The Pilgrims' Way to Canterbury

The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury leads to the site of one of the richest shrines in medieval Europe, and the shrine at the end of it was deliberately destroyed.

Winchester to Canterbury

The route follows the crest of the North Downs from Winchester to Canterbury and the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in his own cathedral in 1170 and canonised three years later. The name is younger than the path: calling the Downs trackway the Pilgrims Way is a nineteenth-century usage, and much of the medieval traffic in fact came from London by the road Chaucer describes rather than along the Downs. The pilgrimage to Becket was immense, and Canterbury stood among the four or five great destinations of the Latin west.

An ending by royal order

The shrine did not decline so much as it was abolished. In 1538 it was destroyed on the order of Henry VIII, the treasure carted away, the bones removed and the cult suppressed as part of the break with Rome, and Becket was struck from the calendar as a traitor to royal authority rather than a martyr. The modern walk is therefore a route to an absence: the destination that made it a pilgrimage was removed by the state four centuries ago, and what remains is the cathedral and the memory of the shrine.

Thomas Becket was killed in his own cathedral in December 1170 by four knights who understood themselves to be acting on the king's wishes, and the cult was immediate. Miracles were reported within days, he was canonised in 1173, and Henry II walked to Canterbury barefoot in 1174 to be scourged by the monks at the tomb. In 1220 the remains were translated into a jewelled shrine behind the high altar, and the anniversary of that translation became the occasion of a jubilee every fifty years, which drew crowds far larger than the ordinary feast.

The pilgrimage generated a whole material culture. Canterbury sold lead ampullae containing water said to be tinctured with a trace of the martyr's blood, and pilgrim badges showing the head of the saint, and thousands of these survive because they were thrown into rivers on the way home. The stone steps to the shrine were worn into hollows by knees.

Henry VIII ended it deliberately and thoroughly. In 1538 the shrine was destroyed and its jewels and gold carted away, Becket was formally denounced as a rebel rather than a saint, his name was ordered struck from service books and his images removed, and a proclamation summoned him to answer charges, so that a man dead three and a half centuries was tried in absentia and condemned. The bones disappeared and have never been located.

What survives is the space. The Trinity Chapel is empty where the shrine stood, marked now by a single candle on the floor, and the Martyrdom, the corner of the transept where he was killed, is the other point pilgrims go to. The destination of this road is an absence, and it is presented as one.