Cry of a Stone sometime around 1619 but it was not published till after his death.

Palace Street

This is the street the Archbishop's Palace faces out onto, so much of one side of the street is grey wall. But it is also home to some notable buildings.

At the end of the street is a charity bookshop with a very crooked door:

Conquest House is where the four knights who murdered Thomas Becket are rumoured to have rendezvoused.

The American Pancake House at the southern end of Palace Street, where it joins Sun Street, was the home of Phillipe de la Noye, one of the early Pilgrim fathers, who sailed to Massachusetts on  the Fortune. When he arrived "de la Noye changed his name to delano. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his descendant.” (Pitkin Guide to Canterbury, p 24) It was in this building that Robert Cushman, "a Canterbury’s grocer’s assistant ... negotiated the charter of the Mayflower" (Pitkin Guide to Canterbury, p 24)

“Mary Tourtel, creator of Rupert Bear, was born ... at 51 Palace Street on 28 January 1874.” ((Pitkin Guide to Canterbury, p 26)

Parrot

The Parrot pub claims it was built in 1370 and is one of the oldest pubs in Canterbury, although it was formerly known as St Radigund's Hall. It is on St Radigund's St at the inside of the sharp ben where it goes from being east-west to northwest-southeast.

It is indeed a delightful old building and the pub has a wonderful menu and some nice beers. I shall be reviewing it properly as soon as the lockdown is over.

In The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer mentions "The sparrowhawk, parrot and the popinjay" but he is referring to birds, not pubs.

Duck Lane

If you travel along St Radigunds Street from the Borough in a north west direction you come to a point where it seems to carry straight on but actually does a sharp turn to travel due west; at the underside of this turn is the Parrot pub. What appears to be the north-west continuation of St Radigunds Street is, in fact, Duck Lane which continues to the Radigund Street car park (though access is only by foot). 

Looking north west along Duck Lane.

Freeman, Hardy and Willis

I was more or less minding my own business, taking a photograph of the Bell and Crown on Palace Street on an overcast Saturday afternoon in the middle of May, when a passer-by asked me whether the sign advertising Truman's Brewery, which gave the date 1666, referred to the date of the pub. He then told me that his family had owned Fremlin's Brewery, and then that the family also owned Freeman, Hardy and Willis (whose Canterbury depot in St Dunstan's is shown). 

He had been going to get a job there as a boy, he said. He then explained that the Freeman part of the firm was associated with Morgan Freeman and explained that the Freemans had been a family descended from a clever slave; they were great engineers. He seemed to be under the impression that FHW, which he said had forty shops in England, was an engineering company. The Hardy, of course, referred to the actor Tom Hardy. And the Willis? This was Bruce Willis. By now I suspected that I was being spun a yarn. He then began to explain that the family of Bruce Willis owned the land on which the Dreamland amusement park in Margate was built and that he had recently tried to but houses nearby for far more than they were worth.

My researches tell me that FHW was a chain of shoe shops established in 1875; there were 540 shops at its peak but the brand siappeared in 1996. None of the actors named seem to have anything to do with the brand.

My informant, Mars, tells me that he comes from New Jersey but is now resident in a detached house with a CT1 postcode that was built in 1938, the year his mother was born.

The experience reminded me of a delightful coach holiday in Greece, visiting the old sites, when, one night in the wonderful coastal town of Nafplion, the original capital of the newly independent Greece, one of my fellow tourists revealed to his wife that he was actually the long-lost (and unacknowledged) son of John Lennon, which had been revealed to him as he was passing a shop in London.

Blackfriars in Canterbury

The Dominican order set up a friary in Canterbury in 1237, using funds granted by Henry III. The friary was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538.

Blackfriars Street runs west from King Street up to what used to be the friars' refectory (dining hall); it then dog-legs to travel north running parallel (upstream) with the River Stour, to Mill Lane.

