Saint Thomas Becket with Michael Staunton

It's one of the most notorious political assassinations in history: the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. The story of two friends who became bitter enemies in a struggle between church and state that drew in some of the most powerful people from all over medieval Europe. So, how did a pretty ordinary kid from London end up as England’s most famous saint? 
This week, Danièle speaks with Michael Staunton about Thomas’ rapid rise to the highest positions in England, his epic feud with Henry II - including what part Henry might have played in Thomas’ martyrdom - and the aftermath of the infamous murder in the cathedral.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
three of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabalski, also known
as the Five Minute Medievalist. Today's episode deals with one
of the most notorious political assassinations in history, the murder
of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett. It's the story
of two friends who became bitter enemies, and a struggle

(00:38):
between church and state that drew in some of the
most powerful people from all over medieval Europe. So how
is it that a pretty ordinary kid from London ended
up as England's most famous saint. This week I spoke
with doctor Michael Stanton about the life of Thomas Beckett.
Michael is a professor in the School of History at
University College Dublin and the author and editor of several

(01:02):
works on Saint Thomas, including The Lives of Thomas Beckett,
Thomas Beckett and his Biographers, and the Historians of Enjevin England.
His new book is Thomas Beckett and His World. Our
conversation on Thomas's rapid rise to the highest positions in England,
his epic feud with Henry the Second, including what part

(01:23):
Henry might have played in Thomas's martyrdom, and the aftermath
of the infamous murder in the Cathedral is coming up
right after this. Well, welcome Michael to talk about Thomas Beckett.
This is an exciting topic. It's always interesting no matter
how many times you hear this story, and so I'm
so happy to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Welcome, Thank you, Danielle. It's very nice to speak here.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
So we were just talking off air about why would
you retell this story again at this moment? So what
was it that spoke to you that made you feel
like I need to tell this story.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I mean, this is a story that has been told
over and over again since Thomas Beckett was murdered in
Canterbury Cathedral in December eleven seventy. It's been told in
different ways. But the reason why I wanted to tell
it in this book, why it's called Thomas Beckett and
His World, is because I thought that this is a
story that tells us a great deal, not just about

(02:19):
a fascinating individual Thomas himself, but it tells you about
the world he was born into, the world of London,
the social life of London at the time. It tells
us about the world of the Kingdom of England at
a very important time in the twelfth century, when the
English crown is becoming a very powerful force. It tells

(02:41):
us about the church, and it tells us about some
of the maybe surprising aspects of the church at this time,
how there's a lot of conflict within the Church that
Thomas Becket felt. It tells us about things like sainthood.
Thomas is hailed as the greatest saint of his age.
They're countless miracles recorded of Thomas. And it also tells
us about storytelling, because while Thomas was alive people started

(03:06):
to try to shape his image who had a counterimage
being presented, and then after his death people started to
go back through this life and say, well, what does
this all mean? And as well as that Thomas is
the person in England of the Middle Ages who had
most written about him in the Middle Ages, we have
these massive tones of letters that were collected as he

(03:30):
was living, and then other letters reflecting on his death.
We have very large number of biographies, often written by
people who he knew, who witnessed his murder. So that's
the kind of opportunity that you don't have for most
medieval figures.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Well, that's what I was just thinking, is that most
of the people I speak to on this podcast are like, well,
we have to make some guesses because there's no records
about this particular person. And I think in your book
you mentioned that there are something like ten biography's of
Beckett shortly after he's murdered, and five of them are
by eyewitnesses, like this, this is unprecedented.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's an amazing opportunity. And you
know a number of these writers actually say I was
there at the murder. I admit I hid behind an
altar when I was witnessing all of this. One of
his biographers held up his arm and blocked one of
the assailants blows and actually nearly had his arm cut off.

(04:28):
On that account, and he wrote an account of Thomas.
And we know great amount of the facts of Thomas's life.
We have those in sometimes day by day, hour by
hour detail. Part of the reason why people continue to
write about him, and people still do to this day,
is that people have different ways of making sense of

(04:50):
it all. On the one hand, it's was he a saint,
was he a heroic figure? Or was he somebody who
is simply a traitor to the king. How can we
explain somebody who was so controversial during his lifetime being
hailed as the greatest saint that England has ever had.
And that's part of the reasons why people wrote in

(05:11):
the eleven seventies, and it's also just been drawn by
the fascination of the subject. They really believed that they
had witnessed one of the most important events in history.
And it wasn't just the fact that these ten biographies
were written shortly after his murder. This in a way
stimulated a revival of historical writing in England. A lot

(05:34):
of other people started writing about their own times, about
recent events, about sequels to Beckett's martyrdom, rebellions against the
king and so on. So it was the excitement of
the event, the complexity of the individual that's what drove
people to write about it.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yes, I mean, you're really selling it, so we're going
to have to get into this, dude. But you're absolutely right.
I think that you're not over selling it in that
this was just a monumental time, and I think that
it is reflected in that writing. I hadn't thought about
that being sort of a stimulus. You write more. But
I think you're absolutely right about that, Okay. So one
of the things that people find fascinating about Beckett is

(06:15):
he wasn't born into the nobility. So let's start at
the beginning. Once upon a time there was a boy
named Thomas.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
There was born in Thomas, and he was born in London,
either eleven eighteen or eleven twenty, We're not quite sure.
He was born right in the center of what is
now called the City of London, so that's the historic
medieval center of London. If you go to London today,
you'll see a little plaque on the street cheapside which
shows where Thomas was born, So right in the heart

