of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was
done he first "destroyed utterly" the Romano-Saxon church and then "set
about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070-
1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to
perfection." That he worked in great haste and too quickly seems
certain. In fact it must be confessed that Lanfranc's church in
Canterbury was a more or less exact copy of his church of St Stephen at
Caen, but, built much more quickly, was too mean for its purpose. It
soon became necessary to rebuild the choir and sanctuary; the nave,
however, was allowed to stand until the end of the fourteenth century;
but even then its design so hampered the builders of the present nave,
for it had been decided to preserve one of Lanfranc's western towers,
that to this day the nave of Canterbury is too short, consisting of
but eight bays.

Lanfranc's choir was of but two bays and an apse. This was too
obviously inadequate to be tolerated by the monks. In 1096 it was
pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a
lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern
transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the
north arm and two in the south. All this was done in the time of St
Anselm and finished in 1115, when Conrad was Prior of Christ Church.

It was this church with Lanfranc's short Norman nave, western facade
and towers, and Conrad's glorious great choir high up over the crypt,
a choir broader than the nave and longer too, and with two transepts,
the western of Lanfranc's time, the eastern of St Anselm's, that St
Thomas knew and that saw his martyrdom in 1170.

Materials for the life of St Thomas are so plentiful that his modern
biographers are able to compose a life fuller perhaps in detail and
fact than would be possible in the case of any other man of his time.
But no account ever written of his martyrdom is at once so simple and
so touching as that to be found in the Golden Legend. It was this
account which the man of the Middle Age knew by heart, and which
brought him in his thousands on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and
therefore I give it here.

"When the King of France had made accord between St Thomas and King
Henry, the Archbishop," Voragine tells us, "came home to Canterbury,
where he was received worshipfully, and sent for them that had
trespassed against him, and by the authority of the Pope's Bull openly
denounced