Canterbury

In the 1st century AD, the Romans captured the settlement here and named it Durovernum Cantiacorum.

In the late 200s, to defend against attack, the Romans built an earth bank around the city and a wall with seven gates, enclosing 130 acres.

Augustine arrived in Canterbury in 597 and soon set up a school. Its written history only begins in the 1500s, when it took its present name in honour of Henry VIII: today's King's School.

In spring 1002, the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred the Unready married Emma of Normandy at Canterbury Cathedral, and Emma was consecrated 'Queen Ælfgifu'.

In 1011 a large Viking army besieged Canterbury, and the city was pillaged. The cathedral was badly damaged, and the archbishop, Ælfheah, was taken hostage and killed at Greenwich in 1012.

In 1066, William the Conqueror ordered a wooden motte-and-bailey castle to be built by the Roman city wall. In the early 1100s it was rebuilt in stone, and by the 1200s it had become the county jail.

The cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest. Rebuilding began in 1070 under Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop, and by 1126 a new eastern end had doubled the cathedral's length.

On 29 December 1170, the archbishop, Thomas Becket, was murdered in the cathedral by knights of King Henry II. Afterwards Canterbury became one of the most notable towns in Europe, as pilgrims came from all parts of Christendom to visit his shrine.

After a fire badly damaged the quire in 1174, the Trinity Chapel was built in 1180–1184 to house the shrine of St Thomas Becket. His remains were moved there from the crypt in 1220.

The Black Death reached Canterbury in 1348. Canterbury had once had 10,000 people, the 10th largest population in England, but by the early 1500s it had fallen to 3,000.

In 1363 an inquiry found the Roman city wall had become eroded by disrepair and stone-robbing. Between 1378 and 1402 the wall was virtually rebuilt, with new towers, and Archbishop Simon Sudbury rebuilt the Westgate, on the site of the Roman west gate, around 1380.

In 1381, during Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt, Canterbury's castle and the Archbishop's Palace were sacked.

In 1413, Henry IV was buried at the cathedral. He is the only monarch buried there.

In 1448 Canterbury was granted a city charter, which gave it a mayor and a high sheriff. The city still has a Lord Mayor and a Sheriff.

In 1504 the cathedral's main tower, the Bell Harry Tower, was completed, ending 400 years of building.

In 1538 King Henry VIII had Becket's shrine demolished and its gold, silver and jewels taken to the Tower of London, ending the pilgrimages. That July the King's Commissioners came to take the surrender of St Augustine's Abbey, and the cathedral and the great monastery of Christ Church were surrendered to the Crown in March 1539.

In the mid-1500s many Huguenots fled persecution and conflict in the Low Countries and resettled in places such as England. In 1575 a Huguenot settlement at Sandwich moved almost entirely to Canterbury, and the next year they began using the cathedral's crypt as their church. They brought silk weaving to the city, and by the 1600s French-speaking Huguenots made up two-fifths of its population.

In 1620, at 59 Palace Street, Robert Cushman negotiated the lease of the Mayflower to carry the Pilgrims to America.

Charles I and Henrietta Maria visited in 1625. Musicians played as the couple entered the city under a velvet canopy held up on poles by six men, and they slept in a room in the abbey gatehouse, Fyndon's Gate.

In 1647, during the English Civil War, riots broke out when Canterbury's Puritan mayor banned church services on Christmas Day. In January 1648, after the riot, Parliamentarians burnt down all the wooden doors of the city's gates.

Canterbury's waits, players of music recorded in the city since 1402, were disbanded in 1641 for 'misdemeanors'. They were brought back in 1660 to play for King Charles II on his return from exile; he and his brothers stayed in the abbey gatehouse on their way to London.

Canterbury's first newspaper, the Kentish Post, was founded in 1717. In 1768 it merged with the new Kentish Gazette, which is still published and claims to be the country's second oldest surviving newspaper.

In 1787 all the gates in the city wall except the Westgate, then the city jail, were demolished, because a commission found they got in the way of new coach travel. The Westgate was Canterbury's prison from the 1400s to the 1800s.

The Canterbury & Whitstable Railway, also called the Crab and Winkle Way, opened in 1830: the world's first passenger railway. It was bankrupt by 1844 and was bought by the South Eastern Railway, which connected the city to its larger network in 1846.

From 1770 to 1844 a brewery operated within the grounds of St Augustine's Abbey. In 1844 a rich young landowner and member of parliament, Alexander James Beresford Hope, visited the ruins, found them deplorable and bought them. In 1848 the abbey was refurbished as a missionary college for the Church of England.

Mahatma Gandhi visited Canterbury in October 1931.

The most devastating raid on Canterbury was on 1 June 1942, during the Baedeker Blitz. Some of the city centre's timber-framed houses were destroyed, and a German raid on the night of 31 May damaged St Augustine's Missionary College so badly that it closed.

Before the end of the war, the architect Charles Holden drew up plans to redevelop the city centre. Locals were so opposed that they formed the Citizens' Defence Association, which swept to power in the 1945 local elections.

The city's biggest expansion came in the 1960s, with the arrival of the University of Kent and Christ Church College. Christ Church was founded by the Church of England in 1962 as a teacher training college and became a university in 2005.

In 2000, while the Whitefriars Shopping Centre was being redeveloped, the Canterbury Archaeological Trust ran a major archaeological project known as the Big Dig, supported by Channel 4's Time Team.

The Westgate museum had 17 six-foot painted plaster maquettes (models) for the bronze barons and bishops in the Lords Chamber at Westminster Palace. In 1987 those not on show were put into storage in the north tower and forgotten, until museum staff rediscovered them in May 2008 when the building flooded. By 2021, three had been restored and were on show at The Beaney.