October 25, 2017
I am inspired by my newly
redesigned website to return to the blog and finish up the story of how I
undertook to update the pilgrimage of my youth. There is one good excuse for
leaving it unfinished, and that is that Chaucer’s pilgrims never got to
Canterbury, never returned to London, and never finished the stories they were
meant to tell.
My hearty companions and I did, however finish our trip. I
returned home on the 10th of June, Anna went on to Berlin for the
summer and Kathy and Jeannie went back to Seattle, all well satisfied with our
adventure. Along the way we saw two Shakespeare plays, at the Globe and the
Royal Shakespeare theatres; went to four evening vesper services, at
Westminster Abbey, Christ College at Oxford, Winchester Cathedral and
Canterbury Cathedral; we had high tea at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford and the
Pump Room at Bath; and we stepped on stones that were stepped on by previous
pilgrims for a thousand years or so.
I am going to end my pilgrimage blog with three chapters
from by book of twenty years ago. The first talks of leaving Southwark, from
which place Chaucer’s pilgrims departed, which deals with some of the problems
of research and of recreating historical events. The second and third parts are
the final chapters of the book, and describe the road into Canterbury from
Harbledown (where Chaucer left his pilgrims), my first view of the great cathedral,
the story of Thomas Becket (who I credit with much of the inspiration for the
whole damned enterprise), but gives the last word to Alison, the Wife of Bath.
Here I should also give a plug for my novel Pilgrimage
Walk, which grew out of this experience—and there I gave the last word to
Anna!
Chapter Seventeen: Redy to
wenden on my pilgrimage
Bifel
that, in that seson on a day,
In
Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy
to wenden on my pilgrimage
To
Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At
night was come into that hostelrye
Wel
nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of
sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In
felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That
toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
The
Canterbury Tales
Belloc’s
old road is made up of best guesses about a path that might have been take by
pilgrims travelling from Winchester to Canterbury. No such guesswork is necessary to determine
the route from London to Canterbury.
Chaucer did not leave us a map, but he gave us signposts. Several places are mentioned in passing in
the text. The trip begins at the Tabard
Inn in Southwark. The pilgrims stop to
rest a few miles later at St. Thomas’s Watering. They travel through Deptford, bypass
Greenwich, mention Rochester and Sittingbourne, pick up some additional
pilgrims at Boughten-under-Bleen, and end just short of Canterbury at “Bob-up-and-doun,”
usually thought to mean Harbledown.
The
whole length of this route is defined by an ancient Roman Road known as
“Watling Street,” on which people have travelled between London and the coast
for about two thousand years. When
Chaucer’s pilgrims made their trip, around 1387, this Pilgrim’s Way was well
established.
The story begins in
Southwark, across London Bridge from the center of the capitol. When London Bridge was the only bridge,
Southwark was the gateway to London, and along the Borough High Street were
lined the coaching inns from which travelers set out to every destination in
Britain. Along this track the Wife of
Bath travelled, and Thomas Becket, and Queen Emma, and Edward the Confessor,
and Chaucer, and Charles Dickens, and all the kings Henry, and Jane
Austen. It is the one sure road that all
of them traversed. Now it was my
turn. Before starting on the next phase
of my own pilgrimage, however, I wanted to get the lay of the land, and I invited
Joannie to accompany on a ramble around Southwark as I scouted things out.
The first thing to look for
were remnants of the age of Chaucer, and there are very few of those left. In medieval times the influence of Winchester
reached north all the way to the Thames, and the Bishop of Winchester had a
palace in Southwark as his local residence.
Remnants of the walls of Winchester Palace are still standing, with the
stone tracery of an ancient stained glass window visible high up in the tallest
remaining wall. The other medieval
structure in Southwark of which some remnants remain, is the church now known
as Southwark Cathedral.
Some say that in the ninth
century St. Swithun, who was then Bishop of Winchester, built a priory here
which came to be known as “St. Mary Overie.” The name means “St. Mary over the
water,” a moniker obviously chosen by Londoners rather than Winchesterites (for
whom it would have been something like “St. Mary over a long stretch of
road”). A different creation myth for
the church makes it a nunnery founded by a woman named Mary who was the
daughter of one of the Thames ferrymen.
Though the building has its
roots in the Middle Ages, it has over the years been damaged by fires, rebuilt,
had its roof collapse, been rebuilt, fallen into decrepitude, been restored,
and generally reflected the changes in the neighborhood around it. And what a neighborhood! Chaucer must have visited this church. In the last decade of his life, the Bishop of
Winchester was Cardinal Henry Beaufort, the son of Chaucer’s patron John of
Gaunt, and Beaufort oversaw many repairs, including the completion of the
tower. Chaucer’s friend John Gower, who
may have provided him with the outline of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, is buried
here. In a portrait effigy, Gower lies
with his head resting on a pile of books.
Also buried here is Edward Shakespeare who, with his brother Will, was a
member of the parish in the decades before and after 1600.
John Harvard grew up in the
neighborhood and attended the church school before emigrating to America in
1637. He left his library of 400 books
and half his estate to a newly-founded college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
consequently got the place named after him.
Harvard was also associated with the Queen’s Head Inn, one of the
coaching inns that lined the High Street.
I picked up a 1907 biography of Harvard to see if I could find out more
about him, but it quickly became obvious that the author, Henry Shelley, had
found almost no details on the life of John Harvard and consequently had
written a book about what his life might have been like if he were basically like other people of
the time.
Shelley makes a wonderfully wacky
contention that John Harvard’s parents were probably introduced to one another
by William Shakespeare because Harvard’s mom was from Stratford-upon-Avon, like
Shakespeare, and the Globe Theatre was in Southwark, where Harvard’s dad
lived. Harvard lost his father, two
sisters, and two of his three brothers to the plague in 1625. His mother married twice more in quick
succession and was quickly widowed each time.
With monies inherited from her husbands, she apparently purchased the
Queen’s Head Inn while John was at Cambridge University, and she left it to him
when she died in 1635, just as he was graduating. Within two years he had emigrated to
Charlestown, Massachusetts, and a year later he was dead. Friends of the University which he never had
a chance to see, donated the funds for a memorial chapel in Southwark
Cathedral.
There is a reference to the baptism of
John Harvard in the records of the church and from the entries surrounding it
you get a sense of what the neighborhood was like in the early years of the
seventeenth century. Moms don’t get a
mention in the record, but the other babies baptised that week get listed along
with their fathers and their fathers’ occupations. In addition to Harvard’s father, who was a
butcher, the other dads of the week included a victualer, an oarmaker, two
watermen, and a brewer. Southwark was then
the center of transportation not only for the inns that lined the High Street,
but for the waterway of the Thames. It
was also the center of entertainment. You could watch plays by Shakespeare and
Marlowe there, you could also watch bears being baited. Those were the glory years of Southwark.
