# Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine's Abbey, and St Martin's Church

World Heritage site in Canterbury, Kent, England, UK

Kent, United Kingdom

Sacred place

## Story

• Christ Church Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey, and St Martin’s Church in Canterbury were inscribed together in 1988, a year also given as 1989, as one property of 18.58 hectares.
• Queen Bertha worshipped at St Martin’s before Augustine of Canterbury landed in 597, and King Æthelberht’s conversion was followed by a mass baptism on Christmas Day.
• Lanfranc rebuilt the cathedral after the fire of 1067, and the murder of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170 made the church a place of pilgrimage.
• The abbey, founded in 598 and consecrated in 613, was surrendered by John Essex and the monks on 30 July 1538.
• Digging under the nave in 1993 found a Saxon church across a Roman road, and in 2026 gold was identified on the birds of Hubert Walter’s silk dalmatic.

## Visiting

The cathedral is open from 10.00 to 17.00 Monday to Saturday, with last admission at 16.00. On Sunday the grounds are open from 11.30, the church opens at 12.30, and last admission is at 16.00. Admission tickets are £18 from October to March. From April to September the admission ticket is £19.50, except on weekends in July and August when the ticket is £21.
An annual admission ticket is valid for one year from booking, and proof of eligibility is required on entry for a concession. Entry is free for a service of worship, and free entry tickets are available when proof of Universal Credit or Pension Credit is shown. Entry is also free with a Cathedral Pass, a Friends card, a full-time student card from Canterbury Christ Church University, the University of Kent, or the University for the Creative Arts, or a valid Application Registration Card. The abbey is open from 10am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday, with last entry at 3.30pm.
Abbey tickets booked before midnight on the day before the visit are sold at a discount, a ticket bought on the day is full price, and each ticket is valid all day within opening hours. Member tickets are free when a membership card is shown on entry. Climbing on the abbey ruins is not allowed, and ball games are not allowed. Assistance dogs are allowed to enter, and other dogs are allowed to enter the abbey grounds only on a lead.
St Martin’s Church is open from 11am to 3pm on Wednesday to Sunday in the low season that begins on 28 September. The church is closed on Sunday at 9am for the service, except for people who join it, and only the churchyard may be looked round then. Larger groups are not allowed to enter St Martin’s unless the visit is booked in advance. A group ticket is not sold, and the donation asked for a pre-booked group is £5 a person with the group’s own guide or £7.50 a person when a church guide gives the tour.
Guide dogs are allowed to enter St Martin’s.

## History

Christ Church Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey, and St Martin’s Church in Canterbury, Kent, form one sacred place inscribed in 1988, a year also given as 1989, across 18.58 hectares. The cathedral, formally the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ, is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and measures 525 feet by 154 feet. St Martin’s has been used for worship since the sixth century, and the abbey church survives as a ruin.

Pope Gregory I sent Augustine of Canterbury on the mission of 596, and Augustine landed on Thanet in 597. Queen Bertha of Kent, a Frankish Christian, was already worshipping at St Martin’s in a repaired Roman building with her chaplain, Bishop Liudhard. King Æthelberht, who died on 24 February 616, received the mission, and thousands were baptised on Christmas Day 597.

Augustine founded the cathedral in 597 and the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in 598, which was consecrated in 613 as a burial place for kings and archbishops. Dunstan, archbishop from 959 or from 960 until his death in 988, added Augustine’s name to the abbey dedication in 978 and attached a Benedictine community to the cathedral. Danish raiders in 1011 seized Archbishop Ælfheah, who was killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012 after refusing a ransom.

Fire destroyed the cathedral in 1067. Lanfranc rebuilt it from 1070 and dedicated it in 1077 on a plan close to the abbey he had ruled at Caen, and the priors Ernulf and Conrad then doubled the eastern arm by 1126. At St Augustine’s, Scolland replaced the three Saxon churches with a Romanesque church more than 100 metres long after the last Anglo-Saxon abbot was removed in 1070.

On 29 December 1170 knights of Henry II of England killed Archbishop Thomas Becket in the north-west transept. A fire in September 1174 forced the quire to be rebuilt in the Gothic manner, the Trinity Chapel followed in 1180 to 1184, and the shrine stayed in the crypt until 1220. In 1538 the shrine was destroyed, and its treasures were taken away in two coffers and twenty-six carts.

The abbey was surrendered on 30 July 1538 by Abbot John Essex and the monks, and the cathedral community was ejected on 30 March 1539. The abbey became a royal palace, then a missionary college from 1848 to 1947, and the ruins passed into state care in 1938 or in 1940. The cathedral kept its see, gained a Perpendicular nave under Henry Yevele, and raised the Bell Harry tower from 1433.

Excavation under the nave in 1993 found an Anglo-Saxon church built across a Roman road, not the Roman church that Bede said Augustine had reused. A study published in 2023 concluded that the pavement before the shrine had been lifted and partly remade when the eastern steps were built. In the summer of 2026 gold was identified on the birds woven into the silk dalmatic of Hubert Walter, and the way the metal was applied may place the weaving farther from Spain than had been thought.

## Photographs

- [Canterbury Cathedral during renovations, August 2019. — BabelStone](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Canterbury_Cathedral_August_2019_B.jpg)
- [(2007/08/02 Canterbury, Kent, England, UNITED KINGDOM) /* UNESCO World Heritage */ Canterbury Cathedral, St. Augustine's Abbey, and St. Martin's Church (1988) — Hideyuki KAMON from Takarazuka /???](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Augustine_Abbey1.jpg)
- [(2007/08/02 Canterbury, Kent, England, UNITED KINGDOM) /* UNESCO World Heritage */ Canterbury Cathedral, St. Augustine's Abbey, and St. Martin's Church (1988) — Hideyuki KAMON from Takarazuka /???](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Canterbury_Cathedral_Crypt1.jpg)
- [(2007/08/02 Canterbury, Kent, England, UNITED KINGDOM) /* UNESCO World Heritage */ Canterbury Cathedral, St. Augustine's Abbey, and St. Martin's Church (1988) — Hideyuki KAMON from Takarazuka /???](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Canterbury_Cathedral_Nave1.jpg)

