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One of England's most venerable cities, CANTERBURY offers a rich slice through two thousand years of history, with Roman and early Christian ruins, a Norman castle, and a famous cathedral that dominates a medieval warren of time-skewed Tudor dwellings. The city began as a Belgic settlement that was overrun by the Romans and renamed Durovernum , from where they proceeded to establish a garrison, supply base and system of roads that was to reach as far as the Scottish borders. With the Roman Empire's collapse came the Saxons, who renamed the town Cantwarabyrig ; it was a Saxon king, Ethelbert, who in 597 welcomed Augustine, dispatched by the pope to convert the British Isles to Christianity. By the time of his death, Augustine had founded two Benedictine monasteries, one of which - Christ Church, raised on the site of the Roman basilica - was to become the first cathedral in England.

At the turn of the first millennium, Canterbury suffered repeated sackings by the Danes until Canute, a recent Christian convert, restored the ruined Christ Church, only for it to be destroyed by fire a year before the Norman invasion. As the new religion became a tool of control, a struggle for power developed between the archbishops, the abbots from the nearby Benedictine abbey and King Henry II, culminating in the assassination of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in 1170, a martyrdom that effectively established the autonomy of the archbishops and made this one of Christendom's greatest shrines. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , written towards the end of the fourteenth century, portrays the unexpectedly festive nature of pilgrimages to Becket's tomb, which was plundered and destroyed at the orders of Henry VIII.

In 1830, a pioneering passenger railway service linked Canterbury to the sea and prosperity grew until the city suffered extensive German bombing in the notorious Baedeker Raids , when Hitler ordered the destruction of the most treasured historic sites described in the Baedeker travel guide series. The cathedral and compact town centre, however, survived, enclosed on three sides by medieval walls, and today remain the focus for leisure-motivated pilgrims from across the globe.