Canterbury Cathedral is the cathedral of the archbishop of Canterbury , the spiritual leader of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Founded in , the cathedral was completely rebuilt between and The east end was greatly enlarged at the beginning of the 12th century, and largely rebuilt in the Gothic style following a fire in , with significant eastward extensions to accommodate the flow of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Thomas Becket , the archbishop who was murdered in the cathedral in The Norman nave and transepts survived until the late 14th century, when they were demolished to make way for the present structures.
Before the English Reformation , the cathedral was part of a Benedictine monastic community known as Christ Church, Canterbury , as well as being the seat of the archbishop. In three Bishops from Britain attended the Council of Arles. This was later rededicated to St Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. Bede recorded that Augustine reused a former Roman church. The oldest remains found during excavations beneath the present nave in were, however, parts of the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building, which had been constructed across a Roman road.
A smaller subsidiary building was found to the south-west of these foundations. It appears to have had a square central tower. During the reforms of Dunstan , archbishop from until his death in , [ 14 ] a Benedictine abbey named Christ Church Priory was added to the cathedral.
But the formal establishment as a monastery seems to date only to c. Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar. The cathedral was badly damaged during Danish raids on Canterbury in The excavations revealed that the new western apse was polygonal, and flanked by hexagonal towers, forming a westwork. It housed the archbishop's throne, with the altar of St Mary just to the east. At about the same time that the westwork was built, the arcade walls were strengthened and towers added to the eastern corners of the church.
