In 1096 it was
pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a
lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern
transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the
north arm and two in the south. All this was done in the time of St
Anselm and finished in 1115, when Conrad was Prior of Christ Church.
It was this church with Lanfranc's short Norman nave, western facade
and towers, and Conrad's glorious great choir high up over the crypt,
a choir broader than the nave and longer too, and with two transepts,
the western of Lanfranc's time, the eastern of St Anselm's, that St
Thomas knew and that saw his martyrdom in 1170.
Materials for the life of St Thomas are so plentiful that his modern
biographers are able to compose a life fuller perhaps in detail and
fact than would be possible in the case of any other man of his time.
But no account ever written of his martyrdom is at once so simple and
so touching as that to be found in the Golden Legend. It was this
account which the man of the Middle Age knew by heart, and which
brought him in his thousands on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and
therefore I give it here.
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