Canterbury Cathedral has a tradition of visitor welcome that reaches back to the days of medieval pilgrimages. This is not only fully maintained today, but has been developed to meet the needs of modern tourists.

Within 100 years of Augustine's arrival Canterbury had become the centre of Christianity in England. The city was sacked repeatedly during the following centuries, and the Cathedral had to be rebuilt many times. Backed by the wealth of the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury became an increasingly important figure in matters temporal and spiritual. In 1162 Henry II appointed his chancellor and loyal friend Thomas Becket to the position, hoping to make an ally of the Church. Instead Becket put the interests of the Church before his friendship with the King, and a long and bitter dispute over Church privileges led to Becket's death in 1170. Four knights, believing that they were acting with the King's authority, brutally murdered the Archbishop in the Cathedral. After the martyrdom of Becket, Canterbury became a major centre for pilgrimage, attracting people from all over Europe. The original site of Becket's martyrdom in the north-west transept is marked with an evocative memorial. In 1220 Becket's body was transferred from the crypt to a new Shrine in the Trinity Chapel, covered in gold and jewels.

Archbishops, architects and stone masons throughout the centuries have contributed to the creation of this wonderful Cathedral. Inside you will see many interesting features including the fan vaulted ceiling of the Bell Harry Tower, the beautiful carved pulpitum which divides the nave from the choir, the striking black and white marble font, the tomb of the chivalrous Black Prince, surrounded by reminders of his achievements, and a 13th century replica of St. Augustine's Chair, the original chair having been lost in a fire. The undercroft has the largest Norman crypt in the world, a collection of silver and other rare ecclesiastical treasures, and contains the 14th century Chapel of Our Lady, built by the Black Prince. Canterbury Cathedral, along with St. Augustine's Abbey and St. Martin's Church have been declared a World Heritage Site.

Canterbury is the seat of the origins of English Christianity, the site where St. Augustine, the monk sent by Gregory the Great to Christianize the English, baptized King Etherbert of Kent on Whit Sunday in 597. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and his church, dedicated to Christ Jesus, was later burned by the Danes during the reign of Archbishop Alphege.

In 1067, the cathedral was destroyed by a fire. Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop, reorganized the monastery and initiated the rebuilding of the cathedral which was dedicated in 1077. Lanfranc's successor, the internationally renowned scholar and theologian Anselm added the towers abutting the eastern transepts and the crypt, the largest of its period in England. The quire was dedicated in 1130, but in 1174, another fire destroyed the entire eastern arm of the cathedral. William of Sens was hired to supervise the rebuilding, and his work on the transept, the vault, and the quire at Canterbury was some of the earliest work in what came to be known as the Gothic style.

William's successor added the Trinity Chapel to the quire as a setting for a new shrine to Thomas Becket, which stood there from 1220 to 1538 when it was destroyed by order of Henry VIII.. Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury under Henry II, "the hooly blisful martyr," whose shrine is the object of the Canterbury pilgrims' journey, was martyred in 1170 at the behest of Henry II, traditionally as the result of an ill-framed wish, something on the order of, "would that there were someone to rid me of this pesky priest" which was taken literally by four of his followers. On December 29, four knights, Richard Brito, Hugh de Moreville, Reginald FitzUrse, and William de Tracy, erupted into the cathedral and demanded to see the archbishop. At the urging of the monks, Becket left the monastery and met his attackers in the cathedral, in the north transept . Following the conventional pattern of accusation and rebuttal, the four charged Becket with treason to the king. Becket resisted fiercely, but was attacked and killed by the sword of Richard Brito. Becket's body was placed in the crypt, and a few days later began a series of miracles which in 1173 resulted in Becket's canonization.

Canterbury quickly became the most popular and lucrative pilgrimage site in England, as the wealth of the cathedral deorations attest. This panel (left) from a window in the south quire aisle depicts medieval pilgrims journeying to Canterbury.

At the heart of the disagreement between Henry and his sometime Chancellor of England was an intense power struggle between the church and the monarchy. There were two fundamental causes of conflict between Becket and the Henry II. The most immediate was a disagreement over Henry's coronation of his son, known as the Young King (since he pre-deceased his father and never assumed effective control), in the presence of the Archbishop of York and other clerics but without the participation of the most powerful representative of the Church in England. Henry wished to crown his son king in his own lifetime, a decision he presumably came to regret since his son's restiveness at being king in name only, without effective power, finally led him to revolt against his father and to die as a result of his rebellion. Henry took this controversial step while Becket was absent on the continent, one which infuriated Becket as an affront to his office and a symbolic statement of the autonomy or the monarch. When Becket returned from France, he excommunicated all the clerics who had taken part in the ceremony, causing Henry to utter his fateful wish.

The issue of the monarch's ability to designate and crown his own successor without the participation of the head of the church was part of a larger controversy over the relative powers of the church and state that had as its most inflammatory expression the Constitutions of Clarendon issued by Henry in 1164. The Constitutions of Clarendon were, from top to bottom, an extreme challenge to the authority and the autonomy of the Church in England. The proclamations in this document effectively reduced the Church from a separate and parallel governing institution to one that was subject to the crown. One of the most contentious issues was the punishment of the criminal clergy, which the Constitutions of Clarendon arrogated ultimately to the royal courts rather than giving the final say to the ecclesiastical courts. In addition, the Constitutions made many other provisions that lessened the autonomy of the Church. For example, they provided that no tenant in chief of the king could be excommunicated without the assent of the king, that the archbishops, bishops, and priests could not travel abroad without the permission of the king, that any dispute regarding the patronage and presentation of a church should be litigated in the royal courts, that all revenues from vacant archbishoprics, bishoprics, abbeys, and priories of the king's demesne reverted to the king, that the filling of those vacancies was at that king's discretion, that the clerics elected to these positions had to perform homage and fealty to the king, that no church of the king's demesne could be permanently bestowed without a grant of the king.

Thomas at first agreed to the Constitutions of Clarendon but later recanted, resulting in a six- year period of exile and the confiscation of all his revenues and those of his property. He had only just returned from exile when the new controversy over the coronation of the Young King arose. Henry believed that Becket had accepted the irregular coronation when word reached him in Normandy of additional measures Becket was taking against the participants in the ceremony.

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