# St Augustine's Abbey

monastery in Canterbury, Kent, England, UK

England, United Kingdom

Settlement · Sacred place. 598 CE – 1538 CE

## Story

• St Augustine's Abbey, east of Canterbury's Roman wall, was founded as the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul and became the burial church of the early archbishops and the kings of Kent.
• Augustine of Canterbury began the house after landing in Kent in 597, with the foundation placed in 598 by one account and between 601 and 604 by another.
• Norman abbots replaced the separate early churches with one Romanesque church, later rebuilt after the fire of 1168 and enlarged until the surrender of 30 July 1538.
• Excavation has found a Roman rubbish dump, a Christian cemetery, the foundations of the west tower, and a furnished burial of about 580 to 600 just north of the chapel of St Pancras.
• The ruins passed through a royal palace, a brewery, and a missionary college, and they now stand with Canterbury Cathedral and St Martin's Church as one World Heritage property.

## Visiting

The site is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, and last entry is at 3.30pm. Tickets bought online before midnight on the day before the visit are discounted, while a ticket bought on the day of the visit costs the full price, and each ticket is valid all day. Admission is free for members who bring a membership card, and a ticket may still be bought on arrival.

## History

St Augustine's Abbey stands just east of Canterbury's Roman wall, between Longport, Monastery Street, and the roads to the north. It was founded as the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul and later took the name of Augustine of Canterbury. The house remained a Benedictine monastery until its surrender on 30 July 1538.

The mission began in a land where Roman Christianity had receded. Bishops from Britain had attended the Council of Arles in 314, but after the legions left in 410 the southern and eastern kingdoms were ruled by pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. A British church continued in the west, with its own Easter and tonsure, and there is no evidence that it tried to convert the English. Pope Gregory I chose Kent in 595 because King Æthelberht was powerful and because his Frankish queen, Bertha, already worshipped as a Christian with her bishop, Liudhard.

Augustine of Canterbury, prior of St Andrew's monastery in Rome, landed on Thanet in 597 and went on to Canterbury. Æthelberht converted, gave land outside the walls, and a mass baptism is said to have followed on Christmas Day of that year. Sees were founded at London and Rochester in 604. Augustine died on or about 26 May 604, or in 605, after arranging for Laurence to succeed him.

The year of the foundation is given in two ways. William Thorne's chronicle, and the usual account of the first buildings, put it in 598. A reading of the excavated sequence places it between the return of Abbot Peter from Rome in 601 or 602 and Augustine's death.

The dwelling rooms were probably timber. The masonry church took longer, and it is dated either to a consecration in 613 or to a start in 609 with consecration by Laurence.

Three churches formed the early monastery. Saints Peter and Paul was the principal burial church of abbots, archbishops, and the kings of Kent. Eadbald founded St Mary to the east about 624, on the same axis. St Pancras stands further east on a different alignment.

One account builds St Pancras between the mid-eighth and the tenth centuries. Another dates its first phase to the years 597 to 609 and its rebuilding to the seventh and eighth centuries, which would make it the oldest visible Anglo-Saxon church and the only standing building consecrated and used by Augustine.

The first phase of St Pancras was an apsed room of reused Roman brick in yellow mortar, with a clay floor and white plaster. A later phase, in white mortar, added porticus, a western porch, and a triple arcade whose column is limestone from the Paris basin. The chapel later served as a farmhouse and a pigsty, and the top of the nave walls was rebuilt in 1962.

Before the monastery, the ground was a Roman cemetery and a rubbish tip rather than a town. A woman buried just north of St Pancras about 580 to 600 was laid out with a garnet disc brooch, beads, a buckle, a bracelet, and a knife.

For two centuries the abbey was the chief religious house in Kent, with a school and a scriptorium. Benedict Biscop was abbot for about two years from 669, appointed by Theodore of Tarsus, before he carried books and stone building north to Wearmouth and Jarrow. Dunstan reformed the house to the Rule of St Benedict and in 978 added Augustine's name to the dedication.

Viking attacks are described both as a sparing of the abbey and as the capture of Abbot Ælfmær in 1011. Cnut favoured the house, and the relics of Mildred came from Minster-in-Thanet.

After 1066 the abbey kept its lands, but Abbot Æthelsige was removed in 1070. Scolland of Mont Saint-Michel, and then Wido, replaced the three early churches with one Romanesque church over 100 metres long. A fire in 1168 forced another rebuilding and is blamed for the loss of earlier records.

Charles Sandys, a Canterbury antiquary, is the writer attached to the published notice of that fire. From about 1250 the cloister, frater, kitchens, lodging, and a lady chapel were rebuilt, and the community grew from 61 monks in 1146 to 84 in 1423.

The abbots fought the jurisdiction of Canterbury Cathedral, which Augustine had also founded in 597, and they won papal privileges and the right to wear the mitre. Thomas Becket was murdered in the cathedral in 1170, and its east end was rebuilt for his pilgrims after the fire of 1174. The Fyndon Gate was rebuilt from 1301 to 1309. In the 1360s Juliana Leybourne added St Anne's Chapel and a chantry.

Robert of Battle, abbot from 1224 to 1253, brought into the succession the name of Battle Abbey, the house William the Conqueror founded where Harold fell. Edith Weston Priory, a small alien cell in Rutland, shows the other scale of Benedictine life and had no link with Canterbury.