By the time Dickens was spending time
there in the nineteenth century, Southwark had become poor and grimy. When structural repairs were made to London
Bridge the road bed around the church was raised, leaving it below street
level. To add injury to this insult, in
1841 they built a railway viaduct right through the yard. The neighborhood was now by then so congested
and so poor that the church fell on hard times.
It had, at the time of the Reformation,
became the parish church for Southwark and the name was changed to St. Saviour.
As the Church of England reorganized
itself over the next several centuries, the diocese of Winchester was curtailed
and Southwark became a part of the diocese of Rochester. At the turn of the twentieth century,
Southwark became the seat of its own diocese and St. Saviour became Southwark
Cathedral. Since that time it has been
extensively restored.
The thing that most surprised us in the
cathedral was its active lived-in look.
It’s the first old church I’ve seen which still paints its
monuments. From a preservation
perspective it gives me pause, but as it is such a long tradition in the
church, there is something wonderful about it.
Harvard alums paid for a nice chapel, and I was glad to see a plaque
dedicated to the memory of Sam Wanamaker, the American actor who zealously
worked to build the replica of the Globe Theatre around the corner, and who
died before it was finished.
From the
cathedral Joannie and I crossed the High Street to see what was left of the
great coaching inns. It’s easy to see from
the map where they were. Each was on a
courtyard that opened from the main street, and the names of the alleys leading
into them still bear the names of the old inns: the George, the King’s Head,
the White Hart, the Queen’s Head (inherited by John Harvard from his mother),
the Spur, and of course the Tabard, from which the Wife of Bath and her
companions set out for Canterbury.
The Tabard
was originally built as a hostel for pilgrims in 1306, eighty or so years
before Alison and company. The founder
was the Abbot of Hyde, whose abbey site I had visited a week earlier just
outside the Winchester walls. In 1539
the property was taken over by Thomas and Henry Tabard, who must have taken
their surname from the place (which had itself been named for a sleeveless
leather coat.) It changed hands again in
1590 after a fire and was renamed the “Talbot,” the symbol for which was a
greyhound dog. Over the next generation
the former abbots lodge was turned into a brewhouse.
The whole of
the medieval building was destroyed in a fire in 1676 that swept through the
neighborhood and leveled all the inns.
The Talbot was entirely rebuilt and reopened in 1681. That building stood for two hundred years,
into the age of photography, and a number of wonderful pictures survive. In 1873 it was advertised for sale, then
consisting of “the Talbot Public House, and other buildings in the inn yard,
including a very Substantial Hop Warehouse of Six Lofty Floors, (Recently
Erected): also Two Houses and Shops.”
Two years later it was demolished, and though a pub called the Tabard
opened on the site for a time, today nothing remains. It was rather sad to see it. The name of the street is Tabard, so there is
no mistaking the location, but no plaque marks it for the interested pilgrim
and the people who work there now, in a quasi-industrial building called
“Tabard House,” informed me that they had never read the Canterbury Tales
and consequently had no interest in talking about it.
At least the George survives and
Joannie and I went there for lunch to regain our spirits. Like the Tabard/Talbot, the George Inn was
destroyed in the big Southwark fire of 1676, but unlike the Tabard, the
building which was built at that time still survives, and in it one can still
see the courtyard formation of the medieval coaching inns. Though it is now only about a quarter of its
original size, it is a wonderful bit of the past and easy to transport yourself
back there.
Except for some solid and interesting
Victorian buildings on the High Street, most of the neighborhood is composed of
awful buildings, built in the post-War period of unspeakable architectural
crimes. It is dominated by London Bridge
Station with its access for trains and pedestrians, and the big complex of
Guy’s Hospital, descended from a hospital originally built in 1173 and called
St. Thomas’ Hospital after Becket.
Though the modern hospital is not
architecturally charming, there is an interesting history to the building which
preceded it. It was founded by Gilbert Foliot,
the Bishop of London, who was excommunicated by Becket for participating in the
coronation of Henry III, an honor which Becket believed belonged only to
himself. Bishop Foliot bowed to the
popularity of the Becket cult by naming his new hospital, which opened the year
Becket was canonized, after his enemy.
Centuries later, when Becket was declared an enemy of the state by Henry
VIII, the name of the hospital was changed to St. Thomas the Apostle, and later
the new Guy’s Hospital overtook the neighborhood. Florence Nightingale founded the first
nursing school here.
As we ate our lunch at the George,
Joannie and I read through brochures of the neighborhood. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the Thames waterfront in Southwark was said to have teemed with pirates and
privateers. Walter Raleigh and Francis
Drake marched around these parts, preparing themselves for their great sea
voyages, and a replica of Drake’s Golden Hinde is one of the local
attractions. The Clink Prison is also
here, from which the slang term for all prisons is derived. It was originally run by the Bishop of
Winchester as a place to incarcerate prisoners who were charged within the
jurisdiction of the church rather than the state, and so it was at the heart of
what caused the breakdown in relations between Becket and his king, Henry
II. Later, when civil criminals began to
be sent there, it was located conveniently near the sailorizing community and
that undoubtedly kept it occupied.
Certainly by Dickens’ day, Southwark was seen to have a pretty seamy
criminal element.
It was nice to have Joannie with me on
this day, especially as we sat at the George and I prepared myself for the
final stage of the walk to Canterbury.
We traded stories about jobs and family and travel, much as my old pal
Alison must have done with her companions.
The conversation inevitably turned to that party of 600 years
earlier. Who were they? One was a sea captain like Peg Brandon, my
stalwart companion of the week before, one was Chaucer himself, and one was the
Tabard innkeeper, Harry Bailey. Chaucer
and Bailey were both actual persons; their companions were born in the brain of
Chaucer, but they were based on types that must have been circulating around
Southwark at the time.
A number of Chaucer’s pilgrims were
church people, and the irreverent way in which he depicts them is testimony to
the breakdown of the church’s power by the end of the fourteenth century. The prioress is the highest ranking among
them, both socially and ecclesiastically.
She has a retinue that includes a nun and three priests. There is also a monk, a friar, a pardoner
(with his bag of fake relics to sell), and a summoner, who summoned people to
the church court and probably threw a bunch of them into the Clink. The only reverent one among them is the
poorest, a parson who travels with his ploughman brother.
Multiple castes of English society are
represented among Chaucer’s pilgrims. At
the top is a knight who travels with his son as squire, and a yeoman servant. There is also a franklyn, who owns an estate,
and a reeve, who oversees the management of someone else’s estate. There is a scholar, a doctor, a maunciple
(who was something like a law clerk), and a bunch of middle class
tradespeople. This is where the weaver
Alison fits into the lineup, along with a tapestry maker, a dyer, a
haberdasher, a miller, a cook, a carpenter, and a merchant.
