Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/56

THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY

information respecting the reintroduction of Christianity into England and its settlement under St. Austin, having been taught by that most reverend Abbot of St, Austin's, Albinus, a man of great and encyclopædic learning, but had journeyed to Rome and had collected much in the way of letters, documents, etc., from the archives there, which he had copied and sent to Bede for his History. He had been quite content, when Archbishop, to allow things to continue as under his predecessors; but Cuthbert, his successor, was of a different calibre, a far-seeing and astute prelate, whose desire was to make his Church pre-eminent in the country. Here, in what was becoming the heart of the Saxon City, was the Cathedral, but its treasure was at St. Austin's. Cuthbert determined that the law prohibiting intramural burials should cease, and to that end he procured from Eadbert, King of Kent, authority that in future the bodies of the Archbishops deceased should not be buried at St. Austin's as heretofore, but at Christ Church Cathedral; to the intent that they might have their resting-place where they had, living, ruled in honour. Up to this time the Kings of Kent, the Archbishops, the religious (Gervase says monks, but they were clerks at the Cathedral), as well as the monks of the Abbey and people of the city, had been buried in the atrium or churchyard of the Church of the Apostles Peter and Paul, beyond the walls; for the Romans declared on first coming into England that cities were for the living and not for the dead.^[1] To this end, as Edmer states, he

"Built a church on the east part of the greater church, almost touching the same, and solemnly hallowed it in honour of the blessed John Baptist. He constructed the church to this end, that

(1) baptisms might be held therein, and

(2) inquiries of Courts of Justice appointed for divers causes which were wont to be held in the Church of God for the correction of evil-doers; also

(3) that the bodies of the Archbishops might be buried in it," etc.

William Thorne, the chronicler of St. Austin's Abbey, gives us a very human account of the way in which Archbishop Cuthbert changed the policy of his predecessors. Thorne was a monk of St. Austin's at the end of the fourteenth century. He was born at Thorne in the parish of Minster in the Isle of Thanet; the Abbey possessed the manor and

1. Gervase, Act. Pont. Cant. (p. 1640).

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