A Mothers' Day Carol

Today is Mid-Lent Sunday or Laetare Sunday or 'Refreshment Sunday', the day when Lenten discipline is relaxed a little. In England it's also Mothering Sunday (for the history of which, see here), and the Oxford Book of Carols includes a sweet little modern carol in honour of this (semi-)medieval tradition, 'It is the day of all the year'.

Various places on the internet will tell you this is a medieval carol, but it's not - it was written by George Hare Leonard, a writer and historian, in the first part of the twentieth century. It's a nice bit of medieval revivalism, and it is sung to a medieval tune - that of the fifteenth-century German carol, 'Ich weiss ein lieblich Engelspiel' ('I know a lovely angel-game'), which you can hear here (at 2:48):



(If you're like me, you can't hear the name of that carol without thinking of the Chalet School's Christmas plays and Joey Bettany's 'golden voice' reducing everyone to tears...)

The Oxford Book of Carols editors have this mouth-watering note:

"'He who goes a-mothering finds violets in the lane' [this is a proverb]. In many parts of the country it was the custom for the children of the family who had left the old home to come back to visit their Mother on the 4th Sunday in Lent (Mid-Lent Sunday). The eldest son would bring a wheaten cake - in modern times a plum cake with an icing of sugar, or a simnel-cake. Sometimes cinnamon comfits ("lambs'-tails") or little white sugar-plums with a carraway seed, or some morsel of spice within - such as may still be found at country fairs - were brought for an offering. One of the children home for the day would stay in and mind the house, so that the mother should be free for once to attend morning service at the church."

Perhaps we could also name today Sugar-Plum Sunday.

It is the day of all the year,
Of all the year the one day,
When I shall see my mother dear
And bring her cheer,
A-mothering on Sunday.

So I'll put on my Sunday coat,
And in my hat a feather,
And get the lines I writ by rote,
With many a note,
That I've a-strung together.

And now to fetch my wheaten cake
To fetch it from the baker,
He promised me, for mother's sake,
The best he'd bake
For me to fetch and take her.

Well have I known, as I went by
One hollow lane, that none day
I'd fail to find - for all they're shy -
Where violets lie,
As I went home on Sunday.

My sister Jane is waiting-maid
Along with Squire's lady;
And year by year her part she's played
And home she stayed
To get the dinner ready.

For mother’ll come to Church you'll see-
Of all the year it's the day-
'The one,' she'll say, 'that's made for me'
And so it be:
It's every Mother's free day.

The boys will all come home from town
Not one will miss that one day;
And every maid will bustle down
To show her gown,
A-mothering on Sunday.

It is the day of all the year,
Of all the year the one day;
And here come I, my mother dear,
And bring you cheer,
A-mothering on Sunday.

How to Choose an Archbishop of Canterbury

Since Rowan Williams has announced that he is to step down as Archbishop of Canterbury for the doubtless much more congenial atmosphere of a Cambridge college, the speculation about his successor has begun. Just as being Archbishop of Canterbury has always been a difficult job, choosing one has always been a matter of factions and politics (you may find this a comforting thought if you find church politics as depressing as I do). For instance, William of Malmesbury gives a detailed and near-contemporary account of the debate about the election of a successor to Anselm, who died in 1109. With the passage of nearly 900 years, this kind of thing becomes amusing rather than disheartening!

Henry I took five years to get around to the business of appointing a new archbishop, for motives William impugns:

After Anselm of venerable memory had escaped the captivity of his body of clay and bidden farewell to this life, his see was vacant for a full five years... All this time, whenever the king was warned to look to the widowhood of his mother the church, he put his advisors off with a bland reply: the archbishops sent by his father and brother [i.e. Lanfranc and Anselm, chosen by William I and William II respectively] had been of high quality, and he was unwilling to fall short of the good fortune of his relatives; there was therefore need of careful consideration to make sure he put in place an archbishop who equalled or came near to the virtues of his predecessors.

Replies like this seemed entirely lawful and proper, but a pile of money kept the king's mind happy, and cured the unease with which others regarded the delay. Finally, when he could not put it off any longer without almost irremediable scandal, the king assembled a council at Windsor, intending to bring the matter to a conclusion.

Amusingly, in the process of revision William emended this last paragraph to: "Replies like this seemed entirely lawful and proper, and indeed they were. So after long and anxious discussion, the king assembled a council..." Do you believe him? I don't!

