Destruction, Deconstruction, and Dereliction: Music for St Thomas of Canterbury during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, 1530-1600

Abstract

Between the late-twelfth and early-sixteenth centuries, much music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) was written in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. However, in the 1530s his cult became a major target for reformers and, in 1538, Henry VIII (1491-1547) ordered the destruction of his shrine and the obliteration of all music written in his honour. This article will examine how music composed to memorialise St Thomas was treated during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It explores the process of self-censorship prompted by Henry’s proclamation on the cult of St Thomas that led to his erasure from liturgical books in England. It analyses the attempts by reformers to discredit music concerning St Thomas, particularly by radical reformer John Bale (1495-1563). Finally, it examines music that was composed by Catholics for St Thomas during the Counter-Reformation and asks what it can tell us about the state of the cult in the late sixteenth century. This approach results in an overview of St Thomas’ cult during the later sixteenth century and contributes to our understanding of changing conceptions of the saint by Catholic communities in the post-Reformation world.

In 1585, Raphael Holinshed gloatingly celebrated the end of the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury in England in his Chronicles: ‘What remembrance is there now of Thomas Becket? Where be the shrines that were erected in this church and that chappell for perpetuities of his name and fame? Are they not all defaced? Are they not all ruinated? Are they not all conuerted to powder and dust?’ ¹ In his enthusiasm to outline how St Thomas had been rooted from the cultural landscape, Holinshed focused on the physical building blocks of his cult; on the shrine that had stood in Canterbury Cathedral from 1220 until it was pulled down in September 1538, on the churches and chapels that were named in his honour, and on the images and statues of the saint that had once existed in abundance. ² Concentrating on the mortar and stone of the cult, Holinshed’s depiction of St Thomas’ obliteration is one of physical iconoclasm and the removal of devotional places and spaces from the map. ³ It did not have an aural dimension, bar the sound of bricks being ground to dust.

However, despite Holinshed’s evocative description, it was not only the physical statements of Becket’s sanctity that were damaged during the Reformation, as the music that had been composed to honour him was also systematically destroyed. Some of this music was strikingly recent. The surviving bass part of a mostly lost motet entitled Gaude pastore makes the central role of Becket in early sixteenth-century English devotional life obvious. ⁴ As a motet, Gaude pastore was probably intended for performance commemorating the Becket Jubilee in 1520, and did not have a part to play as music for public ritual worship. That honour remained with the official liturgy, the most famous of which were St Thomas’ offices for the passion (29 December) and translation (7 July), but the motet attests to an interest in composing devotional songs in St Thomas’ honour. ⁵ Indeed, there were a large number of non-Office St Thomas songs, covering such diverse genres as motets, conductuses, and carols that had been composed over the centuries, of which only a small fraction survive. ⁶ The survivors give us an insight into the cultural importance St Thomas held between the twelfth and early sixteenth century, and of how his sanctity was conceptualised; he was seen as a noted martyr, a confessor, and as England’s patron.

Yet Becket’s paramount cultural position was not to last forever. Although reformer James Bainham was burnt at the stake partly for daring to question Becket’s saintly status in 1532, by the late 1530s the mood had turned decisively against St Thomas. ⁷ As part of the fallout of annulment proceedings against his wife, King Henry VIII (1491-1547) broke with the pope and in some regards aligned himself with the reforming movement that had been sweeping the continent ever since Martin Luther had supposedly nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Alongside a general questioning of the role of saints in Christian worship, Henry objected to the way Thomas Becket — an archbishop who had been murdered due to his opposition to reforms made to ecclesiastical courts by Henry II (1133-1189) — had come to be venerated as a saint, viewing him instead as a traitor. This was a dramatic change from Henry’s earlier stance on St Thomas: around 1520, he likely commissioned a surgical instrument complete with an image of the saint which attests to his orthodox piety in this regard. ⁸

Alongside this campaign to destroy physical remnants of the belief in St Thomas’ sanctity, Henry also ordered the erasure of all music connected with the saint in England. While other studies have mapped the destruction of statues, shrines, and images that propagated St Thomas’ piety, this article will explore the fate of his music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) during the sixteenth century. ⁹ Throughout, the term ‘liturgical’ will be used to refer to the masses and offices in honour of Becket that were used in public ritual worship during the medieval period and beyond by Catholic communities in England and abroad. In contrast, ‘non-liturgical’ will be used to signify music from many different genres, such as conductuses and carols, that were not used as part of formalised ritual worship. ‘Non-Office’ will also be used to describe pieces of music that used extracts from the liturgies (particularly as the cantus firmus in motets) but were not officially part of the Office. The performance context for many of these non-Office songs is often difficult to determine conclusively from surviving evidence, but the most convincing arguments conclude they were publicly performed but not in liturgical settings. ¹⁰ While the conductus had largely fallen out of favour by the fourteenth century, carols and motets were still popular in the sixteenth. ¹¹ Within the sixteenth-century English Catholic context, these songs functioned as private music, with copies of motets circulating amongst ‘sophisticated amateurs of music’ who performed them within their own homes. ¹² Given the destruction of medieval St Thomas music and the secrecy involved in the production and dissemination of sixteenth century material, much of the music discussed in this chapter survives in ephemeral sources without evidence of widescale distribution. Much of it was first catalogued by Denis Stevens and Andrew Hughes, but this article goes beyond their studies and builds on a catalogue of St Thomas music compiled for my doctoral thesis. ¹³

The structure of this article will facilitate the discussion of both liturgical and non-liturgical music concerning St Thomas during the sixteenth century. Firstly, the efforts of Henry VIII to erase music dedicated to St Thomas will be addressed, by exploring the impact of the Proclamation of 1538 on manuscripts bearing St Thomas’ name, and what surviving evidence can tell us about musical self-censorship in the early years of the English Reformation. Secondly, this article will explore how reformers of the 1530s sought to discredit medieval St Thomas music, and tarnish the reputations of those who had promoted it in previous centuries. Particular consideration will be given to the play King Johan by John Bale (1495-1563). Bale is an interesting case study as his plays were likely performed to celebrate the destruction of St Thomas’ shrine in 1538 and his work therefore serves as some of the earliest criticisms of the musical machinery that was used to support the saint’s cult. The final section of this article will take a wider, European view to examine whether new music was written for Becket in the years during and after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and if Catholics sought to reclaim Becket as a symbol of religious resistance to monarchical tyranny. As several scholars have done much to illuminate how liturgical music was used to keep the memory of Becket alive in continental Catholic communities, my focus in this final part will be on the creation of non-Office music, in order to situate the compositional patterns of the sixteenth century within trends of earlier centuries, an aspect which has been underexplored in existing historiography. ¹⁴ This approach will reveal the changing status of St Thomas’ cult during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and present a history of a cult that came to be radically reconceptualised over the space of seventy years in the face of an unprecedented religious revolution.

