So honourable a
place in the Order did this great house hold that we are told the
abbot of St Augustine's Canterbury sat next to the abbot of Monte
Cassino, the mother house, in the councils of the Order, and none but
the archbishop himself consecrated the abbot of St Augustine's, and
that in the Abbey Church. This also Henry stole away, seizing it for
his own use. But by 1844 what was left of the place had become a
brewery, and to-day there remains scarcely more than a great
fourteenth century gateway and hall, the work of Abbot Fyndon in 1300.
Of the church there is left a few fragments of walling, of St
Augustine's tomb, nothing whatsoever.
Less still remains to us of the smaller religious houses that abounded
in Canterbury. Of the Austin Canons, the Priory of St Gregory founded
by Lanfranc in 1084 near St John's Hospital, also a foundation of
Lanfranc, in Northgate Street, really nothing, a fragment of old
wall; of the Nunnery of St Sepulchre, a Benedictine house, nothing at
all. As for the Friars' houses scarcely more remains. Of the earliest,
the Dominican house, only the scantiest ruins of the convent, the
refectory, however, once in the hands of the Anabaptists, is now a
Unitarian chapel.
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