Canterbury Cathedral, Goudhurst & Lynsted in Kent, in southern England. The Cathedral's first Archbishop was St. Augustine, previously abbot of St. Andrew's Benedictine Abbey in Rome, sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great, arriving in AD 597. St. Bede the Venerable (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) records how the Cathedral was founded by St. Augustine, the first Archbishop and is of the setting fro Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Augustine also directed the foundation of a Benedictine Abbey of Ss. Peter and Paul to be built outside the city walls, along with the ancient Church of St. Martin; said to be England's oldest parish church in continuous use and the private chapel of Queen Bertha of Kent in the 6th Century before Augustine arrived from Rome. Queen Bertha was a Christian when she arrived in England with her Chaplain, Bishop Luidhard, and King Ethelbert, her husband, allowed her to continue to practise her religion in an existing church which the Venerable Bede says had been in use in the late Roman period but fallen into disuse. This was later rededicated to St. Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. As well as being the mother church of the Diocese of Canterbury (east Kent) it is the focus for the Anglican Communion. The formal title is the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury.

Second building on same axis added by Archbishop Cuthbert (740-760) as a baptistry and dedicated to St. John the Baptist. Oda (941-958) renewed the building, greatly lengthening the Nave. The Cathedral community was reorganised as Benedictine Abbey during the reforms of Abp. St. Dunstan. Lyfing (1013-1020) and Aethelnoth (1020-1038) added a western apse as an oratory of St. Mary. St. Anselm greatly extended the Quire to the east to give sufficient space for the monks of the greatly revived monastery. The crypt of this church survives as the largest of its kind in England. In 1170 King Henry II had chosen Thomas á Becket to be archbishop. A dark chapter in the history of the Cathedral was the murder of Thomas Becket in the north-east Transept on Tuesday 29 December 1170. Becket was the second of four archbishops of Canterbury who were murdered (also Alphege).

Goudhurst is a village in Kent on the Weald, about 12 miles south of Maidstone. The church in Goudhurst probably existed long before 1119, its earliest recorded date. The church has been altered and restored many times over the centuries. Until 1637 it had a tall spire which was eventually destroyed by lightning. Bedgebury is one of the oldest estates in Kent: having given its name to the de Bedgebury family, it passed into the hands of the Culpeper family in 1450. When the estate was sold in 1680, a new house was built which itself became a girls' school in the 1920s.