St Martin's Church (Canterbury)

Church with old tombstones of the cemetery

Wall side with flint stones and Roman bricks

Nave and apse

The Church of St Martin is an Anglican church building in Canterbury , England. The St. Martin von Tours church dates back to the late 6th century and is therefore the oldest in the English-speaking world that is continuously used as a church. The Canterbury Cathedral is a daughter church of the Church of St Martin . Both churches are on the UNESCO World Heritage List .

location

The St Martin's Church stands in a already used in ancient times burial ground just over 1 km east of the city center, outside the Roman and medieval city walls of Canterbury.

history

Around the year 580 the Frankish princess Bertha married the pagan king Æthelberht of Kent . Bertha was a Christian and came to the court of Canterbury with her confessor Liudhard . Her husband accepted his wife's Christian faith and had a late Roman church restored. Augustine of Canterbury , who was sent to England by the Pope to convert the largely pagan population and later canonized , had the church rebuilt shortly after his arrival in 597. King Æthelberht is said to have been baptized here.

architecture

The brickwork of the rectangular hall church consists of flint bulbs and Roman bricks . Despite many renovations in the following centuries ( bell tower , pointed arch windows, etc.), the nave and the later renewed apse were never vaulted and instead still covered by a wooden rafter construction with infills .

In the south-western corner of the church there is a Romanesque baptismal font composed of several stone rings with a decoration of intertwined circles and overlapping arches.

graveyard

The church stands in the middle of a cemetery that was probably already used by Christians in Roman times; there are about 900 graves here. The oldest surviving tombstone dates from 1686.