(06:44):
of the city of London. His father was a merchant
named Gilbert, and he and his mother, Matilda, they had
come over from Normandy. They were born in Normandy. So
this is of course, after the conquest of England by William,
Duke of Normal you start to get various people coming
over to England, merchants from Normandy coming over and settling

(07:07):
in London. So his parents were actually fairly well off,
but he didn't come from the nobility, and this is
what set him apart amongst a lot of the people
that he was mixing with, and it was something that
was always held against him. He was always reminded of
this throughout his life, and you could say it explains
a number of his behaviors later on. Also when he

(07:31):
was killed and when he became this great saint, people
started to try to explain this. How could he have
been this great figure and come from such a relatively
humble background. So they're actually developed a legend that his
father was a crusader who had been captured in the
Holy Land, and a Saracen princess had saved him from

(07:53):
captivity and later followed him to England. And this was
Gilbert and Matilda, which you might think was a typical
name from the Holy Land, but that was the myth,
and the reason why this story was told was so
that they could explain he must have had some kind
of royal blood for him to be this great. He

(08:13):
must have been the daughter of a princess. And none
of that is true, unfortunately, but it shows us this
kind of preoccupation. So on the one hand, Thomas is
unusual in coming from this non noble background, but he's
also actually illustrates something of the time. This was a
time when people from his background who had actually climb

(08:37):
their way up the social rank as he did, because
of new opportunities that existed in England at this time.
So the ways that you could do this, I mean
the main way was through education. And after a schooling
locally in London and just outside London, he went to
Paris and he was educated in Paris, this very very

(09:00):
exciting time, the aftermath of aval Ardanella Wiz, what people
called the twelfth century Renaissance starting to flourish in Paris.
None of that seems to have affected Thomas, and he
actually dropped out of college after a year and he
came back to London, and one of his biographers says
he actually spent the next year doing nothing, and his

(09:23):
father's prospects were declining, his business was declining. He'd suffered
from a number of fires in London, his mother died.
He seems to have had some kind of a crisis.
But he eventually gets a job and he's an assistant
to he's an accountant, he's an assistant to a financier
in the city of London. And here you can see

(09:44):
London in the twelfth century is developing as a really
important commercial center, and Thomas is part of this. But
his real break comes when he's introduced to Archbishop Theobald
of Canterbury. And this is a really good example of

(10:04):
the sort of social climbing commoner. Usually these people had
a better education than Thomas had. Usually they would have
completed their degree. Thomas had other compensations. Who was clearly
very clever, He was able to do practical tasks. He
was also literate, he was numerous, and these were the

(10:26):
kinds of people who were sought by bishops, archbishops, kings,
nobles at this time, a time when writing was becoming
more important in administering, whether it was a kingdom or
whether it was in church administration. So he finds himself
in the household of Archbishop Theobald working for him, and

(10:50):
that is his real break. It introduces them to a
world that he had not seen before. It allows him
to mix with the of noble background and allows him
to mix with a lot of people who are important
at that time, and also to get to know other
young men who would go on to be very important

(11:10):
figures later on.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yes, I think we can recognize this sort of figure
throughout history. Right The person who finds themselves in the
circles with all the high rollers and starts to get
a taste for that life and starts to quite enjoy
that life. But nobody expected him to rise to the
top of power, especially because he doesn't cut a glamorous
figure from what we've seen in the accounts of his life, right,

(11:33):
I think that a few people mentioned that he might
have had a stutter, that he wasn't particularly good looking.
No one was expecting him to really rise to the top.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, there's a description of him, the couple of descriptions
of him from this time, and what they say about
him is and they praise him, and they say, you know,
he had long, elegant fingers. They say that he had
a very good sense of smell, things like that, but
they don't These kinds of qual are not really the
things that absolutely set somebody apart. I mean, they talk

(12:05):
about the potential that he showed at that time, but
it took a while to be realized. And it was
really the first time it was properly realized was when
he got involved in helping the archbishop in political negotiations.
When he began to be sent off on business and

(12:25):
embassies and so on, and it was through this that
he came to meet Henry the Second, who would become
the other great figure in his life. And this is
where you really see the potential developing. Yeah, so maybe
I should say a little bit about that about Henry
the Second, and because he's such a crucial figure in
all of.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
This, that's what I'm thinking is the perfect contrast in
that Henry is so glamorous that everyone expects him to
succeed at everything. Right, So tell us about Henry.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
So, Henry was younger than Thomas, and Henry the Second
was the grandson of Henry the First. Henry the First
died in the year eleven thirty five, and he had
designated his daughter Matilda, Henry the Second's mother, to be
his successor. As it turned out, this was disputed. It

(13:16):
was disputed by Stephen, who became King Stephens. So the
period eleven thirty five to eleven fifty four was the
reign of King Stephen, but it was the disputed reign.
It was disputed by Matilda, who insisted that she was
the rightful heir to the throne. She nearly became a
ruler of England, but it didn't quite happen. The important

(13:37):
thing from the point of view of Thomas and Henry
the Second is that Henry grew up with this sense
of grievance that he had had the throne taken away
from him. He invaded England at the age of fourteen,
and he was this very capable figure. You can see
this throughout his life. Not everybody approved of Henry the Second,

(13:59):
not every he liked him, but they were all impressed
by him. He was a very impressive, lively, vigorous, capable figure.
He probably got to know Thomas shortly before he became king,
because by eleven fifty three it was clear that the
throne could not really be handed over to Stephen's son.

