April showers break the long March drought, and bring pilgrims to Canterbury; to the shrine, or what remains of it, of St Thomas Becket.
There are several historic routes to Canterbury: the Pilgrim’s Way, which runs along the Downs escarpment from Winchester through Sussex and Kent. And there are more modern paths, such as the Via Francigena, which begins in Rome. Canterbury Cathedral’s website says that the pilgrimage from Rome has grown popular in the last ten years, which attests to the revival of interest in English medieval saints and the present strength of Catholic faith.
Pilgrims have been coming to Canterbury since before the canonisation of ‘the turbulent priest’ in 1173, two and a half years after his murder in 1170. Becket’s cult extended throughout the Christian world. For example, a church in Marsala, Sicily, is dedicated to him.
His wild popularity inspired Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chaucer described a fictional company of storytelling pilgrims who began their journey at Southwark Cathedral in London. Their route has become virtually impassable thanks to the A2; but a group of 20 twenty Chaucer enthusiasts has just started a pilgrimage at the George pub near London Bridge — on the site of the Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s poem opens. They are walking in aid of the National Literacy Trust, and they will stop along the way to retell the original tales. The press release proclaims that the ‘the tales will be told in parks, pubs, churches and traffic islands’, which will explain any roadside eccentrics you may encounter over the next couple of days. And you may well come across them: for example, the Knight’s Tale was told at the Watering of St Thomas, which is now a supermarket on the Old Kent Road.
This is a brilliant idea. Chaucer suffers from being forced on GCSE students who are anything but impressionable. But, with the right translation (Neville Coghill’s is admired by most accounts), the tales are captivating and riotously funny; and as the recent BBC series showed, they can also adapt well to television. Chaucer needn’t be as maddening as your 15-year-old self remembers.
PS: It’s satisfying when something you were taught at school, and which you assumed would be useless in tomorrow’s world, actually comes in handy. So it was with Chaucer. And I now see that he was a bit of sage, too. The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales begins: ‘When April with his showers sweet with fruit/ The drought of March has pierced unto the root.’ Read that, Thames Water et al, and think carefully before concocting more nonsense about doughts and the ‘wrong sort of rain’.
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