rom within. Alphege, the good old
archbishop, was obliged to witness the savagery of the Danes when they
burst through the gates and began a horrible slaughter, which included
the monks of Christ Church, and it is said that about 7,000 Saxons
perished. Not content with all this butchery, they burnt the
cathedral. Archbishop Alphege was carried off by the victorious Danes,
who at Greenwich gave way to drunken excesses, and in brutal fashion
killed their prisoner. The body was brought from London, where it had
been buried, back to Canterbury ten years later by Canute, the first
Danish King of England, who made what atonement he could by lending
his freshly painted state barge for the ceremonious translation of the
martyr's remains. Arrived at Canterbury, the King proceeded to further
demonstrate his submission to the Church his people had devastated by
hanging up his crown in the cathedral which Alphege's successor,
Archbishop Living, had reroofed. Canute, having made a journey to Rome
in 1031, among other pious resolutions, declared that he would amend
his life and conversation, and it was with his help that the Saxon
cathedral was properly repaired and decorated.

During the year following the Norman Conquest a fire began in
Canterbury, which, besides destroying many houses, reduced the
unfortunate cathedral to a roofless ruin once more. Three years
later, in 1070, when Lanfranc was made the first Norman archbishop, he
decided that the Saxon walls were worthless, and he swept away every
trace of the building, which may have been partially Roman, before
proceeding to erect a larger and grander pile in the Norman style
familiar to him. One feature of the original church has, nevertheless,
left its mark on the Norman cathedral. This was a crypt described by
Eadmer, the monkish historian, who, as a boy, saw the Saxon church
being demolished. It was only a small affair, but it must have been
the most remarkable feature of the comparatively small oblong
building, for it was not, properly speaking, a crypt at all, but an
undercroft beneath the eastern altars. "To reach these altars," says
Eadmer, "a certain crypt, which the Romans call a confessionary, had
to be ascended by means of several steps from the choir of the
singers. Thus the Norman archbishop, in planning a larger cathedral,
constructed a crypt under the choir of his new building, and the steps
one ascends to-day are there as the direct outcome of the structural
me