History in the stones: Canterbury
Research for Unlawful Things and The Crimson Thread
Firstly, I’ll be leading a Murder And Mystery historical walk around Canterbury in November, as part of the Canterbury Festival. Do sign up if you fancy walking the city with me and hearing all this out loud.
Canterbury featured heavily in my first novel, Unlawful Things, as the place where the playwright Christopher Marlowe was born and grew up in Elizabethan times. He would have seen Queen Elizabeth I at least once, I think - she visited the city in 1573, when he was a boy of nine or ten, processing through the streets in great pomp.
Happily, there are several maps of Canterbury dating from the sixteenth century, to give us an idea of how the city looked in Elizabethan times. It’s surprisingly recognisable today, with the city walls, the river and the Cathedral Close all clearly marked. You can even see St George’s Church (right of the cathedral, marked 10) where Marlowe was christened in 1564. He lived close by and attended the King’s School in the cathedral grounds. The church’s clock tower is still there, although the rest of the church disappeared in Canterbury’s ‘Baedeker Blitz’ of 1942.
Canterbury had been living through interesting times when Christopher was born to John, a shoe-maker, and his wife Katherine. The roller-coaster of Tudor politics and religion had during the previous 40 years seen the destruction of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, the dissolution of the monastic foundation set up to tend the shrine, closure of St Augustine’s Abbey, and persecution of both Catholics and Protestants as the crown passed from Henry to Edward to Mary and finally Elizabeth.
For 400 years, pilgrims had travelled from ‘every shire’s end’ to Canterbury, to visit the shrine of the ‘holy blisful martyr’ Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in his cathedral in 1170. When I arrived in Canterbury 16 years ago, on foot from London, I walked in the steps of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pilgrims.
The quarrel between church and state which culminated in Becket’s death was mostly won by the church, as King Henry II (who probably ordered the murder) had to back down on his demands for more power over the clergy. He did penance in Canterbury, walking barefoot through the streets to the cathedral, where he knelt at Becket’s tomb and kept vigil overnight.
Pilgrims were accommodated in inns and hostels, including the Eastbridge Hospital (not numbered, but spanning the eastern branch of the river on the map). This fascinating, ancient place was built just 20 years after Becket’s death, and comprised an undercroft where weary pilgrims stretched out after their journey, a chapel and a dining hall, as well as permanent lodging for elderly poor of the parish. Today, in a pleasing example of continuity and run by the same religious foundation, it has almshouses, a chapel and a small museum (sadly currently closed for extensive restoration work).
But when Christopher Marlowe was a boy, Eastbridge’s chapel was a school room. Why? To preserve the foundation from the chilly winds of change blowing through Canterbury. It is possible, although unproven, that Marlowe learned his letters there, before moving to the more advanced King’s School, which he attended with a scholarship from age 13.
But there were other winds of change in Canterbury in those years, and they blew from France. Kent, separated from France by just 22 miles of sea, has been a destination for refugees for centuries. And during Marlowe’s childhood, the refugees were French Protestants, Huguenots, especially those escaping from the horrific St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572. There were so many that they overwhelmed the ‘French Church’ established in the crypt of the cathedral and were given the church of St Alphege to worship in, just opposite the King’s School where Marlowe studied.
Did Marlowe hear the stories of the terrible events in Paris from those refugees? It seems likely. Twenty years on, one of his most popular plays was The Massacre At Paris, which depicts in graphic detail the mob violence that saw thousands dead in three days of horror.
Marlowe wasn’t a stranger to violence himself. After leaving Canterbury for Cambridge University, where he probably became a spy for the Elizabethan secret service led by Francis Walsingham, he moved to East London to write for the theatre. There he was caught up in street fighting that led to his arrest for a murder in Hog Lane, Shoreditch. On his last visit to Canterbury, Marlowe was arrested for a knife fight with a tailor, William Corkine, in Mercery Lane. The lane is picturesque, with Tudor buildings overhanging the pavements, framing a view of the Christchurch Gate and the Cathedral beyond. It’s not hard to imagine a pair of Elizabethan men tussling here (although perhaps without Subway and Pret to nip into afterwards).
On each of these occasions, Marlowe escaped conviction, although he was imprisoned for several months after Shoreditch. He also escaped conviction for inciting a metalsmith to counterfeit money in the Netherlands, and for charges of blasphemy, atheism, Catholicism, and libel. He seemed to have been remarkably lucky. Or maybe someone was watching his back.
Until his luck ran out. When Marlowe died in 1593, at the age of 29, he was on bail and due to appear before the court at Greenwich. He’d been accused of crimes including blasphemy and atheism, after an anti-religious tract was found in rooms he had shared with fellow writer Thomas Kyd. Kyd, under torture, unsurprisingly said the papers were Marlowe’s. Marlowe was arrested at the home of his patron, Thomas Walsingham (nephew of the spy-master) and summoned to appear at Greenwich.
He never made it. On 30 May, he accepted an invitation to spend the day with three men in the house of Eleanor Bull on The Strand, Deptford. The story recorded by the coroner was that a fight broke out over the bill, and hot-head Marlowe struck out with his knife (“the dagger aforesaid to the value of 12d”. Ingram Frizer, one of the men in the room, turned the knife back on him in self-defence. The knife penetrated Marlowe’s eye socket, “of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died”.
Was it an assassination? Quite possibly. All four men in that room had connections with the Secret Service. Perhaps someone didn’t want one of their agents appearing before the court, talking for his life. Perhaps they were worried about the tales he might tell, if he did. In the chilling phrase used by one of his accusers, perhaps someone decided that ‘his mouth should be stopp’d’ forever.
What did he know? Well, that’s catnip to a mystery writer, of course. But I thought back to Marlowe’s childhood, growing up in Canterbury, within living memory of the destruction of the shrine of Thomas Becket. The thing is, nobody knows what happened to the saint’s body. The shrine was pillaged for gold and jewels, taken back to London for Henry VIII’s treasury. Another Thomas, Thomas Cromwell, supervised the destruction. There are stories: that St Thomas’ body was burned, or even shot out of a cannon. It may have been quietly reburied in the cathedral close. (Hilary Mantel, in The Mirror and the Light, has it mouldering away in Thomas Cromwell’s cellar.)
Nobody now knows. But presumably, when it happened, people did know. And when Marlowe was a boy, some of those people would have been alive. Some of the monks, perhaps, who might have become school teachers after the old foundation was dissolved. School teachers for the new school room being set up at Eastbridge?
It’s always the ‘what ifs?’ that get my imagination running as an author. Anyway, that’s the rabbit hole that my literary sleuth Helen Oddfellow started down in my first book, Unlawful Things, and where she returned for The Crimson Thread, which is set entirely in Canterbury and involves chasing down clues among the tombs of the cathedral.
I talked about Canterbury and how it inspired my writing on author Joanna Penn’s podcast Books and Travel, if you’d like to hear more. I met Jo in the Cathedral Lodge, when she had completed her own pilgrimage to Canterbury and was researching her novel inspired by Canterbury, Tomb of Relics.
Or you can join my guided walk around Canterbury on November 1, as part of the Canterbury Festival. The walk, Murder And Mystery In Canterbury, will take in some of the more gory stories from Canterbury’s past. Perfect for All Hallows Day. Why not join me?
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Thanks Anna- what a fantastic guide and putting in context- for next time I ever go to Canterbury!
Enjoyed this, Anna. How amazing that sections of Eastbridge Hospital still exist! The secrets those walls must hold. ✨️