Understanding Becket’s Canterbury: the Legacy of William Urry

213 Understanding Becket’s Canterbury: the legacy of William Urry cressida williams During this year, which marks 850 years since the murder of St Thomas Becket in 1170, and 800 years since the translation of his remains to the new shrine in the Trinity Chapel in 1220, there will be many occasions to reflect on the legacy for Canterbury of its most famous saint. The cult of pilgrimage to his shrine shaped the city, underpinning Canterbury’s economy in the Middle Ages and introducing pilgrim inns and hostels to its streets. The study of Canterbury in Becket’s day and in the early decades of his cult owes a huge amount to one of the city’s greatest historians, William Urry; it is utterly appropriate to reflect on his work and legacy in this anniversary year. Urry’s main contribution towards the understanding of Becket’s Canterbury is Fig. 1 Detail from CCAL-DCc/Rental 31, transcribed in Angevin Kings as Rental B. CRESSIDA WILLIAMS 214 his monumental work Canterbury under the Angevin Kings. This was published in 1967 as a revision of his doctoral thesis for Birkbeck College, entitled ‘Early Rentals and Charters Relating to the Borough of Canterbury’, which he prepared between 1946 and 1955.1 Thus, the work was 21 years in the making. The title of Angevin Kings is deceptive: Urry was not aiming to write a general history of Canterbury during the period.2 Instead, the book is very much led by the sources which he chose for his thesis. Urry had exceptional skills in working with documents, assisted by his first degree in Latin, French and Anglo-Saxon and his History Honours degree, both secured whilst working at the University of London Library.3 The 1967 publication included transcriptions of seven rentals datable from the mid 12th century to about 1206, and transcriptions of 70 charters from the late 11th century to 1236. This material makes up over 220 pages of Angevin Kings, half of the text of the volume. With Canterbury, Urry chose one of the English cities which is best documented for the Angevin period. It was the city in which he had grown up, and where from 1946 he worked in the Cathedral Library. His knowledge of the city and its history was legendary. By the year 1200, Canterbury Cathedral Priory owned between a third and a half of the domestic property of the city. The archive of the cathedral priory survives well and was available for Urry, albeit in temporary accommodation, as the Victorian library building had been destroyed by bombing in 1942, with rebuilding not completed until 1954.4 Urry also examined documents from the archive of Eastbridge Hospital, some documents from the city’s archive and evidence from Domesday Book. The records enabled him to cover the topics of land ownership and tenure, administration, trades and occupations, and the relationships between cathedral priory and city. Woven through everything is people-rich detail. In Angevin Kings, Urry brought the streets of Canterbury to life, by identifying the occupants of buildings and telling their stories and those of their families. He also added personal detail to the Becket story, through the section on ‘minor actors in the story of Thomas Becket’. Urry’s text was accompanied by a set of maps drawn in his very distinctive hand. These reconstructed the city in various sections building by building and tenement by tenement, eleven maps for Canterbury in about 1166, thus four years after Becket became Archbishop, and twelve maps for the city in about 1200, thus during the early decades of Becket’s cult. The detail is often densely packed, with the inhabitant or owner noted, and other detail marked, such as notes on streets and buildings, measurements and the location of wells. These maps are an extraordinary accomplishment. The 1166 map of the cathedral precincts draws heavily from the ‘Waterworks Drawing’ of the 1160s in the Eadwine Psalter.5 At the west end of the cathedral, Urry adds a diagram and explanation of the movements of Becket and the knights on the day of the murder, even plotting on the map the mulberry tree under which it is recorded that the knights left their tunics. Urry’s great skill was in linking the events and people of history to the cityscape itself. With his use of maps, Urry followed in the footsteps of the Rev. H.E. Salter (1863-1951), whose Map of Medieval Oxford was published in 1934, informed by extensive documentary study. Urry’s work should also be seen in the context of an emerging interest in the medieval archaeology of towns and cities; previously, the main focus had been on the Roman archaeology of such settlements. One factor UNDERSTANDING BECKET’S CANTERBURY: THE LEGACY OF WILLIAM URRY 215 Fig. 2 Detail from the map of the precincts in about 1166, with a diagram showing the story of Becket’s murder. Reproduced with permission from the Urry family. CRESSIDA WILLIAMS 216 contributing to the widening of horizons was the devastation of the bombing of World War II, which provided opportunities for excavations in affected cities such as London and Canterbury. Another factor was the rising interest in local history. The Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester was founded in 1948 by William Hoskins, whose seminal work The Making of the English Landscape was published in 1955. Hoskins advocated the importance of combining visual evidence, fieldwork and the study of documents, an approach reflected in Urry’s work. The Society for Medieval Archaeology was formed in 1957, with the intention of encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration.6 Professor Sheppard Frere, Director of Excavations for the Canterbury Excavations