THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY
convenient, is proved by the fact that upon this early constructed nucleus three cathedrals have been successively built and rebuilt.
Of these three cathedrals, nothing of the earliest, except possibly a few fragments of its materials, is to be found above ground. But of it an account has fortunately come down to us, written by a monk named Edmer, who had been a boy at the monastery school, afterwards a member of the convent and precentor, and an eye-witness of its destruction by fire in 1067. His account, with those of others, will be discussed in Chapter II, but we must begin our investigations by first referring to a short but highly important notice, which was written rather more than 300 years earlier by the Venerable Bede, to be found in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Church.
The Coming of St. Austin
This work Bede probably finished about the year A.D. 730. After describing the coming of St. Austin and his company and their reception by King Ethelbert in A.D. 597, Bede goes on to describe how St. Austin obtained a building, which he had been told had been built by "faithful Romans," and "in the same place he (Austin) established a dwelling for himself and his successors."[1] This building, formerly without the walls of the Roman city, was at this time within the city by the extension of the city walls to the north. It is likely, as before stated, that all three cathedrals occupied the same site; and the same may with reason be said with regard to "the dwelling for himself and his successors," which St. Austin established.
It is not my present intention to deal with the question of St. Austin's domestic buildings, but merely to suggest that there is strong reason to believe that they occupied the same relative position with regard to his Cathedral Church with those of Lanfranc and all subsequent builders, down to the time of the dissolution of the Priory in 1540, In this connection it must be borne in mind that St. Austin was a Benedictine monk and that many of his forty companions were members of the same order, certainly all those described by Bede as "servants of God."
- ↑ Bede, Hist. Eccl. I, xxxiii.
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