[The king's] intention was that the choice should fall upon Faricius abbot of Abingdon, a man of great severity, together with remarkable energy in carrying through his plans. The king, however, did not insist on having his own way, at least in the choice of archbishop, and left it to the decision of the meeting as a whole. Here and on other occasions he, as is well known, displayed remarkable self-control; but as for the bishops, it will make a difference to them at the Last Judgement in what spirit they exercised the decision delegated to them.

Good point, William. He goes on:

When they expressed a preference for someone in clerical orders [i.e. not a monk], objections were raised: no cleric had ever been archbishop of Canterbury, save only Stigand, who had come into the see through impudence and had been properly expelled from it; there was no need for a custom of such long standing to be annulled, particularly as it could not be shown to conflict with the faith.

Disappointed in this plan, and being suspicious of the inflexible Faricius, the bishops made the following points in their deliberations: 'If that Lombard is made archbishop, there will be quarrels and schisms all over again. He will spare no one of us, especially as the king thinks as highly of him as if he had been sent down from heaven. [!] But this is not to be said openly. The argument we must use has to be one that wounds no one's feelings. Thus [they said publicly]: We have had more than enough foreign archbishops. There is good store of men who speak the language of the country, as learned as Lanfranc, as pious as Anselm, and monks like them both. There is, for instance Ralph bishop of Rochester, reputed the equal of the ancients, and better than both old and new for humility and approachability. If you trace his lineage, he is sprung from respectable Norman stock. If you enquire into his life, there is no blot on his copybook. He is the only one whose piety even malice could not carp at, for it is beyond cavil. If you look at his learning, he has drained all Athens dry, if you examine his eloquence, speech flows from his mouth like honey; and his language is that of his native Maine, meticulous and (so to say) well combed.'

Note that when they say they've had enough foreign archbishops, they don't mean they want an Englishman - it means 'a Norman, not an Italian'. None of the bishops at this council were English, and there wouldn't be an English-born Archbishop of Canterbury until Thomas Becket (of Norman ancestry, but born in London) half a century later. By 'the language of the country' they mean Norman French (and it's a bit surprising that Faricius, who was born in Tuscany but had been Abbot of Abingdon for nearly 15 years by this point, didn't speak it). The compromise candidate, Ralph, was Norman by birth but had been in England on and off since about 1102; he was appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1108 and was present at Anselm's deathbed. So he wasn't a foreigner by their standards.

You might wonder how William of Malmesbury knew what the bishops discussed behind closed doors, and how they decided what it would and would not be politic to say; the editors of the Gesta Pontificum suggest it's possible he got this information from his fellow historian Eadmer, who as a senior monk of Christ Church Canterbury was probably present at the discussions, and whom William had certainly met.

Anyway, the bishops' tactful realpolitik achieved their ends:

These opinions made the king change his mind and come round to their view forthwith. This took place four days after the fifth anniversary of the death of Anselm [i.e. 26 April 1114].

Let's hope it doesn't take that long to find a successor this time...


Quotations from William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol.1, pp.201-203.

Google and the Book of Kells

I got very excited this morning when I saw that the Google doodle is celebrating St Patrick's Day by taking inspiration from the Book of Kells! It's a lovely idea and a gorgeous design. Despite my Irish ancestors and general love of saints' days, St Patrick's Day is not my favourite holiday, but this is a delightful way to celebrate Irish culture. (I understand why people like St Patrick's Day, but I get vaguely annoyed when it goes along with this weird fascination some English people have with Ireland and its uniquely mystical magical super-special medieval history. "Celtic spirituality is so profound," they sigh, "why don't we have anything like that in England?" Well, we do, you just never troubled to educate yourself about it...)

Anyway, I hope this starts a trend - Google, next Tuesday (2o March) is St Cuthbert's feast day, so maybe we could have something from the Lindisfarne Gospels? And next month, something like this for the 1000th anniversary of St Alphege's death? A medieval manuscript for every day of the year would be just lovely, thank you.