The
independent middle class was a new phenomenon during Chaucer’s lifetime. When he was a boy of about ten bubonic
plague, the Black Death, swept into England from the continent and decimated so
much of the population that the survivors found themselves with expanded
opportunities. Serfs left the bondage of
their feudal manor lords and moved around the countryside or even struck out
for the city. In the period following
the first wave of the plague, England changed dramatically. This is the point at which hedgerows were
planted to break up the land into the smaller plots of yeoman farmers,
independent tradesmen began to flourish in the cities, and the dominant
language changed from French to English.
If Chaucer had been born a hundred years earlier, his French-speaking
party of pilgrims would have included the ecclesiastics and the knight, but
none of the rest of the party. Certainly
Alison would not have come to London as a professional weaver with an income of
her own.
With the rise
of the middle class, pilgrimages also became popular. This was not because these jolly tradespeople
were particularly holy or reverent, in fact they were the opposite. But the pilgrimage was a legitimate way to
see the world. It was an excuse for
travel within a well-developed and acceptable framework. It was like a guided tour with published
itineraries, specified routes, souvenir shops, and travelling companions. It allowed a woman like the Wife of Bath to
travel by herself in safety, without losing dignity or blemishing her
character.
The lack of
holiness is evident in the way that Chaucer treats the clerics in the
party. The monk and the prioress are
both very rich and used to living well (she is also a raving anti-Semite, whose
tale describes how horrible Jews like to murder innocent little Christian
children and throw their bodies into muck heaps). The pardoner is a crook, the friar a
womanizer, and the summoner, who is a drunk and a blackmailer, taunts the friar
by telling him a little story about where friars spend eternity. A friar in hell notices that he’s the only
friar ther and asks the question, “Where is the nest of freres in this
place?” To which he gets the answer:
“Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve, Out of the develes ers ther gonne
dryve.”
Chaucer once
beat a friar and was fined two shillings as punishment, so he wasn’t exactly a
reverent man, but it still seems amazing that he got away with being so
disdainful of the Catholic Church. One
has to keep in mind that the thirteenth century was a really a low point for
the church, and it wasn’t just due to false relics, dubious indulgences,
wealthy bishops, and fornicating priests.
Ten years before our pilgrims headed down the road the “Great Schism”
ripped the church apart. There were two
popes! The English backed their guy,
Urban, in Rome, but the French set up their own pope in Avignon, France. For forty years each claimed to be the true,
honest-to-God pope, and the situation began to raise doubts among even the most
faithful catholics.
So the
rationale for making a pilgrimage had as much to do with travel and adventure
as veneration. I was right in step.
Nearing the End: From Harbledown to Canterbury
Harbledown was called “Bob-up-and-Down”
by Chaucer and every pilgrim stopped here, not just to dismount and walk into
Canterbury, but to see the Becket relics preserved in St. Nicholas Church. Originally built as a leper church in 1150,
it quickly became associated with the pilgrimage to Becket’s tomb after his
murder in 1170. I went into the church
and found three nuns there, two Americans and a Brit. There was a stained glass window in the church,
from the middle of the nineteenth century that depicted Sir Galahad looking at
the Holy Grail held out to him by an angel.
In the background was another knight, oblivious to the vision and still
aimlessly seeking.
The Dutch scholar and cleric Erasmus
visited this church after a pilgrimage to Canterbury accompanied by John Colet,
the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The
year was 1514, the Reformation had not yet come to England, and these were two
Catholic clerics who both spoke out for reform in the church. The cult of relics had descended into a
pathetic sham by that time. Erasmus
wrote about his arrival at this church.
Not far from Canterbury we came into a great hollow
and straightway, moreover bowing so down, with hills of either side, that a man
cannot escape, nor it cannot be avoided, but he must needs ride that way. Upon the left hand of the way, there is an
almshouse for old people, from them runneth one out, as soon as they hear a
horseman coming, he casteth holy water upon him, and anon he offereth him the
overleather of a shoe bound about with an iron hoop, wherein is a glass like a
precious stone, they that kiss it give a piece of money.
[Colet,
his companion] rode upon my left hand near the almshouse, he cast holy water
upon him. He took it in worth not
so. When the shoe was proferred him, he
asked what he meant by it, saith he, it is St. Thomas shoe. Thereat he fumed and was very angry, and
turned toward me: what (saith he) meane
these beasts, that would have us kiss the shoes of every good man? Why do they not likewise give us to kiss the
spittle, and other filth and dirt of the body?
I was sorry for the old man, and gave him a piece of money to comfort
him withall.
The relics had lost meaning for
them. I wandered out of the church and
down toward a pilgrims’ well in the yard. Carved into the stone above it are
three feathers, identifying this as the well of the Edward, the Black
Prince. I would meet him soon enough at
Canterbury Cathedral as his famous tomb and effigy lie adjacent to the spot
where Becket’s shrine stood.
Behind the church was a view to the
west over the green fields of Kent. An
oust-house for drying hops was in the foreground, with its strange bent
chimney. I sat on the grass by the well and read Hilaire Belloc’s description
of arriving in Canterbury. Sadly, for him, after determining and following the
path, the pilgrimage ultimately held no meaning.
He walked in the winter, timing his
journey so that he would arrive at Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of
December 29th, on the day and at the hour of Becket’s murder. And yet he felt nothing. “There was another thing to be duly done
before I could think my task was over,” he wrote.
The city whose name and spell had drawn to itself
all the road, and the shrine which was its core remained to be worshipped. The cathedral and the mastery of its central
tower stood like a demand; but I was afraid, and the fear was just. I thought I should be like the men who lifted
the last veil in the ritual of the hidden goddess, and having lifted it found
there was nothing beyond, and that all the scheme was a cheat; or like what
those must feel at the approach of death who say there is nothing in death but
an end and no transition. I knew what had fallen upon the original soul of the
place. I feared to find, and I found,
nothing but stones.
Now I feared
it too. What if I didn’t feel
anything? I sat for too long on the
grass before the Black Prince’s Well. I
finally rose, rather somberly, and walked back to the church, and then beyond
it to the crest of the steep hill on which it sits. Once the hill is conquered, the road makes a
gentle curve downward and as the pilgrim looks up, THERE IT IS. Canterbury Cathedral comes into view, shining
blue in the distance, its towers rising above all the surrounding
buildings.
I stopped in
my tracks, mesmerized and paralyzed, and sobbed. I wasn’t like Belloc. I had worried for nothing. I felt it and it was powerful. There was my destination.