On 30 July 1538 Abbot John Essex and his monks surrendered the house. Henry VIII ordered the church demolished in 1541. Shrines and royal tombs were destroyed, and the library was broken up. One account says two thousand manuscripts were destroyed, and another says 283 volumes survive.

The abbot's lodging became a royal palace from 1539. Elizabeth I stayed in 1573. Lord Wootton, also spelled Wotton, laid out gardens with John Tradescant. The Hales family later carted stone away to Hales Place.

By the early nineteenth century a brewery, a bowling green, a poorhouse, and a gaol occupied parts of the precinct, and Ethelbert's Tower was taken down in 1822. Alexander Beresford Hope bought the ruins in 1844 and, with Edward Coleridge, opened a missionary college in 1848 in buildings designed by William Butterfield. The college lasted until 1947, though a raid on 31 May 1942 is also said to have ended its work. The King's School has used the college buildings since 1976 and bought them in 1994.

The displayed ruins passed into state care in 1938, or in 1940 in another account. Excavation from 1960 to 1978 uncovered the south side of the Norman church, a Roman rubbish dump, a Saxon Christian cemetery, and the foundations of the west tower. Work on the outer court from 1983 found Saxon metalworking and, in 1987, Neolithic and Bronze Age occupation. Alfred Clapham's guidebook of 1955 set out the ruins for visitors.

In 2023 the north porticus of Saints Peter and Paul, where the earliest archbishops were buried, was opened again for survey and sampling. The abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, and St Martin's Church were inscribed together as a World Heritage property in 1988, while another account gives 1989.

## Photographs

- [St Augustine's Abbey - general view — Rob Farrow](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/St_Augustine%27s_Abbey_-_general_view_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3092087.jpg)
- [Part of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, Kent — Agnete](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/StAugustines%C3%A4chsischeWand.jpg)
- [Entrance to St. Augustines Abbey — Nigel Chadwick](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Entrance_to_St._Augustines_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_984479.jpg)
- [Canterbury Abbey Ruins of St Augustine's Abbey. English Heritage property. — JThomas](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Canterbury_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1276212.jpg)
- [Floor tiles in the visitor centre at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, Kent. — Nilfanion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Floor_tiles_in_St_Augustine%27s_Abbey_visitor_centre.jpg)
- [St Augustine's monastic conduit house, King's Park, Canterbury, Kent, England. Mid-12th century. Scheduled monument. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Conduit_House_of_St._Augustine%27s_Abbey%2C_Canterbury_01.jpg)
- [St Augustine's monastic conduit house, King's Park, Canterbury, Kent, England. Mid-12th century. Scheduled monument. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Conduit_House_of_St._Augustine%27s_Abbey%2C_Canterbury_02.jpg)
- [St Augustine's Abbey — Benjamin Thomas Pouncy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Benjamin_Thomas_Pouncy_-_South_East_View_of_the_Gate_of_St_Augustine%27s_Monastery%2C_Canterbury%2C_Kent_-_B1977.14.6246_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg)
- [Ruins of St. Pancras Church (the arch), St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, Kent, the United Kingdom — Ymblanter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Canterbury_St._Augustine_Abbey_St._Pancras_Church.jpg)
- [Sts. Perer and Paul Church, St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, Kent, the United Kingdom — Ymblanter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Canterbury_St._Augustine_Abbey_Sts._Perer_and_Paul_Church.jpg)

## Sources

- [St Augustine's Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine%27s_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Augustine of Canterbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Canterbury) — Wikipedia
- [Benedict Biscop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Biscop) — Wikipedia
- [Alexander Beresford Hope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Beresford_Hope) — Wikipedia
- [Alfred Clapham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Clapham) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Sandys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sandys) — Wikipedia
- [Battle Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Edith Weston Priory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Weston_Priory) — Wikipedia
- [Canterbury Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Cathedral) — Wikipedia
- [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
- [Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine's Abbey, and St Martin's Church](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/496/) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
- [The Earliest English Church? A Reconsideration of the Chapel of St Pancras at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00681288.2022.2033019) — Archaeological Journal
- [St Augustine's Abbey: report on excavations, 1960-78](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1087913&recordType=MonographSeries) — Archaeology Data Service
- [St Augustine's Abbey](https://heritage.kent.gov.uk/Monument/MKE4614) — Kent Historic Environment Record
- [Underground Activity](https://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/archives/10651) — Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society
- [Mission to England: Reinvestigating the Origins of St Augustine's Abbey](https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/news/mission-to-england-reinvestigating-the-origins-of-st-augustines-abbey) — Kent Archaeological Society
- [St Augustine's Abbey - general view - geograph.org.uk - 3092087.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Augustine%27s_Abbey_-_general_view_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3092087.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [StAugustinesächsischeWand.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StAugustines%C3%A4chsischeWand.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Entrance to St. Augustines Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 984479.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Entrance_to_St._Augustines_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_984479.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1276212.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1276212.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Floor tiles in St Augustine's Abbey visitor centre.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floor_tiles_in_St_Augustine%27s_Abbey_visitor_centre.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Conduit House of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conduit_House_of_St._Augustine%27s_Abbey,_Canterbury_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Conduit House of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conduit_House_of_St._Augustine%27s_Abbey,_Canterbury_02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Benjamin Thomas Pouncy - South East View of the Gate of St Augustine's Monastery, Canterbury, Kent - B1977.14.6246 - Yale Center for British Art.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benjamin_Thomas_Pouncy_-_South_East_View_of_the_Gate_of_St_Augustine%27s_Monastery,_Canterbury,_Kent_-_B1977.14.6246_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury St. Augustine Abbey St. Pancras Church.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_St._Augustine_Abbey_St._Pancras_Church.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury St. Augustine Abbey Sts. Perer and Paul Church.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_St._Augustine_Abbey_Sts._Perer_and_Paul_Church.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

