Belle Skinner Journal Tuesday, September 6, 1887

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Tuesday, Sept. 6.

We left London this noon for Canterbury and are spending the night at the Royal Fountain Hotel.  This afternoon we drove about Canterbury—first visited the Cathedral.  This Cathedral is by far the most interesting one we have seen.  In size it about equals York Minster, but surpasses the Minster in everything else.  Trinity Chapel is beautiful.  Behind the screen in this chapel, are the tomb of the Black Prince, and the Shrine of Thomas-a-Becket.  Rather, the Shrine was here until Henry VIII destroyed it.  In various places we were shown traces of the Pilgrims—such as ? stones around the Saints Shrine.  The effigy of the Black Prince in bronze and gold is under a canopy, in(?) which hang his accoutrements last worn.  The crypt is intensely interesting.  It was here that famously the silk-weavers had their looms.  In a Chapel of the crypt.  French? services are held every Sunday and have been held.

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without intermission for four hundred years.  The stained glass windows of the thirteenth Century are wonderfully beautiful.  The present Cathedral is built on the sight [sic] of an old Norman Chapel.  From the Cathedral we drove through the very pretty grounds of St. Martin’s College.  Then we drove to St. Augustine’s College, and here went over the buildings.  We enjoyed them thoroughly.  The College is a very old one, and is for missionaries.  That is, a College where boys are fitted for missionaries.  We walked through their cloisters, similar to those of the monks, and then went into the museum, filled with curiosities sent to the College by their missionary students.  Then we went into the library and from there went out into the grounds, where we saw the walls of the ancient abbey on which the College is built and the ruins of an heathen temple, also in the grounds.  After this we were shown the dining hall, the oldest in England, and this completed

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Our visit to the College.  We next drove to St. Margaret’s Chapel, a very ancient building—but unfortunately we were too late to go inside.  So we drove back to our hotel.  All the buildings in Canterbury are made of a very hard flint stone, so that although many of them were built in the eleventh Century they are in a good state of preservation now, much better than other buildings we have seen, of later date.