Day Seven:

Canterbury was our last stop.  Spending most of our time at Christ Church, we studied the architecture put in place by, successively, the Normans (Lanfranc, Anselm), the French (William of Sens) and the English (William the Englishman).

We studied closely, with the aid of students' site reports, the extraordinarily spacious crypt and its beautiful capitals of beasts, foliage, and masks, many employing motifs common to Norman manuscripts of the mid-11th century.

The afternoon wound down with coffee, strolling, and, yes, even some shopping.

Our trip ended where the first “colonization” of Britain began, with St. Augustine’s abbey (now in ruins, standing before Christ Church in the background), erected in commemoration of Augustine’s mission to Christianize the British Isles in 597.

End of Day Seven:

In London for our final night, we hit the town and had a celebratory feast in humming Euro-Asian fusion restaurant.

We headed home to Philadelphia, where more reading, writing and studying of the Norman Conquest awaited us....