Apart from the impressive and very old architecture, this Cathedral also was where Thomas Becket, then Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered at prayer by four Knights who may or may not have been ordered to do the dirty deed by Henry himself. Becket had defied his long-time friend King Henry II over a long time. The exact spot of the murder is identified in the Cathedral.
We walked around and then read the Tourist Office information about Canterbury. There was a Roman museum just a few minutes away from the center of town. We opted for that. The cost was only about two pounds each (just under $4.00), for OAP’s (Old Age Pensioners), and we qualified.
It was very interesting even though we’ve seen lots of the same stuff before. This museum had a couple of tricks up its collective sleeve. First, they have a very good idea, from excavations, of how the town looked in A.D. 150 and how it looked when the year A.D. 300 rolled around. There were excellent illustrations showing how the town had grown and prospered.
Second, many of the artifacts that they found were incorporated into displays showing people in their shops. Mannequins were dressed appropriately, and the craftsmen’s wares were shown. Then we came to what is called "the Roman villa under your feet".
It turns out that while everyone has known for a very long time that Canterbury was a Roman town, the big impetus to finding the remains of a villa was the bombing of the city in WWII. When repairs were being made, they discovered the villa under the modern buildings that had been destroyed. The town then put a building up over the villa, and that is the main display in the museum.
Finally, the museum used a computer program to show how the house had looked at its beginnings, and how it looked 300 years later when it apparently was abandoned. By that time, Canterbury was no longer associated with Rome.
We left after seeing the museum. It seemed to us that if we just showed up at the ticket office at the ferry to Calais early, they might get us onto an earlier sailing. Otherwise we had tickets for a six o’clock ferry which got in an hour and a half later. To make matters worse, English time is one hour behind European time. That meant that we’d be getting in at 8:30 p.m. It is still light then, but finding a campground so late at night would be much more difficult.
In fact, we did have difficulty in finding a campground – not because of the time of night, but because we had returned to France as the entire country celebrated the July 14 fall of The Bastille.
