Canterbury Cathedral was one of the most important centres of pilgrimage in Medieval England. There has been a cathedral at Canterbury since 597 when St. Augustine baptised the Saxon king Ethelbert. The Archbishop of Canterbury was the most senior religious figure in the land and he was based at the cathedral. While the cathedral had huge significance at both a religious and political level in medieval times, its importance as a centre of pilgrimage greatly increased after the murder of Thomas Becket there in 1170.Little actually remains of the original cathedral or of the Norman cathedral built by Lanfranc who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by William the Conqueror in 1070. However, written accounts by the likes of Bede do give us an idea of what the cathedral looked like in its original form. The monk Eadmer described how the cathedral looked before the fire of 1067 and how it looked after the rebuilding was completing under the supervision of Lanfranc. Gervase provided a written account of what the choir section of the cathedral looked like during a period of reconstruction in the late 12th Century.