Committee from 1946, supported the formation of the society, while retaining his main interest in Roman archaeology. As Martin Biddle has remarked, there was very little academic interest in the post-Roman archaeology of any towns or cities in the 1960s, when he himself started his programme of excavations in Winchester.7 When Angevin Kings was published, the opinion of reviewers was overwhelmingly positive and the work was considered to be ground-breaking. Geoffrey Martin, who in 1982 would become Keeper of the Public Record Office in London, wrote in his review: ‘[Urry’s] treatment of the evidence is exemplary, and the whole work is a powerful illumination of the medieval town’.8 Urry’s ability to bring together the skills of different disciplines is reflected in the observations on the book by the historian F.R.H. Du Boulay, who wrote: ‘The book is the work of a great archivist, topographer, and antiquary, with local lessons for the economic and social historian interested in an age of swelling population and changing differentiations of wealth’.9 Jane Sayers, diplomatic historian and sometime Deputy Archivist at Lambeth Palace Library, contrasted Urry’s work with the ‘sterile’ approach adopted by the Victoria County History.10 W.A. Pantin (1902-1972), medieval historian at Oxford who built on Salter’s work, remarked on Urry’s focus on the real people of history. He also noted that the work ‘comes providentially at a very appropriate time … for the towns are being threatened more seriously than ever before, and town-plans which have hardly been altered since the 12th century are being obliterated’.11 The 1950s and 1960s in Canterbury saw the clearing and development of areas damaged during World War II, as well as the construction of the ring road and slum clearance. Similarly in Oxford, historic buildings were demolished for redevelopment from the 1930s to the 1950s, Pantin surveying them before demolition. Angevin Kings has informed all work on 12th- and 13th-century Canterbury in the decades since its publication, and it has been widely cited in works on social, economic and urban history. In an obituary after Urry’s death in 1981, Jane Sayers noted that no English town had anything to compare with it.12 Urry’s work has also provided an invaluable foundation for excavations by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust since its formation in 1976, with archaeologists able to refer to his documentary studies when interpreting their findings. Biddle has noted how fortunate Canterbury’s archaeologists have been to have Urry’s solid documentary work in place before embarking on excavations. In Winchester, documentary study followed excavation.13 Urry would have been thrilled to have witnessed the excavation of the house of Terric the Goldsmith by the Archaeological Trust in 1990. Terric leased two UNDERSTANDING BECKET’S CANTERBURY: THE LEGACY OF WILLIAM URRY 217 properties and a stone house from the cathedral priory in the Buttermarket area and features regularly in Angevin Kings, to the extent that Urry noted in the book’s preface that his wife and family had been compelled to live in his company for a long time.14 Angevin Kings has an academic style; in his later writings, Urry’s style is lighter and more accessible, moving away from the requirements of a doctoral thesis and reflecting the experience he had gained through lecturing. What Angevin Kings doesn’t convey is Urry’s wit, his sense of fun, his ability to engage and inspire, and his skills as a speaker and teacher. That shines through accounts of him by family and friends, which are full of admiration and affection.15 Many recall walking with him through the streets of Canterbury, with Urry recounting stories about individual buildings and the people who lived there. There is evidence in his papers now held at the Cathedral Archives of his generous assistance of many historians and academics, and his friendship with them. Urry’s great passion was for the medieval, but his interests were wide-ranging. He saw himself as a successor to William Somner, 17th-century historian and antiquarian of Canterbury, an edition of whose Antiquities he published in 1977. He published many articles on a range of topics in the Kentish Gazette, the Beaney’s Good Books series, the Friends of the Cathedral’s Chronicle and also (of course) this journal, thus making Canterbury’s history better known to the general public. Two books were published posthumously: Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury in 1988, edited by Andrew Butcher, and Thomas Becket: his last days in 1999, edited by Peter Rowe. In the preface to Angevin Kings, Urry states that he considered the book to be ‘a contribution towards a future History of Canterbury’. Had Urry’s life not been interrupted and cut short by illness, he would no doubt have made many more very significant contributions.16 In addition to his publishing and lecturing activity, he carried out an extraordinary amount of work on the archives in his care at the Cathedral Archives and Library, sorting and cataloguing them, collaborating with the conservator and bookbinder, Jack Maple, in matters relating to the physical care of the collections. It is ironic that Urry should be so significant for the understanding of Becket’s Canterbury, as he was known to have disliked Becket intensely, without any clear reason for this.17 However, this dislike did not hinder him from writing and lecturing extensively on Becket. Urry moved from Canterbury to Oxford in 1969 to take up the post of Reader in Medieval Western Palaeography, and his lectures on Becket proved inspirational, with students queuing to attend. In 1970, when