by Timothy Egan
Almost instantly, the church proclaimed Thomas a martyr and a saint. Miracles occurred at his tomb in the church. The blind could see. The deaf could hear. The lame could walk. Word spread of the magic of his mortal remains. To touch any part of him was to be cured. Pilgrims started coming, a trickle at first, then a flood, finally an industry. In ten years’ time, more than seven hundred miracles were attributed to Becket. Of course, as an alternative to common medieval medical practices like drilling a hole in the skull of the sick—the practice known as trepanning—the concentrated mental power of belief had a chance at success. A pilgrimage was one of the primary ways to cure smallpox, leprosy, or the skin-disfiguring malady of St. Anthony’s fire. The cathedral and its bloodstained floor became England’s premier shrine. Canterbury flourished. Its inns and pubs filled with travelers and holy fools. English literature was birthed by the fictional stories of these pilgrims in these inns, stories crafted by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century. His tales were ribald, witty, with characters who sounded like real people. In the end, there was always a twist.
Cowering at the reaction of the faithful, King Henry II was disgraced. He said the murder was a terrible mistake. He built a monastery and pilgrim hospice as repentance. He donned a sackcloth, scratchy and filthy, and walked barefoot on a cold night through the streets of Canterbury, flogged by eighty monks. When he reached the cathedral, the king showed everyone his bleeding back, then crawled inside to spend the night next to the crypt of the man who would become the most famous saint in England.
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TO THIS DAY, Thomas Becket continues to haunt the mother church of the global Anglican faith. “When I’m in Canterbury I go through a door leading me to the steps on which the blood of Thomas Becket fell in 1170.” So began a recent sermon by the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the 105th archbishop of Canterbury. “It’s a slightly odd feeling.” Welby is a sad-faced, late-middle-aged cleric who is so self-effacing you want to slap him—Snap out of it, man, your predecessors made kings crawl and popes tremble! He is one of only three people on earth allowed to touch the Crown; the monarch and the royal jeweler are the others. A new king or queen is anointed with holy oils administered by his hand, sealing the sovereign to God. And yet, Welby feels emasculated every time he sees the list of the 104 prior archbishops on a wall in the cathedral, all the way back to Augustine, the first man to hold the title (not the philosopher, but an Italian evangelist).
In his way, Welby is like many of his fellow British, ritually apologizing for this or that. He is sorry for colonies. He is sorry for homophobia. He is sorry about pedophiles among clerical ranks. He is sorry that Christians can sound “holier than thou.” He laments “secular stagnation” and “the long years of winter in the church.” Civility is gone, and in its place “we have seen an upwelling of poison and hatred that I cannot remember in this country for very many years.” All of this begging-of-pardon and whimpering prompted a fellow Anglican, writing in the Daily Mail, to ask, “What is the point of the archbishop of Canterbury?” It’s a fair question.
The strength of this archbishop is his story. As the son of two alcoholic parents, his childhood was miserable. He was “the shyest, most-unhappy-looking boy you could imagine,” one classmate recalled. Faith was an afterthought. “I vaguely assumed there was a God, but I didn’t believe,” said Welby in a profile in the British press. “I wasn’t interested at all.” After school at Eton and Trinity College, he married, started a family, and rose to become a petroleum executive. But his first child, a girl who had yet to see her first birthday, was killed in a car accident in Paris. The grief and search for healing sent him into the ministry. Somewhat awkwardly of late, Welby has tried to explain his outward melancholy. He suffers from what he calls “the black dog of depression”—no small thing in a country where suicide is the leading cause of death for men under the age of forty-five. It takes him down into a place that is “beyond description, hopeless.” He seems very lonely as well, another national scourge. Britain just named its first minister for loneliness to deal with what the prime minister calls “the sad reality of modern life.”
