was duly arranged in some parts in imitation of the church of the blessed Prince of the Apostles, Peter, in which his holy relics are exalted by the veneration of the whole world.”  We shall never know much more than Eadmer tells us, for if the foundations still exist they lie within the present church.  It is recorded, however, that in the time of St Elphege the church was badly damaged by the Danes, the archbishop himself being martyred at Greenwich.  No doubt as often before, the church was patched up, only to perish by fire in 1067, the year after the Battle of Hastings.

When Lanfranc then entered Canterbury, he found his Cathedral a mere ruin, but with his usual energy, though already a man of sixty-five, he set to work to re-establish not only his Cathedral but also the monastery attached to it.  He did this on a great scale, providing accommodation for three times the number of monks that had served the Cathedral in the decadent days of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was done he first “destroyed utterly” the Romano-Saxon church and then “set about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070- 1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to perfection.”  That he worked in great haste and too quickly seems certain.  In fact it must be confessed that Lanfranc’s church in Canterbury was a more or less exact copy of his church of St Stephen at Caen, but, built much more quickly, was too mean for its purpose.  It soon became necessary to rebuild the choir and sanctuary; the nave, however, was allowed to stand until the end of the fourteenth century; but even then its design so hampered the builders of the present nave, for it had been decided to preserve one of Lanfranc’s western towers, that to this day the nave of Canterbury is too short, consisting of but eight bays.

Lanfranc’s choir was of but two bays and an apse.  This was too obviously inadequate to be tolerated by the monks.  In 1096 it was pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the north arm and two in the south.  All this was done in the time of St Anselm and finished in 1115, when Conrad was Prior of Christ Church.

It was this church with Lanfranc’s short Norman nave, western facade and towers, and Conrad’s glorious great choir high up over the crypt, a choir broader than the nave and longer too, and with two transepts, the western of Lanfranc’s time, the eastern of St Anselm’s, that St Thomas knew and that saw his martyrdom in 1170.

Materials for the life of St Thomas are so plentiful that his modern biographers are able to compose a life fuller perhaps in detail and fact than would be possible in the case of any other man of his time.  But no account ever written of his martyrdom is at once so simple and so touching as that to be found in the Golden Legend.  It was this account which the man of the Middle Age knew by heart, and which brought him in his thousands on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and therefore I give it here.