Late Middle Ages

Thomas Becket and medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury

The archbishop Thomas Becket (c. 1119/20–1170) was murdered in his cathedral on the evening of 29 December 1170 by four knights of his former friend, the king of England, Henry II. The killing turned an already distinguished prelate into the most popular English saint of the Latin Middle Ages and made Canterbury the most frequented pilgrimage destination in England. The cult spread quickly: Becket was canonised by Pope Alexander III on 21 February 1173, the archbishop’s relics were translated to a new shrine at the east end of the cathedral in 1220, and the festum of the Translatio (7 July) was added to the calendar of the English church. The shrine was one of the richest in Christendom, the Vita and Miracula were among the most widely read in the corpus of hagiography, and the pilgrimage was the subject of one of the great works of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400). The cult was suppressed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in 1538, and the shrine was destroyed, the relics burned, and the wealth confiscated. This article examines the life of Becket, the murder, the rise of the cult, the geography and economy of the pilgrimage, and the literary afterlife.

The making of the chancellor and the archbishop

Thomas Becket was born in London c. 1119/20, the son of a wealthy Norman merchant who had been a citizen of Rouen and a member of the merchant guild. The young Thomas was educated at Merton Priory, in London, and in Paris; he was in the household of the archdeacon Roger of Pont-l’Évêque when Theobald, the archbishop of Canterbury, took him into his service and sent him to study civil and canon law at Bologna and Auxerre. He was made archdeacon of Canterbury by Theobald in 1154 and was appointed chancellor of the realm by Henry II in January 1155, the first layman to hold the office. The chancellor was, in the new Angevin administration, the chief executive officer of the kingdom: he was the keeper of the king’s seal, the head of the camera, the controller of the escheators, the captain of the militia. Becket served Henry loyally for seven years. He was a soldier, a diplomat, a courtier, and a household officer; he hunted and feasted with the king; he was a personal friend, a “second self,” as the Vita of Edward Grim of c. 1180 records. He was not yet a churchman in any public sense.

The transformation came in 1162, when the archbishop Theobald died and Henry II appointed Becket to the see of Canterbury. The king expected his friend to be his man in the church, a clerical counterpart to the secular chancellor. Becket underwent, in the famous description of the Vita of Herbert of Bosham, a conversio that began the day of his consecration: he gave up the chase, the cena, the worldly entertainments, the silk, the coccinea; he wore a hair shirt under the archbishop’s robes; he washed the feet of the poor; he was at the altar at matins, in the chapter at prime, in the almoner’s house at the eleemosyna. The conversio was felt to be a betrayal by the king, and the relationship between the two men broke. The seven years of conflict (1162–1170) were the principal matter of Becket’s archbishopric and the principal source of his martyrdom.

The quarrel with Henry II

The constitutional quarrel was over the relationship between the church and the king. The matter at issue was the criminatio clericorum, the trial of clerics accused of felony, and the appellatio, the appeal from the church courts to the king’s court. The archbishop claimed, with the Decretum Gratiani of c. 1140 behind him, that the clerics accused of felony were to be tried in the church courts and that the appeals were to go to the archbishop, not to the king. The king, with the Constitutions of Clarendon of January 1164, claimed that the criminatio and the appellatio were to be tried and determined in the curia regis. Becket at first accepted the Constitutions, then withdrew his acceptance on the grounds that they were contrary to the honor Dei and the libertas ecclesiae. He fled to France in November 1164, taking refuge at Pontigny, the Cistercian abbey, where he was sheltered by Louis VII; he was in exile for six years, supported by the king of France, by the pope (Alexander III, who was himself in dispute with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and needed the support of the French church), and by the bishops of the Latin West. The reconciliation at Fréteval of 22 July 1170 was followed by Becket’s return to England in December 1170.

The martyrdom took place on 29 December 1170. The archbishop had excommunicated the archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury for having taken part in the coronation of the young king Henry on 14 June 1170, an act that was seen by Henry II as a public humiliation. The king’s famous outburst — “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk?” — was overheard by four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton, who crossed the Channel to Canterbury and demanded the archbishop’s absolution of the bishops. Becket refused. They returned with their swords. The archbishop was killed in the north transept of the cathedral, before the altar of St. Benedict. The site, the Martyrdom, was immediately venerated as a locus of pilgrimage, and a new shrine was built over the spot, the Corona, with a marble pavement of the twelfth century that is still in place.