Just before he was enthroned by the queen in 2013, he found out that his father, Gavin Welby, a bootlegger with a rakish reputation, was Jewish. This history had long been hidden from him. Imagine that: a half-Jew leading a state church that had done so much to further hatred of Jews. It was English clerics who spread the blood libel—the toxic notion that Jews killed Christian children in order to use their blood for ritual purposes—as a way to dodge mounting financial debts. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, in part because of the reach of this mortal lie and other falsehoods planted by Christians. Back then, the archbishop’s father would have been an outcast, forced to flee for his life, his home and savings seized. Welby has yet to find a way to use his unusual story, even though he understands the power of narrative to move lives. He did make a plea in another sermon to the legions of atheists, the snarky press, the collapsed and no longer listening. “It is impossible to understand the world today,” he said, “without understanding religion.”
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MY GUIDE FOR A TOUR of the cathedral is a cheeky fellow, quick-witted and well attuned to the slightest slip in the attention of our small group. So, while he dutifully notes that there has been a Christian church on the cathedral grounds since the first stone was stacked in the year 597, he is eager to point out the naughty secrets of this English Vatican. Up here in a ceiling of the former monks’ cloister, look closely: there is the image of a mermaid of some sort, or the early Starbucks logo, openly displaying what looks like her genitalia. Oh, those monks, toiling away in the darkness of winter on thin gruel, their fingers worn to sandpaper—such pranksters! And over there in one large stained-glass window: observe the parable in the colored panels. It tells the story of a felon who was blinded for his crimes, then had his sight restored during his pilgrimage to Canterbury. But his family never gave money to the church for this miracle, so they lost a child. The moral: donate or die.
And finally, on our way out, we marvel at Christ Church Gate, the superbly ornamented outdoor entrance wall to the cathedral compound. The guide directs our attention to one small carving in particular, just beneath a Tudor rose. It appears to be a naked woman, full-breasted, but wait!—is that a penis? Indeed, the figure is a hermaphrodite, he tells us, probably the joke of a bored craftsman. Curious, though, when I try to buy a copy of The Canterbury Tales at the Anglican bookstore, the clerk tells me no, no, no, waving his finger. They can’t sell The Canterbury Tales here at Canterbury Cathedral—just a pamphlet-sized edition with the introduction. The book is too bawdy, full of sexual innuendo. No place in a church for such a thing.
Answering the call of bells pealing for evensong, I dash away in time to get a place deep in the heart of a cathedral that was twenty-three generations in the making. I’m seated in a high-backed pew carved with exquisite designs, the wood aged to dark chocolate. The acoustics are superb. And when the multiracial and multigenerational weave of voices—all angelic in white—comes together, the sound wafts upward to the vaults and carries me away with it. I’m not sure if this is prayer, homage, or performance, but it’s a transcendent few moments for the soul. By the time I go for a run at sunset atop the twenty-foot-high walls first built by the Romans, Canterbury has made its way into my heart. It’s a garden city, soft and green, veined by a river split into two, with Tudor homes and thick-waisted fruit trees and international students in plaid uniforms who know a Chaucer verse by heart. What the Romans created, the Nazis nearly destroyed. Almost a third of the town was hit by German bombing. The explosives unearthed bedrock of the lost urban design: relics of a pagan heritage to go with Canterbury’s pilgrim lineage. Worshippers of Woden, who got around on a horse with eight legs, and Thunor, the Anglo-Saxon god of bad weather, were given a fresh appraisal.