Destruction

In a particularly incendiary letter from 1539, Reginald Pole (1500-1558), one of Henry VIII’s most damning Catholic critics, related rumours that were circulating in Rome concerning the removal of the shrine of St Thomas at the end of the previous year:

Thou hast heard what proofs of ungodliness Henry has exhibited upon the tomb and body of St Thomas. Thou hast heard of this first kind of sacrilege, how he plundered and despoiled the shrine which was studded with so many offerings of kings, princes, and peoples… But that afterwards he should pluck from it the bones of a man who had died so many centuries before him, should cast them into the fire, and when they were reduced to ashes should then scatter them in despite to the wind, has anyone ever read of such an example of barbarity? ¹⁵

Like Raphael Holinshed fifty years later, Pole latched onto tangible evidence of St Thomas’ destruction. By emphasising the antiquity of St Thomas’ shrine, his relics, and the attached devotional gifts, Pole presented Becket’s ruination not solely as an attack on holy relics, but also as a confrontation with heritage and history, and with the people who had seen value in Becket’s saintliness in the preceding centuries.

While the story Pole provides concerning Becket’s bones might not be accurate, he clearly understood that Henry’s move against St Thomas represented more than just mindless physical destruction, but also a reckoning with the history of the cult itself. ¹⁶ Indeed, on 16 November 1538, a month after Becket’s shrine was destroyed, a royal proclamation justified the king’s actions and rewrote the history of Becket’s cult. Although there had been objections to St Thomas since the emergence of Lollardy in the fourteenth century, the proclamation’s final clause permanently changed the official line on the saint. ¹⁷ It accused Thomas Becket of having opposed the ‘wholesome laws established against the enormities of the clergy by the King’s highness’ most noble progenitor, King Henry II’. Becket was particularly criticised for appealing to the pope to abrogate the Constitutions of Clarendon, the 1164 articles Henry II issued to curb ecclesiastical privileges. This was a contrast to previous histories of Becket’s life that had praised him for this move. ¹⁸ Yet the biggest challenge to traditional tellings of Becket’s story came in the proclamation’s insistence that his murder had been ‘untruly called martyrdom’ as, when the knights entered the cathedral, the archbishop verbally and physically provoked them. Furthermore, the proclamation stated that ‘there appereth nothing in his life and exterior conversation whereby he should be called a saint, but rather esteemed to have been a rebel and traitor to his prince’. ¹⁹ In order to discredit this false saint, Henry VIII sought to weed out the means—both visual and aural—that justified and promulgated Becket’s continued existence in the devotional landscape: ²⁰

Therefore his grace straightly chargeth and commandeth that from henceforth the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint, but Bishop Becket, and that his images and pictures through the whole realm shall be put down and avoided out of all churches, chapels, and other places, and that from henceforth the days used to be festival in his name shall not be observed, nor the service, office, antiphons, collects and prayers in his name read, but erased and put out of all the books. ²¹

Despite the seemingly radical nature of such an utterance, the proclamation of 1538 was written in a period of flux. Henry was arguably returning to a more conservative position than that he had held earlier in the decade; indeed, other parts of the proclamation deal with Henry’s conservative stance on such issues as unlicensed English bibles. ²² Consequently, the ‘Becket clause’ can be seen as a boon to reformers such as Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) and Thomas Cromwell (d. 1540), whose opposition to Becket’s cult was well known. Indeed, evidence for Cranmer’s particular animosity towards Becket is demonstrated in a vita of Becket that once belonged to the archbishop, in which somebody has gone through and crossed out every instance of Becket being called a saint or martyr. ²³ While this was perhaps not unusual practice amongst reformers, as a vita is neither an image of Becket nor part of the office the proclamation explicitly refers to, it perhaps demonstrates Cranmer’s desire to go beyond the usual bounds of textual erasure in an effort to discredit Becket. In August 1538, it seems Cranmer and Cromwell were already working to directly challenge the cult of St Thomas, as the former wrote to the latter questioning the authenticity of a vial of the miraculous St Thomas water that was disseminated by the monks at Canterbury. ²⁴ Yet Henry was not as radical as his archbishop and chief minister. Given Henry’s more conservative statements in the earlier part of the proclamation, why did he expressly order Becket to be erased from liturgical books?

Questioning the validity of the cult of saints was a fundamental aim of reformers, given its apparent contradiction of the christocentrism of the New Testament. The existence of saints’ cults also encouraged practices that reformers saw as problematic or downright intolerable: for example, pilgrimage and the production of religious images. While different traditions of the newly emerging Protestant movement utilised religious art to varying degrees, pilgrimage was universally drawn into the collection of practices that reformers used to characterise the Catholic Church as defrauding people of their time and money. ²⁵ The reformers’ general dislike of the trappings of the cult of saints was a match with Henry’s piety, which has been characterised as ‘Lutheranism without justification by faith’. ²⁶ While Richard Rex suggests that Henry’s stance towards St Thomas was one of ‘filial loyalty’ in the early years of his reign, George Bernard has argued that Henry was a ‘rare pilgrim’, and his devotional journeys became rarer after his 1520 visit to Canterbury. ²⁷ However, Henry’s lack of enthusiasm did not result in the destruction of all medieval shrines. The shrine of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey was allowed to remain standing, undoubtedly for its use as an important symbol of royal power. ²⁸ Margaret Aston has shown through the status of St George that the monarch’s Protestant principles could be ‘trimmed’ in favour of a pro-royal cult, and the case of St Edward undoubtedly provides another example. ²⁹ St Edward’s salvation and St Thomas’ destruction therefore seem less to do with Henry’s general aversion to relics and pilgrimage but to St Thomas’ character, as the latter was the former’s antithesis. St Edward was the symbol of sacral kingship, but Becket, in the words of J.C. Russell, represented the ‘canonisation of hostility to the king’. ³⁰ Against the backdrop of the rejection of Royal Supremacy by men such as Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) and Bishop John Fisher (1469-1535), Becket was seen as a spiritual ancestor of those opposing Henry in the present and the language of parliamentary attainder was used to discredit the saint. ³¹ Indeed, Alec Ryrie noted that Henry initially attacked Becket because he could not get hold of his rebellious successor, Reginald Pole, who had fled to Rome in a strange imitation of Becket’s continental exile. ³² As the past and present collided, Becket, More, Fisher, and Pole were created ‘rebel[s] and traitor[s]’ all. ³³