Oxford in the Spring

looks like this:






And also like this:

Anselm and the Owl

Cloister at Canterbury Cathedral

The Life of St Anselm, written by Anselm's close companion and devoted admirer, the Canterbury historian Eadmer, contains many vivid stories about the archbishop: from his childhood visions of God's home in the Alps, to his youthful anxieties about his vocation, to his sympathy for hunted hares and an equally endangered Anglo-Saxon saint, it's full of stories and records of conversations which bring Anselm irresistibly to life. The following episode is perhaps my favourite, a touching story in which Anselm, assailed with the various troubles that come with being an archbishop, laments that he has lost the peace of the cloister. This is something of a trope in the lives of saintly bishops, but it's not difficult to believe it may well have been true of Anselm, who gave up a life of study and contemplation in the abbey at Bec (where he wrote his first philosophical works) to become mired in controversy and political wrangling as Archbishop of Canterbury. The conversation Eadmer describes here probably took place early in his time as archbishop, in the mid-1090s; the king mentioned in this passage is William Rufus.

When Anselm began now to think of all the peace he had lost and all the labour he had found, his spirit was torn and tormented with bitter anguish. For he saw in his mind's eye the life which he had been accustomed to lead as prior and abbot - how joyfully he had reposed and delighted in the love of God and of his neighbour, how devoutly he had been heard by all to whom he ministered the words of life, how still more devoutly his hearers had hastened to put into practice what he taught, and thereby (as he hoped) added to the sum of his reward. And now how different it was! As bishop he ought to have gone on to better things; but he saw his days and nights taken up with secular business; he saw himself unable to devote his attention either to God or to his neighbour in God's name as he had formerly done; and he saw no-one willing to listen to the Word of Life from his lips or to carry it out; and thereby he lost (as he thought) his reward.

To add to these evils of his own, the cruel oppression of his men daily afflicted his ears; and he was deafened by the threats of worse to follow, made by malicious men on all sides. For it was well-known that the king's mind was worked up in a fury against him, and as a result every wicked man thought himself happy if he could hit on any device to exasperate him further. Thus he was tossed by the storms of injuries of many kinds... [Yet he] had some relief from these trials, finding his chief consolation in burying himself in the cloister with the monks and talking to them of things pertaining to their rule of life.

Ruins of the monks' dormitory at Canterbury Cathedral
 

He referred to this once when he was presiding in their chapter [at Canterbury]. He had as usual been discoursing freely about matters which concerned their rule, and when he came to the end of his discourse he made a joking comparison, saying with cheerful good-humour: "Just as an owl is glad when she is in her hole with her chicks and (in her own fashion) all is well with her; and just as she is attacked and torn to pieces when she is among crows and rooks and other birds, and everything then is far from well with her; so it is with me. For when I am with you, all is well with me, and this is the joy and consolation of my life. But when I am separated from you, and my ways lie among men who are in the world, then I am torn this way and that by the onrush of disputes of many kinds and I am harassed by secular business which I hate. Then indeed I am in an ill state, and I tremble with horror at the great danger to my soul which may ensue."

Although he had begun, as I said, in jest, he broke into most bitter tears as he spoke, adding, "But you at least my friends, do you, at least, take pity on me, for the hand of the Lord is upon me." [Job 19:21]

Since his chief recreation was in such companionship, when he was deprived of it he was grievously afflicted. God knows I often heard him most vehemently protest that he would rather be one of the boys in the monastic community, trembling under the master's rod, than sit aloft in the pontifical throne among the congregration of the people having the pastoral care of the whole of Britain.

Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi (The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury), ed. and trans. R. W. Southern (London, 1962), pp.69-71.


I can't help sympathising with Anselm here, and thinking that his is the lament of many a scholar even today! Anselm's comparison of himself to an owl, like his comments about the hare on this occasion, is based on a traditional medieval interpretation of the animal's characteristics. In bestiaries, drawing ultimately on classical sources, the owl is commonly interpreted in a negative way: as a creature which loves darkness and shuns the daylight it was taken to represent the sinner who rejects the light of righteousness. (This is often a surprise to modern readers, who think of owls as benevolent wise old creatures.) But in literature about the contemplative life, of which Anselm would have been thinking here, the owl was often associated with the monastic vocation: it's a solitary bird, which wakes at night while others sleep, and a verse from Psalm 102, 'I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert', is often quoted in reference to the life of the monk who has withdrawn from the world to follow a life of contemplation.

