Few English cities carry their age so visibly, or wear it with such unhurried confidence as Canterbury does. The city's origins predate Christianity by several centuries. The settlement known to the Romans as Durovernum Cantiacorum, later contracted to Durovernum, was an important crossroads town in the tribal territory of the Cantii, the Celtic people from whom Kent takes its name. The Romans arrived in force following the Claudian invasion of AD 43, and they transformed the settlement into a significant urban centre: a forum, a theatre, a bath complex, public buildings, and a road network that still underlies the modern city's geography. The Roman street pattern is visible in Canterbury today if you know where to look, ghosted beneath the medieval lanes.

When Roman authority collapsed in the early fifth century, Durovernum declined, but it did not die. The Anglo-Saxon settlers who gradually occupied the ruins called it Cantwarebyrig, the stronghold of the people of Kent, and under their occupation, it became the capital of the Kingdom of Kent, one of the most powerful early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It was here, in 597, that the monk Augustine landed from Rome, sent by Pope Gregory the Great on one of the most consequential diplomatic missions in British history. His purpose was to convert the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity. The man he needed to convince was King Ethelbert of Kent, whose Frankish wife Bertha was already a practicing Christian and had been permitted by her husband to worship in the ancient church of St Martin's, which still stands today and is believed to be the oldest church in continuous use in the English-speaking world.

Augustine's mission succeeded with remarkable speed. Ethelbert was baptised, Canterbury was established as the primatial see of England, and Augustine became its first archbishop. The decision to anchor English Christianity in Canterbury rather than London, even back then the larger, more commercially significant city, was a historical accident that shaped everything that followed. Canterbury became, and remains, the spiritual capital of the Church of England and the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The centuries between Augustine and the Norman Conquest saw Canterbury grow in prestige and wealth. The archbishops accumulated lands and influence; the cathedral school became one of the finest centers of learning in early medieval Europe; and the city's position on the road from London to the Channel ports made it a natural staging post for travelers, traders, and pilgrims. The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought physical transformation: the Normans rebuilt the cathedral on a grander scale, fortified the city, and added the castle, whose keep still dominates the west of the walled city.

The medieval city that survives in substantial form today, the Westgate Towers, the city walls, the half-timbered buildings of the Mercery Lane, the timber-framed Weavers' Houses on the River Stour, was built in the centuries following the Conquest, when Canterbury's importance as a pilgrimage destination made it one of the wealthiest cities in England. That wealth is still readable in the architecture: in the elaborate carved facades, the guildhall buildings, the prosperous merchants' houses that line the lanes approaching the cathedral. Canterbury's medieval prosperity was paid for, in large measure, by the blood of one man.

The story of Canterbury Cathedral is inseparable from the story of Thomas Becket, and the story of Thomas Becket is one of the most dramatic in English history, a collision between royal power and ecclesiastical authority that still resonates in the politics of church and state. But the cathedral itself is older than Becket by more than five centuries, and its history begins with Augustine's mission.

Augustine established the first cathedral on the site of a former Roman building shortly after he arrived in 597. His successors expanded and elaborated it across the early medieval centuries, but it was the Norman rebuilding under Archbishop Lanfranc after the Conquest that created the foundation of the structure visible today. Lanfranc, appointed by William the Conqueror in 1070, demolished the Anglo-Saxon cathedral almost entirely and constructed a new building of ambition commensurate with Norman power. His successor, Anselm, continued the work in the early twelfth century with the magnificent crypt and choir that survive beneath the current building, among the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in England.

The archbishopric itself, the most senior ecclesiastical office in England, was established with Augustine's mission and has continued without interruption for over fourteen centuries. The Archbishop of Canterbury holds primacy over the Church of England and, since the Anglican Communion expanded across the globe following British colonialism, serves as the symbolic head of a worldwide fellowship of approximately 85 million Christians. The current Archbishop, the 105th in an unbroken line of succession from Augustine, still occupies the historic see at Canterbury, though the official residence is at Lambeth Palace in London.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" - Attributed to King Henry II, December 1170, though the precise words remain disputed

The cathedral's defining moment came on the evening of 29 December 1170, when four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracy, Hugh de Morville, and Richard le Breton, entered the cathedral through the north transept and murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket at the foot of the steps leading to the high altar. The killing was almost certainly carried out in response to the king's furious expression of frustration with his erstwhile friend turned adversary, though whether Henry II actually intended to order Becket's death remains a matter of historical debate. What is beyond debate is the consequence: the murder of an archbishop at prayer in his own cathedral provoked outrage across Christendom. Pope Alexander III excommunicated the four knights and placed England under an interdict. Henry II was forced to perform a humiliating public penance, walking barefoot to the cathedral and submitting to a flogging from the cathedral's monks.