(14:22):
It had to go to Henry. Henry Plantagenet as well
as being the son of Matilda, he's the son of
Jeffrey Plantagenet and this was all arranged with various senior
figures within the church negotiating it, and Thomas is likely
to have been one of those. So Henry becomes king
in eleven fifty four. He's relatively new to England. He's

(14:45):
grown up in Anjou and in Normandy, only spent a
certain amount of his earlier life in England. He needs
to choose new people, and Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, recommends
to him Thomas, his trusted Clark, would be an excellent
figure as Chancellor of the Realm.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Which is a massive position, especially for somebody who has
not reached a venerable age. He's still quite young and
he gets to be chancellor. So what is this position like,
what is it all about?

Speaker 2 (15:20):
So the chancellor, it's an important position because the chancellor
runs the writing office, and this is one of the
things that runs through the life of Henry the Second
and Thomas Beckett in this period in English history, the
growing importance of writing. It's still the case that a
king rules by charisma. It's still the case that are
a king rules by physical power, but a king is

(15:44):
increasingly and especially in England, is increasingly ruling through writing,
being able to communicate with his servants, being able to
use writing to give grants to people, to organize his
fine answers, all of these things. So the chancellor is
the head of the writing office. He had various other

(16:06):
responsibilities as well. So it's a position that was always important.
It's more important now. But the real importance of Thomas
Beckett as Chancellor is the bond that he had with Henry,
and it seems that they immediately hit it off. They
got on extremely well. Thomas worked very effectively in bringing

(16:31):
about a new policy of reform in the kingdom. Henry's
intention is to go back to eleven thirty five when
his grandfather, Henry the First was king. He wants to
turn back the clock to that time. He wants to
have law and order, he wants to have strong kingship.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
All of this.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Thomas is his right hand man. And as well as that,
Thomas is somebody who takes a new delight in the
aristocratic lifestyle, the kind of lifestyle that he had not
grown up in. But he takes to it like a
duck to water. So you know, he's described as taking
an interest in hunting, in feasting. He wears elegant clothes,

(17:15):
he has a pet wolf, and this is all the time.
He's actually in clerical orders. He's a clerk in the
Middle Ages. The term in Latin clericus it means both
somebody who writes like a clerk, that sort of clerk,
and also means somebody who's a cleric. So he is
in religious orders, but he's leading a very secular life,

(17:35):
and he's really taken to this once he gets to
know Henry the second, and so part of his importance
in this political position is because, as one of his
biographers says, there were never in Christian times to better
friends than these two men.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yes, it's incredible, and when you think about it, sort
of in human terms, there's Henry who's completely traumatized by
his entire childhood of being felt like he's shoved to
the side and really wanting all that law and order.
And then you have Thomas, who's sort of like wide
eyed in some ways coming to the court and getting
to know all these great ways of living there are fabulous,

(18:14):
beyond what he could ever have imagined for himself before.
And one of the things that I think is important
that we remark on before we take our next step
into the story is that Thomas stepped back from the
priesthood in that he was educated in the church, he
went to university, but he never took the step of
becoming a priest. So he's not Henry's confessor or anything.
They're just besties who bond over the law. And I

(18:37):
think that's important because You would imagine, given the next
parts of his story, that he would be a priest
at this point, but he's not, and that's deliberate on
his part, that's right.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
And he does a lot of things that are very
let's say, unpriest like. So, for example, he fights in battle.
Henry the second rules over not just England, he rules
lands from the Pyrene to the North Sea. And part
of this is inheritance through his mother and his father.

(19:07):
Part of it is because of his marriage to one
of the most famous women of the time, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
When he marries Eleanor, he inherits vast lands in southern France,
so he's ruling over nearly half of France. So a
lot of what Thomas does is in parties looking after
the kingdom when Henry is across the sea. But he's

(19:28):
also getting engaged in, for example, a campaign in Toulouse
and the south of France where he is actually fighting
on horseback and apparently knocks a very valiant tonight off
his horse. During the aftermath of this campaign, he's described
as being particularly gung ho in this campaign, urging Henry

(19:53):
on to capture the city of Toulouse, He also he
goes off in an embassy to Paris, which is described
in great detail, where he is trying to arrange a
marriage between the children of Henry the Second and King
Louis of France. And this account says that he traveled
along with something like six horse drong carriages. One of

(20:17):
those carriages carried only ale, one of them carried just
changes of fine clothing. On every horse. There was a
monkey sitting on top of it. You have all of
this kind of sense of very lavish lifestyle, very secular lifestyle,
the most secular kind of lifestyle you could imagine. Though
later on some of his biographers would say, well, he

(20:39):
still retained a religious spirit, but they weren't really able
to produce a lot of evidence of that.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
I mean, it doesn't seem very clear. And again it
doesn't seem like that was his aim ever at this point,
was to be, you know, austere in any way. So
Henry has brought Beckett into his friend, been to his
orbit in part because of his knowledge of the law.
And so I think we need to explain why Henry
is so so intent on not only understanding his own law,

(21:10):
but having somebody church train at his side when it
comes to his ideas of reforming the law, because this
is kind of the crux of the matter here.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yes, so they said, Henry the second is real ambition
when he comes to the throne is to turn back
the clock to eleven thirty five. But in order to
do that you have to make a lot of changes.
And he tries, first of all dealing with various nobles
who stood up to him, and he does that quite easily.