The cult of St. Thomas

The cult of St. Thomas was, from the beginning, a political cult. It was an expression of the resistance of the church to the king, a celebration of the libertas ecclesiae against the curia regis, a public statement of the principle that the priest of God was not subject to the secular power. The king himself was forced to do public penance at the tomb in July 1174, walking barefoot through the streets of Canterbury and being scourged by the monks of Christ Church. The relics of the saint were translated to a new shrine at the east end of the cathedral in 1220, in the presence of King Henry III and Stephen Langton the archbishop; the event was the occasion of a new festum, the Translatio (7 July), and of a new cycle of Miracula, the Miracula Thomae, of which the principal collections are those of William of Canterbury (c. 1174–79), Benedict of Peterborough (c. 1176), and the Erasmianus (c. 1180). The Vita of Edward Grim, an eyewitness of the murder, the Vita of Herbert of Bosham, the Vita of William FitzStephen (c. 1175), and the Vita of Alan of Tewkesbury (c. 1186) are the principal Latin vitae; the Saga of Robert of Cricklade and the Passio of c. 1172 are the principal Old French vitae; the Lybe of Seint Albin of c. 1200 and the Lybe of Seint Thomas of c. 1230 are the principal Middle English vitae.

The cult of St. Thomas was a European cult. The shrine was known to Bonaventure and to the legenda of Jacobus de Voragine of c. 1260; it was visited by Louis VII of France in 1179, by Philip II of France in 1185, and by the Bishops of Chartres in 1180. The shrine’s fame was sustained by the Miracula — which were copied throughout the Western church and which gave the cult a permanent place in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine of 1260. The standard treatment is R. Foreville, Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique (Variorum, 1985), and the older but still essential M. D. Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket (Cambridge, 1951), and A. Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford, 1980).

The geography and economy of the pilgrimage

The Canterbury pilgrimage was one of the great pilgrimages of Latin Christendom. The shrine was the principal pilgrimage destination in England, and the route from London, the Old Kent Road and Watling Street of the Roman period, was the principal pilgrimage route. The route passed through the towns of Rochester, Sittingbourne, Boughton, and Harbledown; it was lined with hospitals (notably the Hospital of St. Nicholas at Harbledown, the Hospital of St. Bartholomew of Blean, and the leper-hospital of St. Lawrence), with hostels, with inns, and with the markets that served the pilgrims. The principal sources for the route are the Miracula and the Vitae, the Compassio of c. 1172, and the famous descriptions in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The route was also the principal commercial artery of the south-east of England, and the wealth of the pilgrimage was a major factor in the prosperity of the towns along it.

The shrine itself was one of the richest in Christendom. The Corona, the chapel of the Translatio of 1220, was the most lavish piece of goldsmith’s work in thirteenth-century England; the great shrine was encrusted with jewels, including the Regale of France of Louis VII of c. 1179, the gift of the French king, and the great bequest of Henry III of c. 1230. The shrine was the principal object of pilgrimage, and the offerings of the pilgrims were the principal source of the wealth of the cathedral. The shrine was destroyed in 1538 by the commissioners of Thomas Cromwell, and the relics were burned. The site of the Martyrdom is still a place of pilgrimage; the Corona is a ruin; the cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England. The principal account of the shrine is the Antigrapha of Eadmer, the Vita of Herbert of Bosham, the Vita of William FitzStephen, and the Antiquitates of William of Malmesbury; for the late medieval pilgrim economy, the older C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (3rd ed., 2001), and the more recent R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989).

Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury pilgrimage is, in the cultural memory of the English-speaking peoples, the pilgrimage of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400). The poem describes a group of thirty pilgrims meeting at the Tabard inn in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, and the host of the inn, Harry Bailly, proposes that they tell stories on the way to Canterbury and back, the pilgrim who tells the best tale to be rewarded with a supper at the host’s expense. The pilgrims include a knight, a squire, a yeoman, a prioress, a second nun, a nun’s priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of the law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry-maker, a cook, a shipman, a doctor, a wife of Bath, a parson, a plowman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, and the host. The tales are Chaucer’s version of the exempla of the Biblia of the praedicatores and the exempla of the praedicatores of the late medieval church.

The Canterbury Tales is, in the most important sense, a poem about the late medieval church. The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales is one of the most searching descriptions of the late medieval church in any language; the portraits of the prioress, the monk, the friar, the pardoner, the summoner, the parson, the plowman are the exempla of the late medieval church at work. The Parson’s Tale, the last of the Canterbury Tales, is a long prose sermon in the ars moriendi tradition of the Devotio Moderna, and is one of the most important English texts of the late medieval church. The Tale of Melibee, the Monk’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Friars’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale are the principal exempla of late medieval English satire on the church. The standard treatment is J. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973), and the older G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England (Methuen, 1909), and D. S. Brewer, A New Introduction to Chaucer (Longmans, 1984).

References and further reading

  • R. Foreville, Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique (Variorum, 1985).
  • Michael D. Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket (Cambridge University Press, 1951).
  • Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford University Press, 1980).
  • Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986).
  • Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992).
  • Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge University Press, 1973).