Becket was canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1173, just three years after his death, an unusually rapid canonization reflecting both the political pressure and the extraordinary wave of reported miracles at his tomb. The shrine of St Thomas became almost immediately the most important pilgrimage destination in England and one of the most visited in Europe, rivaling Santiago de Compostela and Rome. The city's economy was transformed: pilgrim hostels, souvenir workshops producing the famous Canterbury ampullae (small lead flasks of water supposedly touched by Becket's blood), and the elaborate apparatus of medieval religious tourism built up around the cathedral over the following three centuries.

The Trinity Chapel, built in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries specifically to house Becket's shrine, is the architectural climax of the cathedral: a soaring space of colored light, with some of the finest medieval stained glass in Europe arranged in narrative windows depicting Becket's miracles. The shrine itself, a jewelled reliquary of extraordinary richness, stood at the eastern end of the cathedral, raised on a platform so that pilgrims could process beneath it. In 1538, Henry VIII, in the course of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, ordered the shrine destroyed and its treasures confiscated for the royal treasury. Contemporary accounts suggest it took twenty-six carts to carry away the gold, jewels, and precious metals. The precise location of Becket's remains after the destruction is unknown; a candle now burns on the floor of the Trinity Chapel at the place where the shrine stood.

The cathedral continued to evolve architecturally through the medieval period. The Bell Harry Tower, completed in 1498, is the great central tower that dominates the Canterbury skyline and which every visitor to the city approaches as a navigational landmark. The Nave was rebuilt in the Perpendicular Gothic style in the late fourteenth century, a project patronized partly by the Black Prince, whose tomb and armor (a replica; the originals are displayed separately) remain in the Trinity Chapel. The cathedral survived the English Reformation largely intact, largely because Henry VIII, despite destroying the shrine, recognized the political and economic value of Canterbury's spiritual prestige, and it survived the Second World War's Baedeker Blitz of 1942 through a combination of extraordinary luck and the heroism of fire-watchers who saved it from the incendiary bombs that destroyed much of the surrounding city.

In the spring of around 1387, a civil servant in his mid-forties with a gift for verse and an extraordinary ear for human speech began writing what would become the first great work of English literature. Geoffrey Chaucer was not, by birth or background, obviously destined to become the father of English poetry. He was born around 1343, probably in London, the son of a vintner; he spent much of his adult life as a customs official and royal bureaucrat, collecting taxes on wool and leather, negotiating trade agreements, and managing properties for the crown. He had read widely in French and Italian — Boccaccio and Dante were formative influences — and he had written poetry of considerable sophistication. But nothing in his career quite prepared the literary world for The Canterbury Tales.

The opening lines of the General Prologue are among the most recognisable in the English language: the famous passage in which the coming of April's rains, the renewal of spring, and the awakening of the natural world conjure an irresistible human impulse towards movement and journey. Chaucer's insight, that the desire to go on pilgrimage is not simply religious but deeply seasonal, almost biological, gives his poem a universality that has survived the complete transformation of the religious culture that produced it. We no longer walk to Canterbury to seek a martyr's blessing, but we still feel, in spring, the urge to go somewhere.

The pilgrims themselves are one of literature's great achievements of character. Chaucer presents thirty-one travelers (including himself, in a characteristically self-deprecating cameo) drawn from almost every level of medieval English society. The Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller, the Prioress, the Franklin, each is introduced in the General Prologue with a specificity and psychological depth that feels novelistic rather than poetic. The Knight is genuinely noble; the Pardoner is genuinely corrupt; the Wife of Bath is genuinely alive, in a way that her male author renders with a sympathy and complexity remarkable for the fourteenth century.

What Chaucer created was a kind of portable anthology of medieval narrative genres: the romance, the fabliau (bawdy comic tale), the saint's life, the moral exemplum, the beast fable, and the sermon are all represented, and the juxtapositions, such as the Miller's ribald tale following directly on the Knight's chivalric romance; the Pardoner's deeply corrupt but theologically sophisticated sermon on avarice, create a running commentary on the relationship between storytelling and truth. The Canterbury Tales is, among other things, one of literature's earliest and most sustained meditations on fiction itself.

Canterbury's connection to Chaucer is commemorated throughout the modern city. The Canterbury Tales attraction on St Margaret's Street recreates the journey in an experiential museum format, not to everyone's taste, but popular with families and school groups. The Chaucer Bookshop on Beer Cart Lane has traded in secondhand books since the 1950s and carries one of the finest collections of medieval literature and local history in Kent. More significantly, the University of Kent and the Canterbury Christ Church University both maintain strong departments in medieval English literature, and the city hosts periodic Chaucer conferences that draw scholars from across the world. The pub culture of Canterbury includes several establishments claiming, with varying degrees of credibility, to occupy the sites of medieval pilgrims' inns.

