Canterbury

Canterbury

Roman

Succeeding an important late Iron Age settlement, the civitas-capital of Durovernum was laid out on either side of the Great Stour in the later 1st cent., with a rather irregular street-grid. Canterbury had an above-average range of public buildings. The site of a forum/basilica complex is known; adjacent to it was a large temple precinct with associated masonry theatre, and a public baths with portico. All date from the late 1st and early 2nd cents. In the late 3rd cent. walls enclosing 130 acres were constructed. Excavations have shown artisan buildings and larger private houses alongside the public buildings. By the later 4th cent. the town was in decay. The relationship of Roman to Anglo-Saxon Canterbury is vexed; there was activity within the walls for much of the 5th cent., and some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon churches might have late Roman origins.

Alan Simon Esmonde Cleary

post-Roman

Canterbury re-emerged as the capital of a pagan English kingdom of Kent, to which St Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. Gregory intended the new English church to have archbishops at London and York, but a series of historical accidents led to Augustine and his successors remaining at Canterbury. It became one of the larger English walled towns, with a self-governing corporation, but it was dominated until the 1530s by its two great abbeys of Christ Church (the cathedral) and St Augustine's. The many distinguished archbishops included Thomas Becket, whose murder in the cathedral in 1170 led to his canonization; when the cathedral was rebuilt after a fire in 1174, it was designed to focus on his tomb, which became one of the great pilgrimage shrines of the West. The city suffered economically from the dissolutions at the Reformation, but revived modestly through silk-weaving introduced by Walloon refugees, and later as a social centre for gentry and clergy. In the Second World War the historic core was heavily bombed, but enough is left for the city to remain a major tourist centre. Pride of place goes to the cathedral and close, with a rich legacy of surviving and well-documented buildings.

David M. Palliser