Canterbury, St Martins



	Dedication : St Martin Simon Jenkins: * Principal Features : England’s Oldest Church; Norman Font: UNESCO WHS

A question I sometimes get asked is “Which is England’s oldest church?”. That sounds a pretty straightforward matter of fact but, as in so many things ecclesiastical, it isn’t because it depends to some extent on what you mean by “church” but I think it is fair to say that the accepted answer is St Martin’s in Canterbury. It is no coincidence that it is within the town that has the cathedral which is the most important in the Anglican form of Christianity.

When I was a primary school kid - even then devouring history that my friends found stultifyingly boring - I was fed a whole raft of codswallop about Christianity (and about most aspects of mediaeval life for that matter), with myth presented as established fact. One of those was that St Augustine (not to be confused with his earlier and spiritually depraved namesake, Augustine of Hippo, who devised some of the bleakest and most un-Christian doctrines in the history of this much-misused religion) “brought Christianity to England” in AD597. That is, despite England’s being part of the Roman Empire and Christianity being the Empire’s state religion more or less continuously since the reign of the Emperor Constantine. It is also despite the presence of Christianity in our northern kingdoms, often of the Celtic variety and emanating from Ireland.

In the late sixth century the kingdom of Kent was ruled by the pagan Aethelbert who married Bertha, a Frankish noble woman who was a Christian. Aethelbert had agreed

as part of the marriage contract that Bertha would be free to pursue her own religion. Aethelbert gave his queen an old Roman building in Canterbury, less than half a mile from the later cathedral, to use as her chapel. Bertha had been brought up near Tours so the chapel was dedicated to St Martin who is indelibly associated with that town. We don’t know whether the building gifted by Aethelbert was already a church. Roman buildings tended to conform to certain designs whether they were religious or secular. In fact, after the departure of the Romans in AD410, the Celts who remained and the Anglo-Saxon insurgents had little use for Roman towns and villas. Their preoccupation was with farming, not urban life. Excavation has indicated a rectangular building with smaller rectangular excrescences on each of the cardinal points. These are the forerunners, or perhaps even the model, for “porticuses” attached to later Anglo-Saxon churches, of which the best example can, perhaps, be seen at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire. This, however, does not mean that the donated building was necessarily built as a church. Taylor & Taylor in their definitive work on Anglo-Saxon architecture plausibly suggested the existence of an apse to the east end but, again, this was a feature of the so-called “Basilican Plan” that the Romans used for secular buildings as well as for churches and even for their own pagan temples.

Excavations reveal that this chapel was probably a simple rectangular central area with narrow, shallow porticuses to each side.

The then Pope Gregory the Great knew a sure thing when he saw one and sent Augustine who was a Roman with forty acolytes to land in England, probably at the old Roam fortress at Richborough on the Isle of Thanet which, at that time, really was an island. Aethelbert allowed Augustine to use Bertha’s chapel for their religious purposes. .In due course, Aethelbert converted to Christianity and allowed Augustine & Co to set about building churches and converting his subjects. It is one of the glorious nonsenses written about this period of history that once a king was baptised all of his subjects, dispersed amongst the wilds and forests, fell like apples into the grateful laps of the pious Christian Conversion Team. This was Bede’s world view over a century after the event and we have all swallowed it more or less hook, line and sinker. This was the man whose most venomous and contemptuous condemnation of the Vikings were that they were “Heathens”. Their tendencies to destruction, slaughter and enslavement was almost a secondary consideration, it seems! Of course, it is perfectly true that Christianity spread over first millennium proto-England like a rash (no insult intended) and royal conversion was undoubtedly a prerequisite but I don’t think it was quite as simple as Bede portrayed it. Perhaps, like the Vikings who later settled in England, they initially put the God of Augustine in amongst their other deities, despite the “One True God” moniker. Pagan beliefs died hard: indeed are arguably not even dead today. When did you last put shoes on a table?