## Sources

- [Canterbury Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Cathedral) — Wikipedia
- [St Augustine's Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine%27s_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [St Martin's Church, Canterbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Martin%27s_Church,_Canterbury) — Wikipedia
- [Augustine of Canterbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Canterbury) — Wikipedia
- [Bertha of Kent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_of_Kent) — Wikipedia
- [Æthelberht of Kent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelberht_of_Kent) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Becket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket) — Wikipedia
- [Henry II of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_II_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Pope Gregory I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I) — Wikipedia
- [Gregorian mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_mission) — Wikipedia
- [Lanfranc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanfranc) — Wikipedia
- [Dunstan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunstan) — Wikipedia
- [Anselm of Canterbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_of_Canterbury) — Wikipedia
- [Ælfheah of Canterbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfheah_of_Canterbury) — Wikipedia
- [Hubert Walter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Walter) — Wikipedia
- [Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine's Abbey, and St Martin's Church](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/496/) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
- [History of St Augustine’s Abbey](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-augustines-abbey/history-and-stories/history/) — English Heritage
- [St Augustine's Abbey](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-augustines-abbey/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and opening times for St Augustine's Abbey](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-augustines-abbey/prices-and-opening-times) — English Heritage
- [Facilities at St Augustine's Abbey](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/st-augustines-abbey/facilities/) — English Heritage
- [Tickets and opening times](https://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/visit/tickets-and-opening-times/) — Canterbury Cathedral
- [Canterbury Cathedral helps unravel medieval material mysteries](https://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/news/posts/canterbury-cathedral-helps-unravel-medieval-material-mysteries/) — Canterbury Cathedral
- [Visiting times and groups](https://www.martinpaul.org/visiting-times-and-groups/) — St Martin and St Paul
- [Canterbury Cathedral, St. Augustine's Abbey and St. Martin's Church](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000093) — Historic England
- [Cosmati at Canterbury Cathedral? Piecing together the history of a medieval mosaic](https://the-past.com/feature/cosmati-at-canterbury-cathedral-piecing-together-the-history-of-a-medieval-mosaic/) — Current Archaeology
- [Interim reports on recent work carried out by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust](https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/journal/126/interim-reports-recent-work-carried-out-canterbury-archaeological-trust) — Kent Archaeological Society
- [Canterbury Cathedral August 2019 B.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Cathedral_August_2019_B.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Augustine Abbey1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Augustine_Abbey1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury Cathedral Crypt1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Cathedral_Crypt1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury Cathedral Nave1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Cathedral_Nave1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey, and St Martin’s Church stand in Canterbury, Kent, as three parts of one sacred place. The cathedral’s formal title is the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury. It is the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Church of England and a symbolic leader of the Anglican Communion, and the mother church of the Diocese of Canterbury. The three places were inscribed together in 1988, at the twelfth session, as a serial cultural property of 18.58 hectares. Another account places that recognition in 1989. The abbey component is given as 8.42 hectares, or 20.8 acres. The cathedral church itself measures 525 feet, or 160 metres, in length and 154 feet, or 47 metres, in width. It is recorded at grid TR 15084 57922. Canterbury has been described as the seat of the spiritual head of the Church of England for nearly five centuries. The cathedral above ground has stood since the eleventh century. St Martin’s has been a place of worship since the sixth. The abbey church is a ruin. Together they mark the reintroduction of Christianity to southern Britain, the growth of Benedictine monasticism from this city, and the later life of the cathedral as a place of pilgrimage and of the see.

Christianity in Britain is mentioned by Tertullian as early as 208 and by Origen in 238. In 314 three bishops from Britain attended the Council of Arles. Roman life in Britain ended during the first three decades of the fifth century, and the arrival of pagan Anglo-Saxons disrupted Christian life in the east of the island. Textual sources suggest that Christian communities of the Roman province survived in western Britain through the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries and developed on their own terms. In the late sixth century the pope in Rome sent a mission to the still pagan kingdoms of the south-east.

Pope Gregory I, commonly called Gregory the Great, was born about 540 and died on 12 March 604. He was a Roman senator’s son, prefect of the city at about thirty, and the founder of a monastery on his family estate before he became pope on 3 September 590. His administration in Rome is described as surpassing that of the emperors Maurice and Theodosius in care for the people. He worked to regain authority in Spain and France, and he saw Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths move from Arian alliances toward Rome. His writings were more numerous than those of earlier popes. In the east he is called Gregory the Dialogist because of the Dialogues, and through the Middle Ages he was called the Father of Christian Worship for his revision of Roman worship. His part in the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts was large enough that he is treated as its author in practice. He was canonised by popular acclaim soon after his death and is counted among the great Latin fathers. In 595 he chose Augustine, prior of a Benedictine monastery in Rome, to lead a mission to Britain. The mission, sent in 596 and known as the Gregorian mission, was to convert the Anglo-Saxons. Gregory prepared the route by asking Frankish rulers for help. About forty missionaries set out. Before they reached Kent they considered turning back, and Gregory urged them on.

Kent was chosen because its king held influence over neighbouring kingdoms and because his wife was already a Christian. Bertha of Kent, also called Aldeberge, was a Frankish princess, born about 565, who died in or after 601. She was the daughter of Charibert I, king of the Franks, and the marriage to the Kentish king probably took place before he came to the throne. It allied Kent with the strongest power in the west of Europe at that time. She came to England with her chaplain, Bishop Liudhard. Her pagan husband allowed her to keep her religion. A Romano-British building was repaired for her, about 580. Bede says that building had been a church in the late Roman period, had fallen out of use, and was dedicated to Martin of Tours, a city near the place where Bertha grew up. Modern scholarship has questioned whether the Roman structure was a church. St Martin’s was her private chapel before Augustine arrived. Local finds show Christianity in this part of the city, and the standing church reuses Roman bricks and whole sections of Roman tile wall. At its core, the brick of a Roman tomb was built into the structure. A blocked square-headed doorway in the chancel may have been the entrance of Bertha’s church. Other walling belongs to the seventh or eighth century, after the mission, including most of the nave. An eastern apse has been removed. The tower is later, in the Perpendicular style. The southern wall still holds Roman fabric. The church was altered and extended in the sixth, seventh, and fourteenth centuries. It is listed at Grade I, designated on 28 February 1952. Since 1668 it has belonged to the benefice of St Martin and St Paul. It is called the oldest existing church in the English-speaking world and the oldest English church building still in ecclesiastical use, with the reservation that Roman and Celtic churches had existed for centuries before it. Shortly before 1844 a hoard of gold coins, possibly of the late sixth century, was found in the churchyard. One piece is the Liudhard medalet, with a diademed figure and a legend referring to Liudhard. The tower has three bells hung for swing chiming. The tenor weighs 6 long hundredweight, 2 quarters, and 0 pounds, or 728 pounds, or 330 kilograms. The churchyard holds the graves of Henry Alford, Canon William Cadman, the painter Thomas Sidney Cooper, and Mary Tourtel, and eleven Commonwealth service burials from the two world wars.