(21:42):
He caused them into submission. Also in his early years
it's described how Thomas and Henry collaborate in bringing back
law and order to the kingdom. So he's interested in
bringing order and this is something that a lot of
people wanted after the Civil War of the previous years.

(22:02):
He's also using law in other ways. This is the
beginnings of the English common law, and it's one of
the major important events or developments of this period. So
it was always the case that you could appeal to
the king over a matter of law, but in practice
you couldn't do that. You had to actually encounter the king.

(22:23):
The king would have to be passing by, or you
would have to go to Westminster and find the King
or some of his justices there So Henry the second
he establishes traveling justices who go from place to place.
He establishes various mechanisms which will allow people access to
the law. And this isn't just out of the generosity

(22:45):
of Henry's heart. It's also because it allows him to
you know, he takes money from various cases. It retains
a certain control over his kingdom that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
So he's brought about all of these reforms in relation
to most aspects of society. The one area that he

(23:07):
has not attempted to do this is with the church,
and the reason is that you have Archbishop Theobald, who's.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
Now very old.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
They're waiting for him to die, and then when he dies,
he thinks I'll be able to reform this and the
kinds of things he wants to deal with. There are
also abuses, as he sees it, that have developed during
the reign of his predecessor, King Stephens. So, for example,
one is the fact that bishops, monks, abbots had started

(23:37):
to appeal over the head of the king to the pope.
That that was really not necessarily Stephen's fault. The papacy
was developing its own jurisdiction. It was expanding its reach
in various ways. So much of the Becket dispute it's
a clash between these two expanding powers expanding jurisdiction, the

(23:59):
monarchy the papacy, both wanting to exploit the rights that
they have you also have. This might be a surprising
sort of thing, but there was a great concern in
Henry's mind and among some of the people around him.
The part of the reason for criminality was the church

(24:19):
courts were being too lenient on churchmen who committed serious crimes.
So you have a lot of people like Thomas who
are in religious orders. They're clerks, they're not necessarily leading
a terribly religious life, but if they're charged with a
serious crime like murder, they can go to a church court,

(24:40):
they can maybe swear an oath, and then be allowed
to go free. So this is a central issue that
Henry wanted to deal with. So these are the kind
of technical issues that would come central to the Becket
the Speakle. Really the bigger issue is about the king
saying the church has gained too much freedom in relation
to rights that should be mine. And on the other hand,

(25:02):
you have people within the church saying there's a principle
here the church has its own liberty and that this
is tyrannical oppression of the church.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Right, And so Thomas doesn't feel like this is going
to be important to him very much at all. Right,
he's helping Henry, the archbishop isn't please, but the archbishop
dies and still I don't think Thomas was thinking I'm
going to be the next archbishop. But this is what happens.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, And there's a couple of descriptions of it that
say that when Thomas heard the news that he was
going to be made archbishop, he was playing chess and
he was wearing some kind of outfit that had long
ornaments hanging from the sleeves, and he said, look down
in his clothes and he said, me, really, is this
the sort of person that you want to appoint to

(25:50):
the most important position in the church in England, Archbishop
of Canterbury. Now how true that is, we don't know.
Thomas must have had in England that he was going
to be in line for this, so certainly that he
was a strong candidate. Clearly Henry believed that Thomas was
the person who would lead his reforms. He came from

(26:13):
the church. He had familiarity with various people within the church,
Canterbury in particular, in a way was returning home to Canterbury.
But he wasn't, you know, not saying that he was irreligious,
there's no sign of that. But he wasn't somebody who
would have seemed to Henry to be a champion of

(26:33):
the church in the future. Very little if any sign
of that. And that's what made the transformation on becoming
archbishop so striking.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Well, I mean, that's the thing. You can't say, well,
I can't say that this was Thomas's plan all along,
because you would think that he would be ordained that
he'd be looking for positions as a bishop or lower positions,
maneuvering his way to the archbishopric. But this isn't what
he does. And yet he's he becomes the archbishop of
Canterbury and there is a transformation. He starts to think

(27:05):
about what his role is here. So tell us a
little bit about how this transformation happens within Thomas. And
it's pretty much universally acknowledged that there is a turning
point right here.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right, Yeah, I think everybody agrees that something happened. Well,
what exactly did happens. That's the real question. And of
course we're dealing mainly with people who are writing in
retrospect after his murder, and they're trying to explain this,
and they're trying to say, you know, how can we
fit together this worldly chancellor and this champion of the

(27:40):
church and later saint on what they say, and there's
no contemporary evidence of this. Nobody's writing about this at
the time it happens, or even in the year or
so afterwards. They say that when he was consecrated, so
as you said, he wasn't a priest, he became priest
a day before he became archbishop. So he becomes archbishop.