Given that the proclamation highlighted Becket’s appeal to the pope concerning the Constitutions of Clarendon, his struggle with Henry II has been seen as a historical proxy for Henry VIII’s own tussle with the pope. To justify his reforms, Henry VIII had to rewrite the history that stood in opposition to them, and one of the main means of doing this was by discrediting Becket’s sanctity. As the liturgy was one of the primary mediums through which celebrants, listeners, and readers learned of Becket’s sainthood, Henry sought to destroy Becket’s liturgy, and systematically discredit its communicative power. Indeed, Ryrie has stressed the liturgy as a ‘nerve centre’ that was ‘vital for any regime to control’ if it wanted to promulgate its own ideology, as necessary as television and radio to modern day governments. ³⁴ Nevertheless, in spite of the importance of the liturgy in shaping public opinion, when the destruction of St Thomas’ cult has been discussed in the historiography, it has sometimes been swept up into grand narratives of the wider attack on images and relics that constituted the main iconoclastic thrust of the Reformation, a programme described by Alexandra Walsham as a ‘holocaust of holy items’. ³⁵ Viewing Becket’s destruction solely through this lens neglects to consider that Henry also sought to erase that other cornerstone of devotion to a saint: music. In his discussion of iconoclasm and erasure in medieval manuscripts, Michael Camille argued that while the destruction of images constituted an ‘embodied response’ and a reaction to the image in question, the erasure of texts was often little more than ‘textual emendation’. ³⁶ While Camille is undoubtedly correct in his interpretation of the tampering with images, his comment about textual erasure somewhat discounts what texts, and liturgical texts especially, could signify.

Firstly, both notated and non-notated texts for St Thomas were representative of musical performances that honoured the saint outside the world of writing. After all, music is not solely the silent imprinting of ink on parchment; it is a sung, heard, melodied, performed, and embodied act that exists beyond the manuscript or printed book. Liturgical music had a communicative, emotive power that could reach beyond the Latinate, literate confines of written text. This is perhaps best shown by the fact that, on the night of Becket’s murder in 1170, numerous laymen were in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral to hear the monks perform Vespers. ³⁷ In the years after Becket’s martyrdom, many came to recognise the importance of the liturgy in emphasising St Thomas’ sanctity — perhaps none more than Stephen Langton (d. 1228) who arranged both Becket’s translation into Canterbury’s Trinity Chapel and his translation office — but it was King Henry V (d. 1422) who pushed the performative limits of liturgy. As part of his attempt to promote himself as a statesman of considerable repute, Henry attended the Council of Constance (1414-1418) and used this international platform to associate himself and England with the wronged saint. Ulrich von Reichenthal (d. 1438), a chronicler at the Council, was notably impressed by the English singers’ performance of Becket’s passion office:

On the eve of St Thomas’ Day, which was Holy Innocents’ Day, the English began the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury. They sent four trumpeters through the city at Vespers time, with their king’s arms hanging from the trumpets. They sang Vespers beautifully in the cathedral, with tall candles burning, bells pealing, sweet singing and the organ. In the morning, on St Thomas’ Day, they celebrated Mass in the cathedral and the bishop of Salisbury sang Mass and two other bishops from England assisted him at the altar. All the clergy were present and the trumpeters blew their trumpets through the city. And the patriarchs and all the bishops and scholars were invited to dinner. ³⁸

Yet liturgical music was not just used for international events. It also had a day-to-day function that impressed a ritualised framework on the hours of the day, especially in monastic contexts. Nowhere is this made clearer than in John Stone’s Chronicle, a record of life at Canterbury Christ Church that began in 1467. A description of the celebration of the feast of St Thomas’ translation demonstrates that liturgical performance was more than just the text recorded in the breviary, but a series of ritual practices that involved everybody at the monastery, as well as vestments and music:

In the year of our Lord 1470… Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury… came to Canterbury. He was received at the entrance to the church by the prior, John Oxney, and the convent in red copes with the response Summe Trinitati. Then he had a procession to the shrine of St Thomas the martyr, with the antiphon Felix locus, and after that he returned to the archbishop’s palace for dinner. The following day, on the vigil of the Translation of St Thomas the martyr, in the year of the Jubilee, John Oxney, prior of Christ Church Canterbury, celebrated High Mass, and at the Mass the whole convent was robed. At vespers, and also at matins, the archbishop celebrated the entire service. ³⁹

While manuscripts can go some way towards illuminating the reality of liturgical performances, the sumptuous meld of music, procession, art, and architecture existed beyond that which any textual rendering could effectively emulate. The erasure of liturgical material is therefore much more than textual emendation, as Camille posits, because it had a performed, experienced life beyond text.