Anselm was particularly fond of the metaphor (which is a Biblical one) of a mother bird surrounded by her chicks - it also appears in one of his letters to Queen Matilda, and in his prayer to St Paul, where it's Christ who is the mother hen and Anselm himself one of the chicks.

In nature owls are apparently often set upon or 'mobbed' by other birds, as Anselm mentions here, and this crops up as a theme in medieval art - for instance, here's a lovely manuscript illustration from a bestiary:

And a misericord from Norwich Cathedral:

 
This 'mobbing' is often interpreted in the bestiaries as an allegory for the just hostility of the righteous towards the wicked, but Anselm, following the more positive interpretation of the owl, sees it in terms of the unjust violence of the wicked towards those who have set themselves apart for God. More generally, the little birds tearing away at the poor owl are an effective image of Anselm's worldly cares, those niggling little worries which unsettle the soul and keep it from peace.

In the thirteenth-century English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the titular birds have a vigorous debate about their good and bad qualities, and the owl seems at times to align herself with the contemplative life: she sings the canonical hours of the monastic day and night, and talks about her love of peace and stability (a particularly Benedictine virtue). At one point she says:

Vorþi ich am loþ smale fo3le
Þat floþ bi grunde an bi þuvele.
Hi me bichermet and bigredeþ
And hore flockes to me ledeþ.
Me is lof to habbe reste
And sitte stille in mine neste.
Vor nere ich never no þe betere,
Þe3 ich mid chauling and mid chatere
Hom schende and mid fule worde,
So herdes doþ, oþer mid schitworde.
Ne lust me wit þe screwen chide,
Forþi ich wende from hom wide.

'For this reason [her sharp claws and beak] I am hated by small birds which fly along the ground and in thickets; they shriek and cry out at me and lead flocks against me. It is dear to me to have peace, and sit still within my nest. I would never be any better off if I argued with them, with squabbling and jabbering and with foul words and bad language, like shepherds do. I take no pleasure in arguing with wicked people, and so I stay far away from them.'

Anselm might not have put it quite like this (it would be interesting to know whether schitworde was part of his perhaps-not-extensive English vocabulary), but essentially he said the same thing to the monks of Canterbury.

Pheasants wandering among the ruins of the monks' dormitory

'Bold Fisherman' and the Heroes of Medieval Romance

[I started writing this post about a folk song, but it somehow turned into a post about Havelok the Dane instead. So I left it for a few days and started writing a post about a different folk song, only for that also to turn into a post about Havelok the Dane before I'd even realised it. This is ridiculous, and probably makes the points I was trying to make in each post look less convincing that they otherwise would be, because you're just going to think I'm obsessed with Havelok the Dane and attempting to link everything to it whether appropriate or not. I assure you that's not the case! I could post this one and then leave the other for a few weeks, to make myself look like obsessive, but instead I'm just going to post them both and if it undermines my point, I apologise. The songs are still great ;)]

A Folk Song A Day reminded me that I've long been meaning to post about one of my favourite traditional songs, 'Bold Fisherman'. You can listen to an excellent rendering at that link, but I think I still prefer Tim Van Eyken's gorgeous version:



'Bold Fisherman' is a widely-distributed song, collected from all over England and beyond; this page has different versions of the lyrics and here you can see all the places it was collected/recorded, which is lots of fun if you like that kind of thing (which I do). For instance, Vaughan Williams collected it in East Horndon, Essex, while at Northmoor, just outside Oxford, a woman named Sarah Calcott sang it to Alfred Williams, who wrote:

Northmoor is a lonely little village on the banks of the Thames between Standlake and Oxford. The road is broken by the river which must be crossed by ferry to Bablock Hythe and Appleton. The old woman, who lives alone, sang me several songs including Lord Bateman, while her pet jackdaw sat upon the arm of her chair in the fire light. At the same time, though extremely poor, she insisted upon my taking tea with her, and proudly filled my pockets with choicest apples to eat on the way home.

Awesome. Isn't it wonderful, the stuff you can find on the internet?

Lucy Broadwood collected it from a woman named Mrs Joiner at Chiswell Green, Hertfordshire, on 7th September 1914, and wrote a little about it in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society 19 (1915), pp.122-148. There she says:

I have always had a strong impression that the modern broadside may be a vulgar and secularized transmutation of a mediaeval allegorical original. To students of Gnostic and Early Christian mystical literature, the River, the Sea, the royal Fisher, the three Vestures of Light (or Robes of Glory), the Recognition and Adoration by the illuminated humble Soul, the free Pardon, the mystical Union of the Bride to the Bridegroom in the House of the Father (or Father-House), are familiar elements, and we can find them all, certainly, amongst the variants of this ballad.