St Augustine's Abbey stands just east of the Roman wall of Canterbury, between Longport on the south, Monastery Street on the west, and Havelock Street and North Holmes Road on the north. It was founded as the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul and, after the death of its founder, became known as St Augustine's. It was a Benedictine house and remained a monastery until the surrender of 30 July 1538. The ruins of the church, the early chapels, and the later monastic ranges now lie in public care, while the great gate and the college buildings beside it belong to a school. With Canterbury Cathedral and the church of St Martin, the abbey forms one World Heritage property, inscribed in 1988, while another account gives 1989. The abbey component covers 8.42 hectares, and the whole property covers 18.58 hectares.

The house was made for worship, study, and burial. An inner precinct held the churches, the cloister, and the cemetery. An outer precinct held vineyards, orchards, and gardens. Monks copied books in a scriptorium and taught in a school that drew students from far outside Kent. Kings of Kent and archbishops of Canterbury were buried in the early churches. After the surrender, part of the site became a royal palace, then a gentleman's house, a brewery yard, a poorhouse, and a gaol, before a missionary college rose on the ruins. What a visitor sees today is the excavated plan of that long sequence, not a living monastery.

The mission that produced the abbey belongs to a kingdom that had already met Christianity and then largely lost it. Before the Roman armies left Britain in 410, the province had Christian bishops. Three of them attended the Council of Arles in 314, and a bishop from Gaul came to the island in 396 to settle a matter of discipline. Material remains show a Christian presence at least until about 360. After the legions departed, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled the south and east and brought their own gods. The invasions broke most of the Roman economic and religious order in the lands they held. In the west, beyond the new kingdoms, a British church continued. It was centred on monasteries rather than on bishops in the Roman manner, it kept its own date of Easter, and its clergy wore a distinctive tonsure. Missionaries from Ireland shaped it. There is no evidence that these native Christians tried to convert the Anglo-Saxons. Place names containing eccles, from the Latin word for a church, and the survival of the cult of Saint Alban, are the traces that Christianity had not vanished entirely from the east. It was against that break that Pope Gregory I, in 595, decided to send monks to the English.

Kent was the chosen door. Its king, Æthelberht, was one of the most powerful rulers in the island and held influence over neighbouring kingdoms. He had married Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, daughter of the Merovingian king Charibert I. The marriage is placed before 588, and perhaps earlier than 560. As a condition of the match she brought her own bishop, Liudhard, and Æthelberht, still a pagan, allowed her to worship. Together they restored a church of Roman date in Canterbury, possibly the present church of St Martin, about 250 metres east of the later abbey. Bede, writing in 731 and drawing on the testimony of an abbot of St Augustine's, says that St Martin's was built in the Roman period and that Bertha used it from the time of her marriage until the missionaries arrived in 597. The standing church is more complicated than that sentence. Its earliest phase is a nearly square brick building, 5.2 by 4.3 metres, with small corner buttresses and an opus signinum floor. A doorway 1.82 metres high and 1.01 metres wide has ragstone jambs and a green limestone lintel, and a round-headed doorway was inserted later. Excavation on the spot, in 1896 and 1954, was too limited to settle the date. One reading puts the first build near 580 as a chapel for Bertha and her Frankish household. Another reads it as a Roman mausoleum, perhaps of the late Roman period, reused in the late sixth century. A coin made into a pendant and inscribed for Liudhard, found with four other coin pendants that probably come from at least two high-status graves, strengthens the case that this was the church Bede meant. Nine burials just to the east may belong to the late sixth or the seventh century. The walls were remodelled in the seventh century in reused Roman brick and pink mortar. Whatever the first date, the building was small, which suggests that the Christians at court before 597 were few.

Augustine of Canterbury was the man Gregory chose. He was born in the early sixth century and died on or about 26 May 604, or in 605. He was prior of a Benedictine monastery in Rome, the monastery of St Andrew, when Gregory selected him in 595 to lead the party usually called the Gregorian mission. The aim was to Christianize Æthelberht and the kingdom of Kent and, through Kent, the other English kingdoms. Before the monks reached Kent they considered turning back. Gregory urged them on. In 597 Augustine landed on the Isle of Thanet and went on to Canterbury, the king's principal town. Æthelberht converted and let the missionaries preach freely. He gave them land outside the city walls for a monastery. Augustine was consecrated bishop. A mass baptism on Christmas Day 597 is said to have included thousands of the king's subjects. In 601 Gregory sent more missionaries, with letters and gifts for the churches. Attempts to bring the British bishops under Augustine's authority failed. Roman sees were set up at London and at Rochester in 604, and a school was founded to train English priests and missionaries. Augustine arranged the consecration of his successor, Laurence of Canterbury. He was soon treated as a saint. One biographer of Bertha says that Æthelberht, under his wife's influence, asked Gregory for the mission. The political logic does not depend on that claim. A king who already tolerated a Christian queen, and who dealt with the Frankish courts, was the practical starting point for a Roman embassy.