Secondly, the erasure of text represented a panoply of diverse responses to Henry’s proclamation that could varyingly indicate antipathy to, acceptance of, or indifference towards either the royal will or St Thomas. In his study of surviving copies of John Caxton’s version of The Golden Legend, Jeremy Smith argued that ‘self-censorship seems to have been the expected norm as reformation became culturally internalised’, as early modern governments did not have the apparatus to effectively police the book market. ⁴⁰ Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the way in which responses to Henry’s proclamation varied between users of different liturgical books. At the one end of the scale, there are manuscripts such as a thirteenth century psalter, now at Cambridge University Library, that, whilst being in England during the sixteenth century, retains Becket’s name. ⁴¹ Did this book belong to a person who objected to Henry’s enforced iconoclasm? And then there is a sixteenth-century Book of Hours used by Henry VIII which contains a commemoration for Becket which remains. ⁴² As it was in use by Henry during his courtship of Anne Boleyn (d. 1536), this is perhaps a case of a book whose incendiary contents had been forgotten or ignored by its owners. There are also manuscripts that show evidence of readers who obeyed the letter of the law but did not engage in aggressive iconoclasm. One example in the British Library has each incident of the word Thomas carefully scraped out, while the rest of the office has been left intact, meaning it would have been perfectly usable had singers wished to later revive the office. ⁴³ Similar approaches that aimed at preserving as much as possible are found in an early fifteenth-century Sarum Missal, now in the Beinecke Library, or the Ranworth Antiphoner, which both contain light crossings-out that are almost insubstantial. ⁴⁴ More intense erasure is found in the ‘Burnt Breviary’ from Canterbury Cathedral, as the folios bearing the office for Becket’s passion have been entirely removed. ⁴⁵ Yet the most violent defacing of a Becket office is to be found in a Sarum Missal from the fifteenth century, now in Cambridge University Library, where the mass for St Thomas has been erased with red dye. ⁴⁶ Although statistical analysis of erasure demonstrates that people were largely compliant with the proclamation —Aude de Mézerac-Zanetti has shown that in 61 percent of surviving reformed missals, Becket’s services are illegible — self-censorship varied widely, from insubstantial penlines erasing the saint’s name to violent defacement. ⁴⁷ This sliding scale of erasure demonstrates that the removal of texts was perhaps closer to Camille’s ‘embodied response’ than it first appears, as those censoring Becket had to choose to what extent they were going to remove his name: a half-hearted following of the law, or total obliteration.

Finally, these books are not only evidence of the type of iconoclasm physically meted out on devotional texts that was so common during the Reformation, but of the destruction of the liturgical value of the manuscripts themselves. As part of the recent ‘aural turn’, scholars have incorporated music and sound into their analyses, which has helped to break down the rigid boundaries between visual and aural culture that had previously been routine in medieval and early modern studies. ⁴⁸ In one such study, Beth Williamson has stressed the need to recognise the ‘eucharistic or liturgical afterglow’ of books utilised in religious rituals; that is, that liturgical manuscripts retained some of their sacredness even outside the ceremonies and performances in which they were used. ⁴⁹ This ‘afterglow’ was not just limited to liturgical books. In her study of the Montpellier Codex — a thirteenth-century manuscript containing French polyphony — Emma Dillon has demonstrated how a combination of manuscript design, illumination, liturgical allusion, texts, and musical sound could replicate the lived experience of prayer, inviting users and performers of the book into a meditative reading of the manuscript outside the bounds of liturgical performance. ⁵⁰ Aggressive attacks on music associated with Becket therefore represent more than just the cancellation of a musical performance or the defacing of a book; instead, it signified the alteration of a manuscript’s sacred character through engagement with this ‘afterglow’. While books which had incriminating sections discretely removed — such the ‘Burnt Breviary’ — may have been altered by someone who desired to preserve the overall ritualistic significance of the manuscript, the person who poured red ink all over St Thomas’ offices may well have wished to make a spectacle of their iconoclasm. As such a method of erasure draws attention rather than deflects, perhaps the iconoclast wished to contrast St Thomas’ defacement with the rest of the pristine manuscript, thereby highlighting the saint’s un-sainting. Such preservation of acts of iconoclasm is known in other contexts. In his study of sixteenth-century Catholic spaces, Peter Davidson highlighted the case of a statue of the Virgin that had been defaced in an abortive English attack on Cadiz in 1596. The statue — known as the Vulnerata —was then moved to Valladolid, where it became a symbol of the self-inflicted wounds of England. ⁵¹ From the other end of the spectrum, Brian Cummings, in his study of a pre-Reformation printed missal kept in York Minster Library that was attacked with a knife, comments that the very act of preserving such a mutilated book turned it into ‘a kind of relic, a sacred body from a wounded past’. ⁵² The preservation of manuscripts in which St Thomas’ name and office were obliterated could therefore mean several things. On the one hand, it could indicate the act of a reformer wishing to emphasise St Thomas’ erasure and revel in the cult’s destruction. On the other, it could be a traditionalist attempting to preserve what had been lost, to mourn through the marks of erasure, and to cling onto the ritualistic significance of the wider manuscript.

In light of this evidence, the removal of St Thomas’ name from liturgical books meant much more than simple ‘textual emendation’ proposed by Camille. It signified the cancellation of lived, experienced performances that existed apart from their textual representation in books. It could also represent a vast array of responses to St Thomas’ cult and Henry’s proclamation, given that erasure could encompass anything from light crossings out to violent defacement. Finally, it represented a government sponsored attack on the very sacredness of liturgical and musical books, and the preservation of the physical act of iconoclasm perhaps operated as either an attempt to remember St Thomas’ un-sainting or as a memorial of what was lost. In response to the horror voiced by Henry’s opponents at the widescale iconoclasm and destruction aimed at St Thomas, reformers found justifications for ending St Thomas’ cult that discredited not only his sanctity, but also the ways in which it had been expressed.

Deconstruction

Given the perceived sacredness of religious music honouring St Thomas, attempts to justify its destruction by reformers were inevitable. Centuries of reinforcing St Thomas’ sanctity through the liturgy meant that devotional practices were hardwired into religious culture, so reformers had to be especially radical in obliterating it. Artistic efforts by English reformers began almost immediately to ‘deconstruct’ Becket’s cult, which I would define as the process of challenging the arguments that had constructed Thomas Becket’s sanctity and of discrediting the people who had promulgated them (even if those people had been dead several centuries). Often this process was conducted in the same way construction had been: through music. One of the best examples of this method are two plays by John Bale, a Carmelite turned reformer, who worked in the household of Thomas Cranmer. ⁵³ One of these plays, now lost, was at different times entitled De traditione Thome Becketi or De Thomae Becketi Imposturis, and was probably written on Cranmer’s instruction sometime between 1536 and 1539 and focussed on Becket’s claims to sanctity. ⁵⁴ A second, entitled King Johan, was performed at Cranmer’s house in the diocese of Canterbury during the Christmas season of 1538. In the following years it was extensively rewritten to reflect new religious realities, and the second version of the play dates to around 1560. Due to the loss of the Becket play, we cannot know what Bale had to say about St Thomas, but King Johan can give us some sense of his opinion. While lines criticising Becket were probably Elizabethan additions, the main narrative thrust of the play dates from the 1530s and addresses the conflict between King John (1165-1216) and Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. ⁵⁵ In 1205, a disagreement had broken out over the appointment of the new archbishop. Both John and the Canterbury monks selected their own candidates, but the pope ultimately rejected both and installed his own choice, Langton. Incensed, John refused to let Langton enter England under threat of death. In response, the pope imposed a lengthy Interdict on England between 1208 and 1214, and excommunicated John between 1209 and 1213. Although John was eventually forced to recant and accept Langton as archbishop, his brief period of opposition to the pope made his reign a pleasing source of historical anecdotes for those who wished to discredit papal supremacy. ⁵⁶

