Canterbury Cathedral

Canterbury has twice been the place where the question of who governs the church came to a head. The first time it produced a murder. The second is unresolved.

The murder

Thomas Becket was Henry II's chancellor and friend before the king made him archbishop, expecting a compliant primate. He got the opposite. The quarrel was jurisdictional: whether clergy accused of crimes were triable in royal courts or only in church ones, and behind that, whether the king or the pope governed the English church.

Four knights killed him in the north-west transept on 29 December 1170, after words of the king's that they took as instruction. The murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral was a scandal on a European scale. Henry did public penance; Becket was canonised within three years.

The shrine that followed became one of the wealthiest pilgrimage destinations in Europe, the frame of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the object of a pilgrim traffic large enough to wear the steps of the Pilgrims' Way into visible hollows.

Henry VIII destroyed it in 1538, had the bones dispersed, and ordered Becket struck from the liturgical calendars, an unusually thorough attempt to unmake a saint, and a revealing one. Becket stood for exactly the proposition Henry was denying.

The Trinity Chapel now holds bare floor and a single candle. It is the most effective thing in the building, and it works because it is honest: the shrine is not there, and pretending otherwise would be worse.

The second question

Canterbury is the mother church of the Church of England and the symbolic centre of the Anglican Communion, some tens of millions of Anglicans across around forty independent provinces.

The Communion is not a jurisdiction. The Archbishop of Canterbury has no authority over any province but his own. What holds it together is relationship, historical association, and the four instruments of communion, of which the archbishop is one, he is a focus of unity, which is precisely as strong and as weak as it sounds.

That has now been tested past its limit. Following the Church of England's decisions permitting blessings for same-sex couples:

• a substantial group of provinces, largely African and Asian and representing a large share of the Communion's actual churchgoers, has declared its communion with Canterbury impaired or severed
• GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship have stated that they no longer recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury as the Communion's focus of unity, and have proposed alternative structures
• provinces on the other side regard the developments as overdue and insufficient

Why it belongs in the entry

Because the building is not a monument to a settled thing. A cathedral that became famous for a fight about who governs the church is currently the seat of a fight about who governs the church, and the outcome will determine whether the Anglican Communion in its present form continues to exist.

The cathedral meanwhile keeps daily choral worship, as it has done for centuries, which is the other true thing about it and the one the disputes tend to obscure.

Canterbury's Gothic choir exists largely because a murder needed somewhere grand to be memorialised, and the shrine built for that purpose was later destroyed by the very institution meant to protect it.

Rebuilt to receive pilgrims

A major fire in 1174 destroyed the choir of the existing Romanesque cathedral, and its reconstruction, led by the French architect William of Sens, introduced early Gothic elements to England on a scale intended specifically to accommodate the enormous number of pilgrims visiting the shrine of the recently murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket, making the building's architectural ambition directly tied to its function as a pilgrimage destination.

The shrine that did not survive the Reformation

Becket's shrine, one of medieval Europe's most visited pilgrimage sites, was destroyed in 1538 on the order of Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries, its treasures confiscated and the site itself levelled, removing physically what had for centuries been the cathedral's primary draw for visitors from across Christendom.

As this entry's companion article covers

Becket's 1170 murder inside the cathedral, and the contemporary tensions within the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which Canterbury remains the symbolic centre, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.