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    Beautiful Britain: Canterbury
    Beautiful Britain: Canterbury
    Beautiful Britain: Canterbury
    Ebook90 pages56 minutes

    Beautiful Britain: Canterbury

    By Gordon Home

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    Beautiful Britain: Canterbury

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      Book preview

      Beautiful Britain - Gordon Home

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, Beautiful Britain, by Gordon Home

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Beautiful Britain

      Author: Gordon Home

      Release Date: October 29, 2004 [eBook #13890]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEAUTIFUL BRITAIN***

      E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Victoria Woosley,

      and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

      (www.pgdp.net)

      Beautiful Britain

      Gordon Home

      Canterbury

      "When that Aprillé with his showerés soote [= sweet]

      The drought of March hath piercéd to the roote,

      Then longen folk to go on pilgrimages,

      And palmers for to seeken strangé strands,

      To ferme [=ancient] halwes [=shrines] knowthe [= known] in sundry lands

      And specially from every shirés end

      Of Engéland, to Canterbury they wend,

      The holy, blissful martyr for to seek

      That them hath holpen when that they were sick."

      CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.

      CONTENTS

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      PLAN OF CANTERBURY, SHOWING THE CHIEF STREETS AND THE MOST INTERESTING BUILDINGS

      CANTERBURY

      CHAPTER I

      THE PILGRIM'S APPROACH TO THE CITY

      It was on April 24, 1538, that a writ of summons was sent forth in the name of Henry VIII., To thee, Thomas Becket, some time Archbishop of Canterbury-—who had then been dead for 368 years—-to appear within thirty days to answer to a charge of treason, contumacy, and rebellion against his sovereign lord, King Henry II. But the days passed, and no spirit having stirred the venerated bones of the wonder-working saint, on June 10 judgment was given in favour of Henry, and it was decreed that the Archbishop's bones were to be burnt, and his world-famous shrine overlaid with gold and sparkling with jewels was to be forfeited to the Crown. Further than this went the sentence, for Thomas of Canterbury was to be a saint no longer, and his name and memory were to be wiped out. The remains were not burned, but throughout the land every statue, wall-painting, and window to the said Thomas Becket was rigorously searched out and destroyed, and from every record his name was carefully erased. And so it came about that the year 1538 saw the last pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas the Martyr.

      A growing incredulity had prepared the way for this wave of iconoclasm, and the shrine once destroyed ended for ever this first phase of the Canterbury pilgrimages. It might have been truly thought, if anyone ever gave a moment to such speculations a century ago, when Englishmen cared little for the landmarks of their island story, that the last pilgrim who would ever wend his way along the old road to Canterbury had died in the sixteenth century, and yet how profoundly untrue would that impression have been in the light of the new enthusiasm for the site of the shrine! A considerable literature on the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester has already sprung up, and this little book is itself a souvenir for the pilgrim to carry away as evidence of the journey he has made, provided he cares to write inside the cover his name, the date of his visit, and the two words at Canterbury.

      Now, I do not disguise the fact that many of the twentieth-century pilgrims are not possessed of the true spirit of the devotee, and instead of approaching the object of their journey by the old-time way, along the beautiful hills of Surrey and Kent, they use the iron road which rushes them all unprepared into the city of the saint-martyr. But

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