As there were many other ‘king versus archbishop’ disputes that Bale could have drawn on when writing his play, the focus on Langton and John is especially interesting in terms of a musical history of St Thomas’ cult. Langton had overseen Becket’s translation on 7 July 1220 and was therefore a key liturgical character in the saint’s office for his translation. ⁵⁷ For Langton, the ceremony had provided the perfect opportunity to emphasise his success in arbitrating between the opposing sides of the First Barons’ War of 1215 to 1217, as well as to stress to the Christ Church monks that Canterbury Cathedral was to be the permanent home of Becket’s body. ⁵⁸ After the translation ceremony itself took place, Langton (or a member of his clerical familia) likely composed the office that became the most popular choice for the translation feast, and it was compiled some point between 1220 and Langton’s death in 1228. ⁵⁹ Bale’s choice to produce two plays in this period — one about Becket, one about John and Langton, the latter of which was probably performed for Cranmer shortly after the destruction of St Thomas’ shrine — perhaps demonstrates that he was aware of the close link between St Thomas and Langton that had first been established in the translation office. In Lesson 5 of one set of lessons associated with Langton’s translation office, his role in the ceremony was placed front and centre:

During the night Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard, bishop of Salisbury, and Prior Walter and the whole group of monks came into the burial place and approached the tomb with sincere devotion. They remained there, praying, through the night; in the morning, opening the tomb, they recognised the former mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit, dressed in episcopal robes. And everyone sang psalms joyously and wept tears of exultation. Some of them lifted up the body… and placed [it] in a wooden coffin in an honourable location, until the day when the translation was to be solemnly celebrated. ⁶⁰

Langton was so heavily associated with St Thomas and the translation that in a copy of the office found in Stowe MS 12, the historiated initial focusses on Langton entirely, with Becket’s corpse pushed to the bottom of the image. ⁶¹ While Bale’s attacks on Langton can therefore partly be explained by the archbishop’s historical pro-papal stance, that Langton had long been liturgically associated with St Thomas probably shaped Bale’s decision to write a play about his dispute with King John, especially considering the play was probably written to be performed for Archbishop Cranmer soon after the destruction of St Thomas’ shrine in 1538.

Given Langton’s role in promoting St Thomas’ cult, Bale sought to undermine his status as a respected doctrinal authority through connecting him with corrupt practices, both musical and non-musical. Throughout King Johan Langton is presented as a purveyor of superstition. King John is shown as receiving good advice from the three estates — Nobility, Clergy, and Civil Order — who are often tempted by the vice Sedition. Bale integrated the allegorical and historical characters through the means of double casting, as the role of Langton was intended to be played by the same actor as Sedition, the vice with which Bale identified the pre-Reformation Church, and a figure drawn from medieval morality plays. Langton’s allegiance to the pope and his political goals during the Interdict are further criticised through breaking down the temporal boundaries between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a striking example of what Dermot Cavanagh has termed his authorial ‘presentness’, Bale combined present and past by dressing Langton up as the purveyor of practices that were being rigorously challenged during the 1530s. ⁶² For example, Sedition (as Langton) is shown offering absolution by invoking some of the most famous relics of the medieval period, which had become infamous during the iconoclasm of the 1530s:

• Sedicyon (as Steven Langton):

• A pena et culpa, with a thowsand dayes of pardon,

• Here ys fyrst a bone of the blyssyd Trynyte,

• A dram of the tord of swete seynt Barnabe;

• Here ys a feddere of good seynt Myhelles wyng,

• A toth of seynt Twyde, a pece of Davyds harpe stryng,

• The good blood of Haylys, and owr blyssyd ladys mylke,

• A lowse of seynt Fraunces in this same crymsen sylke,

• A scabbe of Seynt Job, a nayle of Adams too,

• A maggott of Moyses, with a fart of Saynt Fandigo;

• Here is a fygge leafe and a grape of Noes vyneyearde;

• A bede of Saynt Blythe with the bracelet of a berewarde,

• The Devyll that was hatcht in maistre Johan Shornes bote,

• That the tree of Jesse ded plucke up by the roote;

• Here ys the lachett of swett Seynt Thomas shewe,

• A rybbe of Seynt Rabart, with the huckyll bone of a Jewe;

• Here ys a joynt of Darvell Gathyron,

• Be sydes other bonys and relyckes many one.

• In nomine domini pape, amen. ⁶³ (ll. 1214-31)

Alongside mention of St Thomas’ shoe, Langton highlights several more relics that would be condemned by reformers in the years surrounding the production of King Johan. Perhaps most famously, the Blood of Hailes — a relic of Christ that had been kept at Hailes Abbey since the thirteenth century —had been an early target of reformers, as Anne Boleyn had supposedly begun an investigation into it in 1535. ⁶⁴ However, it was not until 24 November 1538 when the validity of the Blood of Hailes was completely denied as John Hilsey (d. 1539), bishop of Rochester, gave a sermon at Paul’s Cross which roundly rejected it as a feigned relic. ⁶⁵ By 1539, reformers were arguing it had actually been the blood of a duck. ⁶⁶ Moreover, the ‘joynt of Darvell Gathyron’ refers to St Derfel, a sixth-century Welsh monk whose cult had flourished in Llanderfel in North Wales. On 22 May 1538, Llanderfel’s image of St Derfel was used as kindling on the pyre of John Forrest, a Franciscan friar who had loudly objected to both Henry’s second marriage and to the Oath of Supremacy. ⁶⁷ By putting the names of these relics into Langton’s mouth, Bale melded past and present to associate the dead archbishop with not only the ‘feigned relics’ being denounced by contemporaries, but also with the lucrative industry of pilgrimage that the reformers so hated. Given Langton’s role in promoting St Thomas’ shrine as a major cultic site, this association was probably not accidental.