Augustine of Canterbury was born in the early sixth century and died probably on 26 May 604, or in 605. He landed on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and went on to Canterbury, the king’s principal town. The king was Æthelberht of Kent, also written Ethelbert, born about 550 and died on 24 February 616. He was king from about 589, son of Eormenric. Bede lists him as the third king to hold imperium over other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls him a bretwalda. He did not convert at once. He worshipped, in one account, at a pagan temple just outside the walls to the east of the city. He welcomed the missionaries and allowed them to preach. He converted shortly afterwards, and the date of that conversion is known only as before 601. On Christmas Day 597 Augustine baptised many of the king’s subjects, including thousands at one mass baptism. Æthelberht’s law for Kent, the earliest written code in any Germanic language, set a complex system of fines and survives in the Textus Roffensis. Kent was rich, with trade to the Continent, and he may have taken royal control of that trade. Coin is thought to have circulated in Kent in his reign for the first time since the Anglo-Saxon settlement. He is regarded as a saint for his part in establishing Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons. His feast was 24 February, moved to 25 February in some churches, and in the Catholic Church it is kept on 24 February. He gave land in Canterbury for the new church. One tradition says he gave his temple and its precincts so that a church and monastery could be built with becoming splendour, dedicated to Peter and Paul, and endowed with gifts.

Augustine founded the cathedral in 597 and dedicated it to Jesus Christ, the Holy Saviour. Bede recorded that he reused a former Roman church. When other dioceses were founded he was made archbishop, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, in 597. He was consecrated a bishop, arranged the consecration of his successor Laurence, and founded a school to train Anglo-Saxon priests and missionaries. In 601 Gregory sent a second group of monks and clergy with books, gifts, and letters. Gregory intended Augustine to be metropolitan of the southern part of the British Isles and gave him authority over the clergy of the native Britons. In a series of meetings those bishops, long established in the west, refused to submit. Roman bishops were established at London and at Rochester in 604. Augustine also founded, outside the city walls, the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul. William Thorne, a monk of that house in the 1390s, records 598 as the year of foundation. The abbey was probably founded in 598, close to St Martin’s. It had an inner precinct with the main buildings and cemetery, and an outer precinct of vineyards, orchards, and gardens. The first buildings were most likely timber, raised quickly in the Saxon manner. A masonry church, of the kind Augustine had known in Rome, took longer. It was completed and consecrated in 613. One purpose was a home for Augustine and his monks. Another was a burial place for abbots, archbishops, and the kings of Kent. About 624, Eadbald, Æthelberht’s son and successor, founded a second church a short distance to the east, dedicated to Saint Mary, which also received Kentish royalty. Emma of Austrasia, Eadbald’s consort, was buried in the church of Peter and Paul. A third church, dedicated to St Pancras, was built between the mid-eighth and the tenth century. The monastery took Augustine’s name after his death. His grave is on the site, and so are the graves of Mellitus, Justus, and Laurence, early archbishops. Æthelberht was buried in the church of Peter and Paul, and his shrine was later set above the high altar of the Norman church. Theodore of Tarsus was buried here as well.

For two centuries after its foundation this was the only important religious house in Kent. It was described as a missionary school where classical knowledge and English learning flourished. Monks travelled long distances to its school. It acquired a library of religious and secular books and a scriptorium. That influence is said to have reached far beyond Kent and Northumbria, and the house is treated as a cradle of Benedictine monasticism in Britain. The main list of early abbots comes from later medieval histories and is partly dubious. Peter probably died in 614. Benedict Biscop was abbot about 669 to 670. Hadrian held the office from 669 or 670 until 709 or 710, and Albinus followed him. After an abbot named Wynhere, a stretch that has been called the century of uncertainty contains fifteen names that may be unreliable, and possibly none of them were abbots. From the late tenth century, charter witness lists correct the later catalogues.

Before Æthelberht’s death on 24 February 616, further bishoprics had been founded. After that death a pagan backlash set in, and the see of London was abandoned. His daughter Æthelburg married Edwin, king of the Northumbrians, and by 627 Paulinus, the bishop who went north with her, had converted Edwin. By the death of the last of Gregory’s missionaries in 653, Christianity had been established among the southern Anglo-Saxons. The mission worked alongside Irish and Frankish missions, and it influenced later Hiberno-Scottish work on the Continent. What was at stake in 597 was whether the southern kingdoms would be tied to Rome or would remain pagan, and whether the British bishops of the west would accept a Roman metropolitan. They did not. The Kentish conversion still gave the new church its land, its first archbishop, and its first monastery.

From the mid-tenth century English monasticism was pressed toward the Rule of St Benedict, written in the sixth century for Monte Cassino. The Rule required a strictly vegetarian diet, a shared dormitory, and a day divided among communal prayer, reading, and manual labour. The later motto of the order was Prayer and Work. Dunstan, born about 909 and died on 19 May 988, was a leader of that reform. He was successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury, and a minister to several kings. His eleventh-century biographer Osbern, an artist and scribe, says Dunstan was skilled in making a picture and forming letters. For nearly two centuries he was the most popular saint in England, with a fame that included stories of cunning against the Devil. One account makes him archbishop from 959 until 988. Another makes him archbishop from 960 until his death in 988. He revered Augustine, and in 978 he added Augustine to the dedication of the church of Peter and Paul. From then the monastery was known as St Augustine’s. At the cathedral, a Benedictine abbey called Christ Church Priory was added during his reforms, but a formal monastic establishment is placed only about 997, and the community became fully monastic from Lanfranc’s time, with constitutions addressed to Prior Henry. Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar.

In the spring of 1002 the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy were married in the cathedral, and Emma was consecrated with the name Ælfgifu. Danish raids struck Canterbury in 1011. The archbishop, Ælfheah, also called Alphege, was taken hostage. He had been born about 953, had been an anchorite and Abbot of Bath, Bishop of Winchester, and archbishop from 1006. He furthered Dunstan’s cult and encouraged learning. He was killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012 after refusing to be ransomed, and he was canonised in 1078. He is counted as the first of Canterbury’s five martyred archbishops. At the abbey the raiders captured Abbot Aelfmaer and held him hostage. One account says the Danes spared the abbey. Peace returned when the Danish king Cnut was crowned in 1016. He granted the abbey new privileges, and in 1027 he made over the possessions of Minster-in-Thanet, including the body of Mildrith, or St Mildred, great-great-granddaughter of Æthelberht. Pilgrims came for that relic and enriched the house. After the 1011 damage, a western apse was added to the cathedral as an oratory of Saint Mary, probably under Lyfing, archbishop from 1013 to 1020, or Aethelnoth, from 1020 to 1038.

