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The Political Setting of the Becket Translation of 1220

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Richard Eales
Richard Eales*
Affiliation:
University of Kent
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Extract

Between 1170 and 1220 the cult of Thomas Becket had spread widely within Christendom, bearing with it the primary message that the Archbishop was a martyr who had died for the liberties of the Church, and in opposition to royal oppression. But no well-documented medieval cult, and certainly no major cult, is adequately characterized in such as simple and straightforward way. If ‘the causa beati Thome became the symbol of the rights of the church throughout the thirteenth century’ and beyond, this did not prevent it embracing other ideas and aspirations, some of them in apparent tension with each other, from the 1170s onwards. Over much of Europe the image of the Martyr’s fortitude confronting the King’s tyranny, already to some extent pre-sold in the propaganda of the exile years 1164 to 1170, required no qualification. In England, as Beryl Smalley has pointed out, ‘Writers had the more difficult task of combining loyalty to their king with defence of ecclesiastical freedom’, especially after Henry II had achieved a rapprochement with the Church. One way of handling this problem was to universalize the cult, by emphasizing that it ultimately transcended issues of royal-clerical relations, however important. Becket was portrayed as the martyr of the age, whose death had benefited the whole of Christendom. Such beliefs, made more plausible by the extraordinary miracle-working achievements of the tomb at Canterbury, led at their extreme to the systematic comparison of Becket’s death with that of Christ.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 30: Martyrs and Martyrologies , 1993 , pp. 127 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1993

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References

1 No attempt has been made here to give full references to the enormous literature on Thomas Becket’s life and cult. The starting point for the former is now Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986); for the latter the works of Foreville and Duggan cited below.

2 Duggan, Anne, ‘The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century’, in Jancey, Meryl, ed., St Thomas Cantilupe Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour (Hereford, 1982), p. 30.Google Scholar

3 Smalley, Beryl, The Becket Conflict ani the Schools (Oxford, 1973), p. 193.Google Scholar

4 Raymonde Foreville’s crucial arricies on the diffusion of the cult in France are reprinted in Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique (London, 1981). Two of them (one in a revised form) are in Foreville, ed., Thomas Becket: Actes du Colloque International de Sédières (Paris, 1975) [hereafter Becket, Colloque], pp. 135–52, 163–87. See also Foreville, , ‘Thomas Becket et la France Capétienne’, in Harper-Bill, Christopher et al., eds, Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 117–28.Google Scholar

5 On the general process of diffusion, see many of the contributions in Becket, Colloque; Duggan, ‘Cult’, pp. 22–9; Duggan, A., Thomas Becket: a Textual History of his Letters (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar. On St William of Rochester, see refs in Farmer, D. H., The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1987), pp. 438–9.Google Scholar

6 Walberg, E., La Tradition hagiographique de S. ThomasBecket avant lafin du Xlle siècle (Paris, 1929)Google Scholar, and Borenius, Tancred, St. Thomas Becket in Art (London, 1932)Google Scholar are the key works on the literary and artistic expressions of the cult. See also Becket, Colloque; Denis Stevens, ‘Music in Honor of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Musical Quarterly, 56 (1970), pp. 312–48; Phyllis B. Roberts, Thomas Becket in the Medieval Latin Preaching Tradition (The Hague, 1992).

7 Foreville, Raymonde, ‘L’idée de Jubilé chez les theologiens et les canonistes’, RHE, 56 (1961), pp. 401–23 Google Scholar, reprinted in Foreville, Becket; Foreville, Raymonde, Lejubiléde Saint Thomas Becket (Paris, 1958), esp. pp. 1–11, 21–45.Google Scholar

8 Amaury d’Esneval, ‘La survivance de Saint Thomas Becket à travers sons quatrième successeur, Etienne Langton’, in Becket, Colloque, pp. 111–14, quotation at p. 114.

9 Foreville, Jubilé, p. 165. The scale of building work just before 1220 remains uncertain; see the suggestions in Caviness, Madeleine H., ‘A lost cycle of Canterbury paintings of 1220’, Antiquaries Journal, 54 (1974), pp. 65–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caviness, Madeleine H., ‘Canterbury Cathedral Clerestory: the glazing programme in relation to the campaigns of construction’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Canterbury before 1220 — British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 5 (1982)Google Scholar [hereafter Canterbury before 1220], pp. 46–55.