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ONE BENEFIT of the disgustingly unhealthy full English breakfast—eggs and thick bacon, black pudding and sausage, baked beans, buttered toast, and a grilled tomato—is the incentive to trot off and canter, a word that owes its origin to this city. I have another day here before I start the Via Francigena, with a few pilgrim tasks still ahead. One is to visit the natal home of English Christianity. When the Romans left Britain more than four centuries after Julius Caesar first landed in 55 BC, the island dissolved into clans and tribal kingdoms—Christian Celts in the west and north, the more recently arrived Germanic Angles and Saxons in the east and here in Kent. The barbarians from the Continent gave their name to their new island home—Angland. More than a century earlier, Ireland, never conquered by Rome, had fused its Druidic traditions into a lively form of indigenous Christianity, largely due to the persuasion of a tireless former slave, the man known as Saint Patrick. The Irish wove this religion, and their art, monastic settlements, and written and oral traditions, into other parts of the British Isles, and eventually the European mainland. This came at a time when a fledgling faith born among unlearned Galilean fishermen had passed from its persecution phase, through embrace by the Roman Empire, to efforts by bands of missionaries to seed the pagan pockets of Europe.
But the south of Angland stuck with the old gods. The story has it that Pope Gregory sent Augustine north “to a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation whose language they did not understand,” as one early historian put it. Lucky for him, Queen Bertha, the wife of local pagan King Ethelbert of Kent, was Christian by way of her French background, and she welcomed the men from Rome in 597. The other alternative, more typical, would be to throw the foul-smelling strangers into the sea, anchored to stones. With Bertha’s prodding, the king eventually abandoned his own deities and welcomed the religion of a foreign people into his realm.
Christians from afar had no power or leverage in these strange lands of many gods. A century before, they had converted much of present-day France and Germany—as they did Ireland—without state violence or coercion. Their message was optimistic, born of hope, salvation for men and women, no matter their standing among the class-bound clans. They were charitable toward the poor, and affectionate to each other. “How these Christians love one another!” said a pagan among the new arrivals. They promoted a Christ who said he had been “anointed to bring good news” (the god-spel in Old English) to the downtrodden. Nor was the conversion in southern England aided by military victory—a prayer answered in battle, proof of the value of upgrading from one deity to another, as these things often were. The king’s wife, Bertha, simply won him over with the passion for her faith. A large monastery eventually rose on land given to the Catholics by Ethelbert.
But what’s this? The foundational footprint of British Christianity, the former monastery and burial grounds of Ethelbert, Bertha, and Augustine, is rubble: a vast ruin behind a fence in the heart of the Canterbury World Heritage site. It looks like a portent of things to come. I walk over a hushed field of ankle-high grass, between scatterings of stone from a Middle Age complex that once closed off the sky overhead. I see a two-story, crumbling brick arch, the floor of a former cathedral nave, a few pillars holding nothing. Who would destroy a place so crucial to England’s sense of self? Nazis, I presume. The bastards. No, it was fellow English who did it. First by neglect, and then by deliberation—tied to the shifting loyalties of the Crown.
Beware the marriage of church and state, for the divorce is always violent. Six hundred years after that crew of humble missionaries stumbled ashore, Becket had pushed the boundary of ecclesiastical control, putting Catholics in cassocks beyond the reach of civil institutions. “The clergy,” he insisted, “should be ruled by their own law.” This change, shielding priests and monks from nonreligious courts for crimes like rape or murder, infuriated the king. But the killing of Becket only strengthened the grip of the clerical class. It would be 360 years before another monarch in England dared to defy a pope. That came in the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with Rome over his marital desires and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. Emboldened by his unlimited new spiritual powers, Henry VIII set about destroying the old Christian establishment. Thomas Becket’s ghost was the first to go. The saint’s shrine was demolished in the cathedral, and those miracle-inducing body parts were dispersed. He was declared a rebel and traitor by royal proclamation. Other saints were downgraded as well, and stained-glass depictions of their lives were smashed. In 1538, the king closed the abbey that stood where I now stand, ending nine centuries of monastic life. All over the kingdom, monks were forced into the street, their treasures confiscated by the Crown. Thousands of books were destroyed, leaving Oxford University, among others, without a library collection for almost seventy years.