Tradition says that Æthelberht worshipped in a pagan temple just outside the walls, east of the city, and that he gave the temple and its precinct to Augustine for a church and a monastery. The same tradition says he ordered a church of becoming splendour, dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul, and endowed it with gifts. Two practical purposes are clear in the early accounts. The house was a residence for Augustine and his brother monks. It was also to be the burial place of abbots, archbishops, and the kings of Kent. William Thorne, a monk of the abbey who wrote its chronicle in the 1390s, records 598 as the year of foundation, and that is the year given for the probable start of the work. A reconsideration of the excavated sequence places the foundation later, probably between the return of the first abbot, Peter, from Rome in 601 or 602 and Augustine's death in 604. Both dates can stand as the written tradition and the archaeological reading. The domestic buildings were most likely timber, in the ordinary Saxon manner, so that the community could settle quickly. A church of solid masonry, of the kind Augustine had known in Rome, took longer. One account says that church was finished and consecrated in 613. Another says the church of Saints Peter and Paul was probably begun in 609 and was consecrated by Laurence, Augustine's successor, rather than by Augustine himself.

Three churches came to form the liturgical core, and they were not all of one date. The church of Saints Peter and Paul was the principal one. A short distance to the east, Eadbald, son and successor of Æthelberht, founded a second church dedicated to Saint Mary, in which Kentish royalty were also buried. That foundation is placed about 624. The church of St Mary stands on the same axis as Saints Peter and Paul. The third church, St Pancras, stands further east again and on a different alignment. One account places its building between the mid-eighth and the tenth centuries. Another, based on a century of excavation and on survey of the standing walls, argues that the earliest phase is neither Roman nor of the middle or late seventh century, but falls between 597 and 609, and that the building was rebuilt in the seventh and eighth centuries. On that reading St Pancras would be the oldest visible Anglo-Saxon church, the earliest part of the abbey, and the only standing building both consecrated and used by Augustine of Canterbury. The monks of the later abbey associated the chapel with Augustine and with the first communion he celebrated in Kent, though no surviving seventh-century text records the dedication, and the cult of St Pancras is said to have been revived by Pope Honorius only after 625. The dedication may therefore belong to a rebuilding rather than to the first walls.

The fabric of St Pancras shows why the dates diverge. The standing ruin has a nave about 12.97 metres long and 8.11 metres wide, an arcaded opening into an eastern apse, a small room on the south of the apse, wall stubs that may mark a northern one, porticus on both sides of the nave, and a western porch still 3.35 metres high, with a doorway 1.93 metres wide and 2.35 metres high. Straight joints show that the porch and the porticus were added to an earlier nave. The chancel walls that use stone, rather than Roman brick alone, are later medieval. The first phase, as reconstructed from excavations of 1881, 1900 to 1901, 1972, and 1974 to 1975, was a simpler apsed room 12.87 metres long and 8.11 metres wide, built of reused Roman brick in yellow mortar, with unmortared flint foundations, a light yellow clay floor, and smooth white plaster. Small external buttresses marked the corners and the side walls. A fallen arch of the same brick, yellow mortar, and white plaster was found in 1900. A coin of Constantius II, who ruled from 337 to 361, lay in an earlier soil, so the church is no earlier than that reign. A radiocarbon date of 248 to 564 from a pit under the site, and the reuse of Roman brick and opus signinum, point the same way. Four clay-filled postholes under the clay floor are most plausibly scaffolding. At least three east-west burials were later cut by the added south porticus.

A second phase rebuilt the church after a period of disuse. The new work used reused Roman brick in white mortar, unlike the yellow mortar of the first phase. Porticus were added, a western porch was bonded into the nave, and the west door was narrowed to 1.98 metres. A triple arcade of four columns, about 4.72 metres high, was inserted at the junction of nave and apse, and the side arches were later blocked. The surviving column is limestone from the Paris basin, probably imported new rather than taken from a Roman building. A child's burial containing a sceat dated to the early eighth century, and another grave with a radiocarbon range of 672 to 1121, give a terminus for the porticus. The arcade itself has parallels in seventh-century Kent, including Reculver. The upper parts of the walls seem to have been entirely of reused Roman brick. In 1962 the upper courses of the first-phase nave, about the top 0.3 metres, were rebuilt in white mortar, so the present skyline is partly a modern repair. Before that repair the interior had served as a farmhouse and a pigsty, and the chancel contained a chalk-filled hollow 910 millimetres deep made for the pigs. A tiled floor of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, found about 360 millimetres down, seals the earlier deposits. Photogrammetric elevations made in 1998, and a stone-by-stone record made in 2018 and 2019, confirm the joints and the brickwork described by the earlier excavators.

