THE ROMANO-BRITISH AND SAXON CHURCH
Relic of St. Furseus
The crypt chapel contained towards the east an altar, in which was afterwards enclosed as a relic the head of the blessed Furseus. The relic was, of course, not deposited there during St. Austin's archiepiscopate, as the saint did not die till nearly fifty years after the death of St. Austin, viz. in A.D. 650. It is indeed rather surprising to find any relic of such an one as Furseus, venerated in the Metropolitical Church of Canterbury, as during his life he was rather a thorn in the flesh of the Saxon Hierarchy in Kent, he being an Irishman and deriving his orders from the despised British Church, whose members still followed the primitive tradition as to the computation of Easter, the method of making the tonsure, and the use of chrism in baptism. It was Furseus, however, and his companions who converted East Anglia to the Faith. He was of royal Irish stock, being a son of King FINTAN and had been Abbot of Tuam; he had travelled in England and France and in both countries had founded monasteries. He died in A.D. 650 and was buried in the Great Church of Peronne, where his relics have since been famous for miracles. His festival is kept on January 16. A very ancient Life of the Saint, of the time of Bede, exists, and Bede himself, in giving the principal events of his life, quotes it in Book III, chapter 19.[1] Amongst his miracles was that of a most remarkable vision, which appears to have been the original of Dante's Divina Commedia.
There is no record of how his head came to Canterbury, or by whom,
- ↑ Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation.
transept or nave of the church leading to the polyandrium—the curved passage which followed the inner wall of the apse—and communicating with the confessio chapel at its eastern limit, where it turned west, direct to the burial-place of the saint buried therein. Sir William St. John Hope thought that at Canterbury this method of entrance and exit extended simply from the transept close to the east wall of the church. Professor G. Baldwin Brown thought that "the two ends were joined by a straight passage forming the chord of the arc of the apse." Both these ideas are conjectural so far as Canterbury is concerned. In the text, Edmer's description has been followed closely, and as St. Peter's at Rome had a central west to east entrance to the confessio or crypt chapel, as well as a north to south passage to the polyandrium which was used as a place of burial for the Popes, and as intramural burial was forbidden in England at the time of St. Austin, it seems likely that only a central west to east means of access to the passageway and to the crypt chapel was adopted at Canterbury by St. Austin in imitation of that he had seen at St. Peter's at Rome. (See further in the Appendix).
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