CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF CUTHBERT
A.D. 741-942
THE building above described appears to have undergone little or no change during the next 150 years. It was used as the Church of the Archbishop, but the ecclesiastical centre of gravity was to be found in the neighbouring Abbey of St. Austin and in its Church of Saints Peter and Paul. This was on account of the school set up there by Archbishop Theodore, and also, probably to a greater extent, by reason of the policy adopted on its foundation by King Ethelbert and St. Austin, that it should be the burial-place of the Kings of Kent and the Archbishops of Canterbury. All the Archbishops up to the time of Cuthbert (741-759) had been buried at St. Austin's, with the result that the Metropolitical Church possessed no tomb of a distinguished local saint to draw the attention or the devotion of the multitude; and its ambulatory and Crypt Chapel were destitute of any great attraction except for the relic, in the latter place, of the head of the Irish monk, Furseus.
It might have been thought that the particular function of a confessio was fulfilled by the possession of this relic, as its proper meaning is the vault or crypt under the High Altar which contained the relics of a saint or martyr; Cianipini and others use it to signify the grilled opening before the altar, through which, approached by a flight of steps down from the west, relics might be viewed.[1]
The Archbishop who preceded Cuthbert was Nothelm, who was a student of history. He had been a priest of the diocese of London, and had not only been the means of transmitting to the Venerable Bede
- ↑ Canon Livett's Report on the West Wall of the Crypt, Canterbury, 1925.
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