Each of the great cathedrals along the
way had a distinct color in my memory: Wells was a warm brown, Salisbury was
white from every vantage point and all distances, Winchester was a solid grey,
but Canterbury shone blue. It was with
growing anticipation and emotion that I crossed the highway, met up with the
North Downs Way and Belloc’s Pilgrim Road from Winchester and proceeded along
the ancient track of all Pilgrims coming from the west or north. Not far from here was Godmersham, another
home associated with Jane Austen, but by now the momentum to reach the magnet
that was Canterbury was too strong to think of making a side trip, even for my
beloved Jane.
The last week of the walk—the part that
actually followed Chaucer’s pilgrims—was the hardest. Except for Rochester, it had too little left
of the ancient past and too little left of the countryside. It was probably the path itself that did
it. The Romans built the straight thoroughfare
of Watling Street to get them expeditiously from London to the coast and more
than a thousand years later it’s still the way to go for the person with a
destination in mind and a time table to follow.
It is no wonder that the route followed by the pilgrims to Canterbury
would evolve into a super highway with all the development that accompanies it,
but it makes it a less wonderful walk.
The ambler is not looking for the modern England of cars and trains and
schedules and convenience markets, but of the olde England of wields and wolds
and copses. This was the last moment I would have in anything resembling
the English countryside. I thought back
to my first day at Inglesbatch, with the great ancient barn into which modern
machinery will not fit, and of all the things I had seen along the way:
bluebells in the forest, big yellow dogs, slopes filled with sheep and fields
of hay, small square churches, the landscape seen from the height of the
downs. Peg had referred more than once
to the “ubiquitous blue Land Rover,” and I had ever since thought of the
“ubiquitous” things: blue land rovers in the rural districts, semi-detached
houses in the burbs, long undulating rows of attached houses in the urban
sprawl, Boots the Chemist, jacket potatoes, war memorials. We want to think of England as rural, even
though my last week was probably the more realistic representation of England
on the verge of the millennium.
A thousand years ago, on the verge of
that other millennium, pilgrims had gone to the shrines to protect themselves
from the catastrophes predicted to come with the magical number. It was strange to think that human beings
were really not all that much different as we faced the next one.
That one tantalizing glimpse of Oz
disappeared as I descended the hill.
Before I actually reached the cathedral I had to pass one more important
church for the pilgrim, St. Dunstan’s, just outside the west gate in the
medieval town wall of Canterbury. It was
at St. Dunstan’s that Henry II had, on a July day in 1174, taken off his shoes
and put on a sack to go and prostrate himself at the tomb of Becket, the man
who had been his friend, his enemy, and ultimately the victim of his careless
rage.
St. Dunstan’s is also famous for being
the place where Thomas More’s daughter buried his decapitated head in the
family vault of her husband. More was to
Henry VIII what Becket was to Henry II, the friend and Chancellor who would not
submit to the religious views of his king.
I have always admired Thomas More, maybe because of the wonderful Paul
Scofield portrayal of him in A Man for all Seasons. Among the various guys who became saints
because they were martyrs for their faith, he has always seemed like the real
article.
More wrote extensively on a wide
variety of topics, often with humor and imagination. He is thought to have helped Henry VIII edit
his book “An Assertion of the Seven Sacraments,” in which Henry argued against
Martin Luther’s doctrine, and for which he was awarded the title “Defender of
the Faith” by Pope Leo X. After he broke
from the pope and started his own church, Henry demanded an oath of loyalty to
his new church and to himself as its head from everyone in his court; Thomas
More was one of only a handful to refuse.
For More it was not so much a defense of Catholicism per se, but
an argument that each man should decide his own faith, and not have it dictated
by the king.
Before he was executed, he spoke to the
crowd, proclaiming himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” After the axe fell, his head was displayed on
a pike on London Bridge until his daughter was able to retrieve it. What a horrible, grisly, moment for her; it
is actually too awful to think about. Surprisingly, it took 400 years for
Thomas More to be canonized. By the time
he was made a saint and his head became a holy relic in 1935, St. Dunstan’s
Church had long been an outpost of the Church of England. Nonetheless, More’s head made it a pilgrimage
site for Catholics. (In 1978 on the
500th anniversary of his birth, the church opened the tomb just to verify that
there was a head in there. There was.)
By More’s time the pilgrimage had long
since peaked and declined. He was
himself skeptical of relics, indulgences, and of the honestly devout intentions
of pilgrims. He said of pilgrims in the
sixteenth century:
There be cathedral churches into which the country
come with procession, and the woman following the cross with many an unwomanly
song. ... the most part that cometh, cometh for no devotion at all, but only
for good company to babble thitherward, and drinke dronke there, and then dance
and reel homeward.
Hmm.
I guess “Jerusalem” did not qualify as an unwomanly song, but there had
been those moments on my procession across the country when I had babbled here
and dronke cider there. In two days I
would dance and reel homeward.
Before I left St. Dunstan’s I dropped a
fingernail onto the floor near the stone that marked the burial place of Thomas
More’s head. I had scattered my
fingernail relics across England, one at the so-called tomb of Arthur and
Guinevere in Glastonbury, one at the so-called tomb of Edward the Martyr in
Shaftesbury, one high up on the west face of Salisbury Cathedral, one at the
place where Jane Austen died, one at Winchester Cathedral where she is buried,
one at the so-called tomb of Alfred the Great, one at the house where Jane
Austen lived in Chawton, one at the tomb of Edward the Confessor, and now, the
ninth one here at the tomb of Thomas More.
The last one was saved for Canterbury Cathedral. And now the time had come to go there. From the door of St. Dunstan’s you can see
the west gate of Canterbury and the High Street stretching beyond it.
I love the way a medieval wall defines
the confines of the ancient core of a city.
To pass through the gate is to enter the past. At Canterbury we are fortunate that the west
gate still stands. In the early nineteenth
century they almost tore it down so that the menagerie caravans of Mr.
Wombwell’s travelling show could get through.
Thank goodness at the last minute the Mayor stepped in and prevented it.
There was once a church sitting right
on this gate called the Church of the Holy Cross, which was probably named
after a relic of the same contained therein.
An even more interesting relic inspired the name of a pub just outside
the gate, “The Archbishop’s Finger.” (If
I ever become a saint, the “History Pilgrim’s Fingernail” could go
nearby.) I passed through the gate and
onto the main street of Canterbury. The
old half-timbered buildings seem to lean right over the roadway. I stumbled along with ever growing emotion
and anticipation until I saw a sign that said simply “Cathedral.”
A glance to the left brought the
magnificent carved “Christ Church gate” into view, and a few more steps brought
me into the yard of the Cathedral. I had
not been able to see it again since that moment on the hill near Harbledown and
it was a wondrous sight. I paid my fee
and in a fairly high state of agitation moved along the nave to the place where
Becket was murdered. His name, “Thomas,”
is carved in the floor. Belloc was
wrong. It is very moving.