Excavation beneath the present nave in 1993 did not find the Roman church Bede described. The oldest remains were foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building set across a Roman road. They indicate a nave, possibly with a narthex, and side chapels to the north and south, with a smaller building to the south-west. In the ninth or tenth century that church was replaced by a larger one, 161 by 75 feet, or 49 by 23 metres, with a squared west end and apparently a square central tower. The eleventh-century chronicler Eadmer, who had known the Saxon cathedral as a boy, wrote that its arrangement resembled St Peter’s in Rome, a basilica with an eastern apse. The 1993 work showed the new western apse to be polygonal, flanked by hexagonal towers, a westwork that housed the archbishop’s throne, with the altar of St Mary just to the east. At about the same time the arcade walls were strengthened and towers were added at the eastern corners. In December 2003 a small evaluation trench in the south-west corner of the Great Cloister, at TR 15043 57945, cut only as deep as Georgian and later layers in its main sequence, but earlier material appeared. A spread of mortared flints, perhaps a floor base, lay with a substantial Roman wall running from north-east to south-west. Dark loam against and partly over that wall was capped by a very light metalling. A massive footing over the Roman wall was read as almost certainly the north-western twin of the hexagonal south-western tower of the late Anglo-Saxon cathedral.

The cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest. Rebuilding began in 1070 under Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop, in office from 1070 to 1077, who died on 24 May 1089. He was born in Italy between 1005 and 1010, became a monk at Bec, prior of Bec, and abbot of Saint-Étienne at Caen, and was regarded in his lifetime as the greatest theologian of his generation. He cleared the ruins and rebuilt on a design close to Saint-Étienne, using stone brought from France. The new axis lay about 5 metres south of the old one. The church was cruciform, with an aisled nave of nine bays, a pair of western towers, aisleless transepts with apsidal chapels, a low crossing tower, and a short quire ending in three apses. It was dedicated in 1077. The infobox of the building also gives consecration and groundbreaking in 1070, and the last major alteration in 1834. The cathedral is listed at Grade I, with a designation of 3 December 1949, and the precincts are listed at Grade I on 13 December 1949.

Lanfranc’s successor Anselm of Canterbury, born in 1033 or 1034 and died in 1109, was archbishop from 1093 to 1109. He was a monk of Bec, a philosopher, and the author of the ontological argument and of the satisfaction theory of atonement. He was canonised, with a feast on 21 April, and in 1720 Pope Clement XI named him a Doctor of the Church. As archbishop he defended the church in the Investiture Controversy against William II and Henry I, and he was exiled from 1097 to 1100 and again from 1105 to 1107. In exile he took part in the Council of Bari and helped persuade Greek bishops of southern Italy to adopt the Roman rite. He asserted Canterbury’s primacy over York and over the Welsh bishops. At his death that claim seemed secure, but Pope Paschal II later reversed the decisions and restored York’s earlier standing. While Anselm was away, the priors carried the fabric. After Prior Ernulf’s election in 1096, Lanfranc’s east end was demolished and replaced by an eastern arm 198 feet long, doubling the cathedral, raised on a large and richly decorated crypt. Conrad succeeded Ernulf in 1107 and finished the work by 1126. The new quire was a church in itself, with its own transepts. The east end was semicircular, with three chapels off an ambulatory. A free-standing campanile stood on a mound in the precinct from about 1160. William of Malmesbury wrote that nothing like it could be seen in England for the light of its glass, the gleam of its marble pavements, or the many-coloured paintings that led the eye to the panelled ceiling. The Chair of St Augustine, the ceremonial throne, is named for the sixth-century founder but may be Norman. Its first recorded use is in 1205.

At the abbey, William the Conqueror confiscated landed estates but is said to have respected church property, and the house kept most of its land. The last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Æthelsige, also written Aethelsige, was forced to resign in 1070. Scolland, or Scotland, a monk of Mont Saint-Michel, replaced him and served until 1087. He began a Romanesque rebuilding that replaced the three Anglo-Saxon churches with one abbey church more than 100 metres long, about the length of a football pitch and almost two-thirds the size of the cathedral. By 1100 the original buildings had disappeared under that Romanesque work. One account says that by the mid-eleventh century the abbey was among the most architecturally impressive monasteries north of the Alps, in the same narrative that places the great rebuilding after 1066. A further fire in 1168 destroyed so much that the records of the earlier period are thin. There was occasional dispute with the monks of Christ Church and with the archbishop, who wanted jurisdiction over the abbey. The abbots resisted and obtained papal privileges of independence, and permission to use the mitre and other ornaments usually kept for bishops.

The quarrel that remade the cathedral was between Henry II of England and Thomas Becket. Henry was born on 5 March 1133 and died on 6 July 1189. He was king from 1154. He was the eldest son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and of Matilda, daughter of Henry I. At fourteen he was already involved in his mother’s claim against her cousin Stephen of Blois. He became Duke of Normandy in 1150 and, on his father’s death in 1151, inherited Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. Marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine brought Aquitaine. A campaign in 1153 ended in the Treaty of Wallingford, by which Stephen left England to Henry, who inherited the kingdom at Stephen’s death the next year. He restored royal administration, invaded Wales in 1157, and was defeated at the Battle of Ewloe, nearly killed in the fighting. He held England, limited parts of Wales and Ireland, and much of France, later called the Angevin Empire, and for a time power over Scotland and the Duchy of Brittany. He fought a long cold war with his overlord Louis VII of France, taking Brittany and pushing toward Toulouse, without a lasting peace. He and Eleanor had eight children, and three of the sons were kings: Henry the Young King as co-ruler, Richard I, and John, who became king in 1199. Henry wanted the royal lands and prerogatives of his grandfather, including control of the English church.

