The life of Thomas Becket intersects at familiar points in English history and literature: the political chaos in the aftermath of the Anarchy, the glittering court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the shrine to his murder sought by Chaucer’s pilgrims, T. S. Eliot’s famous play. Much in his life and times is well known and Michael Staunton goes so far as to claim that “we know more about Thomas Becket than any other English person of the Middle Ages” (9). The documentary record is prodigious: 800 letters, multiple contemporary or near-contemporary accounts, testimonies to his miracles.
Becket’s family was “thoroughly Norman” (14) from the town of Bec (the “à” prefix to his surname is a spurious reflex of Thomas à Kempis; in his lifetime Becket was “Thomas of London”). Like many young men from a prosperous family Becket was educated (at Merton Priory in Sussex and also in London, Paris, Auxerre, and Bologna), pursued sports and hunting, and made dangerous enemies such as Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London. Staunton makes much of the idea that his subject was able “to be all things to all men” (25), worldly or saintly as the occasion required. Paradoxically, Staunton also paints a picture of a loner who fails to assimilate to or be accepted by any of his worlds (134). A turning point in his young life occurred circa 1139 when Archbishop of Canterbury Theobald of Bec, a friend of his father’s, appointed the twenty-year old as one of his clerks at the Cathedral forever associated with him. Canterbury was a monastic institution but because Becket was not a monk further tensions with clerical associates arose.
The rising prominence of Becket will remind many of a later figure, Thomas Cromwell, another commoner who fell out of favor with a powerful English king. King Henry II appointed Becket Chancellor and then the monks of Canterbury elected him Archbishop even though he was not even a priest until the day before his consecration (he had been an archdeacon). Henry and Becket were close, but their respective positions ensured that perennial tensions regarding the supremacy of the church or of the crown—the “two swords” of Luke 22:38—defined their relationship and the rest of Becket’s life. Under the Constitutions of Clarendon Henry claimed rights devolving from his father whereas Becket insisted on preserving “God’s honour” (132). The two men cycled through multiple stages of antagonism and temporary resolution until 1164 when Becket took refuge with the Cistercians in France where he spent “all but one month of the last six years of his life” (108).
The drama of the historical record ensures that Becket was always on the brink either of triumph or of ruin. Rival Popes, negotiations with Louis VII of France over the marriage of his daughter to Henry’s son, the rise of the Exchequer and other forms of Westminster bureaucracy, contested claims to archepiscopal primacy by Canterbury and York, the “outrage” (142) of the coronation in Westminster of Henry’s son “the young King” by the Archbishop of York in 1170, and recriminatory excommunications all contributed to the turmoil. All roads led to Canterbury, however, and the famous confrontation on December 29, 1170, days after Becket’s fiftieth birthday.
There are five accounts of the murder from those present in, or nearby, the Cathedral and they share a “great deal of consistency” (156). Details vary, but some include the discovery of the hair shirt beneath Becket’s habit. Oddly, there is no contemporary record of Henry’s famous words “Who will rid me of this turbulent [or ‘troublesome’] priest” (154). Staunton notes that chroniclers report Henry’s anger more than offhand irritation, but Staunton does not clarify where the language of the royal query comes from. Among those chroniclers Staunton relies most on Herbert of Bosham, who wrote the longest account soon after the murder, as well as on William Fitz Stephen and John of Salisbury, a clerk to Becket, who after his death made the strongest case for sainthood and martyrdom (conferred Pope Alexander III in 1173, the same Pope who had canonized Edward the Confessor twelve years earlier). When John is first mentioned on page 49 it is not clear that this is the famous author of the Policraticus, a text not mentioned until page 137 (and not in the index). As late as page 171 Staunton mentions that John gives the “earliest surviving account” of the murder, another fact that could have been mentioned earlier. Staunton previously published The Lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester Medieval Sources, 2001) and Thomas Becket and His Biographers (Woodbridge, 2007); in the present volume an outline of who wrote what, and when, would also have been welcome along with some sense of the agendas and relative credibility of the sources.
Books published in the Medieval Lives series, now numbering nineteen, are well bound and printed, illustrated in color, and pitched toward an undergraduate audience. Five of the illustrations are from the Becket Leaves and one wishes for a few words of explanation in Staunton’s captions or main text (the Leaves preserve twelve scenes on four leaves in Wormsley Library MS BM 3750 , thirteenth-century, above a fragmentary versified life of Becket in French attributed to Matthew Paris).[1] Documentation is light and one must pick through the abbreviations in the endnotes to determine who said which quotation in the main text.
Staunton finally offers “A saint, a traitor, a symbol, a model...Others have contended that Thomas defies definition, and his true character will always elude us” (182). This caveat lector risks being a bromide but Staunton warns of “posthumous fabrication” on page 66, a warning that might have been repeated more often. One does, however, detect a degree of deserved sympathy and admiration for this now legendary figure.
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Notes:
1. See Cecily Hennessy, “The Becket Leaves,” in The Cambridge Companion to Matthew Paris, ed. James G. Clark (Cambridge UP, 2026) 201-207.