in Canterbury,
archaeology is all around you.
The city is one of England's historic gems
set in a landscape rich in the traces of
human struggles,
with visible monuments from the
Neolithic onwards.
It is also a place where a great deal of
archaeology survives beneath our feet,
with huge numbers of major excavations
taking place in the city,
where many great names in British
archaeology have dug.
My name is Luke Lavan, I'm Lecturer in
Archaeology at the University of Kent.
In this video I want to show you
something of what the city and its
surroundings has to offer students
coming to study in Canterbury,
which i think is the greatest
archaeological classroom in the country.
The libraries are full of dig reports by
the many archaeological organizations in
the area:
Canterbury Archaeological Trust, Kent
Archaeology Society,
Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit, or Kent
Archaeological Field School.
But today I want to talk mostly about
what you can see above ground.
The earliest visible monument is a
mysterious tomb:
Julliberrie's  Grave, a Neolithic long
barrow of the 4th millennium BC
overlooking the Stour Valley from a high
point facing Chilham
on the Pilgrim's Way leading--like the
railway below--from Ashford
down towards Canterbury. New excavations
for the high-speed train were a great
source for pre-history
but no matter how many times one makes
that journey down from london it remains
true that this route
is only one way of understanding the
connections and archaeological sites of
East Kent.
The hinterland of Canterbury is in fact
the gateway for so many travellers into
and out of the country
as it has been since the severing of the
land bridge to europe in the 7th
millennium BC.
the archaeology of the region reflects
that fact with its many ports forts and
fortresses
nonetheless it's important to realize
that the coastline as we now have it is
a relatively recent formation
with canterbury once accessible from the
sea by the now silted wantsome channel
which until the 18th century separated
the Isle of Thanet from the mainland.
the island is composed of an outcrop of
chalk the exposed face of which gives
great white cliffs and fine beaches at
ramsgate kingsgate and broadstairs
some 25 minutes from Canterbury by train.
these natural walls marking the entrance
to this channel
are deeply impressive. By the bronze age
the place may have become a holy island
a place of transition not only into
britain but into other worlds
the center of pilgrimage and remembrance
the island is indeed covered with an
exceptional number of bronze age burial
mounds
often visible from the sea sometimes
revealed by kent students on field work
a 7th century scholar, Isidore of Seville,
thought that the name of the island
reflected the greek word
for death thanatos perhaps a coincidence
but an etymology that evokes the ancient
character of the place well
of an island of chalk top barrows
greeting sea visitors
of those early sea visitors we know a
surprising amount
from the stunning hoards of Bronze Age
cargo found at Minnis Bay and Langdon Bay
to the spectacular discovery of the Dover
Boat by Canterbury Archaeological Trust
a plank-built sea-going vessel
from 1575 to 1520 BC
when only dugout canoes had been
expected
this discovery of global importance is
one of the must-see attractions of East Kent.
the remains of subsequent centuries the
late bronze age and iron age
are well attested under the fields and
buildings of our county
iron age farmsteads have even been
excavated on and adjacent to the campus
of the university of kent
on digs that employed our graduates. 
But of sites that one can actually visit
from the iron age, the most noted is
Bigbury,
a hillfort two miles west of
Canterbury, where a crossridge dyke and
a single-bank fortification was
established on high ground
overlooking both the Stour Valley and
the route into the city from the west.
this dramatic site was studied by Kent
student Dr Andy Bates for his PhD.
it resembles Germany, with its high
conifers in its steep-sided hills.
this was perhaps the setting for Julius
Caesar's first major battle in Britain
in 54 BC, which he describes in Gallic
Wars book 5
as being 12 miles from his landing where
wooded high ground was well fortified
its entrances blocked with trees.
"He himself, having advanced by night
about 12 miles, espied the forces of the enemy. They,
advancing to the river with their
cavalry and chariots from the higher
ground,
began to annoy our men and give battle.