Thomas Becket, also Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket, was born on 21 December 1119 or in 1120 and died on 29 December 1170. He was a Londoner of a Norman family, educated at Merton Priory in Surrey, then in London and Paris. He entered the household of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1154 Theobald recommended him to Henry as Lord Chancellor, an office he held from 1155 to 1162. Several months after Theobald’s death, Henry appointed him archbishop in 1162. Becket became ascetic and resisted the king’s attempt to recover royal rights over the church. In 1164 Henry summoned him to trial. He was convicted of contempt of royal authority and of malfeasance, refused the sentence, and fled to the Continent. He spent six years in exile under Louis VII. A compromise was reached by papal mediation. He returned in 1170, and the dispute continued. On Tuesday 29 December 1170, in the north-west transept, called the Martyrdom, knights of the king killed him. The king is said to have exclaimed, in frustration, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four knights took those words as an order. Becket is said to have prayed to Ælfheah just before the killing. He was the second archbishop of Canterbury to be murdered, after Ælfheah. Veneration spread at once. He was canonised by Pope Alexander III two years later, and another account places the canonisation three years after the murder. He is venerated as saint and martyr in the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion. Pilgrimage, including the travellers later portrayed by Geoffrey Chaucer, brought offerings that paid for the enlargement of the church. Pilgrim badges showed Becket, his death, or his shrine. The shrine was treated as a place of healing. What changed was the cathedral’s wealth, its east end, and Canterbury’s fame across Europe. The political stake had been whether the king or the archbishop would set the limits of church law. The murder did not settle that argument in Henry’s favour. It made the dead archbishop the centre of a cult the crown later tried to destroy.

In September 1174 fire severely damaged the quire. A monk named Gervase recorded the reconstruction in detail. The crypt survived. The outer walls of the quire were kept and raised 12 feet, or 3.7 metres, while their round-headed windows stayed. Everything else was rebuilt in the new Gothic manner, with pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses. Limestone came from Caen, and Purbeck marble was used for the shafts. The quire was in use again by 1180, and that year the remains of Dunstan and Ælfheah were moved there from the crypt. The master mason was William of Sens, a Frenchman. He fell from the scaffolding in 1179 and was replaced by an assistant known as William the Englishman. Between 1180 and 1184 the old square-ended eastern chapel gave way to the Trinity Chapel, a broad extension with an ambulatory for the shrine. Beyond it a circular chapel, the Corona, or Becket’s Crown, held further relics, widely believed to include the top of the skull, struck off in the attack. These eastern parts stood on a higher crypt than Ernulf’s, so flights of steps joined the levels. The chapel was finished in 1184, but the body stayed in the crypt tomb until 1220. Edward, the Black Prince, and King Henry IV were later buried in the Trinity Chapel. The shrine stood directly above the crypt tomb. A marble plinth on columns carried what Walter of Coventry called a coffin wonderfully wrought of gold and silver and adorned with gems. Other accounts say the gold covered a wooden chest, which held an iron-bound box with the remains. Further gifts were added to the chest or set on pedestals, beams, and hangings. For much of the time a wooden cover hid the feretory and was raised by ropes when pilgrims had gathered. Desiderius Erasmus, who visited between 1512 and 1514, recorded that the prior then pointed out each jewel, its name in French, its value, and the donor, the chief of them sent by princes.

The pavement in front of the shrine is one of only three medieval mosaic floors surviving in England, the others being two at Westminster, one of them the sanctuary mosaic of 1268. That Westminster floor was studied in detail only in 2008 to 2010. David Neal drew the Canterbury pavement in 2015. A two-year study by Warwick Rodwell and Neal, made during the years of restricted movement around 2020 and published in 2023, with petrological work by Kevin Hayward, concluded that the opus sectile floor did not originate in the Trinity Chapel. Most commentators had dated it about 1182 to 1184, when the shrine chapel began, and some had thought it reused an earlier mosaic. The chapel was raised over a high crypt. Eighteen steps were needed between the sanctuary and the shrine. An intermediate landing lifted the altar over its old site, but the mosaic had to be taken up. A French roundel pavement in front of the shrine was partly destroyed, and the mosaic was reduced and reset. Some outer panels were rebuilt in a thirteenth-century Cosmatesque manner. The study concludes that Italian Cosmati workers were brought in to take the floor apart and relay it. Repairs and losses, including pellets missing from black and white marbles, belong to a long history of alteration.

A bird’s-eye drawing of about 1165, the waterworks plan, survives in the Eadwine Psalter. It shows a Benedictine layout with one unusual choice: the cloister and monastic buildings lie north of the church, not south. There was a separate chapter house, still standing, said to be the largest of its kind in England, with glass that depicts the history of Canterbury. Around the great cloister were the refectory, the dormitory on a vaulted undercroft, the chapter house, and the cellarer’s lodgings. A passage led east to the infirmary cloister. The infirmary hall and chapel stretched further east, like the nave and chancel of an aisled church. Under the dormitory was the warming room, the pisalis or calefactory. At its north-east corner the dormitory met the necessarium, a Norman hall 145 feet, or 44 metres, long and 25 feet, or 7.6 metres, wide, with 55 seats and a stream running through it. A smaller dormitory for the officers ran east to west. The kitchen, north of the refectory, was 47 feet, or 14 metres, square, with a pyramidal roof. The infirmary had its own kitchen. Opposite the refectory door stood two washing places, one of them the circular two-storey lavatorium. South of the infirmary cloister, near the east end, is the treasury, with an octopartite vault. Hospitality was divided: the prior received distinguished guests near the east end, the cellarer received middle-class visitors near the west end of the nave, and poorer pilgrims used the almonry inside the gate. The Great Cloister now holds ledger stones moved there after restorations of 1787. Its garth, cleared in the 1930s, keeps only six modern grave slabs. Early in the fourteenth century Prior Henry of Eastry built a stone quire screen and rebuilt the chapter house. Prior Oxenden set a large five-light window in St Anselm’s chapel. The right to elect a prior, with the archbishop overseeing the choice, was confirmed from the time of Pope Gregory IX. Monks of the priory included Æthelric I, Æthelric II, Walter d’Eynsham, Reginald fitz Jocelin, Nigel de Longchamps, and Ernulf. Elections of archbishops, such as those of Baldwin of Forde and Thomas Cobham, could clash with king or pope. John of Sittingbourne was elected prior in 1222, and William Chillenden in 1264.