Although there is no direct criticism of the St Thomas liturgies or Langton’s role in promoting and composing them in King Johan, Bale makes his disdain for the sounds of Catholicism known: ‘King Johan: Why, know ye it not? The prechyng of the Gospell./Take to ye yowre traysh, yowre ryngyng, syngyng and pypyng,/So that we may have the scryptures openyng’. ⁶⁸ He also deepens the link between Langton and the old, corrupt forms of music that King John opined drowned out the Scripture. In a section that Bale removed from the 1560 version of the play, Langton is shown as being heavily associated with this ‘ryngyng, syngyng and pypyng’, as he invites sounding of the very music that Bale was attacking: ‘Stevyn Langton: Opyn the churche dorys and let the belles be ronge,/And throwgh owt the realme se that Te Deum be songe’. ⁶⁹

Langton’s love of superstitious music also links him to the pope who, in the main body of text of King Johan, is also quickly identified with this suspect music. The Pope and Langton therefore share a likeminded support for discredited forms of liturgy, which Bale attacks with poetic flourish:

• Imperyall Majestye:

• A jolye fellawe how dost thu prove the Pope?

• Sedicyon:

• For he hath crosse keyes with a tryple crowne and a cope,

• Trymme as a trencher, havynge hys shoes of golde,

• Ryche in hys ryalte and angelyck to beholde.

• Imperyall Majestye:

• How dost thu prove hym to be a fellawe myrye?

• Sedicyon:

• He hath pypes and belles, with kyrye, kyrye, kyrye. ⁷⁰

Of course, Bale’s attack on ‘ryngyng, syngyng and pypyng’ was motivated by more than his desire to discredit Langton, as it was also a part of his reforming ideology that saw music as a distraction from the Word. ⁷¹ However, Bale clearly had a complicated relationship with music’s role in worship, as his previous life as a Carmelite had left him with a fascination with religious-musical experience that is evident in his surviving works. ⁷² Prior to his break with Catholicism, Bale had composed an orthodox hymn to the Virgin, and he consistently used traditional liturgy in his later Protestant plays. ⁷³ Two of his plays —Three Laws and God’s Promises —are reworkings of the Catholic morality plays and cycle dramas that would have been familiar to him in his childhood and youth. ⁷⁴ Imitation of Catholic rites make up a full fifth of King Johan, a reality that must have brought a visceral immediacy to those who saw it performed. ⁷⁵ Snatches of the pre-Reformation liturgy are often heard throughout the play, if only then to be criticised by characters within the narrative. The first example comes when Dissimulation sings a section of the Litany on his entry, only to be mocked by Sedition, another when the allegorical characters Usurped Power and Private Wealth sing an extract of Psalm 136. ⁷⁶ Bale also includes several examples of secular music to underline the villainy of certain characters, and even offers a stave of notated music which Sedition sings as he enters, stumbling on the character Imperial Majesty organising his exile. ⁷⁷ Here, the use of music is jarring in the face of Imperial Majesty’s restoration of order, and serves to render Catholic characters ‘frivolous and out of touch’. ⁷⁸ Overall, while Bale’s interest in music may be evident by its inclusion, its recontextualization served to reinforce Bale’s criticisms of traditional liturgy and expose its false sacredness.

The criticism of the traditional liturgy and its association with Langton that underpins King Johan aimed to give justifications to both the destruction of St Thomas’ liturgy and the promotion of new primers in English. While it is not possible to fully analyse how tightly entwined Bale envisioned Langton and Becket given the loss of De Thomae Becketi Imposturis, from the evidence accrued in King Johan it seems these plays were conceptualised as part of a wider challenge to the machinery supporting Becket’s cult, and the attack on Langton was more than just an attempt to discredit an unruly pro-papal archbishop. Instead, it sought to discredit the liturgies that had been written for Becket by not only attacking the sounds of the genre itself — the ‘ryngyng, syngyng and pypyng’ — but by undermining the man who had promoted them in the thirteenth century. Of course, King Johan espoused many other reformer talking points, but it is a chief example of the kind of confrontation with liturgical history that Reginald Pole had lamented in 1539.

Dereliction

Although the immediate reaction to the destruction of Becket’s shrine in Catholic Europe was one of horror — Henry VIII was excommunicated in December 1538 in response — perhaps surprisingly, this anger did not immediately result in music-making to bolster his image, as can be seen in the lack of new Becket songs being composed in the second half of the sixteenth century. Music written in honour of Becket in the medieval period came under sustained attack during the Reformation, but a remarkable amount survives. Eight fully or partially surviving medieval offices have come down to us, with a further office for Becket’s Regressio known to have been in circulation but now lost. ⁷⁹ Of the non-Office music, thirty-three songs are known to have been written for Becket, and Denis Stevens has catalogued a further thirty-one sequences and thirty-one hymns. ⁸⁰ Given both the chronological longevity and wide geographical spread of the survivors, it is likely that they represent a small part of what was once a vibrant musical tradition. Therefore, it is perhaps surprising that a similar wealth of musical material did not appear in the sixteenth century, aimed at articulating Becket’s continued sanctity. While the previous studies have shown that there was still much music-making done in honour of St Thomas during the sixteenth century — particularly through liturgical performance in continental institutions — there was a noted drop off in terms of new music being written for the saint in comparison to the medieval period and the seventeenth century, when there was somewhat of a revival. ⁸¹ This final section will explore this hitherto uncommented upon phenomenon, and explore why this comparative lack of new compositions occurred.

In the years surrounding the Council of Trent, the only example of new liturgical music written in honour of St Thomas was an office that appears in Spanish printed breviaries from 1543 and 1547. ⁸² The chant completely ignores the new religious realities of the post-Reformation world, as an antiphon for First Vespers, Honorabilis Angliae, presents St Thomas as if he were still the beloved national saint of England housed safely in his shrine: ‘Honourable in England, acceptable in France,/Desired everywhere./O evangelical leader, O legate of the pope,/O herald of God at the ends of the earth,/O Thomas, rightly named after the apostle,/You who win kings and unbelieving nations for Christ’. ⁸³

While this office was being promulgated in Spain, in England, music for St Thomas was being erased. For the first time, the 1544 Sarum Processional outright excluded Becket’s passion and translation offices, and it was not restored until the reign of Mary I (r. 1553-1558). ⁸⁴ Under Mary, limited attempts were made to recover and return what had been systematically destroyed by her father. Becket’s liturgies were once again performed at Canterbury Cathedral and his name was restored to liturgical books. ⁸⁵ The city of Canterbury also reintroduced the traditional St Thomas Pageant, which perhaps shows the affection with which St Thomas was still held by city elites (although the economic benefits of such an event cannot be discounted). The authorities also pursued those who had attacked his images. ⁸⁶ However, the shrine itself had been so completely destroyed that Mary and her allies could not rebuild it in the short time they had, and the space remained empty. After Mary’s death in 1558, her half-sister Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) undid Mary’s return to Catholicism. Becket was once again removed from the service books, the props for his pageant were finally put away, and he was no longer to be celebrated as a saint in English churches.