This is the opinion which attracts some derision in the articles linked above, and it does obviously go too far; it's also very typical of this era of folk-song studies (just look at all those capital letters!). But it's not actually that silly a theory in essence, though of course unprovable; the allegory Lucy Broadwood was looking for would be most profitably sought not in 'Gnostic and Early Christian Literature' but in medieval romance.

The idea of Christ-as-suitor is everywhere in medieval religious literature; I can't think of a better way to illustrate this than to link to this passage from Ancrene Wisse, in which Christ is imagined as the knightly suitor of a proud and disdainful lady. Another example which always springs to mind when I'm listening to 'Bold Fisherman' is the fifteenth-century lyric 'In a valley of this restless mind', which also features a handsome nobleman seeking and wooing his wayward spouse, and forgiving her inability to love him - but it is, of course, Christ wooing the soul. What we see in these texts as in so many others are generic features of romance being adapted for Christian literature in imaginative, creative ways, intended to inspire the soul with a love of God.

And this goes both ways: just as Christ is often presented as a hero of romance, so heroes of romance are often presented as Christ figures. By this I mean that they are paragons of men: handsome, humble, generous, chaste, brave, explicitly Christian (attending mass, praying, bearing crosses, etc.), with near-supernatural strength but also near-supernatural heroic virtue. Men in folk songs are not usually like this... The bold fisherman, who has come specifically to seek his lover, who is covered in (highly symbolic, kingly) chains of gold, and who is superbly forgiving of the woman's transgression, is much more like a hero of medieval romance than anything else. I'd be prepared to bet that this is what set off Lucy Broadwood's intuition (or "strong impression") that this song has a little more to it than the obvious boy-meets-girl story. I can see how it's easy to be scornful of her language, but some parallels from medieval romances might help to set the song in context.

For instance, the verse where the fisherman takes off his shirt and she realises he's a nobleman. Heroes in romance often have physical tokens which promote recognition of their true identity even when in disguise - unusual beauty, resemblance to some particular person (a father, for instance), their own particular heraldry, distinctive clothes or weapons, etc. In this particular case I can't help being reminded of Havelok, from the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, which takes this extremely literally. Havelok, the son of the king of Denmark, is deprived of his inheritance and his royal identity as a child by a wicked usurper, but his true nature literally shines out of him: when he sleeps, a light streams from his mouth. He also has a birthmark (the romance calls it a kinemerk, which means 'royal token') in the shape of a red gold cross on his right shoulder - the kind of birthmark only a king could have. The combination of the shining light and the golden cross reveals his true identity on three crucial occasions in the romance - first as a child, when he is about to be killed by the fisherman who has been ordered to murder him; again when he is staying with a Danish nobleman, and when he's asleep the whole house sees the light streaming from his mouth and the cross on his naked shoulder; but most famously on his wedding night, when his new wife Goldboru, who believes Havelok to be only a kitchen boy, realises from these tokens that she has in fact married a prince (I posted an extract from that scene a little while ago).

Recognition scenes are a very common trope of both romance and folk song, but I do wonder just a little bit if the revelation moment in 'Bold Fisherman', where the woman learns the fisherman's true identity by seeing rings of gold concealed by his clothing, is a rationalisation of a kinemerk sort of scene. It's a little different from the use of a ring as a recognition token, which is extremely common in ballads and folk songs - including one which is definitely a version of a medieval romance, Hind Horn, a much-shortened version of King Horn, a romance in which the hero does a great deal of 'rowing upon the tide' to meet his lady love. Fishes feature prominently in King Horn, where the heroine has a frightening dream in which a giant fish bursts from a net (symbolising that someone will try to destroy her); when she is captured and held prisoner, the royal hero (another dispossessed prince) disguises himself as a fisherman to gain entrance to the castle, in order to show her the gold ring that reveals his true identity. Horn, with his extraordinary personal beauty and virtue and his twelve loyal disciples... sorry, I mean, 'companions', is another Christ figure, and there's no way that in this romance the fisherman disguise is not meant to recall that.