On 6 May 1382 the Dover Straits earthquake seriously damaged the cathedral. It lost its bells and its campanile. From the late fourteenth century the nave and transepts were rebuilt on the Norman foundations in the Perpendicular style under Henry Yevele. Unlike the contemporary nave at Winchester, where much of the old fabric was recut, the piers here were removed and replaced with slighter Gothic ones, and the aisle walls were taken down except for a low plinth on the south. More Norman work survived in the transepts, especially the east walls, and the apsidal chapels lasted until the mid-fifteenth century. The new arcade was unusually tall against its clerestory. Nave, aisles, and transepts received lierne vaults with bosses. Most of this belongs to the priorate of Thomas Chillenden, from 1391 to 1411, who also built a new quire screen that swallowed Eastry’s screen. The Norman nave floor lasted until 1786. From 1396 Yevele’s pupil Stephen Lote repaired the cloisters and added lierne vaults, and the chapter house gained its wagon vault. Shortage of money delayed the west towers. The south-west tower, later called the Oxford Tower, was replaced only in 1458, to a design associated with Thomas Mapilton. The Norman north-west tower, the Arundel Tower, kept a lead spire until 1705 and was demolished in 1834 because of structural worry, then rebuilt as a Perpendicular twin. That was the last major structural change. About 1430 the south transept apse was removed for a chapel founded by Lady Margaret Holland and dedicated to St Michael and All Angels. The north transept apse became a Lady Chapel in 1448 to 1455. The crossing tower, 235 feet or 72 metres, was begun in 1433, after Chillenden had already reinforced the piers. Around the start of the sixteenth century further buttressing arches were added under the southern and western tower arches. The tower is called Bell Harry, and also the Angel Steeple, after a gilded angel that once stood on a pinnacle. It is the highest building in the city. Because the cathedral sits on the valley floor, the tower is seen from higher ground and along the valley, and those views are treated as part of the place.

At the abbey the later Middle Ages were a time of spending. From about 1250, building followed building: cloister, frater, and kitchen rebuilt, a new abbot’s lodging and a great hall, and in the early fourteenth century a cellarer’s range, brewhouse, bakehouse, and a walled vineyard, with a Lady Chapel east of the church. The number of monks rose from 61 in 1146 to 84 in 1423. Abbot Thomas Fyndon rebuilt the great gate from 1301 to 1309. The chamber over the entrance was the state bedchamber. In the 1360s Juliana Leybourne paid for St Anne’s Chapel, also called the Countess’s Chapel, a small square chapel with its own buttresses, on the side of the abbey. It held the tomb of the Abbot of Bourne, who died in 1334, and of the Abbot of Colwell, who died in 1375. Leybourne was buried there. She gave the manor of Dene in Thanet and a chantry for daily prayers. A new Lady Chapel was added at the east end between 1496 and 1510. In 1530 the monks published a pamphlet of miracles of Augustine. The house owned estates in Kent amounting to 19,862 acres. One history calls the early sixteenth century a time of decadence and says the exactions of the papacy were already pushing the monasteries toward bankruptcy. The suppression came before that bankruptcy.

In 1535 Henry VIII broke with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England after the pope refused him a divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Between 1536 and 1540 the monasteries were suppressed. On 30 July 1538 the king’s commissioners took the surrender of St Augustine’s. Abbot John Essex, also called Foche, and the monks complied. One account says he and thirty brethren signed. The last abbot received a pension and retired to a former manor. The monks received pensions, and many became parish priests. More than 940 years of monastic life ended. Silver-gilt images of Augustine and of Æthelberht, by then venerated as a saint, were seized, with a reliquary holding part of Æthelberht’s skull. Shrines and the tombs of the Kentish kings were destroyed. The library was dispersed. One account says it held two thousand manuscripts and was destroyed. Another says 283 volumes survive, a small fraction of what had been there. Stone was sold from 1541, some of it used in the fortifications of the Pale of Calais. In 1541 Henry ordered the demolition of the abbey church. From 1539 the abbot’s apartments were converted into a royal palace, with a walled courtyard and a private garden, a renovation that took more than a decade. The palace never became a favoured residence. By 1564 it was let to nobles. Elizabeth I leased it that year to Lord Cobham. In September 1573 she lodged there, and on 7 September, her birthday, she attended a ball at the archbishop’s palace and returned at midnight to St Augustine’s. After Lord Cobham’s attainder for treason in 1603, James I granted the residence to Robert Cecil. After Cecil’s death in 1612 the palace was leased to Edward, Lord Wootton of Marley, also spelled Wotton, at £20 13 shillings and 4 pence a year. Another account says the site was sold to him in 1612. He employed John Tradescant the Elder to lay out formal gardens, described as three ornamental gardens to the north and east. In 1618 James granted a seven-year power to search abbeys and churches for hidden treasure, plate, jewels, vestments, and books, and the abbey and some of the land around it were dug. Wootton died in 1626. His widow lived in the palace until 1658, and the green before the gate is still Lady Wootton’s Green, a name from the reign of Charles I. Statues of Æthelberht and Bertha stand on the green. In 1625, after their marriage in the cathedral, Charles I and Henrietta Maria slept in the chamber over Fyndon’s Gate. In 1660 Charles II and his brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, stayed in the gatehouse on the way to London. The gate was badly damaged by bombs in the Second World War and had to be rebuilt. It is now a private entrance to the King’s School. The public entrance to the ruins is on Longport.

Sir Edward Hales, born in 1626 and died in 1684, took the property after Lady Wootton, followed by his son, born in 1645 and died in 1695. They carried stone away to build at Hales Place. The family held the abbey until 1804 or 1805. By then the church, cloister, kitchen, and refectory had been engulfed. From 1770 to 1844 the Alfred Beer brewery worked inside the precinct. In 1804 part of the site was divided into lots and sold. The Great Court became a bowling green and skittle ground. Ethelbert’s Tower, the surviving tower of the Norman abbey, was taken down in 1822. In 1793 a poorhouse was built in the medieval lay cemetery, and in 1808 a new gaol was built in the same place. During the Wotton and Hales years the chamber over the Great Gate was used for cockfighting, and other parts became an inn called the Old Palace. In the 1840s Alexander James Beresford Hope, a landowner, member of parliament, and churchman, bought the ruins. With Edward Coleridge he founded a college to train missionaries for the colonies and to excavate and preserve the remains. William Butterfield designed the college buildings. Construction revealed medieval fabric, and archaeological exploration continued, with pauses, until the 1980s. St Augustine’s Missionary College ran from 1848 until 1947. On the night of 31 May 1942 a bombing raid damaged the college so badly that it ceased to operate. From 1952 to 1967 the buildings housed the Central College of the Anglican Communion. From 1969 to 1976 the theological department of King’s College London used them for the final year of ordination training. Since 1976 the King’s School has used the college buildings, with some new ones, as boarding houses and a library, first by lease and then by purchase in 1994. The ruins were taken into the care of the government in 1940, and another account places guardianship in 1938. They are now in state care. The standing ruins include the abbey church, the Anglo-Saxon church of St Pancras, the rotunda and nave of Peter and Paul, graves of Augustine and of the early archbishops, and the chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where floor tiles from elsewhere in the church have been relaid.

