As famously written by TS Eliot in the Murder in the Cathedral, ‘For ill or good, let the wheel turn.For who knows the end of good or evil?’ Hence, for the truth to be illuminated the wheel of time must turn first. This quote becomes prophetic in the case of the Canterbury Cathedral. The Cathedral which dates back to the Roman times, and was ennobled  because, The ‘Apostle to the English’ and the founder of the English Church, Augustine of Canterbury was its first Archbishop. The Cathedral, which had bewitched and beguiled the legendary English poet and author, Geoffrey Chaucer, who is celebrated as the ‘father of English Literature,’ weaved his magnum opus the Canterbury Tales, around the Cathedral.A groundbreaking discovery pertaining to the stained glasses of this revered and celebrated Cathedral has taken scholars worldwide over by the storm.

In the 1980s Prof Madeleine Caviness, an eminent art historian had made a statement, that years later would led to a seminal discovery. She had minutely observed that some of the glass panels of the Canterbury Cathedral were styled differently, therefore, there was a strong possibility that these  were made much earlier than what was  previously thought by the scholars. For centuries scholars reckoned that these stained glass panels were made in the 13th Century. However, recent researches claim that the stained glass of the Canterbury Cathedral are one of the oldest in the world, and are  dated somewhere between 1130-1160. This can therefore, be taken as a gospel that these windows were a silent spectator of the killing of Thomas Becket in 1170, and bore testimony to Henry II’s,begging for forgiveness. These windows were also extant when the devastating fire almost tore down the Cathedral in 1174.

The glass  panels chronicling the Ancestors of Christ, over one of the entrance of the Cathedral, have been re-dated using a  new technology. A device called ‘windowlyser’ is employed to ascertain the the actual date of the glass. The beauty of this device is that it can be used on location, and it doesn’t cause any wreck to the panels. It gleams a beam on the surface and in response to it the material in the glass radiates. This radiation comprises of the chemical fingerprints of the glass, that helps in determining the age of the glass.

While thinking about the Cathedral, I am reminded of the famous and oft quoted lines by Chaucer, “If gold rusts, what then can iron do?” However, in case of the Cathedral, one can see that with the passage of time the gold has retained its shine and Splendour despite of withstanding innumerable calamities