Canterbury’s best kept secret
Anglicans around the world know Canterbury and its cathedral as the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury---head of their church. Roman Catholics may know it as the place where Thomas Becket was murdered. Few of them will know, and some of them may not want to know, about the oldest, and in some respects the most significant ecclesiastical building, in the city.
It is not an imposing cathedral but a very small parish church standing on a mound outside the walls to the east surrounded by trees and the higgledy piggledy tombstones of a traditional enclosed graveyard. It is approached up a 40 degrees flight of stone steps.
Even the citizens of Canterbury do not seem to know it as I found on a recent visit. Time and again when I asked locals for directions I was told that there are so many churches in Canterbury they had no idea where St Martin’s might be. I eventually obtained a marked map from the tourist office opposite to the Cathedral gate and decided to take a taxi which I would recommend anybody else to do. Even the taxi driver had to follow the map.
The church of St Martin was built in AD400 and incorporates ‘borrowed’ roman stone in the construction of its ragstone walls. The Roman Legions departed in AD410 never to return. It stands, a mute testimony, to the existence of Christian life in the British Isles long before the arrival of St Augustine and his monks.
It was the church made available to the new arrivals by the King of Kent Aethelbert and his Queen Bertha when it was already 200 years old. In due course Augustine built his own Abbey next to where the cathedral now stands.
Whether to his surprise or not Augustine found an existing church which owed nothing to Rome, which was part of a universal church, had links with Alexandria, Asia Minor and North Africa and whose Bishops participated in general councils of that universal church. British Bishops are recorded as present in Arles AD312 and Nicaea in AD 323.
The Romanist historian The Venerable Bede records that shortly after his arrival Augustine convened a council of all the British Bishops and that they assembled from far and wide including from Ireland. This itself is testimony to the existence of a church as also is the fact that he settled in Canterbury. His commission was to establish sees in London and York but he was not welcome in either as they had Bishops of their own so he settled for Canterbury.
That pre Augustine church produced some notable figures not least St Patrick who founded his cathedral in Armagh in AD447 and St Columba who brought Christianity back across the Irish Sea to Lindisfarne and who died in the year Augustine arrived AD597. The theologian Pelagius was another controversial figure so much so that one of the much later 39 articles requires Anglicans not to subscribe to his views. He was active in the middle of the fourth century a contemporary and opponent of one of the fathers of the church St Augustine of Hippo. So influential was he in the British Isles that St Germanus was sent twice almost a century later in AD429 and again in AD447 to root out the Pelagian heresy which incidentally was a denial of the doctrine of original sin amongst other things.
Probably the most significant product however was the Emperor Constantine who has a better claim to be the founder of the Church of Rome than St Peter. At least he was there. He granted religious toleration and made Christianity the state religion. On the other hand there is no evidence that St Peter was ever in Rome. There is a strong indication that he was not. He disappears from view early in the Acts of the Apostles which is the official history of the early church. It is surely to be expected that the man who is destined to found Gods’ church on earth would merit a mention in that document. In that context he does not.
There is clear evidence of a connection with Alexandria. Several lead baptismal fonts have been found. The archaeologist Francis Pryor found one of them at the bottom of a Roman well. There is an illustration in his book Britain AD .The important thing about this one in particular is that round its base are inscribed Coptic/Gnostic religious symbols They would only have come from the Alexandrian church.
The other important factor is the calendar. The fact that the date of Easter was a cause of dispute at the Synod of Whitby causes some amusement today but this is what it was about. The calendar by which the British church functioned did not coincide with that used by the Romans. It could only have been imported and where else but from Alexandria which was the centre of Christianity in the earliest days. In the religious royal household of Northumbria this caused some confusion. The King was of the British church looking to Lindisfarne whereas his Queen was from Kent and of the Roman persuasion. This meant that they arrived at Lent at different times.
St Martin’s did not come early in the history of the British church. There is some evidence of a very early structure at Glastonbury which seems to have substance. It is named for the Bishop of Tours who is credited with completing the evangelisation of Gaul (modern France). In the Coptic church although the worship of saints is forbidden nevertheless their churches are named after them. The first Coptic cathedral in Britain consecrated recently near Stevenage is named after St George.
St Germanus when he came to Britain remarked upon the opulent dress of the clergy he met at Verulamium (St Albans ). It seems unlikely that these gentlemen did not have buildings but perhaps not built of stone they have not survived .It was the Romans who introduced building in stone and the remarkably durable mortar and plasters which made it possible. Hence the survival of St Martin’s.
For anybody with a sense of history it is an experience to stand where those other personages stood all those centuries ago and where moves were made which have shaped the history of these islands to the present day. It is a simple and otherwise unremarkable structure to have been the seat and spring from which such momentous events have flowed. It deserves to be better known not least in Canterbury. 