The cathedral’s own surrender came on 30 March 1539. An inventory of goods, plate, ornaments, lead, and money was made, and what could be moved was handed to the master of the jewel house at the Tower. The prior and monks were ejected. The New Foundation, a college of secular canons, began on 8 April 1541. The shrine of Becket was destroyed in 1538 on the orders of Henry VIII. The king is said to have summoned the dead saint to court on a charge of treason. When the saint did not appear, he was found guilty in absence, and the treasures were taken away in two coffers and twenty-six carts. The relics were lost. Around 1576 the crypt was granted to the Huguenot congregation as their church. In 1642 and 1643, during the English Civil War, Puritan iconoclasts led by Edwin Sandys damaged the building. A group led by Richard Culmer destroyed the statue of Christ on Christ Church Gate and demolished the wooden gates. The gates were restored in 1660, and repairs continued until 1704. The statue was not replaced until 1990, when Klaus Ringwald’s bronze was set on the gate. The original towers of the gate were removed in 1803 and replaced in 1937. In 1688 the London joiner Roger Davis removed the thirteenth-century misericords and put in two rows of his own on each side of the quire, some of them apparently copied from medieval designs. In the nineteenth century George Gilbert Scott replaced the front row with new stalls, many of them copies of work at Gloucester, Worcester, and New College, Oxford. Most of the statues on the west front were installed in the 1860s, when the niches of the south porch were empty. Theodore Pfyffers carved them. There are 53 figures, among them archbishops from Augustine and Lanfranc to Thomas Cranmer and William Laud, and kings and queens from Æthelberht and Bertha to Victoria and Elizabeth II. In September 1872 fire destroyed a large part of the Trinity Chapel roof. The stone and the interior were not significantly harmed, and the damage was soon repaired. The cathedral did not take serious structural harm in either world war. In the Second World War the library was destroyed, but fire wardens put out flames on the wooden roof.

In 1982 Pope John Paul II visited Britain, and a stone plaque in the cathedral commemorates that visit. In 1986 a new altar was placed in the north-west transept on the spot where Becket was killed, the first new altar in the cathedral for 448 years. Above it, a metal sculpture by Giles Blomfield shows a cross flanked by two bloodstained swords which, with their shadows, stand for the four knights. In 2011 Antony Gormley’s sculpture Transport was unveiled in the crypt, made from iron nails from the roof of the south-east transept. In 2015 Sarah Mullally and Rachel Treweek were the first women ordained bishops in the cathedral, as Bishop of Crediton and Bishop of Gloucester. Sarah Mullally is now Archbishop of Canterbury, and Rose Hudson-Wilkin is Bishop of Dover. David Monteith has been dean since 17 December 2022. His appointment, announced in October 2022, was criticised by the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches and by the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans because he is gay and in a civil partnership. The Church of England answered that he lives chastely with his partner. In 2024 the cathedral began to offer blessings for same-sex couples already in civil partnerships or civil marriages, or in covenanted friendship, during ordinary services, under the Prayers of Love and Faith. The cathedral is the regimental church of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and a graduation place for the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University. A canvas of the Adoration of the Shepherds, once given to Bartolomeo Schedoni, has been identified as a lost painting by Gregorio Pagani. The chapter, as of 23 December 2025, has David Monteith as dean, William Adam as Archdeacon of Canterbury and canon residentiary, Lindsay Yates as canon precentor from 2 November 2025, Emma Pennington as canon missioner from 16 March 2019, and Andrew Dodd as canon treasurer from 27 September 2020. The greater chapter includes honorary and lay canons and elects an archbishop only as the person nominated by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister. The foundation also includes choristers, lay clerks, organists, King’s Scholars, and the Six Preachers. Some old offices, such as the cathedral barber, are moribund. One count gives a workforce of over 300, many part-time, and about 800 volunteers. Another, attached to a 2026 notice, speaks of over 750 staff and volunteers together. The cathedral has its own attested constables, who police the close and work with Kent Police.

Polyphonic music for the monks survives from the thirteenth century. An organ may have existed in the twelfth. Organists’ names are recorded from the early fifteenth century. Leonel Power was master of the Lady Chapel choir formed in 1438. After a decline at the Reformation, Dean Thomas Neville revived the music in the early seventeenth century and brought in cornett and sackbut, probably from the city waits, and sets of recorders, lutes, and viols for the boys and lay clerks. The present organ has four manuals, with divisions in the south and north quire aisles and in the nave. Henry Willis built it in 1886 and the same firm rebuilt it in the mid-twentieth century. N. P. Mander rebuilt it in 1978 and reduced it to three manuals. David Flood, organist and master of the choristers for more than forty years, oversaw a redesign that Harrison and Harrison carried out from 2018 to 2020, restoring the fourth manual, with work finished in February 2020. Flood retired on 29 December 2020 after forty-two years. David Newsholme, assistant organist and director of the girls’ choir, and for a time acting director of music, was appointed director of music in July 2021. Jamie Rogers was appointed assistant organist in December 2021. The choir is of boys aged eight to fourteen and girls aged twelve to eighteen, with twelve lay clerks and choral scholars. Before February 2023 choristers had to board or attend St Edmund’s School. That rule ended under an equality and inclusion plan while Monteith was dean, and the change drew criticism. There are seven choral services a week, with evensong at 5:30 in the afternoon from Monday to Sunday, not live-streamed on Thursday, and sung Eucharist on Sunday at 11 in the morning. The girls’ choir was founded in 2014. Its first evensong, that January, was attended by more than 600 people, and its first concert was in December of that year. A choral tradition is claimed for 1,400 years.

The cathedral has twenty-one bells in three of its five towers. The Oxford Tower holds a ring of fourteen, twelve with two semitones, hung for change ringing. All were cast in 1981 at Whitechapel from seven bells of the old twelve, with new metal, and rehung in a new frame. The ringing-chamber floor was lowered to the south aisle vault so the ropes could be longer and the bells set lower, to ease the medieval structure. The tenor weighs 34 long hundredweight, 3 quarters, and 4 pounds, or 3,896 pounds, or 1,767 kilograms. Practice is on Thursday at 7:15 in the evening. The Arundel Tower holds the clock chime, five quarter bells taken from the old peal, struck on the eighth Gregorian tone, the same tone used at Merton College, Oxford. The hour strikes on Great Dunstan, the largest bell in Kent, at 62 long hundredweight, 2 quarters, and 9 pounds, or 7,009 pounds, or 3,179 kilograms, also swung on Sunday mornings for matins. In 1316 Prior Henry of Eastry gave a bell of St Thomas weighing 71 and a half hundredweight, or 3,630 kilograms. In 1343 Prior Hathbrand gave bells of Jesus and St Dunstan. The campanile bells were then named Jesus, Dunstan, Mary, Crundale, Elphy, and Thomas. The 1382 earthquake brought down the campanile and destroyed the first three. The other three were rehung with two more whose casting is unrecorded. The oldest bell now in the cathedral is Bell Harry, about 8 long hundredweight, or 900 pounds, or 400 kilograms, cast by Joseph Hatch in 1635 and hung in a cage on the central tower. It is struck at 8 in the morning and 9 at night, and sometimes as a Sanctus bell. The cathedral also keeps the bell of HMS Canterbury, a light cruiser of the First World War, near the Buffs Chapel in the south-west transept.

