The Archbishop's Three Seats in Canterbury Cathedral

The question ‘Where did the Archbishop of Canterbury sit in pre-Reformation times when officially present at divine service in his cathedral?’ is one which has had no very clear answer hitherto. There can be no dispute that his ‘throne’ par excellence —the sign and symbol of his episcopal and primatial dignity—was the so-called ‘St. Augustine's chair’ still in use at archiepiscopal enthronements—really a marble chair of early-thirteenth-century date (hereafter to be called the Marble Chair); or that a similar throne in the same position, viz. the old ‘basilican’ position of the bishop's throne behind the high altar, existed in the earlier choirs of Lanfranc and Conrad. But under the conditions which prevailed when the choir was rebuilt after the fire of 1174 this throne, however impressive symbolically, must have had such drawbacks from other points of view as to make it hard to believe that the occasions when the archbishop actually occupied it were more than very rare

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