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Magazine
Footloose
The making of a spiritual city
SADHANA RAO
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The great cathedral, and all that is associated with it, presides over Canterbury.
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Canterbury is essentially a small place tucked away in the country with a big religious monument and a bigger reputation.
Photo: Sadhana Rao
Dominating the skyline of Canterbury: The cathedral.
The portraiture of Canterbury has quite a few descriptive sobriquets tagged on to it. Home to the Mother Church of the Anglican Faith, a cathedral with an unusually long choir, a chapel with old stained glass windows, with relics of an ancient monast
ic order; a World Heritage Site. Geoffrey Chaucer composed verse and prose and gave a literary immortal sensibility to the Canterbury lands in his work Canterbury Tales. Since medieval times, Canterbury (in Kent, 56 miles east of London) has been Europe’s spiritual pilgrimage spot on the map. A kind of rare celestial hemisphere where believers thronged for their moments of veneration, invocation and benison.
This little hamlet has seen changes in temperament and tradition, in language and idioms since the first stirrings of its religious activities in 597 AD. Canterbury’s religious journey has been fairly non-linear, dramatic (its Archbishop Thomas Beckett took on the monarchy and was beheaded) and richly textured (Canterbury played an important role in the Anglican Reform movement). Canterbury and its streets still see millions of footfalls. With the intense syncretics of world religion and particularly European religion, travellers from all faiths come to see the cathedral to experience all the sentiments that give Canterbury its flavour.
Fusion of styles
The skyline of Canterbury from every angle is dominated by the cathedral. At 558 feet high, it presides over the city. Architecturally, the cathedral’s façade is a compendium of architectural styles. Each successive attempt at rebuilding reflecting the prevalent style of its time.
In 597 AD, a Benedictine monk, Augustine, was sent by Pope Gregory the Great across the channel. The King of Kent allowed himself to be baptised and donated the land. It was on these lands that Augustine founded the monastery in the centre of which he built the church. The cathedral was later built on the foundations of the original house of worship.
From the original construction (in 1077 AD) only the Crypt (with its carved colonnades) built in the late Romanesque style has survived. The early Gothic style has been used to build the eastern side of the cathedral. The western part, with its 558 feet long nave, was built along the perpendicular style. When viewed from the gardens you get to see stonework of daunting conformity, unexpected angles and startling compositions, a result of ceaseless cultural cross fertilisation. There is a mute determination in these buildings that they would live beyond their difficult origins and proclaim belief. Britain’s mood-changing evening mist and clouds could not obfuscate the cathedral’s proportion and immensity.
Aura of mysticism
The stained glass windows of the chapel exude a sense of timelessness. A few of the original 12th century windows were destroyed, but the craftsmen who recreated the “Miracle Windows” preserved the original composition and their mystic appeal. The images in the Trinity Chapel depict the life of Thomas Beckett. The windows of the choir have images based on inspiration from Biblia Pauperum (the most popular text of medieval times). As the Canterbury Choir (one of the longest established musical foundation), renders an evensong and the windows are illuminated, one feels a part of an ancient Son et Lumiere show.
Towards the north side of the cathedral stands the great cloister that was the centre of monastic life. Alongside it is the Chapter House; the monks gathered there to read the Chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict (hence the name) The solitude and silence that sharpened the experience of monastic learning still remains. A little away to the east of the cathedral stands the church dedicated to St. Martin (England’s oldest church). It is in these emblems that the voice of ancient Canterbury has survived the earthly pragmatism of change.
The Chaucer Museum on St. Margaret Street keeps the spirit of Chaucer alive through memorabilia and shows. At the museum, without much prelude, we were ushered in to watch the enactments of scenes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (“The Knight’s Tale”). To portray romance and treachery, the actors with rehearsed passion and solemnity gave visual form to books one had read. The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories a group of pilgrims (travelling to Canterbury) tell each other to occupy the vacant moments. Though written between the years 1387 and 1400, the tales lend themselves to popular drama as they are spiked with revelations that go beyond the timepiece (in this case a few centuries). Inbuilt into the script are twists in the tales with contemporary references thrown in; new theatrical footnotes to Chaucer.
The museum has the usual shelves crammed with Chaucer memorabilia. The City Council is favourably inclined to the memory of an artist who immortalised the place through his works. The works give an enduring perpetuity to the place.
Buzzing with activity
The Pedestrian High Street is to Canterbury what the Piazza is to Italian cities. You have shops selling religious curios and other odds and ends. Cafés with carefully tended to wisteria, tables dressed with English linen, tea and cream cakes. Life is lived on these streets and there is much diversity, given the mingling of travellers and residents.
Canterbury is essentially a small place tucked away in the country with a big religious monument and a bigger reputation. Yet, it has all the easy rhythms of languor and leisure. From the “old curiosity shop” on the high street, I got a replica of the cathedral with an inscription “time is precious, not its pace”. An apt memento mori from Canterbury.
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