In light of the triumph of Protestantism in England, it therefore seems necessary to look to the continent to explore whether and how St Thomas was promoted through music during the late sixteenth century. Catholic Europe responded to Protestant Reformation at the Council of Trent, which sought to address some criticisms, partly through a standardisation of liturgical material. The result was the imposition of the Roman Rite, and the various locals uses that had provided the framework for worship during the medieval period were abandoned. The introduction of the Roman Rite fundamentally changed liturgy for St Thomas in Catholic institutions, as the Roman calendar did not include the feast for the translation. While St Thomas’ translation had always been more popular in England, prior to the Reformation, there were instances of continental institutions composing their own music in honour of the feast. One such example is a suffrage in honour of St Thomas’ translation composed in Cologne around 1480. ⁸⁷ The feast for St Thomas’ passion — which had been hugely popular throughout Europe during the late medieval period—became a semiduplex feast, meaning it had nine lessons in Matins. This was much fewer than the twelve lessons that appear to have been the norm in the Benedictine monastic use in England during the medieval period, which is found in surviving versions of St Thomas’ monastic office such as that at the Fitzwilliam Museum. ⁸⁸ However, it is in line with other medieval traditions, such as the nine lessons accorded to St Thomas in Sweden. ⁸⁹ Attachment to local customs meant that certain institutions did not unequivocally adopt the Roman rite until the seventeenth century, such as the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, which shows the importance of tradition and liturgical continuity to Catholic communities. ⁹⁰ While full adoption of the Roman Rite took some time, an entry in the Douai College Diaries from 1602 clearly demonstrates that when institutions performed St Thomas’ liturgy on his feast day, they still viewed it as an opportunity for the members of the college to gather, honour the saint, and hold onto ancient liturgical traditions:

On the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, martyr, and our patron, High Mass was sung by the President in the presence of the other doctors and priests and the students of the college, in St James’ Church, where during the Mass, an English priest, Mr Thomas Coniers, of the Society of Jesus, delivered a sermon to the people, in which he eloquently declared the deeds of the same glorious martyr, and described the many martyrdoms and illustrious confessions of the members of this college. ⁹¹

The importance of the St Thomas’ liturgy to sixteenth-century English Catholics has been stressed by scholars, particularly by Katy Gibbons in her article on the Becket cult in France. Focusing on the cult of St Thomas at Catholic seminaries on the continent, especially those staffed by English exiles (such as the English Colleges at Douai, Rome, and Valladolid), Gibbons demonstrated how the continued use of traditional St Thomas liturgies allowed exiles to develop a new meaning centred around the defence of the rights of the church, the theme of exile, and opposition to Royal Supremacy. ⁹² A similar conclusion has also been drawn by Peter Roberts, who has written of a cult ‘revivified’ by Catholic exiles on the continent using St Thomas as a totem through which to bolster their own desire to reconvert England. Roberts discusses the number of plays concerning St Thomas that were written at the expatriate Catholic institutions, including the Breuis Dialogismus, which was commissioned by the Jesuits at St-Omer. ⁹³ Victor Houliston has also highlighted the popularity of religious drama and emphasised how ‘devotion to Saint Thomas was a fertile symbol of popular resistance to the break with the Catholic heritage’. ⁹⁴ Together, the studies reveal a vibrant musical culture in which the traditional St Thomas liturgies were used to connect worshippers to the pre-Reformation past and, for exiles, to the ideals of mission and martyrdom.

While these studies are right to emphasise the continued use of St Thomas’ liturgy and his sustained appearance in religious drama, there is another trend within music for the saint that has not been much commented upon and may reveal a more complicated picture. Thus far, from the pre-Reformation period we have thirty-three surviving pieces of non-Office music that can be connected to St Thomas, either due to their subject matter or the use of chant from the Thomas offices as a cantus firmus in a polyphonic setting. These pieces come from a variety of genres and from across Europe between the twelfth and early sixteenth centuries, and all attest to a desire to compose music in honour of St Thomas that sat separately from or adjacently to liturgy, and often went hand in hand with liturgical music in the effort of cult building. For example, we get the first flurry of non-liturgical musical composition in the first year after Becket’s canonisation. In 1173, a conductus entitled Novus miles sequitur was composed to connect St Thomas’ newly established sanctity to the Henry II’s opponents during the Revolt of 1173-1174. ⁹⁵ Another conductus, Christi miles Christo commilitat, was also from roughly the same period. ⁹⁶ Similarly, Henry V’s effort to promote England and St Thomas through liturgy at the Council of Constance in the 1410s was accompanied by the sudden appearance of non-Office music dedicated to the saint in manuscripts connected with the Alps, which perhaps suggests a period of collaboration between English and continental musicians. ⁹⁷

Yet despite this established pattern of composition in the medieval period, we do not see such similar fervour in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Peter Leech has recently commented that it is ‘surprising’ how few masses dedicated to the saint survive from the post-Reformation period (and none survive from the sixteenth century). ⁹⁸ A search of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales database for polyphonic non-Office music from the sixteenth century points only to a few pieces that Leech has tentatively suggested may have been repurposed for performance on St Thomas’ feast day at the Venerable English College in Rome, and there is only one polyphonic non-Office piece of sixteenth-century music that can definitively be connected to the saint. ⁹⁹ This is the motet Opem nobis by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (d. 1594), which is a setting of the Benedictus from the medieval passion office, written at Canterbury in the 1170s: ¹⁰⁰ ‘Offer succour to us, O Thomas,/Guide those who stand, lift up the fallen/Correct habits, deeds, and life,/And lead us towards the path of peace’. ¹⁰¹

