![]() “No singing is allowed”, he said.Ĭhoral singers have been banned from singing due to health risks attached to flying throat molecules. When Guy began to sing his lament to “Seynt Thomas”, without warning, the Dean stood motionless for a moment but, in the most kindly, polite but firm manner, cut him short, after a few chords had filled the sacred altar area. We dipped our hands in the cool and fresh spring water as pilgrims have done for 800 years.Īs such, I was expecting a virtuoso third rendition of the song as the Dean stood beside us in the Trinity Chapel, an elegant and charming man dressed in canonical black, who could have walked out of a Trollope novel.Ībout a dozen feet away stood a sign showing an image of a medieval shrine informing visitors of the symbolism of the lonely flame in front of us: “The candle burns where the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury stood from 1220 to 1538.” The water of the hospital’s St Thomas’s well was as clear as a rock pool. The next time Guy sang, the opening stanza of the song was beside the miraculous holy well of St Thomas in the grounds of St Nicholas Hospital, a former leper hospice which is now pretty almshouses. St Thomas’s RC Church, St Thomas’ Fingerbone relic on left, and garment on right ![]() It begins: “Saint Thomas honour we/Through whose blood Holy Church is made free”. It’s also the village from where Henry II walked barefoot to the cathedral on Jin penance, before being scourged by his own bishops and monks. – William CashĪs we stood kneeling close to the candle, Guy – a former choral scholar at Cambridge – began to sing a medieval 15th century lament called “Saint Thomas honour we”. It was a song Guy had been practising as we had spent the day walking the final part of the Pilgrims’ Way from Chilham to Canterbury via Harbledown, where Chaucer’s cook gets so drunk in the Canterbury Tales that he can’t continue to the shrine (it’s only half a mile). These will include a loan from the Vatican of a reliquary containing the famous tunicle (vestment) that Becket wore when he was killed in his own cathedral.Ĭhoral singers have been banned from singing due to health risks attached to flying throat molecules. They will – God willing – start around the date of his murder on 29th December and will last until July 2021. Henry VIII issued an order declaring that “henceforth the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed and called a saint… and that his images and pictures throughout the whole realm shall be plucked down and that from henceforth the days used to be festival in his name, shall not be observed, nor the service, office, antiphons, collects, and prayers in his name read, but raised and put out of all the books.” This included removing any references to ‘St Thomas in carols, prayers and in any liturgy.ĭue to Covid-19, the planned programme of festivities to mark his 800th Translation have now been “turned on their head” by six months so that they will now be more sequentially correct. ![]() Here we prayed by the candle light, its flame signifying the spirit of Thomas Becket, the saint whose legacy and golden shrine was destroyed in 1538.īack then, statues of St Thomas and other saints were pulled down – not so unlike today. St Thomas’ Well, restored by the Black Prince Robert Willis, Dean of Canterbury noted this as he led our small pilgrim band of three – myself, Dr Guy Hayward, co-founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT) and his trustee Abigail Rowe – through the cloisters and up the Dean’s Steps into the north transept close to the site of Becket’s murder. The original 1220 service had been at the the third canonical hour of the day, at 9am not 3pm. Instead of the thousands of bishops, priests and members of the public expected for the 800th anniversary of the Translation of Becket’s saintly bones, only a tiny handful of pilgrims made it to the cathedral in which he was famously murdered in 1170. On Tuesday, 7 July, after a two week, 150 mile pilgrimage on foot from Winchester to Canterbury, I knelt in prayer on the worn marble flagstones on the Trinity Shrine of the cathedral to commemorate the memory of Archbishop Thomas Becket.
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