Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
Having reached its greatest glories, Canterbury began to decline, and the dissolution of the two great monasteries and the demolishing of Becket's shrine must have been to the city, on a much larger scale, what the sweeping away of all the Shakespearean landmarks and relics from Stratford-on-Avon of to-day would imply.
There seems to be some discrepancy among historians as to Becket's birth and origin, some making him out a pure Norman, and others a Saxon, and others again half Saracen. But that is, after all, a small matter, although the critics make a great thing of it. They always are inclined to wrangle over unimportant points.
It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether. Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.
I wish to know how all my old companions and fellow-laborers do; if the club yet exists; if you, and Richardson, and Lord John, and Ellis, and Lawrence, and Fitzpatrick, &c., meet, and joke, and write, as of old. What is become of Becket's, and the supper-parties, the noctes coenaeque? Poor Burgoyne!
As the price, however, of his reconciliation with the Papacy after Becket's death, Henry was obliged to withdraw the Constitutions. The position of the Church on this question was clearly stated by Pope Celestine III in 1192.
He accepted the earldom of Huntingdon from Henry, and in 1170, when the younger Henry was crowned in Becket's despite, William took the oath of fealty to him as Earl of Huntingdon. But in 1173-74, when the English king's ungrateful son organized a baronial revolt, William decided that his chance had come.
Even miracles were reputed to be wrought at that shrine, while a drop of Becket's blood would purchase a domain! Whatever may be said about the cause of Becket, to which there are two sides, there is no doubt about his popularity. Even the Reformation, and the changes made in the English Constitution, have not obliterated the veneration in which he was held for five hundred years.
Further on is Canterbury, which is celebrated as the stronghold of Kentishmen and the first English Christian city. Its prime attraction of course is its fine cathedral, which in 1170 was the scene of Becket's murder. Dover on the English Channel lies in a deep valley surrounded by high chalk hills.
At Waterloo a man had told her she must get out of the carriage she had travelled alone in it and she had meekly obeyed. She had wandered out of the station and across a bridge and had eventually found herself in the Embankment Gardens. Then she had asked me how to find Harry. Really she was ridiculously like Thomas a Becket's Saracen mother crying in London for Gilbert.
It was the great and self-forgetting act of an obscure baker, but a saint of God, that built the mighty half abandoned church we see at Rochester, nor was he for sure altogether forgotten when all England went by to kneel and to pray beside Becket's shrine at Canterbury, raised there in a heavenly cause, which must prevail in the end, though neither Rochester nor Canterbury to-day might seem to bear out any such certainty.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking