A bijou church it sits on a very tight site but has a largish graveyard with five CWGC headstones and some nice C17th stones. Unfortunately it was locked but is normally open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and a keyholder is listed, so I blame myself for turning up on a Monday and needing to keep a tight leash on time as I had to return to Essex in time for the end of school!
Having recently bought the relevant Pevsner St Martin is now a high priority revisit once Covid restrictions are lifted which is good since I need to do the Cathedral properly.
ST MARTIN, St Martin’s Hill. The pilgrim to St Martin’s comes to see not only the church where St Augustine and his followers first worshipped, but what may even be part of the church where Queen Bertha, Christian consort of the pagan king Ethelbert, came to pray before the missionaries from Rome arrived. Bede describes the situation of Bertha’s church quite clearly: ‘Erat autem prope ipsam civitatem ad orientem ecclesia in honorem sancti Martini antiquitus facta.’ That is where St Martin’s church stands today, to the E of the city, well outside its walls. The W tower is Perp, very simple, but the rest, nave, and a chancel long in proportion to it, has walling recognizable at once as early. The nave is mainly of masonry blocks, with occasional courses of Roman brick. The chancel is partly similar, but in the E wall with flint instead of stone; but the W half of the S wall, and an extensive patch at the E end of the N wall, are wholly built of Roman brick, carefully coursed. The former walling is like Reculver, the latter like St Pancras, Canterbury, both C7 churches. But is it possible that the brick walling is part of Bertha’s pre-Augustinian building, which Bede believed to have been built during the time of the Roman occupation? The question cannot be definitely answered. Either this is Bertha’s church, enlarged in the C7, or work of two periods in the C7. The only feature of the earlier work is a blocked doorway at the W end of the chancel S wall. It is square-headed and led into a tiny porticus, which has been excavated, barely 5 ft square. The round-headed doorway, also blocked, further E, but also in the earliest walling, is a C7 insertion. It is wholly fashioned with tiles, but one can see how it was inserted into the earlier wall. The early part of the chancel S wall ends in a shallow buttress. A cross wall has been discovered under the chancel floor, the E end of the early church. But why does the early walling go on further to the E on the N side? The W end of the N wall was largely pulled down in 1845, when the vestry was built.
The nave, like the chancel, has no early windows, but the buttresses, the pair at the SE and the single one at the NW angle, are of the typical shallow Early Saxon sort. The semi-circular one in the centre of the S wall is presumably what remains of another of the same sort. Inside, the nave seems wide and lofty - it is 24 ft 6 in. wide, 38 ft long. The chancel is a great contrast, a long, narrow funnel. The W wall of the nave, where the plaster has been stripped off, has the head of a blocked early opening (a window?) c.17 ft up, and to l. and r. blocked Saxon windows, the springers of their tile—turned arches visible where their heads were heightened. Perp chancel arch. - FONT. A splendid big Norman tub, made of Caen stone blocks, decorated with arcading of intersecting arches, and two rows of interlocking circles, all dotted with pellets. For the circles cf. the shafts of the doorway to the Norman dormitory of the cathedral. - CARVING. Relief of St Martin dividing his cloak, dated 1583. Is it French? - PLATE. Chrismatory, C14, of brass; Paten, 1685 by T.K.; Paten, 1772 by T.M. - MONUMENTS. Michael Fraunces d. 1587. 19 in. brasses. - Thomas Stoughton d. 1591. 40 in. long brass of a knight. - Sir John Finch d. 1660. Gargantuan architectural tablet, under the tower. He was the Speaker of the House of Commons who had to be held down in his chair to get the Petition of Rights passed. - Ann Pyott d. 1753. Charming, rather amateurish, tablet with a Rococo urn. But no. Sir Robert Taylor designed it.
Not having researched prior to my visit it appears I need to revisit when the next collection from uni occurs on the open days as Arthur explains:
The beauty of youth is about the house of the Grey Friars; the beauty of old age is about the walls of the small temple on the hill known to all English speaking Christendom as St Martin’s. It is the Mother Church of our Motherland. The light of Christianity may well have been shining here when the light of the Roman lamp was shining in the Pharos at Dover. Bede tells us it was built while the Romans were here, and it is thought it may have been a Roman temple given by Ethelbert to his Christian queen. Here Bertha worshipped God while Ethelbert worshipped his many gods in the temple nearby which was to become the Church of St Pancras, whose ruins we see. We can imagine the king and queen leaving their palace in the morning and parting for a while down the road, Bertha to go to St Martin’s and Ethelbert to his temple. Something of the walls of both is here. Augustine and his companions would catch sight of St Martin’s rising above the wooden houses as they came from Richborough. It would be here that he baptised Ethelbert - though not at this font, of whose age we cannot be certain.
The walls of St Martin’s are nearly two feet thick, and Roman brickwork in the chancel still stands eight feet from the ground with six feet of Saxon masonry above it. The lower part of the wall of the nave has ancient plaster and masses of Roman tiles, and where the woodwork has preserved the walls intact the salmon colour of the Roman plaster is still seen. There is a Roman doorway built up at the east end of the nave, a Saxon doorway at the south-west of the chancel, and a Norman doorway near the font. There are oak beams in the roof which seem to have rested on the Roman and Saxon walls since the Saxons put them there.
Nowhere in England stand two more interesting buildings so near each other as the little temple of St Martin’s and the great cathedral seen from its door. Everything here could stand on a tennis lawn and leave a good path round. The builders who restored this lovely place have not enlarged it. The Normans made their own doorway, the 13th century raised the chancel arch and the roof of the nave, the 14th century built the tower, and the 15th century made the windows.
One window shows us Augustine landing at Ebbsfleet, entering Canterbury by St Martin’s Hill, and baptising Ethelbert; another shows Queen Bertha and her maids, another Bede dying, and another English slaves in the marketplace of Rome.
We need not doubt that it is the oldest building in these islands used for worship. It was probably built by British workmen 1600 years ago. It was an ancient place when the first stone of Westminster was laid. It fell on evil days, and it is said that for 150 years the church peeped out from a vast heap of coal piled up here; but otherwise it has been a church all the time since Ethelbert. It would look out on Canterbury when the city was eight feet below its present streets; it was one of three churches outside the Roman walls in a line from east to west—St Martin’s, St Pancras, and the old church where the cathedral stands. So that we have here a straight mile with Roman, Saxon, and Norman in it, as we have found once more in Kent, at Eynsford.
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