Palestrina’s use of the text (but not the melody) of Opem nobis is interesting considering how it neatly fits into the history of St Thomas music composed in the preceding centuries, as the chant was one of the most popular choices for the cantus firmus (the plainchant melody used as the base for a polyphonic composition) when writing a motet in honour of Becket. Of the seventeen other surviving motets dedicated to Becket, two of them use Opem nobis as the tenor. ¹⁰² This figure may seem quite low, until considering that Opem nobis is the second most popular Becket chant tenor choice, only beaten by the use of Iacet granum, responsory 5 from the passion office, which appears in five motets. ¹⁰³ Furthermore, one motet — Opem nobis/Salva Thoma/T: Pastor cesus — uses Opem nobis in one of the upper voices in addition to another Becket chant as the cantus firmus. ¹⁰⁴ While the appeal of Opem nobis probably related to both its important position in the office and the generic nature of its text, after the Reformation, it took on new meaning in light of Catholics’ desire to correct and regulate the bad behaviour encouraged by reformers.

Although Palestrina’s fifth book of five-part motets was reprinted multiple times (beginning in 1584), Opem nobis first appeared in the 1595 edition, the year following the composer’s death. Stevens argued that the posthumous date and contrapuntal style makes it unlikely to be an authentic Palestrina setting, instead suggesting it was by one of his students, perhaps composed for the Venerable English College in Rome, a seminary focussed on training priests for missionary work in England. ¹⁰⁵ As Katy Gibbons has demonstrated, the story of St Thomas was important in such institutions, due to its perennial theme of exile. ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, the sacred space at the English College was designed in Becket’s image. Alongside Durante Alberti’s imposing altarpiece depicting St Thomas alongside St Edmund of East Anglia (d. 869), there was once a fresco cycle (now lost) that portrayed a series of English saints. ¹⁰⁷ Yet despite this burst of artistic creativity to honour Becket in Rome, Opem nobis is currently the sole undisputed example of polyphonic musical composition for St Thomas between 1530 and 1600. This is a dramatic decline from the fifteenth century, from which we have twelve surviving or partially surviving polyphonic songs dedicated to St Thomas (and a further five texts that could have once been set polyphonically). While this state of affairs may just be an accident of survival, it is notable that so much non-Office music for St Thomas from the fifteenth century has survived in comparison to following century, despite the great deal of destruction wrought by the Reformation. This suggests a subtle shift in attitudes towards St Thomas, or at very least an alteration in how he should be musically honoured.

The reason for this change was perhaps related to the idea that St Thomas’ stand for Church independence was superseded by more obvious martyrdoms enacted during the Reformation. By the 1580s, the cult of St Thomas was no longer characterised by miracle-making due to the destruction of the shrine and, after attempts to catalogue and memorialise Catholic martyrs in response to John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), Becket’s stand against the Constitutions of Clarendon seemed a little weak to be considered martyrdom. The deaths of Thomas More, beheaded for his objections to the Oath of Supremacy, or Edmund Campion (1540-1581), condemned for his missionary work, were much more relevant to sixteenth-century Catholics than the long dead archbishop. Up against these new martyrs, Becket’s death seemed to be for a narrowly institutional, clerical Church that was disconnected from the energised post-Tridentine Church. ¹⁰⁸ Candace Lines has even argued that, to a certain extent, the emergent cult of Thomas More ‘incorporated and replaced’ the cult of Becket in the Catholic imagination. ¹⁰⁹ This view is supported by contemporary evidence, as Nicholas Harpsfield (d. 1575), the Catholic apologist, argued that the martyrdom of More superseded that of Becket because it was for the church universal, rather than a local jurisdictional dispute. ¹¹⁰ Although works such as Thomas Stapleton’s Tres Thomae attempted to challenge Harpsfield’s view by presenting St Thomas as a model of correct ecclesiastical resistance to a secular tyrant, the memory of Becket’s murder was somewhat muted due to the passage of time and the bloody reality of the Reformation. While the process of canonisation for many Reformation martyrs would not begin until the nineteenth century, as early as the 1580s, Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) recommended that a Te Deum should be sung on the confirmation of an English martyrdom, and that their relics could be used to consecrate altars and their pictures preserved in the chapel of the English College in Rome. ¹¹¹ Alongside this growing endorsement of the Reformation martyrs, St Thomas’ model of martyrdom was somewhat undermined and the very ideas that gave his cult momentum during the medieval period were debased. Instead of triumphing as a powerful symbol of Catholic resistance, St Thomas was forced to compete with new martyr cults that had greater contemporary relevance, and this competition perhaps led to an alteration in how the saint was musically celebrated.

Conclusions

In his comparative study of the cults of St Thomas at Canterbury and St Cuthbert at Durham in the fifteenth century, R. Barrie Dobson argued that the Canterbury cult was undergoing a period of ‘decline management’ which resulted in fewer pilgrims, donations, and miracles than at its thirteenth-century height. ¹¹² However, liturgical and devotional music provides very different picture as it appears the fifteenth century was a high point, especially in terms of the non-liturgical and non-Office songs composed. In the years immediately leading up to the Break with Rome, it was likely that there was much music-making in honour of St Thomas in England, of which Gaude pastore is our only surviving witness. This all changed in the 1530s, when a sustained campaign against musical expressions of devotion to St Thomas led to a high level of self-censorship amongst owners of manuscripts containing Becket music, severely limiting the amount of surviving material. Works criticising the cult from a reforming perspective, such as John Bale’s King Johan, also challenged the very arguments that had earlier supported claims to Becket’s sanctity. The destruction and discrediting by reformers also undoubtedly changed Catholic perspectives of St Thomas. During the late sixteenth century, he was no longer the pre-eminent model of martyrdom as cults of the new Reformation martyrs provided more relatable alternatives. With the dismantling of St Thomas’ shrine in 1538, the cult lost what had given it meaning during the medieval period: namely, the central devotional site that held the saint’s relics. The exact character of his sanctity changed and from within this vacuum came new significance. While music played a vital role in connecting English exiles to St Thomas and to their mission back home, the emphasis on liturgy and religious drama came hand-in-hand with a decline in non-liturgical and non-office music associated with St Thomas. The destruction, deconstruction, and ultimate decline of this music should therefore be taken as an important statement on the position of his cult during the sixteenth century, and perhaps indicate a subtle shift in how his sanctity was musically celebrated within Catholic communities.