(28:02):
And they say once he was consecrated, he experienced this
remarkable transformation. He was touched by the hand of God.
They use order this biblical imagery about it, and they
say that this manifested itself. First of all in his
way of life, that he retained the sort of formal
clothing of the archbishop, but beneath that he started to

(28:27):
wear a monastic habit, and beneath that again he started
to wear a hair shirt. So that is the brittle
kind of shirt that cut into his skin, the kind
of thing that hermits would wear in order to mortify
the flesh. And they say that on the outside he
looked like as you would expect, he conformed, but within

(28:49):
everything was different, and they actually say that even better
than this, one of the really distinguishing things about this
was that he deliberately kept it secret out of humility.
He didn't want to show it to anybody else. This
is an impossible claim to refute. It was amazing, but
nobody could see it. So people later draw on they say,

(29:12):
you know, well his confessor said this, or there's a
story about how one of his attendants said, you know, basically,
you're looking very fat Thomas, and he said, well, yeah,
maybe I am. And what he didn't realize is that
he was all booked up because of the hairshirt and
the monastic habit. So that's how it was rationalized. But
whatever happened within, we can certainly see that he started

(29:36):
to behave differently as regards Henry the Second and as
regards himself, positioning himself in a different way. And the
dispute with Henry didn't happen immediately, it was gradual. First
of all, it seems that Henry had wanted him to
continue as chancellor, even as archbishop, but he resigned that office.

(29:57):
And then you start to have various little skirm It
might be over matters of taxation, for example, or Thomas
might have excommunicated one of the King's noble men for
doing something against Canterbury. So you have these little skirmishes.
But then matters come to a head when Henry tries

(30:18):
to push through his reform program. So he starts to
ask Thomas and the other bishops if they will agree
to what he calls the customs of the realm, the
customs of the kingdom, or my ancestral customs. So what
he's talking about here is that the rights of the

(30:39):
king as regards the church. So it'd be the same
now as they were in the year eleven thirty five
when his grandfather died. He says that explicitly, and Thomas
and the rest of the churchmen say, no, there's nothing
that surprising about this in that most churchmen are going
to say, at least, let's negotiate it. We're not going

(31:02):
to simply acknowledge this reform, which is actually quite radical
to turn back the clock in this way. But it's
the way that Thomas did it that really caused the problems.
There are a series of meetings, matters get more bitter
between Henry and Thomas, and eventually Henry demands that Thomas

(31:25):
agrees to these customs. These customs are things like, for example,
a clerk who is convicted of a serious crime has
to be handed over from the church court to the
royal court. Or it might be things like you can't
appeal to the pope's jurisdiction without first passing this by

(31:45):
the King, or you can't just go into exile and say,
visit the pope or leave the Kingdom for any reason
without having the permission of the King. Thomas is pressured
by various people within the church. And it's not that
these people within the church other bishops, for example, the
Bishop of London. It's not that he wanted to sell

(32:06):
out the rights of the church to the king. It
was more the sense that this isn't really all that important.
Just say yes, just say that you'll acknowledge the customs.
It doesn't really mean anything. We've had assurances that he's
not really going to go through with this. He just
wants his honor to be recognized. So Thomas agrees, and
it's at this meeting at Clarendon, a meeting with all

(32:28):
of the bishops and the nobles of the kingdom. And
then Henry says, okay, you've agreed. Now I'm going to
ask for these customs to be put down in writing,
and he presents them to Thomas, and at this point
Thomas says, no, I can't accept these being put in writing. Again,
it's this theme that runs through so much of it

(32:48):
about how at this time writing is becoming an extremely
important technology. It's something that can be used to advance
the rights of the king, the rights of an archbishop.
It's something that is part of the discussion as it
wasn't before, and England is at the cutting edge of this.

(33:09):
So from this point on the king and the archbishop
are pretty much estranged. And it leads to Thomas being
summoned to trial at Northampton in October eleven sixty four.
And this again is a major occasion. The bishops, the nobles,

(33:29):
the King, all of their attendants, huge numbers of people converging,
but really they've it's an excuse for Henry the Second
to pressure Thomas to resign his office. It's perfectly clear
that they don't have a working relationship, they're not talking
to each other. Henry and the people around him think

(33:49):
this is the way we'll pressure him to resign, and
they drag up various charges against him, for example, that
he'd embezzled money when he was chancellor. And eventually, after
a few days of this, Thomas is in a very
defensive position. It looks like he's going to be you know,
he'll have to resign or he'll be convicted, he'll be

(34:11):
imprisoned maybe. And then one morning he gets up and
according to his biographers, he's changed in a way. He
decides to take a different approach. The first thing he
does is he goes and he says mass. There's nothing
unusual for an archibicial Canterbury to do that. But the
Mass that he said was not the Mass of that

(34:31):
particular day. Instead, he had chosen to say the Mass
of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the liturgy
of this Mass is all about the persecution of the
martyrs by the secular powers. Kings and princes have stood
and spoken against me. And then Thomas comes into the chamber,

(34:51):
the trial chamber, as he's on his way his cross bearer,
as his customary, is carrying his cross before him. Thomas
grabs it out of his arms and walks into the
chamber carrying the cross. There's a scuffle. Some of the
other bishops try to drag the cross from him. The
Bishop of London said he was always a fool and
he always will be. And what he's doing here is

(35:14):
he's raising these issues to a new level. Instead of
it just being about the matters of embezzling money, instead
of it just being even about the royal customs, about
the rights of the crown as against the Church, he's saying,
I'm fighting for good against evil. I'm fighting for God,
and I'm fighting against a tyrant. And this is the

