A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Instead, the new Bishop Augustine recognized reality and established himself in the extreme south-east in Kent, the nearest kingdom to mainland Europe, where pagan King Ethelbert had married a Frankish Christian princess called Bertha, and where there was still a lively sense of the importance of the Roman past. The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury. When political power later shifted away from Kent, successive Anglo-Saxon bishops and archbishops in Augustine’s line found advantages in being slightly at a distance from imperious monarchs in Wessex or Mercia, and stayed in Canterbury. Only much later did twelfth-century Angevin monarchs turn a revived city of London into their capital, also developing a palace immediately to its west in Westminster. The Archbishops of Canterbury then experimented with exploiting the possibilities of a newly acquired property in the heart of London itself, on the site of what is now the parish church of St Mary-le-Bow, but they soon changed tack. They thought it wise to develop a minor estate of theirs at Lambeth, which was a quick barge journey across the River Thames from Westminster, and the new palace there became their true centre of operations, rather than Canterbury itself. One late-twelfth-century archbishop even tried to fulfil Gregory’s plan and move his cathedral to Lambeth, a scheme foiled only by his death on crusade.28