(I hope you noticed that Havelok was supposed to be killed by a fisherman; that man adopts Havelok instead and brings him up, living a fisherman's life at Grimsby. Havelok contains more words for different kinds of fish than any not-about-angling book you could care to mention).

So fishermen and rings and secret marks of identity all say 'medieval Christian romance' to me, and this is the context in which I think 'Bold Fisherman' is best interpreted. Of course this does not admit of definite proof, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to accept Lucy Broadwood's ideas about allegories of mystic union and Gnosticism - that's looking in the wrong direction. But the relationship between the ballad and medieval romance is undeniable, and that means that some of the generic features of medieval romance - such as Christ-as-wooer, and wooer-as-Christ - have made their way into ballads. Make fun of allegorical theories and call it just a 'very classic love story' all you like, but stories have histories, and those histories help us understand them. I don't know why folk singers are so fond of claiming otherwise.

The Shrine of St Augustine at Ramsgate

Some wonderful news in the wake of Pugin's bicentenary, from here:

Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark has formally established Pugin’s church of St Augustine in Ramsgate as a shrine of the ‘the Apostle of the English’. In an official decree the Archbishop grants the shrine canonical privileges and designates it as a place of pilgrimage.

A shrine to St Augustine existed on the Isle of Thanet before the Reformation and so this new place of pilgrimage recovers an ancient tradition. St Augustine’s is a Catholic church already dedicated to the saint and stands closer than any other to the place of Augustine’s landing, his first preaching and his momentous encounter with King Ethelbert of Kent in 597AD.

The official day on which the foundation of the shrine will be remembered is 1st March. This is Pugin’s birthday and recently the day of popular bicentenary celebrations held in his honour. This day links the erection of the shrine with the church’s founder who is buried within. The cult of St Augustine is fully in tune with the heart and mind of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852). He states in his letters that he selected the Ramsgate site because ‘blessed Austin landed nearby’ and he personally chose the dedication name and wanted the church to be a memorial to the founding identity of Christian England and its early saints.

There already exists a strong local interest and devotion to the saint. His feast day each year in celebrated in Ramsgate with a festival of Catholic history and culture called ‘St Augustine’s week’. Prayers are said and hymns sung in his honour. St Augustine’s has already functioned as a quasi-shrine and pilgrims already journey there from all over England and beyond to learn about the conversion of the English and the beginnings of Christianity in this land. In 1997 thousands descended upon the St Augustine’s site to celebrate 1500th anniversary of the Augustine landing. Hundreds of monks joined Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Bowen in the pilgrimage. In the year 2000 St Augustine’s was a ‘Jubilee Shrine’ and had special indulgences attached. This continued a long pilgrimage tradition surrounding St Augustine in Ramsgate and Thanet.

...

Fr Marcus Holden the parish priest and custodian of St Augustine’s commented, ‘This is amazing news for us. Pugin’s church is secured by this added living identity which also fulfils many of his own dreams in honouring the English saints and St Augustine in particular. There was need here not only to rescue the church as a great work of art but also to find a fitting spiritual significance for the future of the site. Through his decree, the Archbishop has done just that. The shrine will now draw pilgrims keen to learn about the early saints and to pray for an evangelisation of England in our own times’.

The church is presently being restored and brought back to its former glory and major celebrations are planned this year surrounding the feast day of St Augustine.

This is fantastic news! I wrote in my first post on St Augustine's about the various saints of the Anglo-Saxon church who are prominently commemorated there, and it's wonderful to see this officially recognised. In my previous post I touched on the idea that the existence of St Augustine's, Ramsgate goes some way to remedy the loss of the abbey of St Augustine's, Canterbury. From the very early days of Augustine's mission, Canterbury had two significant religious communities, centres of art, learning and literature whose importance it is difficult to overstate; today Christ Church lives on through the cathedral, but of St Augustine's, now in ruins, barely a shadow survives. The original shrine of St Augustine, at the site of his burial, was destroyed at the Reformation (unless it's at Fordwich or Chilham, as I mentioned the other day!). This new shrine repairs a wrong.

I was present at the celebrations for the 1400th anniversary of Augustine's landing in 1997 mentioned in the article; I remember it fondly, though I didn't know then that I would ever come to care quite so much about the medieval history of Canterbury (to be fair, I was only eleven years old). Let's hope for many more such celebrations to come.