There is a small chapel near the spot
and I ducked in there to have a good cry for a half hour or so. As I rummaged in my little belt pack for some
tissues, I noticed the altar, carved to represent human skulls and
thigh-bones. The objective of this
realistic-looking pile of bones was clearly not to give comfort. Bones. Bones. Bones. The whole of the cathedral was designed to
give the maximum effect to the display of bones—and it is fabulous. From the main entrance through the west door,
the cathedral rises up and up to the empty place that once held the
shrine. Beyond it, at the very eastern
tip of the cathedral is the “corona,” or “Becket’s Crown,” the place where the
severed cap of Becket’s skull was kept in a separate reliquary.
Who was Thomas Becket? And what
circumstances caused him to be murdered for the benefit of Henry II, his king
and former friend? That is the ultimate
Canterbury Tale.
The Last Chapter: The “Holy Blissful Martyr” and How He Got
that Way
Thomas Becket was born in London in
1118 and went to work for the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was
twenty-one. He subsequently studied law
and theology on the continent and when he returned to England was appointed
archdeacon of Canterbury. A tall and
charismatic individual, Becket clearly stood out among the men of his age. When Henry II was crowned in 1154, the
Archbishop recommended Becket to the young king and he was made Chancellor, in
which position he became Henry’s strong ally and friend. When Henry tangled with the Pope over control
of church affairs in England, Becket stood strongly with the king. In 1162 Henry thought that he could fully
gain the reigns of the church in England if he had Thomas Becket named
Archbishop of Canterbury. If Becket were
both Archbishop and Chancellor, the powers of church and state would be
consolidated, and Henry would be able to stand up to the pope. Becket did not seek the position and vainly
attempted to persuade Henry to chose another candidate.
Once he was appointed, Thomas Becket
had something of a conversion experience.
He became a zealous defender of the Catholic Church, resigned his
position as Chancellor, and devoted his considerable energy and talent to
fighting the king over who would control the church in England. Many of the stands that Becket took were
petty; he would not agree that minor clerks in the church should stand trial in
the civil courts for crimes committed among the populace. Henry was also petty, eventually even
accusing Becket of having embezzled funds during his chancellorship.
Here were the two most powerful men in
England, not only by virtue of their offices, but by the strength of their
personalities, former confidantes, highly visible celebrities, and they began
to duke it out in public. When Henry
ordered Becket to appear in court, not as the Archbishop of Canterbury, but in
a civil action, Becket refused, left England and headed to Rome for papal
support. Such support was a long time
coming and then only in name. Becket
remained in exile in France for six years while he and Henry blasted away at
each other from either side of the Channel.
Henry persecuted Becket’s family; Becket excommunicated half of England
just for speaking to Henry.
In 1170 the king had his oldest son,
Henry, crowned by the Archbishop of York, to secure the succession. Becket was furious and excommunicated the
Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London for having participated. (English kings, by tradition, were always
crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury.)
Henry and Becket finally met in France in July of that year, each made
some concessions, and Becket returned to England on the first of December. The public acclaim at his return was compared
(after his death) to that given to Christ on his entry into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday.
Henry was still in France and fed up
with the whole business. In the presence
of several members of his court he muttered the immortal words: “Will no one
rid me of this troublesome priest?”
(Some sources say “wretched” or “low-born” rather than
“troublesome.”) Four knights immediately
crossed the channel and made their way to Canterbury, Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh
de Moreville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton. Becket was warned but would not hide. On 29 December 1170, he went from his dinner
to the church for the vespers service and was followed by the knights.
It was five o’clock in the evening when
the knights rushed into the church.
There were a number of monks there for the service, and a small crowd,
having heard the commotion, followed the king’s men into the nave. Becket resisted with force their attempts to
take him prisoner, he swore at the knights, not just as the Archbishop of
Canterbury but as their social superior.
Tracy swung at him with his sword but Edward Grim, one of the monks of
the Cathedral, deflected the blow from Becket by taking the force of it on his
arm. Becket’s scalp was grazed and began
to bleed. When he saw the blood Becket
said “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” Another sword blow brought Becket to his
knees and from there prostrate to the floor.
Richard le Breton then delivered a blow to the back of Becket’s head so
forceful that it severed the cap of his skull, instantly killing the Archbishop
and breaking the blade of the sword on the pavement.
Hugh of Horsea, a fifth knight who had
joined the party as they came into the cathedral, then put his foot upon the
neck of Becket’s corpse and put the tip of his sword into the exposed brain
matter, scattering it out onto the pavement.
“Let us go, let us go,” he said as he finished, “The traitor is dead; he
will rise no more.”
After the knights clattered out of the
cathedral there must have been profound silence, though there were numbers of
witnesses. Finally Osbert, Becket’s
servant, went to his master and bound the severed piece of his head back on
with a strip of his shirt. Others began
to come out of the darkness. The floor
was soaked with brains and blood and the people in the church began to soak
them up with pieces of cloth; some are said to have dipped their fingers in the
blood and smeared it on their faces.
Becket’s body was carried to the high altar and bowls were placed
beneath it to catch his blood. They knew
he was a martyr. They knew he would be a
saint. The collecting of his relics began
instantly upon his death. The blood was
put into small bottles called ampullae or phials. It would work miracles for centuries.
Becket was an arrogant man but he also
tried to be a holy one. When the monks
of Canterbury prepared his body for burial they found that under his vestments
he wore a lice-infested hair shirt. It
was to meant to make him suffer constantly in a small way. He apparently took it off only to be scourged
or whipped on the back, a greater suffering to which he had submitted himself
that very morning. Fearing the return of
the knights, the monks quickly buried Becket in the crypt of the church—though
it was reported that there was a short delay while they waited for Becket to
rise up and bless them before lying down again.
The miracles began immediately. A blind man, who didn’t know about the
murder, came to the cathedral that day and was cured. A paralyzed woman drank some water into which
drops of blood were dripped and she walked again. The pilgrimages began.
Across the channel, Henry II was told
about the murder. He burst into tears,
he howled, he could not leave his room for days. Two years later Becket was, not surprisingly
canonized. A year and a half after that
Henry made his pilgrimage to Canterbury.
He came from France to Southampton and from there more or less followed
Belloc’s path. He stopped at Harbledown
to dismount from his horse, and at St. Dunstan’s church he put on a sack and
walked barefoot. When he came to
Becket’s tomb he was, at his own request, whipped by each of the bishops,
abbots, and monks. The king stayed for a
day and a night at the grave, his head thrust into an opening designed so that
the coffin could be touched, and he left Canterbury with a small bottle of the
blood of his former friend. In his wake
came pilgrims by the thousands. Two of
his sons would follow his humiliating example: young Henry, whom he had
attempted to crown during his lifetime, and Richard the Lionhearted, who
stopped here on his way to the crusades, and again on his way home after having
been a hostage in Austria.
