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So great was his abstraction, that he suffered the Lombard to dismiss the monk without a word spoken by him; and he was first startled from his reverie by Lanfranc's pale hand on his vast shoulder, and Lanfranc's low voice in his dreamy ear: "Up! Hero of Europe: for thy cause is won! Up! and write with thy bold characters, bold as if graved with the point of the sword, my credentials to Rome.
So great was his abstraction, that he suffered the Lombard to dismiss the monk without a word spoken by him; and he was first startled from his reverie by Lanfranc's pale hand on his vast shoulder, and Lanfranc's low voice in his dreamy ear: "Up! Hero of Europe: for thy cause is won! Up! and write with thy bold characters, bold as if graved with the point of the sword, my credentials to Rome.
The new Archbishop of York refused Lanfranc's demand that he should take the oath of obedience to Canterbury, and asserted his independence and coordinate position, and laid claim to three bordering bishoprics as belonging to his metropolitan see, Worcester, Lichfield, and Dorchester.
It stood till 1379 with a low and short Norman nave and transept to the west, and a great Transitional choir and transept to the east. In 1379 Lanfranc's nave and transept were destroyed. It may be thought that at last a great and noble nave would be built north of the Frenchman's choir. Not at all.
Learning and education found their centre in the school of Bec, which the teaching of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised in a few years into the most famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc's first contact with William, if it showed the Duke's imperious temper, showed too his marvellous insight into men.
Lanfranc's choir was of but two bays and an apse. This was too obviously inadequate to be tolerated by the monks. In 1096 it was pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the north arm and two in the south.
He assisted the king in the removal of the Saxon bishops and the substitution of Normans in their places, as also in the reformation of the great English monasteries which appear to have fallen into considerable disorder. Lanfranc's character was remarkable for its firmness, and brought him into frequent collision with the imperious temper of his royal master.
During the four centuries which passed during the construction and reconstruction of the fabric, considerable changes had manifested themselves in the science and art of architecture. Hence it is that Canterbury Cathedral is a history, written in solid stone, of architectural progress, illustrating in itself almost all the various kinds of the style commonly called Pointed. Of these the earliest form of Gothic and Perpendicular chiefly predominate. The shape and arrangement of the building was doubtless largely influenced by the extraordinary number of precious relics which it contained, and which had to be properly displayed and fittingly enshrined. Augustine's church had possessed the bodies of St. Blaize and St. Wilfrid, brought respectively from Rome and from Ripon; of St. Dunstan, St. Alphege, and St. Ouen, as well as the heads of St. Swithin and St. Furseus, and the arm of St. Bartholomew. These were all carefully removed and placed, each in separate altars and chapels, in Lanfranc's new cathedral. Here their number was added to by the acquisition of new relics and sacred treasures as time went on, and finally Canterbury enshrined its chiefest glory, the hallowed body of St. Thomas
It was founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc, and no doubt for a time served as a hospital for Lepers, but it was soon appropriated for the use of the sick and wayfarers generally, and though nothing save the chapel remains to us from Lanfranc's day, the whole place is so full of interest that no one should pass it by.
The present cathedral consists of work extending from Lanfranc's time until that of Prior Goldstone in the fifteenth century, thus exhibiting specimens of all the schools of Gothic architecture. Canterbury Cathedral is among the largest churches in England, being five hundred and twenty-two feet long, and its principal entrance is by the south porch.
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