800 years of Britain’s Franciscan heritage celebrated on pilgrimage from Dover Beach to Canterbury

While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness...

The pebble beach next to the harbour at Dover may not be the most obvious place for a religious gathering. In his famous poem of 1867, Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold described religious belief as rising and falling like a wave upon the shore.

In Arnold’s view, the tide was turning on the “Sea of Faith” in England as it was across much of Europe.

Yet on 10 September 2024, around 100 people gathered for an outdoor Mass on Dover Beach to mark the 800th anniversary of the Franciscan friars arriving in Britain.

The altar was a repurposed picnic bench with the linen held in places with pebbles. The congregation was a sea of grey, black and brown habits as friars, religious sisters and lay Franciscans from all over the world came to celebrate this occasion.

St Francis of Assisi had chosen Agnellus of Pisa to establish a Province of the friars in England. On 10 September 1224, Agnellus along with eight other friars landed at Dover and set off on foot for Canterbury the next day. They would go on to establish friaries in London and Oxford, and within a few short years they would have a presence across the country.

Following in the first footsteps of those friars, a group of around 40 pilgrims set off after Mass (and a bacon roll!) to walk the 19 miles from Dover to Canterbury. The day was part of a series of events organised jointly by Catholic and Anglican Franciscans to mark the anniversary of the friars arriving in Britain.

It also coincides with the 800th anniversary of the stigmata which St Francis received on 14 September 1224, just a few days after his friars arrived in England.

Dover is famous for its white cliffs, and having started the day down at the beach we needed to head up to the cliff tops. The first part of the walk was heavy going as we climbed narrow, wooded tracks and paths onto the North Downs way. It eventually gave way to spectacular views over the Kent countryside, until the clouds descended and the heavens opened.

Along the way we passed signposts for the Via Francigena, the 1,200-mile route from Canterbury to Rome – a reminder that pilgrims walking the other way had much further to travel. It is one of two main pilgrimage routes through Canterbury, the other being the Pilgrims Way to London, made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales.

As I felt the rain beginning to seep through my jacket, I wondered what had made St Francis so determined to settle a Province in this land. Britain was already a Christian country. St Augustine had arrived in Kent some 627 years before Agnellus. The train station in Dover is called Dover Priory on account of the Augustinian monks who lived nearby long before Franciscan friars were on the scene.  

While England may have been Christian, it was existing in what historians have described as the Dark Ages, which covered western Europe for most of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In those days, “the Church looked old then as now; and there were some who thought her dying then as now,” as GK Chesterton remarked.

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It was against this backdrop that Francis and his friars emerged, not to convert but to renew and provide an alternative to the monastic way of life.

“While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness”, Chesterton wrote of Francis in his biography of the saint.

The message of St Francis and the life of the friars seemed to find fertile soil in England. When the English Reformation began in 1534, there were around 60 Conventual Franciscan friaries in England. Initially, their poverty and lack of property meant they were left alone. But eventually suppression came their way as it had to the monasteries.

It was not until 1906 that the Conventual friars returned to England, and the Province was only formally revived in 1957.

As our pilgrimage progressed, we stopped off at several churches, including St Margaret of Antioch in the village of Womenswold, where local parishioners had prepared afternoon tea for us. Built in the twelfth century out of timber and flint pieces, which jutted out of the soil in fields all around us, the church would have been brand new when Agnellus passed through. It is now Grade I listed and under the authority of the Church of England.

Along the walk, I talked so some of the friars and sisters currently based in England, from Brixton and Canning Town to Godalming and Glasgow. Like the first friars who arrived, these are very international houses with people from the US, Australia and Ghana, to name but a few.

Fortunes have ebbed and flowed for the Franciscans since their return to this country. Like many religious orders, vocations have waned and some friaries have closed. Chilworth Abbey in Surrey was taken over by the Benedictines in 2011, while a purpose built study centre in Canterbury was sadly sold in 2017.

There are, however, signs of a renewed interest in the spirituality and way of life of the Franciscans. The Francis papacy has undoubtedly played a part in that. Laudato si, perhaps the most significant encyclical from Pope Francis, takes its name from St Francis’s Canticle of Creation. It has found an appreciative audience far beyond the Church and even Christianity.

Closer to home, the Franciscan Studies programme at the University of Durham is gaining in popularity. The University has recently been advertising for an Assistant Professor in Franciscan Studies to join the teaching staff as part of the Centre for Catholic Studies. The Capuchin friars have also set up a house in Durham, providing both an intellectual and spiritual home in the city.

Last year, the National Gallery in London hosted a hugely popular exhibition on St Francis with artwork from across Europe. Over 220,000 people visited the exhibition according to the Gallery, with visitors describing it as “informative”, “stimulating”, and “beautiful”. Earlier this year, the Herald highlighted that Assisi is becoming a pilgrimage destination to rival that of Santiago and the Camino.

By the time we finished our own Camino, it was getting dark in Canterbury. A few wrong turns and persistent rain had made our journey slightly longer than planned, but it had not dampened our spirits. The spire of Canterbury Cathedral was a welcome sight on our approach as it surely was for Agnellus and his companions 800 years ago.

It turns out that the Victorian poet and sceptic, Matthew Arnold, had something of a soft spot for St Francis, describing him as a “a figure of the most magical power and charm”. He remarked how his “profound popular instinct…enabled him, more than any man since the primitive age, to fit religion for popular use”.

While Arnold struggled with faith and the idea of the supranatural, he nonetheless appreciated the beauty of St Francis’s words and witness.

Similarly, as scepticism and non-belief seem to be the norm in our time, certainly in western Europe, the wisdom offered by the “little poor man” from Assisi is proving invaluable once again as his followers continue his vision and work 800 years on.

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Photo collage: (left) ‘Saint Francis’ by El Greco (file photo) / (right) Canterbury Cathedral (file photo).

James Somerville-Meikle is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Southwark and a freelance writer.

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