For the next fifty years pilgrims made
a point of venerating three places in the church: the scene of the crime,
called “The Martyrdom,” where an altar had been constructed called “The Altar
of the Sword’s Point,” the high altar where Becket’s body had lain over night,
and the crypt where he was buried. The
tip of the sword that killed him was saved and exhibited as a relic; the actual
blood-stained stone on which he died was cut out of the floor and sent to
Rome. Eventually the makeshift grave was
replaced by a masonry tomb. Two large
openings in each side allowed the faithful to be closer to the saint, and it
was through one of these that Henry II had thrust his head.
A fire in the cathedral the year after
Henry’s visit damaged much of the area above the tomb and when rebuilding began
it was decided to expand the Trinity Chapel above Becket’s grave and to build
there a new shrine. On a summer day in
1220, fifty years after the murder, the new shrine was dedicated and, with
great pomp and circumstance, Becket’s remains—his “relics” since he was a
saint—went into it. This “translation”
of the corpse, as they called the exhumation and movement of the body of a
saint from one place to another, would thereafter be venerated each year on
July 7th.
Since Becket had not been embalmed in
any way, all that was left to move into the new shrine were bones, and at least
some of them did not get translated into the new shrine. The head and the severed cap of the skull
were each kept in separate jeweled reliquaries.
At least some bones went to Rome and to other shrines, and for years one
could see various parts of Becket around Europe. (A tooth, for instance, was in Verona.)
Two monks from Canterbury went on to
positions at other monasteries and brought relics of Becket with them. Benedict, the Abbot of Peterborough, arrived
at his new post in 1179 with two bottles of blood, clothes that had belonged to
the Archbishop, and stones from the floor where Becket fell. Roger, the Abbot of St. Augustine’s
monastery, just around the corner from the Cathedral in Canterbury, received
his new post by agreeing to their request to bring with him a portion of the
skull of the saint. Weirdest of all,
there are at least three arms attributed to him, in Florence and Lisbon. That pub outside the wall, the “Archbishop’s
finger” took on new meaning.
Whatever bones were left to be moved
were put into an iron chest called a feretrum and placed in the shrine. There are a number of good descriptions of
what the shrine looked like and it was fabulous. Henry III, whose grandfather’s life was so entwined
with Becket’s, and who was to invest so much of his own energy in improving the
shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, was present for the
translation. The feretrum with the
relics was carried by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton (whose
grave site is reputed to be on St. Martha’s hill near Guildford).
No other
graves were allowed into the holiest place in the cathedral, adjacent to the
shrine, until the death in 1376 of Edward, the Prince of Wales, known as “The
Black Prince.” Chaucer probably knew him
since he was the son of Edward III, and the brother was John of Gaunt. As a young man Edward gained a reputation for
heroism in two battles in France—at Cressy and Poitiers. When he returned from the latter battle in
1357, he stopped at Canterbury to make his offerings of thanksgiving at the
tomb of St. Thomas and then continued on to London through Harbledown where he
visited the well that is now named for him (and probably also saw the famous
shoe of Becket).
On a later campaign
to Spain, the Black Prince contracted an illness which killed him, at the age
of forty-five, on the 8th of June 1376.
His death was a blow to the nation.
There had been every expectation that he would inherit the crown and
rule as a wise and seasoned veteran. His
father, Edward III, was by then coming to the end of a fifty-year reign. His son, Richard, was just a boy. His brother, Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt,
and his nephew (who would become Henry IV after deposing and murdering
Richard), had designs on the throne. The
battle for power that began then between the two branches of the
family—popularly known as the “War of the Roses”—would divide England for the
next century.
Edward asked
to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral, but not in so prominent a position as he
was given. When Chaucer visited the
cathedral, the tomb of the Black Prince was there, his effigy shining gold and
his shield coat and gauntlets hanging above him. On the opposite side of the shrine, Henry IV
designed a place for himself and his queen.
Such was the powerful attraction of Becket that Henry IV placed himself
for eternity adjacent to the uncle whose son he had murdered. They are the only members of the Royal family
interred here.
The shrine
was the focus of any pilgrim’s visit.
There were four parts to it: the six-foot high base made of pink marble,
the bejeweled and gold-plated wooden ark which held the feretrum, a gold mesh
covering onto which particularly rich pilgrims could attach jewels and other
precious and valuable offerings, and a painted wooden cover which could be
lowered over the top to protect the valuables and raised again by a rope and
pulleys.
We get our
best description of it from Erasmus, who was here in Canterbury before he made
the visit to Harbledown described earlier.
(He and his friend John Colet were travelling in the opposite direction
from me.) Making the usual rounds of the
church, they stopped first at the site of the murder. “On the altar is the point of the sword,”
wrote Erasmus, “with which the head of the most excellent prelate was cleft,
and his brain stirred, that he might be the more instantly dispatched. The sacred rust of this iron, through love of
the martyr, we religiously kissed.”
The two
proceeded then down to the crypt. “There
was first exhibited the perforated skull of the martyr, the forehead is left
bare to be kissed, while the other parts are covered with silver. There also hang in the dark the hair shirts,
the girdles and bandages with which the prelate subdued his flesh; striking
horror with their very appearance.” Back
upstairs in the choir, an enthusiastic guide unlocked the reliquarie and began
to bring out the treasures to show the polite Erasmus and his skeptical colleague.
It is wonderful to tell what a quantity of bones
were there brought out: skulls, jaw-bones, teeth, hands, fingers, entire arms;
on all of which we devoutly bestowed our kisses; and the exhibition seemed
likely to last for ever, if my sometime unmanageable companion had not
interrupted the zeal of the showman.
When
an arm was brought forth which had still the bloody flesh adhering, he drew
back from kissing it, and even betrayed some weariness. The priest presently shut up his treasures.
Erasmus then
describes the shrine.
A wooden canopy covers the shrine, and when that is
drawn up with ropes, inestimable treasures are opened to view, the least
valuable part is gold; every part glistened, shone, and sparkled with rare and
very large jewels, some of them exceeding the size of a goose’s egg. The cover being raised we all
worshipped. The prior with a white wand
pointed out each jewel, telling its name in French, its value, and the name of
its donor, for the principal of them were offerings sent by sovereigns and
princes.
Among the famous stones was a diamond called the “Regall of
France,” which was given by King Louis VII.
After the destruction of the shrine, Henry VIII, who was one of the last
visitors to the shrine before it was destroyed, had this stone set into a ring
which he wore on his thumb. In 1520 when
he was still a devout Catholic, Henry made a pilgrimage to Canterbury with
Emperor Charles V. It is clear from
Erasmus, visiting just a few years earlier, though, that the pilgrimage was
already dying. Most of the relics were a
sham and they knew it, Henry simply made it all official.