Anyway, Bertha’s chapel developed into the church we see today. That is indisputable. So unless you define the oldest church as being the oldest one indisputably originally built for the sole purpose of Christian worship this is the oldest. Roman Silchester had a building that might have been a church - again, with the basilican plan - but as it has been dated to the third century when Christianity was still a very dangerous belief system to espouse publicly; so I think it unlikely. And, of course, there are remains of oratories built by the Celtic monks but these were designed, generally, as the focal points for outdoor gatherings of Christians, rather than being churches as we would know them. If you want to see the “real thing” - an ancient church built for the purpose - then Escomb in County Durham might be a major contender. Possibly also Brixworth in Northants. Escomb. however, is much the most complete of the three, although Brixworth’s Anglo-Saxon elements are very extensive and impressive. It reminds me of the endless debates amongst we kids on the post-war Birmingham council estate where I was brought up about which family was the first to move into the street. Noses could be bloodied, eyes blacked and the vilest insults could be hurled in support of that prestigious title. Nobody ever agreed, not even the parents. But if any of my old neighbours are reading this (are you there - the Hardimans, the Braggs, the Davises, the Coxalls, the Griffins?) it was definitely us Walls. My mum and dad told me so for a fact!

The photograph above will tell you that there are only fragments of Bertha’s chapel remaining but this is for the church crawler a very important pilgrimage and I was amazed, even on a Sunday morning in the Summer, how many visitors there were. This is a church that really does have a special place in our island’s history. We need to be careful, however. Nobody is very clear whether the oldest fabric we see her was definitely part of the original Bertha church or was part of the Augustine church.

Anyway, about the building, The only remaining probable part of Bertha’s church is part of the south west wall of the present chancel. That church, however, probably did not have a chancel as we would know it but an eastern porticus may have performed a similar function in housing the altar. This can be a slightly disappointing realisation because when you look to the present west wall it is clearly very ancient and you easily imagine it to be part of Bertha’s church. It is, however, later Anglo-Saxon and it is hard to date. It could well be as early as seventh century. So too are the nave walls so what we seems to have had at that point is an Anglo-Saxon nave with a Roman chancel. At this point the church would have had two cells: a large nave with a western doorway and three western windows arranged in a row and with a couple of windows on each of its sides. The porticuses had been removed. The chancel would have been based around the Bertha/Augustine chapel. It was extended further east in the thirteenth century in the Early English style and a chancel arch inserted so as to form a distinct and discrete chancel with Bertha’s wall forming a part of its south side. Complicated, isn’t it? It will become clearer when you see the pictures!

One oddity here is the very large font. It is very large and has unusual geometric decoration as well as the more usual “blind arcading” pattern. The Church Guide suggest it might be a well head moved from the cathedral cloisters.. Well, who knows? I think there would have not been a font there when it was a Royal Chapel but you might have expected an Anglo-Saxon font later. Did this Norman one replace it and was it originally a font? Mystery!

Left: Looking east through the rather awkward-looking Early English chancel arch. The EE triple lancet east window can be seen in the background. A print of 1839 shown within the Church Guide shows a single window with simple scissors tracery without discussing the apparent discrepancy. So this triple lancet might be a replacement, although ones needs to beware of the fanciful nature of many such prints. Right: Part of the original chapel south wall in the chancel. The doorway is a little older than the wall to its right and was inserted in the seventh century..

Left: Another filled-in doorway further to the west of the chancel south wall. This too is an Anglo-Saxon insertion into the original wall. Right: The chancel south wall from the outside. None of the windows are original.. The priest’s door in the photograph left can clearly be seen. To its left in this picture you can see the remains of square headed doorway which gave entrance to the south porticus from the original church. Note the materials with lots of Roman tiling in evidence.


	Left: This piece of wall on the north side of the chancel next to the chancel arch is surely also part of the original structure of Bertha’s chapel. Was the doorway to the north porticus here too? Right: The thirteenth century eastward extension on the chancel with the limit of the seventh century chancel visible on the right of this picture.

The Anglo-Saxon west wall. Just to emphasise again that this was not part of the Bertha/Augustine structure. Only at St Martins, perhaps, could you look at a seventh century west wall and feel ever so slightly cheated! It now forms the east wall of the tower that was added in the fourteenth century. Like all of the famous Anglo-Saxon west walls such as Brixworth and Deerhurst, you look for tell-tale evidence of filled in windows and doorways and try to make sense of what the wall looked like originally. The central section might show the outline of an inordinately tall - even by Anglo-Saxon standards - doorway. Much more likely is that the arched upper section was a window over the top a much more modest west doorway that has been replaced by the fourteenth century one, To its right is another filled-in window and you can make the outline of another to its left, thus probably forming a triplet of windows. Such is the mystery of how this wall evolved in the seven hundred years between its construction and its incorporation into the tower we cannot know. Was that central window always larger than its flanking counterparts or was it enlarged and when? Taylor & Taylor pointed to the curious lack of heads to their arches and believed they were originally lower in height. The Church Guide believes they were enlarged by the Normans. We must assume that the topmost opening was inserted when the west tower was added,






	It might be almost sacrilegious to say so, but the font is perhaps the most visually interesting part of the church. It is most peculiar. It is made of as many as twenty separate pieces that have not been joined together altogether seamlessly - to say the least. Like everything else here, its provenance is something of a mystery. Some believe it to be pre-Norman or even that it was the font in which Aethelbert was baptised. That’s nice story but this surely is not a sixth century font?

