On our City of London walks we wander along Cheapside and turn into Ironmonger Lane. On the wall of the building on the corner is an image of one of the most famous Londoners ever St Thomas Becket.

It marks the site of the birthplace of the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury and is an important part of the history that we cover on our London walks since it gives the opportunity to tell our walkers about the office of England’s chief prelate.

In the spring of  AD597 St Augustine landed in England with instructions from Pope Gregory to convert its inhabitants to Christianity.

As a deacon in Rome, Gregory had been much taken with a group of fair haired slaves he had seen for sale in the market place. When he asked their nationality he was told that they were Angles, to which he made the famous, punning riposte that they were “not Angles but Angles.”

The story is probably apocryphal and its veracity is difficult to ascertain today, but certainly something persuaded Gregory that the Angles were worth converting to Christianity, and so he persuaded St Augustine and a band of fellow monks to set sail as missionaries and so it was that in the Spring of AD597, Augustine arrived in Kent and set about his duty of bringing the Good News of Christ to its pagan inhabitants.

The missionaries were received with courtesy by Ethelbert of Kent, a pagan King who was married to a Christian wife. The King agreed to grant Augustine an audience and so the two men met at Thanet, with Ethelbert seated in the open and Augustine and his fellow monks standing before him with their standards, a silver cross and a portrait of Christ, placed where the King could see them.

Having listened to Augustine’s message, Ethelbert told the missionary that he and his people could not be expected to abandon the religion that they had always followed, but he granted permission for the monks to go to Canterbury and preach their message to anyone who would listen.

Eventually, however, Ethelbert did find himself moved by Augustine’s message and on the following Whit Sunday, the King was baptised at Canterbury and within a few years most of his subjects had followed suit.

Thus began the conversion of  England to the Christian religion, as gradually its message spread throughout the other Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. Augustine was made Archbishop of the English and, having established his See at Canterbury, he founded a monastery there. From this foundation eventually grew Christ Church Cathedral, which today is an awe-inspiring mix of Romanesque and Perpendicular Gothic architecture.

Of course on our London walks we tell the story of the murder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

At a little after 4pm on December 29th 1170, four Norman knights - who were responding to an outburst against the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, by King Henry 2nd, “What Miserable drones and traitors have I nourished…who allow their lord to be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric,” arrived at Canterbury Cathedral and murdered Becket.

In so doing they sparked off one of the greatest saint-hero cults of the Middle Ages and turned the unappealingly arrogant, haughty and self-centred Becket into a posthumous international icon.

Within three years the dead arch-bishop had been canonised and the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury soon became one of the Christian world’s greatest places of pilgrimage, and countless miracles were said to have taken place there.