The refectory is still there. Between 1640 and 1912 it was an Anabaptist meeting house which later was used by the Unitarians. In 1920 it was used for storage and in 1982 it was bought for, you guessed it, the King's School to be an art gallery. According to Doel & Doel (2018, 24) the refectory, built 1260,has "a projection out of its river-facing wall where a pulpit was located, from which one of the friars would read scriptural passages at mealtimes.”

The guest house of the friary was on the other bank, connected to the refectory by a bridge which no longer exists. The guest house became a private house in 1780 and subsequently the Beerling Hall.

A door in a wall leading to the hospitium of the Dominican friary

Door in a wall

This old door is set into a very old wall at the north end of Victoria Walk by the Marlowe theatre; it appears to lead to a property known as Beerling Hall. 

According to the Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society this building was a guest hall for the Dominican 'Blackfriars' monastery; it dates to 1320. It has been used for weaving, as a private house (from 1780), and as a furniture store (from 1905) until it was bought and restored in 1979 by Mr and Mrs Beerling; it is not a community hall. However, as with so much, it now seems to have been acquired by the King's School.

The door is interesting because of the unusual marking on it:

Another martyr, another St Thomas

This gate, called the 'Roper Gate', is all that is left of Place House, an old Tudor house owned by William Roper who was Lord of the Manor of St Dunstan's and an MP and lawyer at the time of Henry VIII; his father had been Attorney General. William Roper joined the household of Sir Thomas More and married More's eldest daughter Margaret. After More was executed for refusing to swear allegiance to Henry VIII as head of the Church of England (becoming a martyr for the Roman Catholic church), Margaret got his head back from its spike in London Bridge and buried it in the family tomb in St Dunstan's church, across the road. William Roper then wrote the (at the time) definitive biography of his father-in-law.

William is portrayed in Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons as someone who would always disagree with whatever point was being made. He is a minor character in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. 

Heraldry

Canterbury's Coat of Arms dates from 1380. It is described as: "Argent Three Cornish Choughs Two and one Sable Beaked and Legged Gules on a Chief of the Last a Leopard Passant Gardant Or". Here it is displayed outside Tower House in the Westgate Gardens.

The heraldic Latin means:

• Argent: there is a silver background; argent is the Latin for silver as in the chemical symbol Ag and Argentina.
• Three Cornish Choughs: these are the three birds; they are taken from the crest of Thomas Becket.
• Two and one: two on top and one below
• Sable beaked: with black beaks
• and Legged Gules: gules is red
• on a Chief of the Last: on a band above what has just been described
• a Leopard Passant: often described as lions, these are 'leopards' in heraldry; they are taken from the royal coat of arms. Passant means that they are walking with one of the front feet raised
• Gardant : they are seen from the side with the face turned towards the viewer
• Or: golden

The motto: ave mater angliae means 'hail the mother of England'.

Pubs, Inns, Alehouses

There are lots of pubs in Canterbury. This is a picture of the oldest. It is supposed to date from 1372.

At the moment I am mourning pubs. The coronavirus lockdown has meant that all of the pubs in Canterbury are closed. It isn't a good time for the brewing industry. The new puritanism of the Millennials has led to the closure of hundreds of pubs in Britain over the last few years. In Bedford, where I used to live, this was accelerated by the influx of Moslems into some areas; Islam forbids a Moslem to drink alcohol although this custom is sometimes honoured in the breach. But Canterbury with its two Universities (almost as many students as there are residents of the City) and its large tourist trade has a lot of pubs ... or it had before the lockdown. Even so, there are the relics of closed-down pubs. Here is one, on the corner of King Street and St Alphege Lane:

The two windows coloured blue are etched 'Rigden's Fine Ales'. According to the brewery history wiki (accessed 10/5/2020) Edward Rigden founded a brewery in the early 1700s. It had a brewery in Court Street Faversham although there is also an advertisement dated 1858 for Rigden and Delmar's Superior Canterbruy Ales and Beer citing a brewery in Beer Cart Lane, Canterbury. Another source says that Rigden's "started in Faversham, Kent in about 1750 and became George Beer & Rigden's in 1921 after taking over George Beer's Brewery in Canterbury" but this latter clause conflicts with the date given for the advertisement from the first source. The Canterbury brewery was called the Star Brewery and stood in Broad Street. George Beer is buried in St Martin's churchyard.