When Henry
went on his rampage to destroy the Catholic church in England, the shrine of
Becket was a particular target. The
image of his ancestor, Henry II, prostrating himself before the shrine of the
man who had betrayed him was sickening to Henry VIII. Becket was the ultimate traitor. Thomas More was nothing compared to Becket—he
had never plotted against his king. 368
years after the death of the archbishop, Henry VIII instituted legal
proceedings against Becket and condemned him.
Thereafter he was not to be venerated, called a saint, depicted in
images, or described in books. In 1538,
at Henry’s command, the shrine was destroyed, the relics burned and scattered
in the wind.
In January 1888, archaeologists working
on a survey project in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral discovered an old
skeleton. This, in itself, was not a
surprise since church crypts are usually full of skeletons, but this one was
unusual for three reasons: it was buried in the place where Becket had lain for
the fifty years before being translated to the shrine, it had obviously been
buried very quickly, and it had been buried not as a corpse, but as a pile of
bones. Could Becket’s relics have
survived the destruction of the shrine?
Could the monks of Canterbury, knowing that the Royal Commissioners for
the Destruction of Shrines were on their way, have replaced Becket’s bones with
the bones of an ordinary mortal and moved the saint’s bones to a safer
spot? Could the Commissioners have
balked at the thought of actually destroying the relics and collaborated with
the monks to hide them?
A local surgeon, W. Pugin Thornton,
laid out the bones and inspected them. A
local dentist examined the teeth. The
skeleton was that of a very tall man who had died at about the age of fifty a
long, long time in the past. So far,
much like Becket. Thornton was also a
practitioner of phrenology, a popular pseudo-science of the period, and so he
was also able to discern from the size and shape of the skull that the man who
used it had been of “large perceptive qualities, much intellect, indomitable
energy, the power of arrangement and management, but unworthy of trust.” Still like Becket, if read from the Church of
England perspective.
Thornton published a little booklet
called Becket’s Bones, which included photographs of the remains. There is the skeleton, all laid out. There is the skull with a whopping big wound
in it, as if made by a sword blade. Hmm,
rather Becket like. And there are the
arm bones, connected to the hand bones, connected to he finger bones; and the
thigh bones connected to the shin bones, connected to the ankle bones,
connected to the foot bones. In fact,
there are just too many dry bones to be Becket if one believes, as I do, that
many of his parts had to have been distributed during the great age of relics
in Medieval times. How could he still
have two arms if his other three arms were in Italy and Portugal? (Okay, there was that papal bull about the
spontaneous regenerative power of relics, but that was just bull.)
One source contemporaneous with the
translation says that Archbishop Langton kept some of the small bones out at
that time. That would be perfectly
consistent with church practice at the time, especially since these were relics
of unquestionable authenticity. There
doesn’t seem to be anything that would have prevented subsequent archbishops
from opening the shrine either. The
feretory was a locked iron box, but there must have been a key to it. With all those kings from here and there
visiting, who’s to say that they didn’t get their souvenir bone before they
exited the church.
And even though the wound in the 1888
skull was whopping, the skull was all there.
It’s pretty clear from the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder that
the cap of Becket’s skull was severed right off; and clear from the testimony
of pilgrims, including Erasmus, that at least two parts of the skull were not
in the shrine anyway, but were mounted in reliquaries for separate veneration.
But a lot of folks wanted those bones
to be Becket’s. And if not those bones,
then maybe some others buried elsewhere in the Cathedral. There are a few mysterious graves in the
church, some of unknown origin, some of dubious provenance. I picked up a book in the Cathedral gift shop
called The Quest for Becket’s Bones, by John Butler, and used it to
guide me to each of these sites for a good look. One of the interesting contentions over the
years has been the notion that Becket’s bones do still exist, and that a
secret society (probably consisting of only three people) guards the
information, passing it to a new member only at the death of one of the
previous members.
Exactly one week after I arrived back
home, the London Sunday Times published a half-page article, complete
with color pictures, with the big-print headline: “Becket’s bones ‘kept
secretly at Canterbury for 460 years.’”
Joannie sent it to me and I read it with amazement. It seems that one of the three guys had confessed
to the secret. The bones in question
were not the ones exhumed in 1888 and debated for the next 50 years, but
others, also buried in the crypt, which had been secretly exhumed and examined
in the 1940’s. This skeleton had no
hand, which sounds more likely for a saint whose relics were scattered around,
but there are still more questions than answers.
According to Cecil Humphrey-Smith (who
acknowledged this information only upon the death of his godfather, Julian
Bickersteth, who was a canon at the cathedral), the discovery “was kept secret
because the cathedral authorities were opposed to the revival of the cult of
Becket and because two canons did not want to see Canterbury overrun by
tourists.” According to the Times,
Humphrey-Smith, a Catholic, “justified his decision to speak openly about ‘the
Secret’ after so long. ‘St. Thomas has a
part to play in restoring England to its ancient faith.’” he said. The dean of Canterbury Cathedral responded by
saying, “The weight of evidence is that Becket’s bones are not in the
cathedral. The weight of evidence is
that they were destroyed at the Reformation.”
The weight of evidence, the burden of proof, the ancient faith, the power
of the thing. Dem bones, dem bones, dem
dry bones.
The comment about the tourists was an
interesting one. Would the cathedral get
more visitors if they still had the bones of Becket? Even without them there are nearly two
million visitors a year. If the bones were
suddenly discovered there would certainly be a leap in visitation, but it would
probably settle back down to the regular huge crowd before long.
Do we need relics at the turn of the
second millennium? There is certainly a
pervasive cult of celebrity death in England and America today which may be the
modern analog. The death of a famous
person, or a violent incident that becomes famous through the media, creates a
pilgrimage site that is instantly covered with a mountain of flowers, messages,
stuffed animals, and images. The
individuals who put them there have no personal connection to the victim, their
connection is cultural, something shared through the larger population. I think that is very close to what the
connection was to relics. They were
imbued with their power by a common agreement to accept them as special, and
when the acceptance declined so did the power.
Today the media is the church that defines our saints, but that does not
mean that the feelings of connection, the profound grief, the sense of sharing in
a larger loss, are not real.
And why do they continue to come to
Canterbury? John Simpson, the Dean of
the Cathedral addresses that question in the brochure every visitor gets upon
entrance. They come, he says, “to see
its magnificent architecture; because of its historical associations; because
it is one of the glories of England, of Europe, indeed of the world.” It is so much a part of the collective
culture that people go to Canterbury Cathedral because they feel they should if
they are tourists; this is a tourist destination, every guidebook says so.
Joannie made a trip back to Canterbury
Cathedral with me later and was bothered by all the tourists milling around,
but I loved it. Tourists have always
been part of the experience. Even in
Chaucer’s day, Canterbury Cathedral was getting 200,000 pilgrims annually, but
they have always detracted from the experience of their fellow tourists. The poet T.S. Eliot hated the thought that
people went there without knowing why thy did so.