The ground under the abbey was not empty Roman countryside in the simple sense, nor was it a town. The zone east of the wall was used for Roman inhumation and cremation, the cemetery known as East B. Late Roman burials are reported on the west of the abbey site, near the later church of Saints Peter and Paul. Where excavation reached the brickearth and gravel under that church, the natural soil was covered by late Roman rubbish tips. A shallow gully may be a foundation trench, but no Roman building has been confirmed inside the later precinct. Pits and gullies under St Pancras cut a soil that held artefacts from the first to the fourth centuries, and a trench south of the chapel may have met an east-west Roman road. A resistance survey of the whole publicly displayed site, made in 2009, found rectilinear anomalies, but none of them has to be older than the Middle Ages. One anomaly south of the nave matches the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, founded in 1793, rebuilt on the same ground, and moved in 1937. The excavated picture is of open land used for tips, with a cemetery to the north and west, in the centuries before the monastery. That sits beside the result of the excavations of 1960 to 1978 on the south side of the abbey church, which found a rubbish dump of the Roman town of Durovernum running from about 5 BC to AD 375, and no evidence in that area for occupation in the fifth or sixth century. The same excavation found, for the Saxon period, a Christian cemetery, architectural fragments from the church, and the foundations of the west tower.

A burial found in 2019 complicates any claim that the sixth century is absent. Just north of St Pancras, rescue excavation uncovered the grave of a woman in her twenties. She had a silver Kentish disc brooch inlaid with garnet, a necklace of amber and glass beads, a copper-alloy belt buckle, a copper-alloy bracelet, and an iron knife. The objects suggest a high-status burial of about 580 to 600, the years in which Bertha's household and then Augustine's mission arrived. It is not known whether she was buried alone or in a larger cemetery, or whether she was a Christian. Furnished burial was normal among contemporary Frankish Christians, so the goods do not prove a pagan rite. She may have been one of Augustine's early converts, or part of a cemetery already there when the first church was placed. A separate furnished burial of the same broad conversion period was found beside the Sessions House during excavation before the redevelopment of the former prison, east of the monastic core. The two graves should not be collapsed into one.

For two centuries after the foundation, the abbey is described as the only important religious house in the kingdom of Kent. It was characterised as a missionary school where classical knowledge and English learning flourished. Its library held religious and secular books, and the scriptorium produced manuscripts. The influence of that workshop is later judged to have reached far beyond Kent. The early list of abbots is a harder kind of evidence. The main sources are the later medieval histories of the house, and their information is dubious and in places fictional. A critical list runs from Peter, who probably died in 614, through a string of names with traditional dates, a vacancy from 667 to 669, and then a firmer succession. After an abbot called Wynhere there is a century of uncertainty, in which fifteen names transmitted by the house historians may not all have been abbots, and perhaps none of them were. Independent witness lists repair the late Anglo-Saxon period only in part. Wigstan appears in 946 as abbot of St Augustine's though the house historians omit him. Eadhelm seems to have held the office from about 949 to about 958 and is likewise absent from their lists. The tenth-century list is very inaccurate, and the eleventh-century list only a little less so.

Benedict Biscop belongs to the firmer years. He was born about 628 and died in 690, a nobleman of Northumbria, and for a time a thegn of King Oswiu of Bernicia. At about twenty-five, around 653, he made the first of six journeys to Rome, setting out with Wilfrid, who was detained at Lyon while Benedict went on. A second journey followed twelve years later. On the way home he stayed at Lérins, off the coast of Provence, from 665 to 667, took the monastic habit and the name Benedict, and learned a life already shaped by the Rule of St Benedict. Pope Vitalian then sent him back to Britain with Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus in 669. Theodore appointed him abbot of Saints Peter and Paul at Canterbury, and he held that office for about two years, the house list giving him about 669 to 670. Hadrian followed him, from 669 or 670 until 709 or 710, and then Albinus. Benedict did not stay in Kent. In 674 King Ecgfrith gave him land for a monastery at Wearmouth. He brought masons from the Continent to build in stone and, on a later journey, books, relics, glaziers, and a privilege from Pope Agatho. In 682 he set Ceolfrith over a sister house at Jarrow. His pupil Bede wrote there. The two years at Canterbury matter because they tie the Kentish monastery to the man who carried Roman books, chant, and stone building into Northumbria. The abbey was already a point on a road between Rome and the north, not only a burial church for Kent.

The tenth century reorganised the house. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury from 959 to 988, brought it into line with the Rule of St Benedict, which Benedict of Nursia had written in the sixth century for Monte Cassino. The Rule set a vegetarian diet, a common dormitory, and a day divided among communal prayer, reading, and manual work. The later motto of the order was prayer and work. Buildings at St Augustine's were enlarged and the church rebuilt. In 978 Dunstan revised the dedication, adding Augustine to Peter and Paul. From that year the monastery was known as St Augustine's. Dunstan was himself buried on the south side of the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral, where a Benedictine community, Christ Church Priory, was added to the cathedral church. The formal monastic establishment there is placed about 997, and the community became fully monastic under Lanfranc.