This pub is the Bell and Crown. It is presently a free house but is has a sign advertising Truman, Hanbury and Buxton; Truman's Brewery in Brick Lane, London was the centre of what was at one time one of the biggest brewery companies in the world. One of the ground floor windows, however, is etched with the word Fremlins. Fremlins was a brewery in Maidstone, Kent founded in 1790 which became the biggest brewer in Kent by the mid-1900s. Fremlin's took over George Beer & Rigden (above) in 1949. It is speculated that Roald Dahl's book The Gremlins, about little creatures who damaged RAF aeroplanes, was inspired by stories told in Fremlin's brewery about a mischievous sprite who created havoc in the brewery and had to be appeased by publicans leaving dishes of beer on the street outside the pub.

The Bell and Crown also has a window advertising Geo Beer & Cos Pale Ales; Beer's was a brewery that owned the Star Brewery in Canterbury and amalgamted with Rigden's in 1922.

"Face"

This sculpture of a face is by the sculptor Rick Kirby. According to an article in Kent Online, it stood outside the Marlowe Theatre from 2003 to 2009 and was reinstated in 2011. 

It is very similar to a double sculpture in Bedford called 'Reflections of Bedford' (source = The Virtual Library, Bedford) erected on 12th December 2009 which features two faces staring at one another. 

I came to Canterbury from Bedford in January 2020.

Chitty, chitty, bang, bang.

When I was at school, my teacher read us a story about a magical car called Chitty-chitty-bang-bang. The book (published 1964) was by Ian Fleming (who also wrote the James Bond books) and it was soon made into a musical film (1968) starring Dick van Dyke; as a little boy I loved the songs, particularly 'You Two' ("Someone to care for, to be there for; I have you two ... Could be we three get along so famously, 'cause you two have me and I have you two too.") and Hushabye Mountain. 

The book was inspired by a real racing car and this building in Canterbury is where it was built!

"Count Louis Zborowski, who lived at Higham Park at Bridge, was a well-known engineer and racing driver who built the Chitty Bang Bang cars in his workshop at 16 St Radigund’s Street, Canterbury, in the early 1920s. He died in a crash in the Italian GP in 1923." (Kent Online 14/9/2009)

Murder of an Archbishop: Thomas Becket

One of the reasons that Canterbury is famous is that it was here that four knights, acting on the supposed authority of King Henry II, murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket, subsequently sainted, in his own cathedral. This event caused a scandal in the mediaeval world and led to the archbishop's shrine becoming a place of pilgrimage, making the local church hugely rich, and creating spin-off tourism for the town. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales isn't about Canterbury itself but is a compendium of stories supposedly told by a group of pilgrims travelling to St Thomas's shrine.

Here is a picture of Conquest House:

It's a lovely old building, on Palace Street, just opposite the entrance to the Archbishop's palace, from which you can gain access to the Cathedral precincts and what was then the priory church of Christ Church Canterbury. The significance of all of this is that this is where the four knights are supposed to have rendezvoused (according to Pitkin, undated). Doel & Doel (2018, 79) says that the knights "left their weapons in the house of Gilbert the Citizen, now known as Conquest House. After being enraged by Becket they returned to collect their weapons, before retrning to the cathedral and killing the archbishop." They also record a secret passage "in the surviving Norman undercroft", a possible escape route for the knights. Unfortunately they don't say what is at the other end of the passage.

