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Updated: May 12, 2025
From the opposite transept, steps lead down to the undercroft, and also up to the south choir aisle the way the pilgrims approached the shrine of St. Thomas. Also opening from the south-west transept is St. Michael's or the Warrior's Chapel, as it is now popularly called.
The usual place for the Lady Chapel in cathedrals is, of course, at the extreme east end; but at Canterbury the situation was occupied by the shrine of St. Thomas. The principal altar to the Virgin in our cathedral was that in the crypt, in the "Chapel of Our Lady Undercroft." The vault of the Dean's Chapel is noticeable.
This was a crypt described by Eadmer, the monkish historian, who, as a boy, saw the Saxon church being demolished. It was only a small affair, but it must have been the most remarkable feature of the comparatively small oblong building, for it was not, properly speaking, a crypt at all, but an undercroft beneath the eastern altars.
The massive buttress supporting the choir wall, at the head of the steps to the undercroft, is divided into stages by a flat niche or panel with side-shafts of Purbeck marble. This was found, in 1840, to contain a mural painting of the Crucifixion, with the Blessed Virgin and St. John at the foot of the cross.
They usually stand in the centre of the market-place, and have an undercroft, the upper storey resting on pillars. Beneath this shelter the market women display their wares and fix their stalls on market days, and there you will perhaps see the fire-engine, at least the old primitive one which was in use before a grand steam fire-engine had been purchased and housed in a station of its own.
Mylne was consulted and, by his direction, piles of bricks were erected in the undercroft, and other methods were used to discharge the weight of the upper works. These schemes were brutal and inartistic. Though they answered their purpose for some years, they were afterwards found to be doing harm rather than good.
The cloister and chapter-house have round arches; the remains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the Saracenic coupling to which we have got used in Italy, Sicily, and Southern Gaul. In an odd position to the west of the church, forbidding any west front, is an undercroft with columns with good, but not very rich, twelfth-century capitals, clearly of a piece with the cloister.
In its great length this choir is unique, and in the lowness of its vaulted roof is also unusual, but this is accounted for by the undercroft beneath. From the centre of the choir the remarkable inward bend of the walls, necessitated through the determination not to alter the plan of the Trinity Chapel so hallowed by the memory of the Blessed St.
Beneath this flying arch appears the splendid western screen, approached by the flight of steps necessitated by the crypt or undercroft, for, being on perfectly level ground, there would have been no need for this unique feature.
During the past year John had added to his brother's castle a chapel with an undercroft, placed at the southeastern corner of the second ward.
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