![\"CantMC\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/445\/2015\/06\/cantmc.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCanterbury’s Magna Carta parade in Burgate<\/p>\n
The exhibition \u2018Canterbury in the Age of Magna Carta\u2019 is in the Drawing Room and when I was there a couple of youngsters with their mother were working on their own seals. As you might expect the exhibition makes good use of both William Urry\u2019s maps from his Canterbury under the Angevin Kings <\/em>and also charters and other documents from the Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, one of the exhibition\u2019s sponsors. Canterbury Christ Church University is the other partner under the leadership of Professor Louise Wilkinson, and, as she said in her lecture at the conference, Canterbury is very fortunate in the quality of its medieval records for this period. If you haven\u2019t been to the exhibition, I would recommend you do because it offers interesting materials not only on Canterbury\u2019s own Magna Carta, the city’s citizens in John\u2019s time, but images and artefacts covering pilgrimage to St Thomas\u2019s shrine, including a piece of pink marble that may have been part of the shrine. Similarly, if you haven\u2019t been to Faversham\u2019s Magna Carta exhibition, it too is well worth a visit.<\/p>\n Keeping with the same period I was also present when a group of students (undergraduates and postgraduates) from the University of Kent staged a performance of the first section of \u2018The Play of Adam\u2019, that is the section dealing with the Fall, at St Stephen\u2019s church, Hackington. This play dates from the twelfth century and survives in a single manuscript copy. The reason why it is so interesting is that it is in the vernacular, in this case Anglo-Norman and thus could have been performed in any part of the Angevin Empire, including potentially Canterbury. The reason I am drawing your attention to this performance, apart from the fact that it was well done and the actors made good use of the playing space outside the church\u2019s west door, is that it deals very cleverly with several themes that were of deep concern to churchmen and others in authority in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Among these were ideas about formalising marriage and the marriage ceremony that the Church wished to encourage, especially its solemnisation at the church door, to be followed by a nuptial mass, and something very similar takes place where God joins the hands of Adam and Eve together near the beginning of the play. Similarly, ideas about the feudal bond between master and man take place, in this case between God and Adam, a reciprocal relationship that equally bound medieval society together, at least ideally. Although, as Magna Carta showed, when this bond was broken society became unstable and it was difficult to reinstate ideas of trust between the parties. Moreover by staging the action at the church door and in the churchyard \u2013 God retires into the church at various points \u2013 the audience, then as now, can understand the spiritual implications put forward by the writer, and for those who had experienced the Interdict in England during John\u2019s reign, such a play might have been especially painful, a reminder of how English people (Mankind and Adam) had been estranged from the Church and thus from God.<\/p>\n The play also featured a very fetching Hell Mouth, suitably positioned on the north side of the playing area and thus the church, and a splendid snake that quivered beautifully at God\u2019s approach, finding itself condemned to crawl on its belly forever. However the play is one of hope because, even though Adam and Eve are driven from Paradise, Satan and his devils plant thistles in Adam\u2019s corn and destroy his crops, the message of the Resurrection is given in several lines and there is an especially good linking of Eve and Mary. This connection might also be seen as joining Creation and Domesday, another theme that was of concern to contemporaries. Thus once again Canterbury has served up some fascinating medieval events this week. On that note, I\u2019ll finish by saying that preparations for the Medieval Canterbury Weekend in 1-3 April 2016, under the Centre, are coming on well, which should mean booking will open in July through the university\u2019s Arts & Culture facility, either in person at Augustine House or through the relevant webpage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although I hadn\u2019t actually intended to be in the city to see the Magna Carta parade, I happened to be there and so joined the crowd to see the band, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6665,"featured_media":243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[817],"tags":[169,341,313,9,317,373,29,193,301,225,117,353,89,101],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-archives","tag-artefacts","tag-beaney-exhibition","tag-canterbury","tag-canterbury-cathedral","tag-church","tag-community-history","tag-drama","tag-faversham","tag-general-election","tag-local-and-regional-history","tag-louise-wilkinson","tag-magna-carta","tag-middle-ages"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Sheila Sweetinburgh","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/445\/2015\/06\/cantmc.jpg","postExcerpt":"Although I hadn\u2019t actually intended to be in the city to see the Magna Carta parade, I happened to be there and so joined the crowd to see the band, […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}