Canterbury, Archbishop of

Canterbury, Archbishop of, Primate of All England, chief bishop of the Church of England, with jurisdiction over 29 dioceses in the ecclesiastical province of Canterbury, and bishop of the diocese of Canterbury, which consists of the eastern part of the county of Kent and the rural deanery of Croyden. The archbishop has palaces at Canterbury and at Lambeth in London. He presides over the upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury; the General Synod, the representative body for the entire Church of England; and the Lambeth Conference, a decennial assembly of bishops of the Anglican Communion. By tradition he is a member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament and crowns the new British monarch.

The archbishopric began in ad 597 with the arrival of St Augustine of Canterbury at Kent and the baptism of King Ethelbert in St Martin's Church, Canterbury. During the Middle Ages a long struggle for precedence between Canterbury and York was settled in the 14th century in favour of Canterbury. In the 16th century Thomas Cranmer was archbishop when the Act of Supremacy (1534) separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1960 Archbishop Geoffrey Francis Fisher visited Pope John XXIII in Rome, inaugurating a new era of fellowship between the divided Churches. A total of 104 archbishops have occupied the see of Canterbury since 597; the archbishop until 1991, Robert A. K. Runcie (1921-2000), was elevated in 1980. He was succeeded by George Leonard Carey. In January 2002, after eleven and a half years as archbishop, Carey announced his decision to retire in the autumn of the same year. His successor, Dr Rowan Williams (formerly the Archbishop of Wales), was enthroned in February 2003.