Canterbury

Canterbury Cathedral in Kent is the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, the foremost prelate of the English Church. It was founded in 597 by Augustine, leader of the Gregorian mission.

After the Norman Conquest the cathedral was rebuilt between 1070 and 1077 under Archbishop Lanfranc, and rebuilt again in the Gothic style after a fire in 1174. Its greatest claim to sanctity was the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered before the altar by knights of Henry II in 1170; pilgrims flocked to it for the next three and a half centuries. In 1538 Henry VIII dissolved the priory and destroyed Becket's shrine during the English Reformation, though the cathedral church itself survived.