I thought this week that I would start with a couple of notices. First, the joint lecture organised by the Centre and Brook Agricultural Museum, the Fourth Nightingale Memorial Lecture that was due to take place this month, has been postponed until Friday 2 October. All other details remain the same in that it will be given by Dr John Bulaitis on the tithe ‘wars’ that took place in the county in the early 1930s, and will be held at Old Sessions House on Christ Church’s Canterbury campus. This is a fascinating topic for anyone interested in social history and the ways different constituencies negotiated their place in the countryside using conflict, compromise, and cooperation at a time of considerable economic difficulty in the farming world. Such strains within Kentish society will also be in evidence at ‘The Great War and its aftermath’ study day, led by Dr Martin Watts and several colleagues, next month on 23 May. This, too, will be held in Old Sessions House and places can be booked through the university’s online system – see the Centre’s homepage and click on the link.

Although now damaged, the ‘Cheker lion’ is a reminder of Christ Church Priory’s once great pilgim inn

I am going to stay with this idea of social and economic strain on regional society, but I am heading back in time from the twentieth to the sixteenth century because that’s the period I know more about. So I am going to talk briefly about Canterbury in the first and second decades of that century, when the city appears to have been experiencing a significant downturn in the cloth industry as it increasingly lost out to the Wealden clothiers. Not, of course, that everyone was suffering, that never happens in a recession or even in times of war, because there are always those who find ways to profit. Nevertheless in broad terms it was not a good time, especially as it has been suggested by Andrew Butcher, an expert on the city’s medieval history, that probably a third of the city’s population had been involved in cloth production at a slightly earlier period. Moreover, the signs had seemingly been on the wall for some time, the city have been caught out on the ‘wrong’ side when Edward IV regained the Crown in 1471, and, even though Canterbury and Kent had generally favoured Henry Tudor, political instability in the 1480s had brought its own problems.

Notwithstanding the number of people below the freemen seeking an annual licence to trade independently had recovered a little by c.1500 from the low point of the mid-fifteenth century, such numbers are relative and may just as likely reflect even worse conditions elsewhere as anything else. And it is into this picture that the city’s civic authorities decided to initiate (or restart) the St Thomas pageant. The timing is interesting, not least because the very nasty dispute between the cathedral monks and civic officials had yet to be totally resolved, indeed matters were still rumbling on in the royal courts. Nonetheless, the mayor and aldermen in 1505 spent over 25s on a pageant wagon and all the other things needed, such as costumes for the four knights (played by boys) and a puppet of some sort used to represent Thomas Becket, and something similar for the angel. Presumably at a particular point in the proceedings, as the wagon was hauled around the city, the dramatic enactment of the archbishop’s murder took place during which part of the archbishop’s head was sliced off because among the props used was a leather bag and blood. This elaborate portrayal of events in 1170 was seemingly the only pageant funded by the civic authorities, the wagon and its actors forming part of the procession of the ‘Marching Watch’ that took place annually on the eve of the feast of the Translation of St Thomas’ relics (to the new shrine in 1220), that is 6 July.

More on this very interesting pageant as part of the summer feast day of St Thomas will, I hope, appear in 2016 in Archaeologia Cantiana, the journal of Kent Archaeological Society, but here I just want to return to the apparent dilemma faced by governments, and I doubt I need to spell this out during an election campaign, of whether they should spend to boost the economy artificially or whether round after round of cost-cutting is the way forward. In Canterbury in 1505 it looks as though the mayor went for the former. He was joined by the prior at Christ Church, who at about the same time had apparently gained archiepiscopal and royal support for a great new gateway – Christ Church gate – to replace a smaller gateway on the other side of the priory’s Sun Inn. This former inn, but probably best known in recent times as a coffee shop, is soon to become the Dean and Chapter’s new visitors’ centre for the cathedral. Christ Church Priory’s new gateway took over a decade to build but the intention was presumably to have it finished by 1520, and this date is, I think, critically important because the prior, like the city, was looking to recover lost ground by staging a sumptuous St Thomas Jubilee. Even though it may not have been all the prior and mayor hoped for as it turned out, this was well in the future in 1505 and over the next decade it may have felt as though Canterbury was entering a brave new world where revenue from pilgrimage would again make a valuable contribution to the coffers either side of the new gateway. So perhaps the moral here, if there is one, is that seeing the glass half full rather than half empty may be as relevant today as it was in the twilight years of Henry VII, albeit a good dose of realism is also valuable.