For
wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given
his
blood for the blood of Christ,
There
is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it
Though
armies trample over it, though sightseers come with
guide
books looking over it; ...
Therefore,
O God, we thank Thee
Who
hast given such blessing to Canterbury.
“Murder
in the Cathedral”
When I had recovered myself after
sitting and weeping for a time, I went out to be among my comrades, the throng
of fellow pilgrims and tourists milling about the place. Immediately outside the little chapel in
which I sat was the site of the murder.
There is a small stone table there, made from pieces of the medieval
“Altar of the Sword’s Point,” and above it hangs a very modern sculpture of
three iron swords. It took me several
minutes to decide if I like it or not, and in the end I decided that I do like
it, very much.
Before I began to follow the ancient
path by which pilgrims walked around the church, I visited a special exhibition
called “Canterbury and Becket: The Power to Inspire.” It was good luck for me that this exhibit
coincided with my visit to Canterbury, because in it were actual Becket relics,
borrowed by the Cathedral from other institutions for a six-month period. Here was a bishop’s mitre said to have
belonged to him, now owned by Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic cathedral in
London. Here also was a tunic he had
worn, sent at the time of his death to Rome and kept ever since by the church
of Santa Maria Maggiore in a fabulous reliquarie. Another reliquarie was the centerpiece of the
show; recently purchased at auction by the Victoria and Albert Museum, it is an
enameled box or “chasse” showing scenes from Becket’s life and death. It has long been empty but must have held an
important relic at one time and is the biggest and best example of some fifty
that are known.
There was also a wooden bowl with a
crystal set into it which had come from Becket’s shoe. This shoe was the one that Erasmus had kissed
at Harbledown but that his companion, John Colet, refused to kiss having
finally had his fill of relics. When the
shoe fell apart, the crystal was remounted in this bowl and it still belongs to
St. Nicholas’ Hospital in Harbledown.
This exhibit also had some chunks from the shrine, and a wonderful range
of pilgrim badges and ampullae from the shrine.
(As a gift, Joannie bought me a reproduction in sterling silver of the
most popular badge, showing the mitred head of Becket.) The exhibit put me in exactly the right frame
of mind to reenter the cathedral from the cloister. This was where Becket had entered it on the
night of the murder.
I made my way down to the crypt and
when I came back up and circumambulated the nave. There are a number of very interesting
monuments in the main body of the church, my two favorites were those to the
Hales and Thornhurst families, for very different reasons. The Hales monument is a wonderful work of
maritime art. A fabulous alabaster
carving of an Elizabethan ship is in the background and a corpse, in full armor
and with its hands folded in prayer, is being lowered over the side by two
sailors; this young man died on an expedition to Spain. His father committed suicide in the River
Stour and that awful deed is depicted in a painting very beautifully worked
into the monument below the ship carving.
Before all this horrible activity, an alabaster woman kneels in
prayer. I think she must have been the
wife of the suicide and the mother of the burial-at-sea, both named James
Hales.
Thomas Thornhurst and his wife both
look remarkably relaxed in the effigies on their tomb. She looks like she just fell asleep, one hand
resting lightly on her chest, the other on a book. He lies beside her, resting up on one elbow, and
holding his coat of arms. I’m sure they
must often have lain in bed this way, she reading, he in full armor admiring
the family crest. The strangest part of
this monument is their three little children, a son and two daughters, each
kneeling on a cushion and holding his or her own skull. Dem bones.
I had finally been through every part
of Canterbury Cathedral except that part which I had travelled so far to
see. It was with some trepidation that I
made my way up to where the shrine had been.
The stone steps have been worn by the tread of a million pilgrim feet
into hard waves. At the top of the
steps, the golden shrine of Henry IV and his bride momentarily draw the eye
away from the place that is the destination of the pilgrimage, but then there
it is.
I stood and looked at the vacant
tiles. This is what I had come for, this
spot. The ceiling was impossibly high
above me, sunlight streamed through the stained glass giving the air a
marvelous glow. Did it matter that the
shrine was gone? That the relics were
destroyed or so well hidden that they will never be discovered? Had I really come for them? It was the moment of truth.
I had always thought that the power was
in the thing, in this case the relics.
But the absence of them was also powerful. It was much more effective to look at the
vast empty space in Canterbury Cathedral that had held the shrine with Becket’s
remains, than it was to see the reproduction shrine of St. Swithun in
Winchester, or even the real shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster.
The power was there. The pilgrimage was worthwhile. I had hoped to find a connection with the
past and in this spot, where hundreds of thousands had preceded me for eight
hundred years, I felt the power of the pilgrimage. It was spiritual without being religious; it
had as much to do with the human spirit as with the spirit of God. I reached into the empty space and touched
something larger than my own experience.
It was wonderful. I was overcome
with emotion.
My month in England had passed. I would go home the next day and resume my
“real life.” I had no regrets that the
adventure was over. The goal had been
this spot and in this spot I found resolution, even though my quest had always
been hazy and ill-defined. I would think
for months to come about what the resolution was. Was it that I had completed a physical
challenge that had filled me with self doubt?
That was certainly a big part of it.
But I also felt that desire, however it is defined, that had propelled
the medieval person to escape for a time from the usual to the unusual. If the purpose of a pilgrimage was to seek
some sort of spiritual and emotional fulfillment, then I had arrived at the
destination.
It is worth noting here, at the very
end, that the Wife of Bath and the rest of her party never stood in this spot,
never felt this resolution. The book was
not completed and consequently neither was their pilgrimage. They are forever frozen on the road just
outside Canterbury’s west gate. They got
as far as Harbledown without taking the last few necessary steps to bring them
here. I felt sorry for her about
that. I no longer felt sorry for
anything else about her though—she had been a worthwhile companion, a good
foil. If Chaucer could not bring her
here, maybe I could.
Near where Becket’s shrine stood was a
rack of devotional candles and I lit one for her. “For Alison,” I though, as the wick of the
candle grabbed the flame from the match.
“What a Dame!”
What
that Aprille with his shoures sote
The
droghte of Marche hat perced to the rote,
And
bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of
which vertu engendered is the flour;
Whan
Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired
hath in every holt and heeth
The
tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath
in the Ram his halfe course y-ronne,
And
smale fowles maken melodye,
That
slepen al the night with open yë,
(So
priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than
longen folk to goon pilgrimages
(And
palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To
ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And
specially, from every shires ende
Of
Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The
holy blisful martir for to seke,
That
hem hath hopen, whan that they were seke.
The
Canterbury Tales
THE END
Picture: Pilgrims at Canterbury, June 2017