Pilgrimages were outlawed, shutting off the flow to the south for English Christians. Henry VIII was excommunicated. A religious war followed. After Henry’s death, one of his children, Mary, a Catholic, used state violence to restore the Roman faith; she sent nearly three hundred people to die in various human bonfires. You can still find her dour countenance all over Canterbury. It came as a surprise to look up from a pint in a pub and see Bloody Mary staring back at me from a frame on the wall. Another daughter of Henry’s, Elizabeth I, attacked Catholics during her long reign. Mass was forbidden, bishops were executed. For a time, clerics hid in “priest holes,” brick shelters, and were fed through tubes in the masonry.
No matter who was in power, the medieval Becket trade remained highly competitive. The cult that had developed around every conceivable body part—hair, teeth, a piece of a finger—spread far and wide after he was martyred a second time by Henry VIII. Any church of standing needed a saintly relic, if not from Becket, then from a certified entrant to heaven. The reason was simple: relics could produce miracles, crucial to conversions. Relics had supernatural power. They gave off energy. And relics could generate a small fortune from people who paid to view them, and were rewarded in return with a specific reduction in years spent in that foggy lounge of purgatory.
Although Henry VIII had tried to erase every trace of Becket from Canterbury, his long-dead nemesis got the last word. Today, the newer shrine that I saw, with the shadowed swords, draws throngs of people. In 1982, John Paul II, the first pope to visit Canterbury Cathedral, knelt in silent prayer at the spot where Thomas was killed, the marble floor worn by the knees of millions of pilgrims. In 2016, a bone fragment of the saint was brought to England from Hungary and given a tour worthy of a Rod Stewart revival. “Becket’s Elbow to Return to Site of His Murder” was the headline in The Guardian. It makes sense that a king’s murder of a Catholic archbishop would still have so much resonance. For what is the story of Christianity but another state execution—the killing of a seditious Jew by a Roman governor?
I was told I could find the saint’s relics at the comparatively small Catholic church of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The sacred scraps are behind glass, above the altar in the Martyrs’ Chapel. One object is a piece of cloth from his clerical vestment. The other is a bone chip, wrapped in jewels, though there is no explanation of what part of Becket’s frame this came from. The skeletal nugget could be anyone’s, and the cloth could be a fraud as well. In this dark and lonely chapel in Canterbury’s old town, you have to accept on faith that the two holiest items did indeed belong to Thomas Becket. I sit and take in what aura there is, the years and hopes imbued in these average-looking objects. I think of all the people with tumorous bellies or sightless eyes, pleading. Sadly, I’m not feeling anything. But then, I didn’t ask for anything. Not just yet.
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THE NEXT MORNING, Sunday, brings me to the oldest church in the English-speaking world—Saint Martin’s. It may be the oldest active community in the English-speaking world, as some in Canterbury assert. Saint Martin’s is a modest clump of brick and rock, off the street in a nest of ancien
t yews and gravestones that have settled into ashen-colored permanence. Set next to a prison, Saint Martin’s is both a cemetery and a church, all of it exuding decay—not the best enticement for young people to join a faith on the brink of extinction in Britain. The chapel was first built in Roman times for a sect of local Christians. The Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, and Anglicans all added on to it, so that the structure is a compact tutorial in English history—not unlike the self-evident geology lesson in the tiers of the Grand Canyon. It was here that Queen Bertha took Augustine and his forty monks when they arrived at Canterbury in 597.
On the way to the church, I saw my first sign to the Via Francigena: a yellow cartoon pilgrim in a loose-fitting tunic, with a wooden staff and a bindle of his possessions over his shoulder. What a thrill! Follow this elfin wayfarer for a thousand miles and you’ll never get lost. Either that or you’ll recover from a lifetime of being lost. I was encouraged by the sight of a pair of young pilgrims, two women briskly striding out of Canterbury. Just behind them was a covey of middle-aged trail walkers, with heavy, high-end backpacks and lightweight hiking sticks. Heading out to see the world along Pilgrims Way, they were excitedly chattering like soldiers going off to war. I felt the same way. There is nothing like a beginning, when the slate is clean, the road open, the tank full of optimism.