Christianity had started to become powerful in the Roman Empire around the third century.
Following the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century, the influence of Christianity grew steadily.
The cathedral's first bishop was Augustine of Canterbury, previously abbot of St. Andrew's Benedictine Abbey in Rome; when other dioceses were founded in England he was made archbishop. He was sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 as a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine founded the cathedral in 597 and dedicated it to Jesus Christ, the Holy Saviour
Augustine also founded the Abbey of St. Peter and Paul outside the city walls.
This was later rededicated to St. Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. The abbey is part of the World Heritage Site of Canterbury, along with the cathedral and the ancient Church of St Martin.
Bede recorded that Augustine reused a former Roman church. The oldest remains found during excavations beneath the present nave in 1993 were, however, parts of the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building, which had been constructed across a Roman road.
They indicate that the original church consisted of a nave, possibly with a narthex, and side-chapels to the north and south.
A smaller subsidiary building was found to the south-west of these foundations.
During the ninth or tenth century this church was replaced by a larger structure (49 m. by 23 m.) with a squared west end.
It appears to have had a square central tower.
The eleventh century chronicler Eadmer, who had known the Saxon cathedral as a boy, wrote that, in its arrangement, it resembled St Peter's in Rome, indicating that it was of basilican form, with an eastern apse.
During the reforms of Dunstan, archbishop from 960 until his death in 988, a Benedictine abbey named Christ Church Priory was added to the cathedral.
But the formal establishment as a monastery seems to date only to c.997 and the community only became fully monastic from Lanfranc's time onwards (with monastic constitutions addressed by him to prior Henry).
Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar.
A pilgrimage is a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance.
Typically, it is a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith, although sometimes it can be a metaphorical journey into someone's own beliefs.
Many religions attach spiritual importance to particular places: the place of birth or death of founders or saints, or to the place of their "calling" or spiritual awakening, or of their connection visual or verbal) with the divine, to locations where miracles were performed or witnessed, or locations where a deity is said to live or be "housed", or any site that is seen to have special spiritual powers.
Such sites may be commemorated with shrines or temples that devotees are encouraged to visit for their own spiritual benefit: to be healed or have questions answered or to achieve some other spiritual benefit. A person who makes such a journey is called a pilgrim.
As a common human experience, pilgrimage has been proposed as a Jungian archetype by Wallace Clift and Jean Dalby Clift.
The Holy Land acts as a focal point for the pilgrimages of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
According to a Stockholm University study in 2011, these pilgrims visit the Holy Land to touch and see physical manifestations of their faith, confirm their beliefs in the holy context with collective excitation, and connect personally to the Holy Land.
