In case you’re looking for another stop on your Jane Austen 250th Birthday Pilgrimage, a church where she once worshiped recently restored and rededicated a treasured work of art: a twelfth-century marble carving that may depict the medieval St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered in 1170.*
The church, St. Lawrence the Martyr, is a stone’s throw from Godmersham Park, the palatial Kent estate of Austen’s older brother Edward Knight. Austen, the daughter of an Anglican minister and herself a devout Anglican, attended services at St. Lawrence during her regular extended visits to Edward’s family--although the church interior was renovated decades after Austen's death and apparently no longer looks much like the place Austen would have known.
Still, Austen must have seen the carving, a relief sculpture made from Purbeck marble that depicts a seated figure wearing the mitre and vestments of an archbishop and holding a crozier. According to a Church of England press release, the carving, displayed in the church’s chancel, “is thought to be” either Becket or his predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec. If it's Becket, it's the earliest known sculpture of him.
Both prelates lived centuries before the Protestant Reformation and the English church’s break with Rome. But all that unpleasantness is holy water under the bridge by now, and Roman Catholic representatives were included in the rededication ceremony, held in late August.
St. Thomas, if that’s who he is, was apparently in desperate need of a facelift, as anyone with close to nine centuries on their speedometer would be. The carving “was worn and fragile, and we had been told that it could not join an exhibition at the British Museum some years ago because it was too delicate to move,” the release quotes former churchwarden James Russell as saying.
But now it’s refurbished, just in time to greet the Janeite pilgrims who will likely find their way to St. Lawrence during next year's birthday festivities. “We have a lot of visitors because of the Jane Austen connection,” Russell said, “but there are now increasing numbers visiting because of interest in the possible connection to St. Thomas.”
* Many thanks to longtime family friend Marianna McJimsey for calling this news tidbit to my attention! Telling loved ones that you’re a Janeite is like setting up a thousand Google alerts.
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