(35:37):
real transformation you have, not just a transformation of Thomas
himself whatever that meant, a personal transformation, a political transformation.
But now the dispute has become something that transcends just
these individuals and just these particular issues.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yes, he draws a line in the sand and there
is no going back from there, even though they try
a couple of times to reconcile. The writing is on
the wall at this point. So in the interest of time,
I'm gonna have to fast forward us a little bit.
So Thomas ends up in exile for quite a long time,
but he's convinced to come back to Canterbury. And everybody
has a bad feeling about this. But he's back in

(36:16):
Canterbury around the Christmas season. What happens what happens here?
Because there is some drama when people talk about this,
like Henry the Second exclaims something and then it all,
it all goes to hell, as they say, yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
So, as you say, he's away in exile for more
than six years, and during that time the dispute gets
more and more bitter. The various sides have their weapons.
Thomas now gains from the Pope the right of excommunication
and suspension of people, and that's something that he uses
from time to time. Finally they patch up a piece

(36:52):
and in the year eleven seventies, you say, Thomas is
ready to go home to Canterbury to be restored as
archbish or Canterbury. The last thing he does before he
sails to England is that he sends ahead of him
a letter and this letter excommunicates a number of his

(37:13):
enemies within the church or suspends them from office. And
this is the last straw as far as these people
and as far as Henry the second goes. These bishops
make their way to King Henry, who is in Normandy
at this time, and they complain about what Thomas has done.
And Henry is noted for being an angry king. There

(37:35):
is a story about him when somebody praised said something
about the king of Scotland, isn't the King of Scotland
a great warrior? Henry got so angry that he rolled
on the ground and started chewing his mattress. So he
had this explosive temper. The famous words that people quote
are who will rid me of this troublesome priest? Or?

(37:57):
Who will rid me of this turbulent priest that's not
courted by any contemporaries. What they say is that he
says something like this, this lowborn clerk who came to
my court pennyless with a limping mule, and I gave
him everything. I raised him up from nothing to this position.
And now he lifts up his heel and he kicks

(38:18):
me in the teeth. He says, even worse than this,
are these drones, all of you drones, who do nothing
to avenge me. And this was the cue for four
nights to set out and decide that they would take
revenge on the King's behalf against Thomas.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
So I have to ask you, do you think that
was what Henry intended?

Speaker 2 (38:40):
I don't think it was what he intended. And in fact,
there's a certain amount of evidence that people were sent
in pursuit of these knights to bring them back. Should
also be said the intentions of the knights aren't entirely
clear either. So the image that if you've ever seen
an image of Thomas Beckett, it shows the Knights in

(39:00):
full armor piling on with their swords in Canterbury Cathedral,
and that's how it all happened. Did they plan to
do that? Probably not. It seems, going by the accounts,
that what they wanted to do was to arrest Thomas.
They wanted to arrest him and they wanted to bring
him across the sea to Henry to face trial. That's

(39:23):
bad enough in itself. The intention doesn't necessarily seem to
have been to kill Thomas. But if you come in
to a cathedral wielding swords in full armor, there's a
danger that these kinds of things can happen, and that's
what happened. So the accounts tell us, and as I've
said at the start, many of these accounts are eyewitness accounts.

(39:45):
They're very, very detailed, and they tell us more or
less the same story. That the knights come to the bishops,
to the archbishop's palace. They challenge him, They say, come
with us, we want to take you back to the king.
You are a disgrace the way you've broken the piece.
All of this, they go out then to arm themselves

(40:07):
and Thomas is dragged into the cathedral by various monks.
The cathedral, of course, is the sanctuary, that is the
place where he is supposed to be safe, particularly when
you're talking about the Church of Canterbury. Canterbury Cathedral the center,
the holiest space in English Christendom, and the leader of
the church. So he's dragged in. It's the twenty ninth

(40:30):
th of December eleventh seventy the afternoon, so it's getting dark,
it's cold. All of that, The monks are singing vespers,
there's certain local people there as well. Thomas is dragged
into the cathedral and then they start to hear the
noise of doors being cut down. They've locked the door outside.

(40:52):
The knights managed to burst in. So they burst in.
They're dressed in full armor. All you can see is
their eyes. They're holding their swords and they shout out,
where is Beckett, traitor to the king. Very fact that
they call him Beckett is going back to his early roots.
It's just you're just Beckett, You're just the Londoner, the

(41:13):
merchant's son. And they approach him. There's a bit of
an argument between them. Thomas says, I'm no traitor, I'm
simply being loyal to God and so on. What exactly
happened next is not quite clear. One account, one of
the knights tries to drag him by his cloak and says,

(41:36):
we're taking you out of the church. We're going to
bring you to the king, and he actually knocks the
knight over. Certainly, it seems that there was a little
bit of a struggle and then one of the knights
strikes at him. The others start to strike as well,
and in a short time he's lying dead on the
floor of Canterbury Cathedral. So it's this incredibly shot murder

(42:01):
and shocking for a number of reasons. First of all,
because of who he is is one of the most
famous people in the Christian world. Of course, he became
even more famous after that, but he was a major
figure in the ecclesiastical in the political world of the
time when he was killed, and it was also the
place where it happened, and the violence of it, if

