Awe-Inspiring Canterbury Cathedral

It's hard to believe, but it's my next-to-last weekend in England!  Wanting to make the most of it and see as many things as I can, my hosts were lovely enough to suggest going with me to Canterbury and then taking me today to see the Seven Sisters park (which I'll talk more about in another post).  My preceptor, Karen, had a driving lesson and wasn't able to go to Canterbury with her husband, David, and I.  We set out early Saturday morning in one of the coldest mornings I've had here, with a hard frost on the ground and the car thermometer reading -2.5!  Of course, that's a little less cold when you consider that's Celsius.  It warmed up as we went along, but it was still enough to warrant starting the day with a nice hot latte to warm my hands, especially since I misplaced my gloves at some point during the previous day.  We started off strolling through Canterbury, intending to slowly meander our way over to the cathedral.  Neither of us had been to Canterbury before and I personally was imagining the cathedral to be set apart from the shopping district by at least some distance, so imagine our surprise when we turned a corner and saw this:

That would be the ancient entrance to the courtyard of Canterbury cathedral, smack dab next to a Starbucks.  

Now some obligatory shots of the outside of the Cathedral, which dates from 1100 (a tour guide told us at one point, "There isn't much left from the oldest part of the church.  Almost everything else you see here is new".  When I asked him when was it re-done, he replied, "Oh, in the 1300 and 1400s." Never assume that new means from your lifetime, or even from your great-great-grandparents lifetime)

 Can you see the scaffolding on the lower right of this shot?  Recently (actually recently) a few stones fell off the outside of the church.  With closer inspection, they realized that there were a few parts that were cracking and putting some of the stained glass windows in danger.  They took all those out and are cleaning them while re-doing the outside of the cathedral.  We're lucky this isn't like the 1300s; they just completely demolished the building then and started over.

 The Cathedral cat, Laptop.

Only in St. Anselm's chapel was the stained glass doing this to the walls.  I just loved it. 

These places are awfully awe-inspiring.  Also, I think of Star Wars.  I have no idea why.

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England.  It was founded by St. Augustine, but really became something when Thomas Becket, Archbishop, was murdered here by a few rogue knights who thought they were on a mission from the King.  He was sainted at lightspeed (only 2 years) and pilgrims flocked here by the thousands to be healed by touching or kissing his tomb.  Unfortunately for them, King Henry VIII had a big issue with the Catholic church (namely that pesky first wife) and spent a lot of time destroying anything to do with Roman Catholicism, including the relics of St. Thomas Beckett.  He couldn't just destroy them because Beckett was an important figure.  So he put Beckett on trial, claiming that if he was really a saint he could arise from his grave to defend himself.  Since that didn't happen, Henry VIII declared Beckett to be a heretic and burned his bones.

Can you see the arms and elbows in this marble alter?

St. Augustine's Abbey ruins

Canterbury University