ody of the martyr was preserved, the King laid
aside his cloak and received five strokes with a rod from every Bishop
and Abbot there present, and three from every one of the eighty monks.
In that place he remained through the whole night fasting and weeping
to be absolved on the following day.

[Illustration: WEST GATE, CANTERBURY]

The martyrdom of St Thomas, the penance of the King, these world-
shaking and amazing events might in themselves, we may think, have
been enough to transform the church in which they took place, if as
was thought at the time, heaven itself had not intervened and
destroyed Conrad's glorious choir by fire. This disaster fell upon
the city and the country like a final judgment, less than two months
after the penance of the King in 1174, and within four years of St
Thomas's murder.

Something of the great masterpiece that then perished is left to us
especially without, and it is perhaps the most charming work remaining
in the city, the tower of St Anselm, for instance, and much of the
transept beside it.

For the rest the choir of Canterbury, as we know it, the choir began
in 1174 by William of Sens, is as French as its predecessor, but in
all else very different. In order perhaps to provide a great space for
the shrine of the newly canonised St Thomas of Canterbury, to whose
tomb already half Europe was flocking, the choir was built even longer
than its predecessor. The great space provided for the shrine in the
Trinity Chapel behind the choir and high altar opened on the east into
a circular chapel known, perhaps on account of the relic it held, as
Becket's Crown. Till 1220 when all was ready, the body of St Thomas lay
in an iron coffin in the crypt, and the great feast and day of
pilgrimage in his honour was the day of his martyrdom, December 29, so
incredibly honourable as being within the octave of the Nativity of Our
Lord. But in 1220 it was decided to translate the body from the crypt
to the new shrine in the Trinity Chapel in July, for the winter
pilgrimage was irksome. From that year a new feast was established, the
feast of the Translation of St Thomas upon July 7th, and thus in
England down to our own day, St Thomas has two feasts, that of his
Martyrdom on December 29, when still his relics are exposed in the
great Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, and in the little church of St
Thomas, the Catholic sanctuary in Canterbury, and that of his
Translation upon July 7th.

Of that