The blind arcading decoration and in particular, the pellet moulding within that design and within the ring chain decoration looks Norman. This was certainly the view of the Taylors and of Pevsner which is a pretty formidable body of opinion. But was it made as a font? As previously mentioned, the Church Guide reckons it started life as a well head in the cathedral cloister. Perhaps that would explain why it has apparently been assembled from parts rather than being a single piece. Curiously too, that Victorian print shows as a much squatter piece with less ring chain decoration. We must, I think again question the accuracy of that print. I think we must go with the Church Guide’s view, not least because,although they don’t say so, the cathedral itself will have much more documentation to support such a provenance.

It is a curiously rough old piece of work, even allowing for its reconstruction. Some of the “circles” are quite geometrically drawn. others less so and the way that they are interlinked is crude and inaccurate. In particular see the panel (top right). We can forgive the inaccuracy of the blind arcading: making that regular in a course all around a circular surface - much less meeting up properly - was too much for many a Norman mason with his limited toolset. The rim, however, is really rough. In fact, it looks like it has been patched together. It does beg the question: never mind if this was taken apart and reassembled was it ever a single piece to start with? Was that artist drawing what he actually saw in 1839? The stone is from Caen in Normandy which might also support the case that it was in the cathedral.


	Left: Inside a niche in the Anglo-Saxon fabric of the north wall this remarkable survival is displayed. Made of brass, it is a fourteenth century chrismatory - a receptacle for the holy oil. Right: The two north doorways of the ancient chancel. To the left the doorway to demolished north porticus with a stone lintel. To the right the doorway to the Anglo-Saxon church with its tiled arch.

Left: I felt that this glass at the top of a window in the north aisle must surely be mediaeval and clearly French. That, surely, is Joan of Arc in the gold armour at the bottom carrying the long banner. I have seen it described as being of 1980 from Chartres in France. Surely not? The most plausible subject is the walls of Tours from when St Martin came. But this glass looks like it was part of a larger design. Perhaps the glass was placed here in 1980 and it might even have originated in Chartres but that glass was surely not manufactured in 1980. Right: The main panel of the window of which the Walls of Tours piece is the top. This is,(of course) St Martin of Tours. He was a popular saint commemorated in many English churches and was the patron saint of France’s Third Republic (1870-1940). Martin was a fourth century Roman soldier who became Bishop of Tours. Unsurprisingly, all sorts of nonsense is ascribed to him in his hagiography but this scene is perhaps the most familiar. Still a soldier, he meets a beggar and cuts his cloak in half with his sword and shares it with the man. Christ appeared to Martin in a vision that night. Martin’s shrine became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in mediaeval Christianity. Martin’s military and ecclesiastical history is actually pretty well documented and plausible. This window is made of mediaeval glass and was donated to the church from France but there is a suggestion that this is not an original mediaeval composition.

Left: Looking to the west Centre: This piscina could, at a stretch, be of almost any date up to about AD1200 but it is thought to be Norman. In truth, I don’t know how anyone would know and I am a little puzzled because I am unaware of any other Norman work (as opposed to the font which is a fitting) within the church: and this is set in the Anglo-Saxon south wall of the nave. Right: This wide filled-in doorway on the north side was the doorway to the north porch.

From the congruous to the incongruous. Left: From the west door you can see Canterbury Cathedral - seen here through a 270mm lens so not quite as close as it appears. Right: The now-closed Canterbury Prison is directly opposite the west end of the church! Built in 1808, it closed in 2013 and was bought by Canterbury Christ Church University who have not, however, done anything with it to date.


	Left: The fourteenth century west tower through which you pass to enter the church these days. Right: The west door built into the Anglo-Saxon west wall with the faint outline of an arch above it.


	Return to Kent


	Return to Home Page

I hope you have enjoyed this Page and, perhaps many more besides. Could you help me to make it better still and preserve its future?

Please click here to see how.


	You may Download or Print this Page from the Link below