St Martin's & St Paul's
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The following extracts about the history of St Martin's Church is taken from the booklet The Cradle of English Christianity written by Martin Taylor and used with his consent. Copies of the booklet, which has many colour illustrations, are available from the St Martin's and St Paul's Parish Office, Church Street St Paul's, Canterbury, UK, CT1 2LX, price £4.95 including UK postage.
The story begins in the 580s when Ethelbert, heir to the throne of Kent, married a Franking princess, Bertha. Her father, Charibert, had ben king of Paris in her infancy, but he was long dead. The princess had been brought up near Tours, where St Martin had been bishop two centuries earlier. One of the conditions of the marriage was that Bertha should be able to continue to worship as a Christian. She was therefore accompanied to Kent by a chaplain, Bishop Liudhard, and King Ethelbert gave her a former Roman building - the westwern part of the chancel of the present church - beside the old Canterbury to Richborough road, as her royal chapel.
What was this part of St Martin's originally, when it was first built during the period of Roman rule? Possibly a Christian church, for there were certainly Christians in Roman Canterbury. Perhaps a mortuary chapel, where relatives of the dead would sometimes gather for a commemorative feast. All that is clear is that this must be the very building which her husband restored for Bertha's use as a Christian chapel in his pagan kingdom.
St Augustine's mission set out in 596. Its probable route (from papal letters requesting support for it) is shown on the map. To travel so far, "to a barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation whose language they did not understand" was a daunting prospect - so much so that Augustine returned to Rome to plead that the mission should be called off. Pope Gregory insisted that it should continue and redoubled his efforts to secure support for it. He arranged for Augstine to be consecrated as Abbot and Bishop and to be provided with Frankish interpreters.
So in May 597 Augustine and his forty companions, together with the Frankish interpreters, came ashore on the Island of Thanet. Their landing place, marked with a cross since 1884, is thought to have been at Ebbsfleet, a spur of land projecting into the Wantsum channel, which then divided Thanet from the mainland. As Gregory himself put it in a letter, they had come to the "world's end", and found themselves "in a corner ( 'angula' or 'angle') of the world!"
Hearing of their landing, King Ethelbert ordered them to remain there. Bede tells us what happened next. "Some days later, the King came to the island, and sitting in the open air" (fearing witchcraft if they met under a roof) "commanded Augustine and his companions to come hither to talk to him...They came... bearing as their standard a silver cross and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted upon a panel. They chanted litanies and offered prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themsleves and those to whom they had come." [Bede's Ecclesiatical History of the English Nation, Book 1, Chapter 25].
Having heard Augustine, the king replied that he found Augustine's words "fair", but that because they were "new" and "doubtful" he could not accept them and forsake those beliefs that he and the whole English race had held for so long. Nevertheless he acknowledged their earnestness which had brought them on such a long journey, and he promised that the missionaries would be received hospitably and not molested.
Augustine crossed the Wantsum by boat and probably set foot on the mainland at Richborough, the very place where the Roman legions had begun their conquest of Britain in 43AD. From the fort's western gate, he would have set off along the Roman Watling Street to Canterbury.
According to Bede, as the Mission approached the city, they sang in unison " beseech thee O Lord in thy great mercy that thy wrath and anger may be turned away from this city and from thy house for we have sinned. Alleluia". He then tells how the mission base was established in Queen Berth's chapel. "In this church they first began to meet, to chant the psalms, to pray, to say Mass, to preach, and to baptise, until when the king had been converted to the faith they received greater liberty to preach everywhere and to build or restore churches". In view of the smallness of the chapel they soon must have embarked on adding the present nave [Ecclesiatical History of the English Nation , Book 1, Chapter 26].
"At last the king, as well as others...believed and was baptised ". Precisely when and where this momentous event took place Bede does not say but he impiles it was soon and in the area of the church. History was to show that this simple ceremony, signifying the alliance between the Church of Rome and the English Bretwalda was the start of the conversion of the English which would, one day, set the pattern for the whole of medieval Europe.
Following the king's conversion, Augustine was given a site for his household in the city and a former Roman building for his church. Here his bishop's throne would have been installed as the sign of his authority; here the routine of chanted services would have been maintained while priests were out on missions. Excavations in 1993 located the foundation trenches which may be from the first cathedral. This spot is marked by a Compass Rose of brass set into the floor at the east end of the present nave - a symbol of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Writing to the Patriarch of Alexandria in the summer of 598, Pope Gregory mentioned a report that ten thousand of the Kentish people had been baptised the previous Christmas. The success of the mission caused him to send a second team of missionaries in 601 with supplies of book, vestments, utensils, and relics. With them he also sent precise instructions on the organisation of the new church, nominating London and York as the centres of two equal provinces, each with its own archbishop.
To Augustine he sent a pallium as a symbol of papal authority.
Augustine died sometime between 604AD and 609AD on the 26th May. He was buried temporarily outside the Abbey Church of St Peter and St Paul. When the building was completed his body was moved into the porticus of St Gregory.