(42:24):
he read the accounts of it, the violence is really striking.
And this changed everything. Now the person who had been
unpopular amongst many of the other figures within the church,
who had been detested by many of Henry the Seconds people,
he was now hailed as a saint, and not just

(42:46):
a saint, but the greatest scent of his era.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Well, I mean, it's hard not to give him that
title when he is in, as you say, the holiest place.
He's the holiest guy, and he seems to be standing
up for God. He's got the Pope on his side,
and yet these men will come in and in case
people because I think sometimes people are like, was it
an accidental killing where people just waving swords around and
something bad happened? But I didn't realize until reading your

(43:11):
book that in the aftermath Thomas is lying on the
floor of the cathedral and I actually pokes the wound
to make sure that he's dead. It's like this is
absolutely gruesome and appalling in all senses of the word,
not only from our modern perspective where the murderer's bad,
but like all the medieval context around this as well.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
Well, the writers quote the somebody who is there says
that the knights said to each other, one said to another,
this fellow won't get up again. He's dead. And then
they went out of the church and then rode out
in Canterbury shouting King's men. We're King's men, tying themselves
to the king. It's not an act just of their own.

(43:53):
Nor is it the case that sometimes you hear the
idea that Thomas was looking to be killed, that he
wanted to be a martyr. And he was accused during
his lifetime of posing as a martyr, as for example,
bringing in the cross before him, saying the massive Saint Stephen,
all of this, but there's no evidence of that. You

(44:14):
can see letters, We have letters saying, you know, next Tuesday,
I'm going to do this kind of business, and Wednesday
I'm going to do this. No sign that he wanted
to sacrifice himself. But it is something very striking that
even people who would be very critical of Thomas and
you know, there's so much negative information there about so

(44:34):
many of his motives that can be brought up, but
the personal bravery at the end is absolutely clear. And
you know, he could have been taken out of the church,
he could have been arrested, but he chose not to
be and that is one of the strange mysteries of
the story. He's not somebody who you would have seen

(44:55):
sacrificing himself for the church in this way.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yes, absolutely, and the loyalty I think of the people
around him, as you say, someone actually raising their hand
sort of reflexively to keep a sword off of their friend,
their leader. It's just, yeah, it's a really dramatic moment.
And I'm not saying that lightly, but this is a
moment in which there are so many unexpected things happening

(45:20):
that it is stunning all these years later.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, and the aftermath is equally surprising. So initially, when
Thomas lay dead on the floor of the cathedral, he
wasn't a saint. People were afraid, the monks were afraid
that the knights would come back and maybe desecrate the
body take further actions against the monks. So what they

(45:43):
did was they buried him very quickly, and according to
contemporary accounts, when they were stripping the body to bury it,
they discovered that he was wearing the monastic cabot and
the hair shirt underneath. And they turned to each other
and said, how could we have had any doubts about
this man when we can now see what was within him. Now,

(46:05):
obviously that's something that is after the event, and it's
an interpretation, but you did also have immediately popular acclaim
for Thomas amongst the ordinary people of Canterbury. And right
from the start you start to hear of, for example,
a man who had been there in the church. He

(46:29):
dips his clothing in the blood of Thomas. He brings
it back to his wife, who's been paralyzed for some time.
She dips it in her bathwater and she's cured. You
start to have all of these stories of especially the poor.
You have a lot about, say children, you have a
lot about women. It tells us a great deal about

(46:52):
ordinary life at this time. These people who would come
to Canterbury, they'd tell their stories about how they'd seen
Thomas in a vision, or they prayed to Thomas. Thomas
had intervened. So gradually this starts to spread beyond Canterbury
and beyond the poor. The tide starts to turn against Henry,

(47:12):
against the Knights, they are sentenced to go off on
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where apparently they died. Measures
are taken against Henry himself. He has to do recompense,
and Thomas has canonized within two years of his death,
which is a remarkably fast time. But maybe the strangest

(47:36):
thing about the aftermath, and one of the reasons why
the cult of Thomas Beckett as a saint continued to
prosper at least until the Reformation, is because the king,
Henry the Second himself decides to take the lead in
promoting it. How this happens is that, if you think

(47:58):
of it, Henry Second has been this incredibly vigorous, capable,
successful king. He's had very few troubles really throughout his
life as king, except for the clash with Thomas Beckett
that has certainly been a headache in various ways. But
this is the first time that Henry looks weak. This

(48:19):
is the first time that people from all over the
Christian world are outraged attributing this murder to him. Ultimately,
so he does an initial kind of penance, but still
people decide to take this as an opportunity to rise
up against Henry. So Henry, just three years after the

(48:41):
murder of Thomas, he faces a rebellion that involves his wife,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, his sons, all of his sons, basically,
the King of Scotland, the King of France, various other nobles,
and he manages to fight back against this literarily, but

(49:01):
really to gain victory over these people he has to
do something symbolic. So in the year eleven seventy four,
he goes on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. He takes off
his shoes. When he arrives at the city, he walks barefoot.
He's whipped in turn by each of the monks of Canterbury.