The Danish wars are told in two ways that do not match. One account says the invaders spared St Augustine's, and that in 1027 King Cnut made over all the possessions of Minster-in-Thanet, including the body of Mildrith, or Mildred. Belief in the power of that relic drew pilgrims, and their gifts enriched the house. Mildred was the great-great-granddaughter of Æthelberht, so the translation also restated the abbey's link with the Kentish royal line. The other account says the abbey suffered with the rest of Canterbury. In 1011 Vikings raided the city and held Abbot Ælfmær, also written Aelfmaer, as a hostage. Peace returned when Cnut was crowned in 1016, and he granted the abbey important new privileges. The translation of Mildred's relics is placed in that restoration rather than only in the grant of 1027. The two stories agree that Cnut favoured the house and that Mildred's shrine brought pilgrims. They disagree on whether the abbey was spared.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 did not confiscate the abbey's lands in the way it confiscated many lay estates. One account says William the Conqueror respected church property. Another says the abbey, unlike some houses, kept most of its land and possessions. The last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Æthelsige, was forced to resign in 1070. His replacement was Scolland, also called Scotland, a monk of Mont Saint-Michel, abbot from 1070 to 1087. Wido, or Guy, followed him from 1087 to about 1093. Scolland began a rebuilding that, within forty years of the Conquest, replaced the three separate Anglo-Saxon churches with one Romanesque abbey church. It was over 100 metres long, almost two-thirds the length of Canterbury Cathedral, which was itself rebuilt between 1070 and 1077. By 1100 the original buildings at St Augustine's had disappeared under the new work. The excavations of 1960 to 1978, which included work directed by S. E. Rigold, traced that Romanesque sequence and the phased construction of the west end of the first Norman church, and they distinguished the work of Scotland and of Wido. Some 12,000 sherds, from Belgic pottery to post-medieval wares, came out of those seasons. The same report describes four separate churches on a single east-west line, a count that sits beside the three Anglo-Saxon churches of the written history.

A great fire in 1168 forced further rebuilding. The destruction is given as the reason so few records survive from the centuries before it. Charles Sandys, a Canterbury solicitor and antiquary, is the writer attached to the published notice of that fire. He was born in 1786, educated at the King's School from 1794 to 1800, and practised as a solicitor in the city from 1808. In 1844 he joined the British Archaeological Association, and in 1846 he became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His history of gavelkind and other Kentish customs appeared in 1851. He also contested Robert Willis's account of Canterbury Cathedral, defending an older view of the fabric against the claim that Lanfranc had rebuilt almost the whole church after the Conquest. He belongs to the generation that was measuring the city's churches at the same moment the abbey ruins were being bought for a college.

From about 1250 the abbey spent heavily. The cloister, the frater, and the kitchen were rebuilt. A new abbot's lodging and a great hall were added. In the early fourteenth century the house acquired land for a cellarer's range, a brewhouse, a bakehouse, and a walled vineyard, and a lady chapel was built east of the church. A later lady chapel, at the east end, is dated between 1496 and 1510. One history of the house calls the high medieval decades a time of worldly magnificence, with royal visits and banquets, and notes that papal levies and the building debt would have swamped the abbey without generous benefactors. The same writer later calls the early sixteenth century days of decadence, and gives the estates as 19,862 acres. Those judgements are one historian's verdict, not a set of audited accounts. What the building record does show is continuous work, and a community that grew from 61 monks in 1146 to 84 in 1423, a large house for the time.

The monks defended their independence against Canterbury Cathedral and against the archbishop, who wanted jurisdiction over the monastery. Abbots obtained papal privileges that kept the house free, and they received permission to wear the mitre and other ornaments usually reserved for bishops. Their rights were written up in chronicles, of which Thorne's is the best known. The quarrel mattered because the cathedral was the other great Benedictine church of the city. Augustine of Canterbury had founded it in 597 and dedicated it to Christ the Holy Saviour. Bede says he reused a Roman church. Excavation under the present nave in 1993 found instead the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building laid across a Roman road, with a nave, perhaps a narthex, and side chapels, and a smaller building to the south-west. In the ninth or tenth century that church was replaced by a larger one, about 49 by 23 metres, apparently with a square central tower. The eleventh-century writer Eadmer, who had known the Saxon cathedral as a boy, compared its arrangement to St Peter's in Rome. A sherd dated about 650 to 850, found in mortar that probably belongs to the earliest post-Roman walls on the cathedral site, has been taken to place those walls in the late seventh century or later. If that sherd is set aside, the pottery cut by the walls gives only a limit after about 450. The cathedral was completely rebuilt between 1070 and 1077. Its east end was enlarged in the early twelfth century and largely rebuilt in Gothic after a fire in 1174, to hold the pilgrims who came to the shrine of Thomas Becket, murdered in the cathedral in 1170. Before the Reformation the cathedral was served by the Priory of Christ Church as well as being the archbishop's seat. The abbey's claim to stand outside that seat, while still burying the archbishops, is the political fact that the privileges were written to protect.

The gatehouse was rebuilt from 1301 to 1309 by Abbot Thomas Fyndon, and it is still called the Fyndon Gate or the Great Gate. The chamber over the entrance was the state bedchamber. In 1625 Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria slept there after their marriage in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1660, after the Restoration, Charles II and his brothers, the dukes of York and Gloucester, stayed in the gatehouse on their way to London. German bombs in the Second World War damaged the gate so badly that it had to be rebuilt. It faces a small square known since the reign of Charles I as Lady Wootton's Green, after the widow of Edward, Lord Wootton of Marley, who lived in the palace until her death in 1658. Statues of Æthelberht and of Bertha stand on the green. The public way into the ruins is on Longport. The gate itself is a private entrance to the school.