Being repulsed by our cavalry, they
concealed themselves in woods,
as they had secured a place admirably
fortified by nature and by art,
which, as it seemed, they had before
prepared on account of a civil war;
for all entrances to it were shut up by
a great number of felled trees."
A Late Republican helmet found at Barham
may be from this expedition.
a good deal of interesting material has
been found at Bigbury over the years
from the firedog of a great leader to
the chains used to shackle slaves together.
The site came to a sudden end around 50 BC
with a burning destruction and a
Roman-style ditch being the last
attested feature.
Yet recently a great number of connected
earthworks have been identified by LIDAR
survey,
showing a well-organized local power. The
devastating impact of Roman intervention
might lead one to think that the next
few years would be of decline and
stagnation.
But this was not the case: a new
settlement and oppidum,
Durovernum, was established in the
lowlands as a large open settlement.
Canterbury had begun. Nothing of this
first city is visible above ground today
but the houses of late Iron Age Canterbury
have been uncovered
underneath the number of sites in the
town notably in the Westgate Gardens
and in the Marlowe (Theatre) car park,
where a high-status enclosure was located.
soon the town was minting its own coins.
when the Romans did return in AD 43 the
people of East Kent seem to have allied
with them.Traces of a Roman fort have been found
around the castle
ditches include the remains of
disarticulated human bone
close to where a murder grave was found.
This was a dark time,
even in allied territory, but the city
continued without a break, eventually
acquiring a theatre,
then a street grid in the second century AD, now oriented towards Dover, the great
new port of the age,
where the Roman lighthouse still stands
one of two which lit the harbour facing
the great tower of Boulogne
on the Gallic side. The remains of the
Roman city are everywhere, from its
temple and theatre, forum and baths,
to private houses and cemeteries. Many
can be visited today, from the Roman
Museum with its mosaic
floors, to the Roman Tower Museum, which
introduces a great monument of the 3rd
century AD: the city wall. This structure,
built in a time of deteriorating
imperial fortunes,
defines today the fundamental outline of
the city centre.
It was part of a militarization of the
region now ringed by massive fortresses
such as that at Richborough Castle where a
victory arch for the conquest of Britain
once stood.
Even so, the countryside of Kent was
still full of Roman villas,
the subject of much field work, as at
Otford in 2019
where University of Kent students worked
alongside the "Discover Roman Otford"
project.
the surviving city walls are mainly
medieval but much fabric survives from
the late Roman period.
This is a rich time for excavations,
producing a great number of cemeteries
in recent years
as well as a very late pagan temple and
the spectacular Canterbury Hoard,
buried around AD 400, providing some of the
first evidence for Christianity
in the chi-rho symbols and inscriptions of
its silver spoons.
the "Dark Ages" of Canterbury are marked
by the collapse of the Roman town: the
spread of sunken huts
and wooden houses amongst the ruins and
the arrival of costume types and burial
customs that are often associated with
incomers:
the Jutish followers of the mythical
Hengist and Horsa--names which mean "Stallion" and "Horse"
respectively.
The remains of cemeteries of this period
are found across the landscape of East
Kent,
sometimes with small bits of ships
interred alongside the deceased.
The contents of these graves reveal much
about the culture of the period
with its weapons being prominent bones
from Buckland
cemetery had injuries from a life of
fighting: axe-wounds to skulls,
sometimes healed over, sometimes not. Our students re-excavated a contemporary
cemetery nearby.
The hinterlands of Canterbury now start
to see the formation of estate centres
and monasteries as the new Jutish
overlords of Kent consolidated their
power
and accepted the arrival of a Roman
mission to the English in 597.
this was possible due to the protection
of Christian princess Bertha
from Francia, who had married the Kentish
ruler Aethelbert.
She had earlier founded the oldest
extant church in England,
St Martin's, on the east side of the
city.
