Canterbury Recollections
Here at Tea, Talk and Tattered Pages, we are reading The Body in the Transept by Jeanne M. Dams as our quarterly book club selection. The protagonist is an American expatriate living in a fictional Cathedral town in England called Sherebury. The ancient cathedral reminds me of the real one in Canterbury.
I do love a good English mystery!
Today is the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury, and that’s got me thinking about my last visit to Canterbury. It’s a brilliantly photogenic town, with centuries of history. In its ancient cathedral, King Henry II’s henchmen murdered St. Thomas Becket because he wouldn’t accede to Henry’s demands. Four centuries later, another tempestuous King Henry - VIII, ordered the death of another St. Thomas - More. St. Thomas More has a connection to Canterbury too, because his daughter Margaret More Roper, settled here.
Did you catch my article about St. Thomas More on Catholicmom.com? You can check it out here: The Temperaments at Play in Marriage. I also included a chapter about St. Thomas More in my book Piety and Personality: The Temperaments of the Saints.
I love to explore pilgrimage spots, and it’s even more fun if you have to do some discovering and detective work. My friends and I had visited Canterbury once before, and toured the Cathedral. But I did some more research and went back on my own. I took the train from London and made my way around the town on foot. I can imagine the protagonist from The Body in the Transept living in this charming town, and stumbling across a body in the darkened cathedral!
This evening, I pulled out an old travel journal to reminisce about my last visit to Canterbury. Want to read an excerpt?
“I took a right out of the Train Station - Canterbury West, which brought me to St. Dunstan’s Street. I had taken notes from my book, ‘In the Footsteps of St. Thomas More’ about Canterbury, and what there was to see, and one of the first things was St. Dunstan’s Church! So I went there first. Wow. Beautiful old stone church…very British, very picturesque. King Henry II walked with bare bloody feet from here to the Cathedral doing penance for St. Thomas Becket’s death. I thought of that…and looked down the street. I walked it too! Tired, but not barefoot. I took pictures of the brick gateway of Margaret Roper’s home, ‘Roper House’, which is all that is left. This is on the opposite side of the street from St. Dunstan’s Church, back in the direction of the station and the West Gate. That was very impressive…I took pictures from many angles. Part of the garden wall, with an old oaken door, are supposedly also still in existence, but I couldn’t get in to see them.
“I’m so glad I took those notes from the St. Thomas More book…his head is buried at St. Dunstan’s!! There’s a monument in the floor that reads, ‘Beneath This Floor is the Vault of the Roper Family in which is interred the head of Sir Thomas More of illustrious memory, sometime Lord Chancellor of England who was beheaded on Tower Hill 6th July 1535. A.D. 1932.’
“On the walls are pictures of the vault under this monument (which is inaccessible) with the iron barred cage holding the precious relic of St. Thomas’s head, that his poor daughter Meg brought back to the family vault. She also is buried there. I prayed, and kissed the monument. I read and photographed the story of his life on the wall, and the monument to Meg’s son (St. Thomas’s grandson). In 1973, St. Thomas More Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and the St. Thomas More Church in Vienna donated a window of his life that I also photographed. It’s full of symbolism.
“Having visited ‘St. Peter in Chains’ chapel in the Tower of London where some say he is buried, and ‘Tommy More’s church’ in Chelsea where others say he is buried, and where his first wife is certainly interred, and the site of his home in Chelsea, and the Bell Tower where he was imprisoned, and a lock of his hair in the Tyburn convent vault, and the site of his martyrdom on Tower Hill, and the site of his trial in Westminster Hall, and having seen the play of his life in the London theater, it was very moving to know that his blessed head was buried here for sure.”
Do you see why I love taking pilgrimages, and leading group pilgrimages? My love of mystery and my love of the Saints mingle together, as I trace their paths through the places where they lived and died. It brings them closer to me, so that I may strive to walk with the Saints by pilgrimage, and more importantly, by imitation.
If I were to make a bucket list, I think #1 would be to go on a pilgrimage that you were leading! I went to Rome once, but the significance was lost on me. I need someone like you to explain the details of the saints' lives.