In the 1360s Juliana Leybourne paid for a small square chapel on the side of the abbey, called the Countess's Chapel or St Anne's Chapel, with its own buttresses. It held the tomb of the abbot of Bourne, who died in 1334, and the tomb of the abbot of Colwel, who died in 1375. Leybourne was buried there. She gave the manor of Dene in Thanet to the abbey and endowed a chantry for daily prayers after her death. The abbot list names Ralph Burne, who died in 1334, and Thomas Colwell, who died in 1375, as the men those tombs commemorate.

Other Benedictine houses show the range of the order of which this abbey was a great example. Battle Abbey, in Sussex, was founded by William the Conqueror on the field of Hastings and dedicated to St Martin of Tours. He had vowed a monastery if he won, and in 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing of the Conquest. The high altar was to stand where King Harold fell on Saturday 14 October 1066. William died before the church was finished. It was completed about 1094 and consecrated under his son William II, who presented his father's sword and coronation robes. The first monks came from the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier. The house was planned for 140 monks and never held more than 60. William I exempted the church of St Martin of Battle from episcopal jurisdiction and set it on a level with Canterbury. The abbot was mitred, sat in Parliament, and held a privilege of pardoning a criminal he met on the way to execution. The church was remodelled in the late thirteenth century and destroyed at the suppression in May 1538, when seventeen monks remained, among them Abbot John Hamond. Henry VIII gave the site to Sir Anthony Browne, who demolished the church and made the abbot's lodging a country house. Robert of Battle, abbot of St Augustine's from 1224 to 1253, carried that house's name into the Canterbury succession. The two abbeys were surrendered in the same summer.

Edith Weston Priory was a different kind of Benedictine settlement and had no dependence on Canterbury. It was a small alien cell in Edith Weston in Rutland, attached to the abbey of Saint-Georges at Boscherville, which Ralf de Tanquerville, chamberlain to William the Conqueror, had founded about 1050. By 1114 his son William gave the church and manor of Edith Weston, and a few monks were placed there to collect the rents and to pray for the founder. A second English cell, Avebury Priory, was founded about the same time. Like other alien houses, Edith Weston Priory passed to the Crown in time of war with France, and during one such period it closed. The last known prior is recorded in 1361, and by 1394 the church and manor had been sold to St Anne's Priory at Coventry. One architectural guide dismissed it, saying that Brooke Priory was the only monastery in Rutland because Edith Weston hardly counted. The earthworks are thought to lie under Rutland Water. Set beside St Augustine's, it shows the other end of Benedictine life in medieval England: a rent-collecting cell of a French mother house, not a royal burial church with a school and a scriptorium.

The end at Canterbury came with the break from Rome. In 1535 Henry VIII 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 and their property taken for the Crown, on the stated ground that the houses no longer applied their wealth to the religious uses for which it had been given. The commissioners reached St Augustine's on 30 July 1538. Abbot John Essex, also called Foche, who had ruled since 1522, and his brethren signed a voluntary surrender. One account numbers those brethren at thirty. The abbot received a pension and retired to a former manor of the monastery. The monks received pensions, and many became parish priests. Resistance elsewhere had been met with execution, which is offered as the reason this house did not resist. More than nine centuries of monastic life on the site ended that day. In 1530 the monks had still published a pamphlet of miracles associated with Augustine. They cannot have expected the shrine to be gone within a decade.

Henry ordered the demolition of the abbey church in 1541. Stone was sold locally, and some of it went into the fortifications of the Pale of Calais. Silver-gilt images of Augustine and of Æthelberht, by then venerated as a saint, were seized, together with a reliquary that held part of Æthelberht's skull. The shrines of Augustine and of the other saints were destroyed, and so were the tombs of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Kent. The people who had been buried in the church of Saints Peter and Paul included Æthelberht himself, whose shrine was later set above the high altar of the Norman church, Eadbald, and Eadbald's consort Emma of Austrasia. Theodore of Tarsus, Justus, first bishop of Rochester and fourth archbishop, Mellitus, first bishop of London and third archbishop, and Laurence were buried at the abbey, and their grave sites are marked among the ruins. The library was dispersed. One account says it held two thousand manuscripts and that they were destroyed. Another says that 283 volumes survive and that they are only a small fraction of the books the house once owned. Both figures can be true if a great collection was broken up and a remnant kept.

Not every building was felled at once. From 1539 the abbot's apartments were converted into a royal palace, with a walled courtyard and a private garden. The work took more than a decade, and the palace never became a favourite residence. By 1564 it was being let to nobles. Elizabeth I leased it to Lord Cobham, a Kentish diplomat and member of Parliament, and in September 1573 she lodged there. On 7 September, her birthday, she attended a ball at the archbishop's palace and returned at midnight to St Augustine's. After Cobham's attainder for treason in 1603, James I granted the residence to Robert Cecil. Cecil died in 1612. One account says James then leased the palace to Edward, Lord Wootton of Marley, at a yearly rent of 20 pounds, 13 shillings, and 4 pence. Another says the site was sold to Lord Wotton in 1612. The spellings Wootton and Wotton are both used for him. He employed John Tradescant the elder to lay out ornamental gardens, three of them in one account, on the north and east of the palace. In 1618 James granted a seven-year power to search for treasure, plate, jewels, vestments, and books hidden in abbeys and churches, and the abbey was searched and some of the ground dug. Wootton died in 1626. Lady Wootton lived on until 1658.