From here spreads out Canterbury's World
Heritage site:
the birthplace of the English Christian
tradition: St Augustine's Abbey,
burial-place of archbishops and kings of
Kent, and then
the Cathedral, established in those first
years.
Soon the Greek bishop Theodore from
Tarsus set up a fine school.
Close to two centuries of conservation
have recovered much of the history of
the abbey site,
which now serves as a museum and a
contemplative garden,
sheltering the brick church of the 6th
century St Pancras.
The history of Canterbury now starts to
be traceable in the street names of the
city:
The Borough and Burgate mark the line of
the inner borough
of the well-ordered late Saxon town, the
cellared buildings of which turn up in
excavations such as at Whitefriars
Shopping Centre.
The city continued to develop also as an
intellectual centre,
led by the great monk, Bishop Dunstan, as
first-rate libraries grew up.
But it's only at the very end of the
Anglo-Saxon period that we start to get
bits of stone masonry within the city,
usually in the form of parts of churches
or in small changes to the city walls.
These sadly failed when the Danes took
the city and burned the Cathedral in
1011.
When bishop Alphege refused to be
ransomed, he was martyred by his captors
in a game of cattlebone throwing. A
church in his memory still stands in the
city today.
A much stronger imprint is visible of
the Norman conquest, from the wooden
"motte and bailey" castle
which stood on Dane John or "Donjon"
Mound, to its stone replacement:
a fine keep at the end of Castle Street.
The Cathedral itself was rebuilt after a
fire in 1067,
and again in 1174, giving the crypt and
then the outer shell of the choir
as conceived by Bishop Anselm and Pryor
Arnold.
The Cathedral is of course, as the mother
church of the English, the heart of the
city,
being a centre of faith, arts, and culture.
The Saxon cathedral is today buried
beneath the nave,
but masterpieces of architecture from
the Norman period onwards are visible in
its fabric,
from St Gabriel's chapel with its
12th century frescoes to the aqueduct-fed
water tower,
to the sky blue windows of the
ambulatory. We are now able to capture
the form of the Cathedral in 3D
through laser scanning and studies in
cross-section,
thanks to research by the University of
Kent School of Architecture and Planning.
The Cathedral is exceptionally long and
made of beautiful, but soft, stone from
Caen. Within its courts can be found both the
ruins of Christchurch Priory,
the foundation of King Henry VIII; the
King's School.
The battered remains of the monks'
dormitory and hospital now
contrast sharply to the Chapter House
and cloister which escaped destruction,
the latter being used as a sermon house
during the Reformation.
The centre of the Cathedral is a
monument to kingly power: statues of
Lancastrian monarchs
form a screen across the nave, and royal
tombs are found beyond it,
down to the Black Prince in all his
finery.
But all of this orbits around a
contradiction: a monument to a saint who
defied royal power and
was slain for it within this very
Cathedral in 1170:
Thomas Beckett. Under the patronage of St
Thomas the city grew in wealth and fame,
now not only the ecclesiastical capital
of England
but a place of miracles and pilgrimage.
The Cathedral interior was renewed after
a second conflagration
and the religious houses of the city
multiplied with friaries: grey, white, and
black,
established across the city alongside
the now vanished Priory of St Gregory
and the Holy Sepulchre Benedictine
Nunnery, home of "The Holy Maid of Kent",
Elizabeth Barton.
Barton was one of several Canterbury-based
figures who opposed King Henry's divorce
or his church reforms and who paid for
it with their lives.
The most noted is perhaps John Stone, who
was hung, drawn and quartered
before his innards were parboiled and
displayed on the city gates.
The severed head of Thomas Moore sits at
St Dunstan's.
However, a martyr's memorial at Wincheap
recalls a brief reaction under (Queen) Mary
when 40 Protestants were burnt here,
after suffering in the castle prison.
The destruction of Beckett's shrine, which
had brought so many pilgrims to Canterbury,
had a disastrous effect on the city more
noticeable than the Black Death.