10 Southern, R. W., The Monks of Canterbury and the Murder of Archbishop Becket (Urry Memorial Lecture, Canterbury, 1985)Google Scholar, and Cheney, Christopher R., Pope Innocent III and England (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 208—20 Google Scholar, are useful surveys of a complex subject, documented in the Canterbury letter collections and the chronicles of Gervase of Canterbury.

11 Cheney, C. R., ‘ Magna Carta Beati Thomae: another Canterbury Forgery’, BLHR, 36 (1963), pp. 1—26 Google Scholar, repr. in Cheney, , Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford, 1973), pp. 78—110.Google Scholar

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13 Sayers, Honorius III, p. 190; Duggan, ‘Cult’, p. 38.

14 Carpenter, D. A., The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), pp. 193, 200—31, quotation at p. 193.Google Scholar

15 Besides Carpenter, Minority, the major recent studies are Stacey, Robert C., Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III 1216–124$ (Oxford, 1987), pp. 1–44 Google Scholar; Holt, J. C., Magna Carta, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 378–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Cheney, Innocent III, pp. 391–400; Sayers, Honorius III, pp. 162–94; Cazel, Fred A., ‘The Legates Guala and Pandulf’, in Coss, P. R. and Lloyd, S. D., eds, Thirteenth Century England II (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 15–21.Google Scholar

17 Carpenter, Minority, pp. 142, 180–00; text of one 1220 letter in W. W. Shirley, ed., Royal and other Historical Letters illustrative of the Reign of Henry III, 2 vols, RS (1862, 1866), 1, pp. 535–6. See also Richard Eales, ‘Castles and Politics in England, 1215–1224’, Thirteenth Century England II, pp. 23–43.

18 See above, n. 12; Smalley, Becket Conflict, especially pp. 204–5, 214–15; Duggan, ‘Cult’, pp. 36–8.

19 Baldwin, John W., Masters, Princes and Merchants: the Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle, 2 vols (Princeton, 1970), quotation at 1, p. 166 Google Scholar. Other assessments of clerical influence in Cheney, Innocent III, pp. 375–86; Holt, Magna Carta, pp. 216–31, 281–2.

20 Baldwin, Masters, 1, pp. 145–7, 256–7; Smalley, Becket Conflict, pp. 201–5.

21 On English crusading in this period, see Tyerman, Christopher, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago, 1988), pp. 86—99 Google Scholar; Lloyd, Simon, English Society and the Crusade 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 198–209 Google Scholar; Cheney, Innocent III, pp. 239–70.

22 Lloyd, Simon, ‘Political Crusades in England, c. 1215–17 and c. 1263–5’, in Edbury, P. W., ed., Crusade and Settlement (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 113—20 Google Scholar; Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 133–44. Dunstable Annals, in H. R. Luard, ed., Annales Monastici, 5 vols, RS (1864-9) [hereafter Ann. Mon.], 3, p. 49.

23 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 36–56; Mayer, H. E., ‘Henry II of England and the Holy Land’, EHR, 97 (1982), pp. 721–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stubbs, W., ed., The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, 2 vols, RS (1879-80), 1, pp. 298–300.Google Scholar

24 Forey, A. J., ‘The military order of St Thomas of Acre’, EHR, 92 (1977), pp. 481–503 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many other accounts are less critical in separating contemporary evidence from later traditions.

25 Mayr-Harting, Henry, ed., St. Hugh of Lincoln (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar. See also the documents transcribed in D. H. Farmer, ‘The Canonisation of St Hugh of Lincoln’, Lincs. Arch. Reports and Papers, 6, pt 2 (1956), pp. 86–117; and the Lives: Decima L. Douie and Hugh Farmer, eds., Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, 2 vols (London, 1961); Richard M. Loomis.ed., Gerald of Wales, the Life of St Hugh of Avalon (New York, 1985).

26 Most notably the Barnwell Annals, in Stubbs, W., ed., The Historical Collections of Walter of Coventry, 2 vols, RS (1872-3), 2, p. 243.Google Scholar

27 Mason, Emma, St Wulfstan of Worcester c. 1008–10951; (Oxford, 1990), pp. 254–79 Google Scholar, on the growth of his cult, pp. 279–85, on the canonization.

