The arrival of St Augustine in England from Rome in 597 was an
event of profound significance, for it marked the beginnings of
relations between Rome and Canterbury. To later generations this
came to mean relations between the papacy in its universal role, hence the
throne of St Peter, and the metropolitical see of Canterbury and the
cathedral priory of Christ Church, for the chair of St Augustine was
the seat of both a metropolitan and an abbot. The archiepiscopal see and
the cathedral priory were inextricably bound in a unique way.Relations with Rome had always been particularly close, both between
the archbishops and the pope and between the convent and the pope. The
cathedral church of Canterbury was dedicated to the Saviour (Christ
Church) as was the papal cathedral of the Lateran. Gregory had sent the
pallium to Augustine in sign of his metropolitan rank. There had been
correspondence with Rome from the first. In Eadmer's account of the old
Anglo-Saxon church, it was built in the Roman fashion, as Bede testifies,
imitating the church of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, in which
the most sacred relics in the whole world are venerated. Even more
precisely, the confessio of St Peter was copied at Canterbury. As Eadmer
says, ‘From the choir of the singers one went up to the two altars (of Christ
and of St Wilfrid) by some steps, since there was a crypt underneath, what
the Romans call a confessio, built like the confessio of St Peter.’ (Eadmer
had both visited Rome in 1099 and witnessed the fire that destroyed the
old cathedral some thirty years before in 1067.) And there, in the confessio,
Eadmer goes on to say, Alfege had put the head of St Swithun and there
were many other relics. The confessio in St Peter's had been constructed
by Pope Gregory the Great and contained the body of the prince of the
Apostles and it was in a niche here that the pallia were put before the
ceremony of the vesting, close to the body of St Peter. There may be, too,
another influence from Rome and old St Peter's on the cathedral at
Canterbury. The spiral columns in St Anselm's crypt at Canterbury,
which survived the later fire of 1174, and are still standing, were possibly
modelled on those that supported St Peter's shrine. These twisted
columns were believed to have been brought to Rome from the Temple
of Solomon. At the end of the sixth century, possibly due to Gregory the
Great, they were arranged to form an iconostasis-like screen before the
apostle's shrine. Pope Gregory III in the eighth century had added an
outer screen of six similar columns, the present of the Byzantine Exarch,
of which five still survive. They are practically the only relics of the old
basilica to have been preserved in the new Renaissance St Peter's.
The Irish in Mercia: A Cultural Context for the Earliest Anglo-Saxon Prayer Books