The four knights were:

• Reginald FitzUrse, the ringleader, who traditionally struck the first blow. 
• Hugh de Morville was Lord of Westmoreland; his father, also Hugh de Morville, had been Constable of Scotland. Assassin Hugh held castles in Appleby (my surname!) and Knaresborough, where the four knights holed up for a year following the murder (they were subsequently excommunicated and sentenced to the Holy Land for 14 years). He died in the Holy Land and was buried either under the door of the temple in Jerusalem or under the portico in front of the Al-Aqsa mosque there or on the island of Brean Down off Weston-Super-Mare.
• William de Tracy was lord of the manors of Bradninch and Moretonhampstead in Devon and Toddington in Gloucestershire. One of the traditions about what happened after the assassination suggests that William died in 1174 of leprosy at Cosenza in southern Italy, possibly on his way to the Holy Land.
• Richard le Breton aka Richard de Brito may have ended up in Jersey and be one of the ancestors of the present Viscount Esher, Christopher Brett.

Until January 2020 Conquest House was being used by Unboxed, a low-packaging food shop. 

Bibliography

Doel, Geoff & Doel Fran, 2018, Secret Canterbury, Amberley Publishing, Stroud Gloucestershire ISBN 978 1 4456 6912 0

'Pitkin', undated, Canterbury, Pitkin City Guides ISBN 978-1-84165-635-9

Friars, friars and more friars

Being such a religious town, Canterbury had more than its fair share of friars. This is shown on the map. There is a street called Blackfriars, a Greyfriars Garden, and a Whitefriars Shopping Centre.  Whatr are all these friars?

Blackfriars refer to the Dominican order because they wear a black cape over a white habit. Founded by (later Saint) Dominic de Guzman (a Spaniard born 1170 in Caleruega in Burgos, Old Castille, Spain with an interesting name that suggests his family might have been conversos, that is ex-Moslems who had converted to Christianity during the Spoanish Reconquista) the Dominicans were founded in 1216 to preach the gospel and oppose heresy; they were stalwarts of the Inquisition and nicknamed the dogs of God a pun on the Latin domini canis.


The Greyfriars are the Franciscans (the Greyfriars Garden is next to the Franciscan Garden). The Franciscans were founded in 1209 by St Francis of Assissi; their hallmark was poverty. The word friar itself is a version of 'Fransiscan).

The Whitefriars are Carmelites and derived from a monastery on Mount Carmel in what was at the time the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem but is now near Haifa in Israel.

Roman Wall?

This is a section of wall outside the Parrot public house.

"The Roman wall was ... more than five feet thick as can be seen in front of the Parrot restaurant in St Radigan's." (Birmingham 2015, 43)

I can't see any evidence that this is a Roman wall but I don't really know what I am looking for, except for thin red bricks as can clearly be seen in the picture of St Martin's church on this page. 

The Parrot's website tells us that it is "One of Canterbury’s oldest buildings, ... built on Roman foundations in the 14th century"

There is a plaque next to this wall which says that this is the Roman wall but it was made higher and incorporated into the wall of St Mary's church. That's this wall:

You can see traces of red brick in the lower sections of the wall although they are fatter than what I would typically expect to see. Any Roman brick experts out there?

Charles Dickens stayed here

The Sun Hotel (originally called the Little Inn) is a Tudor building on the Burgate, just outside the entrance to Canterbury Cathedral. When was it built? The website says it is "a 15th century Tudor building" ,the plaque says it was built in 1503, and the Kent Messenger dates it to 1480.

Charles Dickens stayed at the Sun and wrote about it in David Copperfield; Mr Micawber stays at the Little Inn. David Copperfield goes to school in Canterbury and Micawber turns up as one of the teachers.

Local legend has it that the House of Agnes on St Dunstan's street just outside the Westgate (now offering bed and breakfast accommodation) is where Agnes, the woman who was to become David Copperfield's second wife, was imagined to have lived.

Don Juan in Kent?

Today I walked down to Dane John gardens where there is a little kiosk selling refreshments and some great cooked food called Don Juan, presumably named after the gardens but perhaps after the proprietor? The cafe advertises 'Sabor Latino' (Latin taste) and its menu belies its humble size: you can get Sunday Roasts and a wonderful range of Mediterranean dishes and Mexican streetfood. 

