Canterbury — Story, Setting & Ideas

Layered City: Roman, Saxon, Medieval

Danks presents Canterbury as a palimpsest of occupations. He notes the Dane John as a 'variant of Donjon or stronghold' and describes the city wall where 'the soldiers of the Middle Ages faced and fortified the British earthwork.' Roman cemeteries yielded 'bracelets, pins, mirrors, horse-bits, coins, even rouge-pots,' and the roads from Richborough, Dover, and Lympne converge on streets still named Burgate, Watling Street, and Wincheap. The Saxon period is embodied by Queen Bertha and King Ethelbert, with Augustine's arrival marked by a 'silver cross and painted Christ.' Danks's method is to let material remains—a brick, a rampart, a street name—carry the narrative forward.

The Cathedral Crypt: Becket's Bones and a Penitent King

In the crypt, Danks describes two recent discoveries: a well that 'probably supplied the water for the ampulles or leaden bottles of the pilgrims,' and a stone chest containing bones 'certainly those of a tall man' with 'the mark of violence on the skull.' He reports the argument of Dr. Moore that the bones may be Becket's, hidden to avoid violation, but he does not assert certainty. The slab 'bears no inscription' but 'will be readily pointed out by a guide.' Danks then recalls Henry II's penance in 1174, when the king 'laid his head on the tomb of Becket between those two slender pillars' and was scourged. The author leaves the question of motive—'penitence' or 'policy'—open.

The Shrine and Its Destruction

Danks reconstructs the vanished shrine from textual and architectural clues. It stood in the Trinity Chapel on a platform with three steps, the lowest 'worn by pilgrims' knees.' Three arches supported the coffin; through one, suppliants passed to 'derive some virtue from the relics.' A monk called the Mystagogus—'as Erasmus, with a touch of mockery, calls him'—drew up an oaken cover to reveal 'all the splendour of gold and gems.' Within thirty years of Erasmus's visit, 'every vestige of this magnificence was swept away,' and only a single small panel of stained glass survives. Danks's account is careful to distinguish what is known from what is inferred.

Huguenot Weavers and Surviving Traces

Danks notes that the chantry in the crypt, built by a prior and a mason, is now the Chapel of the French Protestants, who have held services there since 1575. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, refugees 'are said to have numbered three thousand' and brought 'a large trade in silk-weaving and paper-making.' Their descendants 'are now merged into the English population, but their names and the weekly French service still survive.' This observation ties the cathedral's fabric to a later wave of migration, showing how Danks reads the city's history through both architecture and ongoing practice.

Danks's essay rewards a reader who attends to the specific: the worn step, the reused brick, the uninscribed slab. He does not claim to have written a complete history, and his text is best approached as a series of connected observations rather than a systematic account. The illustrations by E. W. Haslehust, listed in the front matter, complement the prose by offering visual counterparts to the sites described. For those interested in how a place accumulates meaning through physical layers, this short work provides a focused, personal record.

Reading about Canterbury’s layered streets, I remembered standing in a sun-baked Italian piazza, feeling the same quiet weight of centuries pressing through cobblestones and facades. That sensation returns whenever I page through Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo Comprising a Tour Through North and South Italy and Sicily with a Short Account of Malta — Text and Context. Both books let me wander slowly, tracing old stones as if hearing faint footsteps beneath my own.