28 Burton Annals, in Ann. Mon., 1, p. 211. See Mason, Emma, ‘St. Wulfstan’s staff: a legend and its uses’, Medium Aevum, 53 (1984), pp. 157—79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Draper, Peter, ‘Kingjohn and St. Wulfstan’, JMedH, 10 (1984), pp. 41–50.Google Scholar

29 Martindale, Jane, ‘The Sword on the Stone: resonances of a medieval symbol of power’, Anglo- Norman Studies, 15 (1993)Google Scholar (forthcoming); Tewkesbury Annals, in Ann. Mon., 1, p. 84. See also Barrie Singleton, The remodelling of the East End of Worcester Cathedral in the earlier part of the thirteenth century’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Worcester Cathedral — British Archaeo logical Association Conference Transactions, 1 (1978), pp. 105–15.

30 Scholz, Bernhard W., ‘The canonization of Edward the Confessor’, Speculum, 36 (1961), pp. 38–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 As in the supposed reply of the papal nuncio to John in 1211, Burton Annals, in Ann. Mon., 1, pp. 209–14, and above, n. 28. See also Holt, Magna Carta, pp. 113–14.

32 Carpenter, Minority, pp. 187–221 is a full narrative of events in the summer of 1220.

33 Carpenter, Minority, pp. 162, 187–91, quotation at p. 188.

34 Dunstable Annals, in Ann. Mon., 3, p. 57; and on sanctions for recovery of castles, above, n. 17.

35 Carpenter, Minority, pp. 194–9, quotation at p. 199. Barnwell Annals, 2, pp. 244–5, may exaggerate Henry’s triumph, but almost every chronicler mentions the fall of Rockingham.

36 5 Kalends July for 5 July, appendix to the Quadrilogus Life of Becket, in J. C. Robertson, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols, RS (1875-85), 4, p. 426; Foreville, Jubilé, p. 8. The translation date of 7 July was elaborately computed to coincide with the Old Testament period of jubilee (Lev. 25); Duggan, ‘Cult’, pp. 38–9.

37 See especially Annals, Dunstable, in Ann. Mon., 3, p. 58 Google Scholar; Waverley Annals, in Ann. Mon., 2, pp. 293–4; F. Madden, ed., Matthaei Parisiensis Historia Anglorum, 3 vols, RS (1866-9), 2, pp. 241–2; Barnwell Annals, 2, pp. 245–6. On the setting, see also William Urry, ‘Some notes on the two resting places of St. Thomas at Canterbury’, Becket, Colloque, pp. 195–208.

38 Barnwell Annals, 2, p. 246; Foreville, Jubilé, pp. 37–45, 165–6.

39 Foreville, Jubilé, pp. 89–95, compares the surviving texts; see also Duggan, ‘Cult’, pp. 39–40. The sermon text is in Roberts, Phyllis B., Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto, 1980), pp. 65–94 Google Scholar. At p. 10 Roberts suggests the text ‘may well represent a latter amalgam of two stages of Langton’s preaching on Becket in 1220 and 1221’.

40 This text, recovered only recently, is in Roberts, Selected Sermons, pp. 53–64. For the attribution of the sermon to Langton, see Phyllis B. Roberts, Stephanus de Lingua-Tonante: Studies in the Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto, 1968).

41 Tim Tatton-Brown, ‘The Great Hall of the Archbishop’s Palace’, in Canterbury before 1220, pp. 112–19.

42 Text in Russell, Josiah C. and Heironimus, John P., The Shorter Latin Poems of Henry of Avranches (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), pp. 64—78 Google Scholar; attribution discussed in David Townsend and A. G. Rigg, ‘Matthew Paris’ Anthology of Henry of Avranches’, Mediaeval Studies, 49 (1987), PP. 353–90, esp. pp. 360–1, 372–3.

43 Woodruff, C. E., ‘The financial aspect of the cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 49 (1932), pp. 13–32.Google Scholar

44 Russell, J. C., ‘The canonization of opposition to the King in Angevin England’, in Taylor, C. H., ed., Anniversary Essays in Mediaeval History, by Students of Charles Homer Haskins (New York, 1929), pp. 279—90 Google Scholar. By contrast, Duggan, ‘Cult’, pp. 41–4, underplays the significance of the Becket cult for secular politics.