How we homeschooled today #97

Pilgrims, monks, and murder

Today, after only a small amount of bribery, I got the children out of the house for the second Big Day Out in a row. We were out before 9am! (Needless to say, as we closed the front door I realised I hadn’t brushed my hair or eaten breakfast, but that’s the price you pay for getting two homeschooled children out of the house so early.)

We were off to Canterbury Cathedral. In case you’re as cartologically-challenged as I am, here’s where Canterbury is (we live in London):

Canterbury has been a centre of pilgrimage for over 1,000 years. Google Maps tells me it’s a 20 hour walk from London, but the Pilgrims Way walking route suggests 6 days. We decided to take a high-speed train. (Although, homeschooling goals… will we one day walk the whole way?)

The children read their Daisy books all the way there and back. I had taken two medieval-themed books, and in case you’re more interested in these than the children were, they are:

• Usborne See Inside the Middle Ages, which has lift-the-flap pages on monasteries and building cathedrals, and

• A Little Lower than the Angels by Geraldine McCaughrean, a story about a stonemason’s apprentice who runs away and joins a band of travelling players. It’s good, possibly slightly too advanced for my two as a read-aloud (they’re aged 6 and nearly 8).

I spent the journey brushing up on my Canterbury Cathedral knowledge—thank goodness for Wikipedia and on-train Wi-Fi.

Arriving at Canterbury, we walked through the town. I told the children that I didn’t know where the cathedral was, so they needed to look out for signs and help us all get there. (This was true, as well as being generally a good thing to do.)

We walked through the city gate, the oldest surviving medieval city gate in the country (c. 1349). Traffic still drives through it today!

Via Wikipedia

Canterbury is full of old buildings, so we took the opportunity to imagine what London would have been like in the medieval period, before the Great Fire, with all the buildings overhanging the street. Here’s a Canterbury building from 1573:

Before long we looked down a little side street to see a splendid Gothic gateway, beyond which lay the cathedral.

We started with a quick walk around the whole cathedral. There are children’s audio guides, but those things always make me grumpy: the children spend the whole time staring at the screen of the guide, not staring at the incredible building they’re walking around. So today we found a good compromise: a quick walk round using our eyes, followed by a slow walk round with the audio guides. In all we spent over three hours in the cathedral (at the children’s insistence, not mine!).

I told them about Thomas Becket being murdered in the cathedral. They were scandalised. We found the very spot where it happened. We found wall paintings from 1180—some of the oldest in England. We sat in the Chapter House where the monks had their daily meetings. We learnt that monks had two meals a day, eaten in silence. They developed a sign language so they could ask for butter, beer, or local delicacies like oysters and plums. We saw a wooden sculpture of a horse, built to commemorate the more than 8 million horses killed in World War I. We saw the tombs of the Black Prince and Henry IV. On the audio guides, the children got completely hooked on listening to plain chant, polyphonic, and organ music—Widor’s Symphony in G Minor, which we have been listening to on repeat since we got home. I told them about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and kicked myself for not bringing our children’s version with me—although let’s be honest, they would still have read Daisy all the way. We compared the architecture to St Paul’s Cathedral, which we visited at the weekend (St Paul’s is in the Classical style, so a marked contrast to Canterbury’s Gothic.)

There’s far too much to tell you about, but it was a fantastic day out and we felt thoroughly immersed in Medieval life. If you’re in the UK, children get free entry to Canterbury Cathedral until the end of this year, and your ticket is an annual one, so you can go back as much as you like for the next twelve months. The audio guides are £5 each, which I initially thought exorbitant but after two solid hours they seemed like pretty good value. Apparently it costs £18,500 a day to keep the cathedral running, so I guess they need to make some money.

Tomorrow we have to have a quiet day at home. Partly because that’s what I’ve promised the children, but mostly because after two days out of the house we’ve completely run out of food and clean clothes.

---

Thanks for reading! If you’re not subscribed, sign up for free and never miss a post.