Chapter 2 - Thomas Becket’s Mother

Summary

In his biography of Thomas Becket, Frank Barlow dismisses the saint's parents, arguing that: “the remembered origins of the family were relatively humble.” The main histories chronicling Thomas's life do indeed describe Gilbert Becket and his wife as London burghers, who, though relatively comfortable, were distinguished neither by their birth nor by any extraordinary accomplishments. The most that can be said about Thomas's mother in these accounts is that she was a virtuous, zealous lady of Norman blood.

Within a hundred years of Thomas's martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, a very different version of the saint's parentage and birth had risen to prominence in popular lives of the saint. According to this new narrative, Gilbert had met a non-Christian princess while on pilgrimage, and his union to her led to the conception of Thomas on their wedding night. In fact, the fantastical narrative about Gilbert and the foreign princess soon came to dominate the early part of Thomas's lives and was presented as fact from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries.

There exists three main versions of this legend. The earliest account to feature the narrative about Thomas Becket's non-Christian mother is the thirteenth-century Later Quadrilogus or Quadrilogus I. Aside from several other pieces repeating the Quadrilogus narrative, two other versions of the legend appear by the end of the Middle Ages. The first of these, the thirteenth-century compilation of hagiographical narratives known collectively as The South English Legendary, might only postdate the Quadrilogus account by a few decades. The second, a Middle English translation of the Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend of Jacob of Voragine does not emerge until the early fifteenth century.

This chapter will focus on these three main versions of the Becket legend in order to provide the necessary information to this now relatively obscure text prior to exploring the treatment of conversion in the legend. The discussion of the Becket legend both returns us to the questions about conversion addressed in chapter one while also introducing the main aspects of the legend as a preliminary to an exploration of its intersection with Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale in subsequent chapters.

Becket's Mother in the Historical Accounts of His Life

Not much is said about Thomas Becket's parents in the biographies of Thomas composed by his contemporaries.