The gardens are beautiful and if you walk to the top of the Dane John mound you get some stunning views:

This is the traditional site of the first Norman castle; it is a motte, whose Norman word is donjon. A plaque on the site records that it was built by Hamo, son of Vitales "who appears on the Bayeux tapestry" (it is not clear whether this refers to Hamo or Vitales). 

In 1790 Alderman James Simmons shaped Dane John unto a cone and laid out the gardens (PCG, 14).

By the Domesday book in 1086 the castle had moved to its present site. The donjon later became part of the fourteenth century walls that are still very much erect at this spot:

This path along the walls takes you to the Riding Gate whose name is probably a corruption of Red Gate after the traces of red Roman brick that can be seen in it. This was part of the Roman walls and the gate allows access fto the city along Watling Street. 

I discover from the Pitkin City Guide to Canterbury that "archaeologists have shown that the Normans raised their first defences on a Roman burial mound" which is the Dane John. You can climb to the top:

Cricket in Kent: where it began?

Today's walk took me to the delightful suburb (they would probably rather I called it a village) of St Stephen's, to the northwest of the city centre, on the way to the University of Kent high on its hill.

There is a church with a row of terraced almshouses. The end house, which was where the Warden lived (shades of Trollope), has been turned into a pub called Ye Olde Beverlie Inn. Attached to it is a plaque:

So this was the first clubhouse for what became the Kent County Cricket Club.

Here is a photograph of the Inn (lurking behind the nearest traffic light) and the almshouse to the right, taken from the delightful if tiny St Stephen's Green.

If you walk from the inn across the green you reach the Beverley Meadow, still large enough to play cricket on. Just before the meadow is a fantastic old half-timbered house:

The Abbot's Mill

As I walk downstream along the Stour past Sainsbuty's and the coach park where, in normal days, the visitors arrive and pass the little Church of England primary school and past the car park I arrive at Saint Radegund's Bridge. Across the road is a pub called the Miller's Arms where the vegan chef cooks fantastic Sunday roasts (and other dishes too, all good) and which serves Shepherd Neame beers on draught. Of course it's closed at the moment due to the lockdown restrictions triggered by the Covid-2 coronavirus scare. But across the road from the marvellous Millers Arms is the Abbot's Mill gardens. Even a shallow river like the Stour gushes quiter convincingly through the weir here, in the olden days it must have provided a significant source of power.

A notice records that the mill was built by Hugh II, the abbot of St Augustine's Abbey. He used his own money to buy it, during the reign of King Stephen, according to the Historic Canterbury website. 

It is a pleasant spot and you can bridge the Stour here and walk further south through a garden called Solly's Orchard where a cider company have joined the City Council in planting apple trees for the benefit of hungry passers-by. 

Then you can walk past the Marlowe onto the High Street. 

Mysterious fauna and flora

Well maybe not mysterious. I am just ignorant. But here is a family of ducks the like of which I'd never seen before. I suspect that the blue/ purple coloured one on the bank fourth from the left is the drake. The bird on the bank sitting next to him is, perhaps, the mature female, his missus, and the light brown coloured ducks are daughters. In the water is another drake, the young lad, trying out his charms on what would appear to be a mallard duck.

Are these just off-colour ducks, a family of freaks? Or is this another species. Anybody out there know?

I also found what might be an orchid on a secluded part of the Stour bank: 

Once again my ignorance prevents me from knowing anything about this.

The Canterbury Roman Theatre

The Roman road Watling Street went from Dover through Canterbury to London (and then on to St Albans and Wroxeter). The London to Dover section more or less follows the A2 although in Canterbury itself the High Street that was the old coaching A2 (the route that Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims would have taken) is slightly to the north of Watling Street.

The Three Tuns pub is on Watling Street (a section still bearing that name) in Canterbury. It is built on the site of the old Roman Theatre as this sign shows:

The oldest church in the English-speaking world

Today I went to the east of Canterbury city centre to see St Martin's Church.