The library has worked since the Middle Ages. Some items that survived the dissolution have been in the collection for nearly a thousand years. It holds about 30,000 books and pamphlets printed before the twentieth century and about 20,000 later books and serials, strong in church history, older theology, British and local history, travel, science, medicine, and the campaign against slavery. In July 2018 the cathedral bought at auction a medieval Bible for £100,000. It was renamed the Lyghfield Bible after the monk William Lighfyld. It had once been at Canterbury and had left after the dissolution. The Friends of the cathedral have published a chronicle since 1928. Margaret Agnes Babington, honorary steward and treasurer, and daughter of the vicar of Tenterden, raised funds by lecturing. An anonymous book of 1932, The Romance of Canterbury Cathedral, was hers.

The cathedral receives no regular government funding and only occasional grants. It is not funded by the Church of England. The Church Commissioners pay the dean and two residentiary canons. In 2023 the daily cost of maintenance was given as around £20,000, met from entry fees, rents, the shop, and the lodge and conference centre. An appeal launched in October 2006 aimed at £50 million. By the end of 2010 it had raised £11.5 million, and by May 2014 more than £20 million. Fabric projects already identified were costed at £30 million, including roofs of the nave, aisles, and north-west and south-east transepts, the stone of Bell Harry, the north side of the Corona, the gate, the glass, and the books. In the autumn of 2008 a lead roof over a transept was restored for about £500,000. In 2018 the nave lead was replaced. A programme from 2016 to 2022, the Canterbury Journey, also covered landscaping, access, visitor facilities, and external repair. It was expected to cost nearly £25 million, with £13.8 million from a lottery grant, £10.9 million from the cathedral trust, and £250,000 from the Friends. The final cost was £34.5 million. Another statement says the trust obtained the £24.7 million needed for a programme planned to finish in 2021. In 2016 to 2017 the trust received £3.66 million in donations, with £1.61 million more pledged. In 2018 Léonie Seliger and Rachel Koopmans led conservation of the eight twelfth-century miracle windows in the Trinity Chapel. A statement of the property’s condition in 2006 said the structure was under threat and that a major appeal was under way. The south-east transept has been under extensive repair. Ruins of Christ Church Priory have been placed in a category of immediate risk of further rapid loss, with a solution agreed but not fully carried out, and with grant help the work has moved slowly. The three parts of the property have not always been kept to the same standard, and they still have separate conservation regimes. A conservation plan has been prepared for the cathedral. The precinct is governed by the Care of Cathedrals Measure of 1990, amended in 2005, and the church is exempt from ordinary listed-building consent. Quinquennial inspections are made by the dean and chapter.

In the summer of 2026 an international team spent five days in the cathedral archives on a study of imported patterned silks. The medieval seal bags, pouches that protected wax seals, form the largest known collection of their kind in Europe. The focus was a surviving fragment of the dalmatic of Hubert Walter, a long wide-sleeved tunic. Walter was born about 1160 and died on 13 July 1205. He was Chief Justiciar, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193, and Lord Chancellor. He was not noted for holiness or learning, but he is judged one of the outstanding ministers of the English crown. His uncle Ranulf de Glanvill helped him into the Exchequer. He served Henry II, failed to obtain York, and became Bishop of Salisbury soon after Richard I’s accession. He went on the Third Crusade and was a principal figure in raising Richard’s ransom after the king was captured in Germany. As justiciar until 1198 he raised money for the French wars and set four knights in each hundred to administer justice, a forerunner of justices of the peace. He began the Charter Roll. He revived a plan for a church to rival Christ Church Priory and dropped it when the pope ordered him to stop. After Richard’s death in 1199 he helped secure the throne for John and served John on missions to France. He was buried in the cathedral. The metal on his dalmatic now looks dull grey. Instruments showed it to be gold, once highlighting the heads and feet of birds woven into the silk. The method of applying the metal may challenge the long-held view that the silk was made in Spain. There is a strong possibility that it came from farther away, though the place of manufacture is not yet settled. The wider study looks to Spain, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, and it is due to meet in a conference in the summer of 2028, with a book to follow. The same season’s notice says the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery thought to have been made in Canterbury in the 1070s, was to be shown in London from 10 September 2026. On 17 September 2026 Benjamin Pohl was to speak at the cathedral lodge, without charge, on a reading of that embroidery as an aid at monastic mealtimes, during a run of open days from 11 to 20 September 2026.

The boundaries of the property do not take in every related building. St Martin’s is aligned with the church and churchyard. Most of the abbey’s outer precinct is included, but the Sessions House and gaol that once linked the abbey to St Martin’s, the almonry buildings on Lady Wootton’s Green, and a detached thirteenth-century conduit house are left out. The cathedral section follows the old precinct boundary. A twelfth-century conduit house on Military Road, which supplied water, is not included. The visual and ceremonial links between the three places lie in the buffer zone, and a busy road through that zone affects the relationship. Development pressure beside the buffer zone is a standing concern. The ruins suffer from weather and need regular repair. The whole property lies in an area of archaeological importance. Most of the cathedral precinct, the remains of the abbey, and part of its medieval precinct are scheduled, and many buildings are listed. Grade I buildings in the precinct include the cathedral, the chapter house, the main gate, the cloister, the Dark Entry, the lavatory tower, the library, Meister Omers, the Norman staircase, the Prior Sellinge Gate, the prior’s chapel, the remains of the cellarer’s hall, the archbishop’s palace, the archdeacon’s house, the deanery, the Wolfson Library, and several houses in the precinct. Grade II* buildings include number 17, the Pilgrims’ Entry or pentice at number 29, and the County of Kent War Memorial Cross. The separate conservation of the three parts, and the road between them, are the practical limits on reading them as one place. What the place changed is still visible in the standing church, the ruin, and the parish church on the hill: a Roman mission of 597, a royal conversion, a monastery that trained priests and copied books, a murder that drew Europe to a shrine, and a see that outlived the monastery.

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