Sir Edward Hales, and then his son of the same name, took the property after her death. They did not keep the medieval buildings. They carried stone away to build a new house at Hales Place. The abbey stayed with the Hales family until 1804 or 1805. By then the church, cloister, kitchen, and refectory had been lost. 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 a skittle ground. Ethelbert's Tower, the remaining tower of the Norman church, was taken down in 1822. A poorhouse was built in 1793 in the medieval lay cemetery, and a new gaol was built on that ground in 1808. A guide written for the later missionary college says the abbey reached its lowest point of degradation in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the Wotton and Hales years the chamber over the Great Gate was used for cockfighting, and other parts of the building became an inn called the Old Palace.

In 1844 Alexander Beresford Hope bought the ruins. He was born in 1820 and died in 1887, a wealthy Conservative politician, writer, and churchman, the son of Thomas Hope. He sat in Parliament for Maidstone, for Stoke-upon-Trent, and from 1868 for Cambridge University, and he was sworn of the Privy Council in 1880. While at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1839 he helped to found the Cambridge Camden Society with John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, and he spent his fortune on churches, among them All Saints, Margaret Street, designed for that society by William Butterfield. At Canterbury he joined with the Reverend Edward Coleridge, a master at Eton, to found a college that would train missionaries for the British colonies and, at the same time, excavate and preserve the abbey. Butterfield designed the college ranges, put up between 1845 and 1848 on the line of the inner court, reusing the Fyndon Gate and the cemetery gate. Digging for the foundations revealed medieval walls and began an archaeological exploration that continued, in seasons, into the 1980s. St Augustine's College opened in 1848 and is said to have lasted until 1947, when the buildings were let to the King's School. On the night of 31 May 1942 a German raid damaged the college so badly that, in one account, it ceased to operate. From 1952 to 1967 the buildings housed the Central College of the Anglican Communion. From 1969 to 1976 the theology department of King's College London used them for the final year of ordination training. Since 1976 the King's School has used them as boarding houses and a library, first by lease and, in 1994, by purchase.

The ruins, as distinct from the college, passed into state care in 1938, when the Office of Works took guardianship of the ground that was not privately owned. Another account places that step in 1940. Further land was added in 1941, in 1960, and in 1974, after a hospital on the site, closed in 1937 and later used as a technical college, was demolished in 1971. Excavation preceded the opening of a garden there in 1977. In 1996 the public gardens along Longport were brought in, and the southern part of the precinct, including the cloister buildings, is the part displayed to visitors. The northern ground, beyond Butterfield's ranges, was sold in 1961 for a teacher-training college. Excavation toward North Holmes Road from 1983, as that college expanded, found that the earliest church probably stood in an area of Saxon occupation, with metalworking before the abbey. An excavation in 1987 toward Havelock Street found Saxon occupation beyond the western side of the outer court, and occupation of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic, described as the earliest then known within the area of the city. The outer court itself runs from a middle Anglo-Saxon industrial zone to a Norman ditched enclosure and then to a walled medieval court.

Alfred Clapham wrote the official guidebook to the abbey for the Ministry of Works. It was published in 1955, after his death on 26 October 1950. He was born in 1883, worked for the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and became its secretary and then a commissioner. His principal books were the two volumes of Romanesque architecture in England, in 1930 and 1934, and a study of Romanesque architecture in western Europe in 1936. He was president of the Society of Antiquaries and was knighted in 1944. The guidebook is the postwar statement of the ruins as a monument in public care, written by the scholar who had spent his career on the Romanesque buildings of which the Norman abbey church is a major example. He also wrote guides to the Augustinian abbey at Thornton and the Benedictine abbey at Whitby, so the Canterbury volume sits in a set of monastery handbooks rather than in a private history.

In August 2023 a limited excavation returned to the north side of the church of Saints Peter and Paul, the porticus of St Gregory, including part of the north wall and the burial places of the earliest archbishops. Ken Dark directed the work. The plan was to lift the gravel around those tombs, to survey and photograph them, to take samples for radiocarbon dating, and to revisit the archive of the earlier excavator Jenkins. An interim report on that season was prepared in 2023. The results of the dating were not part of the notice that the dig was under way, so they are not stated here. What the season does show is that the seventh-century burial church was still being reopened in the twenty-first century, and that the questions were the same ones the mission had left: who was buried on the north side, and how the first masonry church related to Augustine's arrival.

The abbey changed what Christianity looked like in the southern English kingdoms. It was the first monastery established in an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and it was the burial place of the kings who accepted the Roman mission and of the archbishops who led it. Its school and scriptorium made Canterbury a centre of books. Its exemption from the cathedral, and the mitre worn by its abbots, kept a second power in the city for the rest of the Middle Ages. The suppression transferred that wealth and those shrines to the Crown, and the palace that followed never replaced the monastery as a centre of either learning or pilgrimage. The college of 1848 tried to revive the missionary purpose on the same ground. The ruins that remain, the marked graves of Augustine of Canterbury, Mellitus, Justus, and Laurence, the relaid floor tiles in the chapel of St Mary, and the brick walls of St Pancras, are the parts of that story that can still be walked.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/st-augustine-s-abbey