Bertha (died about 601) was a Christian Frankish princess who married the pagan King Aethelbert of Kent. According to Bede she adopted a pre-existing Roman church on this site to be her private chapel, naming it for St Martin of Tours, a town near when she grew up. When St Augustine arrived on his mission to convert the English (597) he adopted this church as his headquarters, and here he baptised the King (who by this time ruled not just Kent but all of the eastern side of England as far north as the Humber). It was after this that he built his Abbey (nearby) and the church that became the Cathedral (a little further off).

This infor comes from Bede, the historian, saint and 'doctor' of the church, who writes of "a church dedicated of old to the honour of St. Martin, built whilst the Romans were still in the island" in chapter 26 of his Ecclesiastical History of England, written about 731.

From the front view above the church looks Victorian mock-mediaeval but if you look at the side walls of the back you can see Roman bricks (typically flat) among the Saxon flints:

You can learn more about this church from its website here.

The Murder of Archbishop Sudbury

Today my Canterbury travels took me behind the modernist trapezium of the Marlowe Theatre and past the bijou Curzon Cinema to Pound Street. Here is Sudbury Tower, a fourteenth century tower built into the town walls near the Westgate and named after Simon of Sudbury, a controversial Archbishop of Canterbury.

Born in Sudbury (Suffolk) he studied in Paris and became chaplain to Pope Innocent VI, based in Avignon, who sent him in a diplomatic misson to Edwatd III of England. In 1362 he became Bishop of London and in 1375 Archbishop of Canterbury. 

In 1377 Edward III died and Sudbury crowned the boy King Richard II in Westminster Abbey. This did no harm to his career since he became Lord Chancellor in 1380. He was instrumental in the introduction of the poll tax which sparked the Peasant's Revolt in 1381 led by John Ball and Wat Tyler. When the peasants came to London they attacked the Tower and found him hiding there. They dragged him out and beheaded him (apparently it took eight blows to sever the neck completely).

This is what I love about Canterbury. In the old days, when parchment was a scarce resource, a scribe would sometimes use parchment that had already been written on; they would scrape off the ink and reuse it. This means that many historical documents have been lost but also that some have been preserved: in some cases we can still read the ancient text. The technical term for such a multiply rewritten manuscript is a palimpsest. Canterbury is like a palimpsest: its new streets have old buildings; within in nowness there are the marks of old times. 

Sex on the Stour

I arrived in Canterbury in January, suffered on successive weekends storms Ciara and Dennis and by the end of March entered the coronavirus lockdown with everyone else in the UK (and so many around the entire world). So I haven't had a lot of chance to get to know the city. But the current lockdown rules allow me an hour's exercise every day so I'm exploring the bits that are open.

I hadn't realised how wet the west of Canterbury is. As it flows past the town the Stour breaks into a number of pieces. I love walking down the bank and observing the wildlife. As a Londoner (long ago) I have often had the opportunity to see fucking pigeons but today I saw pigeons fucking. And a pair of Mallard drakes having a fight. And what is either a rat or a water vole. Spring is in the air and that means sex. Even the flowers are getting in on the act: a flower is essentially the sex organs of a plant and the beautiful colours and fragrances are designed to attract insects so pollination (insemination) can occur.

Blooming tulips on North Lane outside the Cafe du Soleil

The great thing about the Stour is that it is a chalk river; there are only 210 of these in the world and almost all of them are in England with a few in Northern France. Today the water was beautifully clear and showed the emerald-green water weeds sprouting from the gravel bed.

As well as the unruly wildlife there are observations of the human fauna. There is a new breed of lockdown jogger. These are mostly ladies. I'm not one to criticise another person's body: when you're living in a glass house like myself you can't throw stones; these days I bulge in all directions except the places I have always wished I bulged. But I wear tents. I wear ill-fitting garments. Shirts are never tucked. I've even moved to braces. These joggers favour body-hugging lycra perhaps in the belief that their so so solid flesh is indeed about to melt and that the consequence will be an awkward splurge, a consummation most devoutly to be wished away.