Chaucer himself never held any office in Canterbury and may have walked the pilgrimage route only once or twice, if at all. The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where his fictional pilgrimage begins, was a real establishment; it survived until the nineteenth century, though the current public house on Borough High Street occupies only a fraction of the original site. Southwark's Borough Market, which spreads across the railway arches near London Bridge Station, occupies ground that pilgrims have crossed for seven hundred years. To begin a journey to Canterbury from here is to step, however lightly, into a tradition that connects the medieval and the modern with unusual directness.

On a morning in early May, a small group of people gathers on the pavement outside Southwark Cathedral, directly across the river from the City of London. They are dressed for walking — boots, waterproofs, day packs — and they carry a variety of objects that mark them as something other than ordinary hikers: a shell (the traditional symbol of the pilgrim), a wooden staff, in one case a hand-sewn badge stitched to resemble one of the medieval Canterbury ampullae. They are about to walk sixty-two miles to Canterbury. Some are religious. Some are not. All of them, when asked why they are doing this, struggle to give a simple answer.

The principal walking route is the North Downs Way National Trail, a 153-mile long-distance footpath that runs from Farnham in Surrey to Dover, passing through or near Canterbury. The section most relevant to the Chaucer pilgrimage runs from Southwark (the traditional starting point) along a mixture of ancient trackways, North Downs ridges, orchard paths, and village lanes to the Westgate of Canterbury: approximately sixty-two miles, typically walked over four to six days. The trail is well-marked, well-served by village pubs and B&Bs, and passes through some of the finest walking country in southeast England, the chalk downland of the North Downs, the apple and hop orchards of the Kentish Weald, and the ancient woodlands above the Stour valley.

The route has been formalized and popularized by several modern initiatives. The British Pilgrimage Trust, founded in 2014, has done more than any other organisation to revive the practice of pilgrimage walking in Britain. Its co-founders, William Parsons and Guy Hayward, describe their mission as making pilgrimage accessible to people of all faiths and none, drawing on the ancient tradition of walking to sacred places as a practice of attention and intention rather than doctrinal compliance. The Trust has trail-blazed an Old Way route from Southampton to Canterbury, following what it argues are medieval routes predating the post-Conquest pilgrimage tradition, and runs guided pilgrimages throughout the year. Their approach is deliberately inclusive: they describe the pilgrimage as 'a walk with nature and history and other people,' without requiring any particular religious belief from participants.

The Pilgrims' Way is another named route with deep historical associations, though historians debate how much of it actually corresponds to medieval pilgrimage traffic. The name was first applied to the route in the nineteenth century by the surveyor Ordnance Survey cartographers, and it runs along the foot of the North Downs from Winchester (rather than London) to Canterbury, a route of approximately 120 miles. The Winchester start reflects the historical importance of Winchester Cathedral as a rival and complementary pilgrimage destination (it houses the shrine of St Swithun), and walkers combining the Winchester and Canterbury shrines follow a route that was certainly used by medieval pilgrims, even if the specific path has changed considerably over eight centuries.

Beyond the organized trail networks, Canterbury's modern pilgrimage culture has attracted writers, artists, and filmmakers. The novelist and travel writer Patrick Barkham walked the route and wrote about the experience; the artist Antony Gormley has spoken about the influence of pilgrimage walking on his work. The cathedral itself has responded to this renewed interest with considerable sophistication: the Cathedral's Pilgrimage and Retreat program offers facilitated walking pilgrimages with chaplaincy support, poetry readings at significant points along the route, and a formal welcome ceremony for arriving pilgrims at the West Door, a recreation of the medieval practice of receiving pilgrims.

What do modern pilgrims seek? The answers are as various as the people who walk. Some come in grief, working through bereavement at the pace of their own footsteps. Some come in transition, between jobs or relationships or phases of life, using the walk as a literal enactment of moving from one state to another. Some are motivated by a specifically religious intention; the cathedral is still a working church, and the daily services are attended by walkers who have arrived that morning and by local worshippers who have attended for decades. Some come because they have read Chaucer and want to understand the landscape that produced the Tales. And some come simply because walking is its own justification. After all, the rhythmic, forward-moving act of putting one foot in front of another, in the company of other walkers and through the countryside of genuine beauty, is one of the oldest forms of human happiness, requiring no further explanation.

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