(49:22):
He acknowledges his guilty role, if not the full role,
full responsibility for the murder, and he spends the night
at Thomas's tomb. The next morning, as he's leaving Canterbury,
it turns out that his main enemy still fighting against him,
the King of Scotland, has been captured, so it seems

(49:43):
that Thomas has given him the victory. So he's done
penance to Thomas has rewarded him. Now the king, his children,
his family, they start to claim Thomas as their own,
and they say he's our English. His daughters go off
and marry various rulers in Germany, in Sicily, in Spain.

(50:07):
They take veneration of Saint Thomas with them, and he
becomes this unifying figure, which again nobody could have predicted.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, I can't think of another instance where a
king is down on his knees, he's being whipped by
something like eighty months over the course of the day.
I can't think of another example of this performative humility.
And I would imagine there is part of Henry, I,
even if it is performance, that does feel bad about

(50:38):
his friend for the longest time and how this all
ended between them. But even then, you know, whether he
feels this or not, it is an absolutely remarkable event.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
I agree. I think that when Henry heard the news
of Thomas's murder, it said that he shut himself up
in the rooms for days, and obviously he was aware
of the consequences of this, but I don't think that
we can doubt that he was also upset for his
former friend in a way as well. It shows us

(51:09):
what an impressive figure Henry is, or was, that he
would take this kind of step, that he could see
the power of public image. It's something that he and
Thomas were always very conscious of throughout their dispute, and
even when they're friends, and you see it especially now.

(51:30):
It was a really genius stroke by Henry to take
the name of Thomas as his forgiver, to associating himself
again with Thomas. It must have taken a lot to
so that humility, even if it was even if it
was feigned humility, and it did work.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yes, And for the record, Henry never did win that
power over the church.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
No he didn't. He didn't, but in a way, nor
did Thomas win. And in fact, some of those who
wrote after, some of his strongest artisans, they said, the
problem is that everybody cares about Thomas the miracle worker.
Everybody cares about this image of Thomas. Nobody cares about

(52:17):
what he fought for anymore. And there was a certain
kind of sense among his successors as archbishops of Canterbury
and others within the church that we've been through those disputes,
we don't want to keep fighting those battles again. But
there is a sense the combination of Henry and others

(52:38):
that they took the sting out of the dispute, so
neither side really won, but neither side really lost either.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
Yeah. I mean, when you consider what a watershed moment
this was, you would think maybe that a tide would
have been turned, but really it just was one of
those moments in history that was ably huge. And then
its impact how to ripple effect, Like, don't get me wrong,
but when it comes to the actual dispute, not much changed.

(53:10):
So the whole story is fascinating, and we've gone longer
than we usually do. And so I appreciate your time
in explaining this so thoroughly and so well, because people
hear about this incident, but when you really dig into
it in the way that you have done in your book,
and your book is just wonderful. I hope everyone will
read it. It really sort of illustrates what a moment

(53:31):
this was. So thank you so much for coming on
and telling us all about it.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Thanks a lot, Danielle.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
To find out more about Michael's work, you can check
out his faculty page at University College Dublin. His new
book is Thomas Beckett and his world. Before we go,
here's Peter from medievalis Dot next to tell us what's
on the website? What's up? Peter?

Speaker 3 (53:54):
Hey?

Speaker 1 (53:54):
Hey?

Speaker 3 (53:54):
So next week I'm going to be at the Canadian
Society of Medievalis the annual a conference. Yeah, it's happening
in Waterloo, not too far away from you know, from
me in Toronto. So it's been a year since I've
attended one of these conferences. But there's a lot of
friends and colleagues there, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Yes, I hope to stop buy and see amount of
people as well, because it is a great bunch of
people that we have here in Canada, and we actually
have people from other places as well, not just Canadians
but part of the Canadian Society and Medievalist and yeah,
it's a great, great organization, great indeed, but they're even
better for Canadians, so sure, I'm not going to say that.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
So anyways, I wanted to little shout out to the
Dragon Lab at the University of water Blood and that's
d R A G E. N. And it's a disue
of humanity space that is kind of run by Steve
Bernards sky He's I really love his work and stuff
like that, and they run a whole bunch of projects
related to the archaeology and environment and like medieval stuff.

(54:57):
So I just want to shout out to all they
could work they are doing out there.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yes, absolutely, it's so important to have people that are
working on the front lines of the digital medieval stuff,
because I mean, we really need this. This is the
way that people are accessing it more and more these days.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Exactly, exactly. So while I'm at the conference, please enjoy
what's on the website this week. We have a wonderful
piece by Veronica Minaldi and if you're looking at a
twelfth century tail and what it can tell us about
learning and teaching for us today. So we have that
plus ten cities that fell into ruin during the Middle Ages.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
Ooh, that could be interesting.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Yes, yeah, we have lots of nice pictures of piles
of rock.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
I love piles of rock because there's so much scope
for the imagination there.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Right, me too, Me too, I love a good pile
of rock.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Absolutely. Well, thank you Peter for stopping by and telling
us what's on the website, and I will see you soon. Thanks,
Thank you to all of you for supporting this podcast
each week, whether it's by spreading the word, letting the
ads play through, or becoming patrons on patreon dot com.
Without you, this podcast would not exist, so thank you.

(56:08):
To find out how to become a patron and help
me keep the medieval goodness coming, please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from martyring to bartering. Follow
medievalist dot Net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue
sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sabalski across
social media at fiven Medievalists or five Minute Medievalist, and

(56:31):
you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by gifrog. Thanks for
listening and have yourself a fantastic day,