On a wet and windy morning, in the depths of winter's cold, I decided it was time to find and see for myself the sad and sorry tribute to the Canterbury Martyrs. This was not going to be an outing to look forward to, more a pilgrimage of respect for those forty two "good and godly" people who were burned there at the stake for their beliefs.
During the reign of Queen Mary, a person's religious convictions were counted as more worth than life itself and toward the close of this reign, the Archbishop, Cardinal Pole, set forth certain articles of enquiry to be made, of both lay-people and the clergy, at a visitation throughout the diocese of Canterbury.
Any person who was suspected of having Protestant opinions came under his fearful scrutiny, schoolmaster, priest, the tavern-keeper, the poor, the sick and unlearned women and children , all risked the same fate if these suspicions were thought to be proved.
Even a careless song from a minstrel's lips could be construed as heresy.
As a result, six men and women were burned for heresy in the Martyr's Hollow in January 1557 and seven more, most of them peasants from the surrounding countryside, in June 1558. In all a total of forty two suffered this fate before the end came.
However, all did not survive to reach the stake, many died of hunger while they were imprisoned at the castle.
A preserved letter, thrown out by the prisoners hoping to that it would catch the eye of a passer-by, tells how they were kept in cold irons and that their keepers denied them any meat to comfort them. It also told that anyone who did bring them bread, butter or cheese would have to pay money to the guards. The end of the letter ask that they might not be famished for the Lord Jesus's sake.
These were all people who lived in and about the villages that surround my own. One heroine, Alice Bendon, practised living on two and a halfpence a day, to try to see how well she could sustain hunger before being actually put to it, as she knew that when she was put in the Archbishop's prison her allowance would be a half pennyworth of bread and a farthing drink and her lodging a bit of straw between the stocks and a stone wall.
And so to the monument itself, it stands in a place now called the Martyr's Field, but bears little resemblance to a field, rows of houses surround the grassy area that looks like a small park, yet the remembrance of what eyes have seen there haunts it still.
The names of those so cruelly murdered are chisled in the stone cross, the grass is clipped and tidy, the flower beds weeded and seating is provided. But who would want to dwell too long on this site of sorrow, where the earth and the air surrounding have witnessed the cries and screams of those burnings?
They do not bring the tourists here and it's not in many guide books. The modern pilgrim to Canterbury heads straight to the Cathedral with all it's pomp and splendour, perhaps unaware of the cruelty inflicted upon some of the people from the past who's eyes had also gazed at it's magnificence.
The memorial is not a place that I would wish to return to, but I will, for in my haste to beat the cold, spiky wind that accompanied me to it, I forgot to take some flowers to lay there.
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