Where once pilgrims had thronged in the
city's great pilgrim inns,
and where monastic houses had flourished,
now a new society began
with Protestant divines and lawyers and
of Huguenot refugees
who began a weaving business in the city.
It's difficult to study this period from
its material remains.
There was some iconoclasm, with crosses
and statues removed,
but it did not start in earnest until
the mid-17th century,
when the city fell to the army of
Cromwell. At this time,
the great hall of the Archbishop's
palace was levelled as "High Church"
William
Laud preceded the King to execution.
But the cancellation of Christmas saw a
revolt and the Puritans lost power.
With the restoration of the "Merry
Monarch" in 1660, conditions began to
improve for the city,
which acquired its first
(modern) theatre a few years later, opposite the Cathedral.
Henry VIII had left a few new buildings:
the Mint, the King's School, the refounded
Cathedral,
and a palace, all carved out of ruined
monastic buildings.
But elsewhere they were left as fields
of masonry,
making perhaps for pleasant gardens. One
aspect of the Catholic past that endured
in Canterbury was its hospitals.
These varied from Norman bishop
Lanfranc's leper hospital at Harbledown
to St John's hospital in Northgate or
the red uniformed Eastbridge hospital,
all of which are still active, looking
after the city's old folk.
But on the edge of town older loyalties
survived, with aristocrats sheltering
private masses
in mansions now lost. Little can disguise
the decline of the city of which the
population hit a low in the mid 16th
century and which struggled to recover
until the 18th century when it became an
increasingly elegant county town
with new classical buildings and army
barracks. Most of these structures have
now
disappeared in contrast to the Westgate
or the Cathedral nave, the cloister, or
the tower,
monuments to the prosperity of the city
in the late 14th and 15th century.
This decline of the mediaeval city
paradoxically ensured its architectural
survival:
full of late wooden buildings such as
The Parrot pub which is a 15th century
wealden hall.
Industry hardly touched the city with
only a few factories
often associated with food processing
from the rich hinterland of East Kent.
The railway station of Can:terbury West
stands in contradiction
a first railway to the seaside, pulled
over the hill to Whitstable
by two stationary steam engines and a
twin
of Stevenson's "Rocket" for the last
section. The latest monuments of
canterbury's history have not survived
as well as this medieval core, but do
provide some impressive sights.
The return of Canterbury's Jewish
community, exiled in 1290,
is testified to by the 18th century
synagogue in a rare Egyptian Revival
style
with its ritual baths. Protestant chapels
also emerge from the back streets
alongside new schools of the period.
Fine townhouses survive from this time
alongside an art gallery
even if the great Guildhall, the
Philosophical Society, the Cornmarket,
the Theatre Royal and the first
courthouse are gone.
We rely on Dickens'' David Copperfield to
evoke the city of the 19th century,
just as we rely on Chaucer's Tales and
the imagination of (Christopher) Marlowe
to evoke the atmosphere of the 15th and
17th centuries.
For the modern age, the long decline of
Canterbury has become its greatest asset,
with conservation heritage and tourism
providing many jobs.
Yet this priority was not easily won for
the town, with residents facing off
modernist planners
who swept much of the city away after
the great destructions of the Beideker
raids in 1942,
which killed 76 and removed 800
buildings,
two years after the Battle of Britain
had been fought and won in Kentish skies.
Indeed, the Second World War has left a
strong trace in the landscape of East
Kent,
from its air bases to coastal
fortifications
which you can visit at Manston Spitfire
and Hurricane Museum,
and at Dover Cliffs Tunnels, a short
distance from Canterbury.
But whatever your period of interest, Canterbury has a great deal to offer you:
the chance to visit monuments,
excavations, and museums, and to grow up
in a large community of heritage lovers,
from the cathedral glaziers and
archivists to the vibrant amateur
societies
to the archaeological units, and the
academics waiting to take you into this
gem of history
set in the Garden of England.
 
Thanks for watching!
