THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY
bours than for severity to himself. During his time there were no beggars in the Diocese of Winchester.
At the age of fifty-two years he was, on the death of Elfric, translated to Canterbury. He who had trembled at the idea of becoming Bishop of Winchester, was terrified at the prospect of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. He was translated in 1005 and immediately went to Rome for the pallium. On his return he held in 1009 a great National Council at Enham, in which thirty-two Canons were published for the reformation of errors and abuses and the establishment of discipline, amongst them the ancient law of the "Friday Fast" was confirmed; they also provided against heathenism, lawlessness and the sale of slaves, especially to heathen men; the setting up of a Navy and of an Army,—but as Ethelred the Unready was King all these provisions came to naught.[1]
As it was during the Archiepiscopate of St. Alphage that the Danish invasions culminated in the attack on the City of Canterbury, the massacre of the inhabitants, and the captivity and martyrdom of the Archbishop, it is necessary to enter into this period of our history in rather more detail.
From the year 787 when the first ships of the Danes sought the land of the English, the Saxon Cathedral was in constant and imminent danger of destruction. The eighth, ninth and tenth centuries were, to the English monasteries, times of ruin and desolation. They were the Treasure Houses of the Nation, and consequently it was the Religious House, and not the Parish Church, that the heathen Northmen (as they were called) plundered and burnt. This, I think, accounts for many of these latter buildings coming down to us more or less unscathed.
Whether they were Danes, Norwegians, Saxons, Jutes or Goths, they were all called "Northmen," and the history of their depredations is such that it is a marvel that Christianity in the country survived at all; that it was not wiped out as completely in the northern and eastern parts of the country, as it had been three centuries and a half before by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.
For the purpose of this history we can only very briefly refer to those invasions which affected the County of Kent; and more particularly the
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