Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/67

THE CHURCH OF ST. ODO before the time of St. Odo (942), and it will be convenient to take them in chronological order:

St. Blaise, A.D. 316, already mentioned as having been bought by Archbishop Plegmund (890-914). He had been Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia and was martyred A.D. 316. His festival, according to the Bollandists, is kept on February 3; that is the date also observed by the Christ Church monks, where the entry in the Kalendar in Register K and in that of the Archdeacon of Canterbury's Black Book (a volume of about the fifteenth century) gives

"$\overline{Sc}$i Blasii $\overline{mr}$ et pontificis."

He is not mentioned in the Canterbury Benedictional or in the Canterbury Martyrology, but occurs in the St. Austin's Abbey Kalendar as a Black Letter Saint. At Christ Church his relics were venerated down to the time of the Dissolution (1540). When first brought to Canterbury no statement is made as to where the relics were deposited, but after the fire of 1067 and the rebuilding by Archbishop Lanfranc, they were placed behind the altar dedicated to him in the upper apse in the north transept, and after the fire of 1174, on the rebuilding and enlarging of the church by Prior Ernulf, the shrine of St. Blaise, perhaps because it contained the oldest of the relics preserved in Christ Church, occupied a place of honour behind the High Altar. It was probably set on a beam over this altar, as in Register Q, ff. 26vo. and 27ro., in the account of Archbishop Winchelsea's enthronization in 1294, it is stated that during the ceremony, the Archbishop, the Prior, and the Ministers of the Altar, made a station behind the High Altar, under the shrine of St. Blaise, before the marble chair (of the Archbishop then placed at the top of the steps where the High Altar now is); then turned towards the east, and eight monks alternately sang the song Benedictus under the shrine of St. Blaise before the Archbishop sitting in his chair. In 1315, in the time of Prior Eastry, the head of St. Blaise was kept in a silver and gilt reliquary. There was also a bone of St. Blaise kept in filacterio (a reliquary that could be hung up 37