Becket’s anniversary was marked with a full programme across Canterbury, Urry returned to give a lecture at the then new University of Kent. His son recalls that the lecture was delivered with no notes, with diagrams drawn on the whiteboard. Those attending would have filled the lecture hall twice over; an adjacent lecture hall was used for the overspill.18 There are many ways in which Urry’s legacy can be built on and developed. Jake Weekes of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust has reflected that there is the potential to build on Urry’s ‘extraordinary topography’ of Canterbury through exploring further archaeological evidence for the ‘obscure, poor or disenfranchised’ who are missing from the historic written records and thus also from Urry’s work.19 The proposed Canterbury map in the British Historic Towns Atlas series would CRESSIDA WILLIAMS 218 be a worthy heir to Urry’s contribution to interpreting the city through mapping. Modern technologies, such as mobile apps and virtual reality applications, would help share the history of Canterbury more widely with younger generations. Urry made the most of the technology available to him, even building his own photostat machine, made from lenses, old tins and fishing weights.20 It is likely that Urry would have embraced up-to-date technology to inspire others with his love of history and of Canterbury. Fig. 3 Plaque commemorating William Urry in the Cloister at Canterbury Cathedral. It reads: ‘Remember before God William George Urry, Archivist of this Metropolitical Church and of the City of Canterbury, Reader in Palaeography at Oxford, Fellow of St Edmund Hall, 1913-1981’. UNDERSTANDING BECKET’S CANTERBURY: THE LEGACY OF WILLIAM URRY 219 ‘It is a happiness of local historians that, however slight, their work is never entirely replaced and by the time another comes to write their particular efforts, the original has assumed an antiquarian value all of its own’.21 Thus writes Urry in the introduction to his edition of Somner’s Antiquities. Urry’s work could never be described as slight, and will certainly never be replaced: it holds a firm place in the understanding of Canterbury and indeed of English medieval cities. Angevin Kings and Urry’s other published works will remain heavily used and treasured volumes on the shelves of the Cathedral Archives, a building he saw rise from the ground, which houses collections he cared for with expertise and passion, and near which his ashes now lie. In his review of Angevin Kings for this journal, the late Allen Grove wrote that Canterbury ‘ought to be most grateful’ to Urry. This article is a sign of that gratitude. acknowledgement The author is grateful for the assistance of many provided during the preparation of this article, in particular Professor Louise Wilkinson of Canterbury Christ Church University, Bill Urry and Elizabeth Wheatley, son and daughter of William Urry, Professor Paul Bennett of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, Nathalie Cohen, Canterbury Cathedral Archaeologist, and Ken Reedie. endnotes 1 Urry pasted a description of the background to his thesis and its publication in the copy which he deposited in the Cathedral Archives and Library. 2 Angevin Kings, p. ix. 3 F or a general outline of Urry’s life, see the address given at his memorial service by Dr Henry Mayr-Harting, reprinted as the foreword in William Urry (edited by Peter A. Rowe), Thomas Becket, his last days (1999). 4 T he records he studied form part of the archive collection of Christ Church Priory which was inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in 2016. 5 T rinity College Cambridge MS R.17.1. 6 F or a history of the Society, see https://medievalarchaeology.co.uk/the-sma/sma-retrospectand- prospect/ (accessed October 2019). 7 M artin Biddle, ‘The study of Winchester: archaeology and history in a British Town, 1961- 1983’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 69 (1984), here p. 95. 8 R eview in History, vol. 55, no. 184 (1970), p. 238. 9 R eview in Economic History Review, vol. 21 (Apr 1968), p. 170. 10 Press cutting amongst reviews in CCAL-U543 (William Urry papers); publication not known. 11 R eview in Medieval Archaeology, vol. 13 (1969), pp. 289-90. 12 O bituary in the Journal of the Society of Archivists, vol. 6, no. 8 (Oct 1981), p. 534. 13 ‘Archaeology and the history of British towns Canterbury and Winchester’, recording of open lecture delivered at the University of Kent on 30 May 1969 (available at University of Kent Special Collections and Archives). 14 Angevin Kings, p. xi. 15 S ee for example Marjorie Lyle, ‘William Urry, a talk … to the Canterbury Recorder Talking Newspaper’ [no date], available at http://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/ (accessed October 2019). In May 2017, a day to commemorate William Urry was held at the Cathedral Archives. Those sharing their recollections included his son, Bill Urry, Professor Jane Sayers and Marjorie Lyle. 16 Urry was first diagnosed with cancer in 1960, and received drastic treatment for two years. The treatment proved successful, but cancer returned in 1971. CRESSIDA WILLIAMS 220 17 S ee, for example, Mayr-Harting’s address reprinted in Thomas Becket, his last days (1999), p. vii. 18 R ecollections at the ‘Remembering William Urry’ day in May 2017. 19 Jake Weekes, ‘Residues, rentals and social topography in Angevin Canterbury’, in Sheila Sweetinburgh (ed.), Early medieval Kent 899-1200 (2016), pp. 227-44, here pp. 227-8. 20 R ecollections by Bill Urry at the ‘Remembering William Urry’ day in May 2017. 21 The Antiquities of Canterbury by William Somner, with a new introduction by William Urry (1977), p. xvii.