Canterbury Cathedral

In 596 Pope Gregory I ordered Augustine, a Benedictine abbot in Rome, to lead a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons; he founded the cathedral at Canterbury in 597 and dedicated it to Jesus Christ, the Holy Saviour. Bede recorded that he reused a former Roman church, but excavations beneath the present nave in 1993 found the oldest remains to be those of an Anglo-Saxon building laid across a Roman road.

Under Dunstan, archbishop from 960 to 988, a Benedictine house known as Christ Church Priory was added. Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy were married here in the spring of 1002, and Emma was consecrated "Queen Ælfgifu". Danish raids badly damaged the cathedral in 1011; the archbishop, Ælfheah, was taken hostage by the raiders and killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012, the first of Canterbury's five martyred archbishops. Fire destroyed the building in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest.

Rebuilding began in 1070 under the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc, who cleared the ruins and worked to a design based closely on the abbey of Saint-Étienne at Caen, where he had been abbot. The new cruciform church was dedicated in 1077. The fabric then passed largely to the priors: after Prior Ernulf's election in 1096, Lanfranc's east end was demolished and replaced by an eastern arm 198 feet long, doubling the length of the cathedral. Ernulf was succeeded in 1107 by Conrad, who completed the work by 1126.

Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in the north-west transept — also known as the Martyrdom — on Tuesday 29 December 1170 by four knights of Henry II, who is said to have exclaimed in frustration, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" The posthumous veneration of Becket transformed the cathedral into a place of pilgrimage.

In September 1174 fire severely damaged the quire, and the rebuilding was recorded in detail by a monk named Gervase. Everything but the crypt and the outer walls was replaced in the Gothic style, and the quire was back in use by 1180. The French master-mason William of Sens directed the work until a fall from the scaffolding injured him in 1179, when a former assistant known as William the Englishman replaced him. The Trinity Chapel, built to house Becket's shrine, was completed in 1184, though his remains were not moved up from the crypt until 1220.

The 1382 Dover Straits earthquake cost the cathedral its bells and campanile. From the late 14th century the Norman nave and transepts were rebuilt in the Perpendicular style under the master mason Henry Yevele, much of it during Thomas Chillenden's priorate (1391–1411); the 235-foot crossing tower was begun in 1433. Income from pilgrims at Becket's shrine — among them those Chaucer put on the road in the Canterbury Tales — largely paid for this rebuilding.

Becket's shrine stood on a marble plinth above his original tomb, its gold-covered chest kept under a wooden cover raised on ropes once pilgrims had gathered. Erasmus, who visited in 1512–1514, recorded that the prior "pointed out each jewel, telling its name in French, its value, and the name of its donor". The shrine was removed in 1538 and its treasures carried away in two coffers and 26 carts. Christ Church was surrendered to the Crown on 30 March 1539 and the monks ejected; the New Foundation of secular canons came into being on 8 April 1541.

In around 1576 the crypt was granted to Canterbury's Huguenot congregation as their Church of the Crypt. In 1642–43 Puritan iconoclasts led by Edwin Sandys did significant damage in their "cleansing" of the cathedral, destroying the statue of Christ on the Christ Church Gate. The Norman north-west tower was demolished in 1834 owing to structural concerns and replaced by a Perpendicular twin of its neighbour, the last major structural alteration to the building. The library was destroyed in the bombing raids of the Second World War, though the cathedral did not sustain extensive bomb damage; local fire wardens doused flames on the wooden roof.

A new Martyrdom Altar was installed in 1986 on the spot where Becket was killed, the first new altar in the cathedral for 448 years. The cathedral is listed Grade I and has formed part of a World Heritage Site since 1988. It receives no state funding and is not funded by the Church of England, relying on entry fees and commercial income; upkeep costs around £20,000 a day, and the Canterbury Journey restoration programme of 2016–2022 finished at £34.5m. David Monteith became dean in December 2022.