Murder of Thomas Becket (1170): Death in Canterbury Cathedral

The murder of Thomas Becket took place on 29 December 1170, when four knights of King Henry II killed the Archbishop of Canterbury inside his own cathedral. The killing ended an eight-year quarrel between a powerful king and his former friend over the rights of the Church in England. It shocked Christian Europe, turned Becket into one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages and made Canterbury a destination for pilgrims for more than 350 years.

Background: from royal friend to archbishop

Thomas Becket was born in London around 1120, the son of a Norman merchant family living in Cheapside. He was not an aristocrat, a fact his enemies never let him forget. After study in Paris and work as a clerk, he joined the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who used him on missions to Rome and made him archdeacon of Canterbury in 1154.

That same year Henry II became king of England, ruling also over Normandy, Anjou and, through his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, much of south-western France. On Theobald’s recommendation Henry appointed Becket as his chancellor in 1155. Becket proved a brilliant administrator, lived lavishly and became the king’s close companion, even leading troops in the Toulouse campaign of 1159.

When Theobald died in 1161, Henry expected that making his loyal chancellor archbishop would give him a cooperative Church. Becket was ordained priest on 2 June 1162 and consecrated archbishop the next day. To the king’s surprise he resigned the chancellorship, adopted an austere life and began to defend the Church’s privileges with the same energy he had once spent serving the Crown.

The quarrel with Henry II

The central dispute concerned “criminous clerks”, members of the clergy accused of serious crimes. Church law said they could be tried only in church courts, which could not impose death or mutilation. Henry argued that this let murderers and thieves escape proper punishment, and he wanted convicted clerics handed over to royal courts.

In January 1164 Henry set out what he claimed were the ancient customs of the realm in the Constitutions of Clarendon. Among other things they limited appeals to Rome and required clerics to answer in royal courts. Becket first gave verbal agreement, then withdrew it, and Pope Alexander III condemned several of the clauses.

At the Council of Northampton in October 1164 the king turned on Becket with financial charges dating from his time as chancellor. Fearing for his liberty, Becket fled in disguise and crossed to France in November 1164. He spent about six years in exile, first at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny and then at Sens, under the protection of King Louis VII of France.

The conflict was part of a wider medieval struggle between popes and secular rulers over who controlled the Church, a struggle seen a century earlier in the Walk to Canossa. Alexander III, himself in conflict with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, needed Henry’s support and tried hard to avoid a complete break.

The coronation crisis and the return to Canterbury

In June 1170 Henry had his eldest son, Henry the Young King, crowned at Westminster by Roger, Archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury. Crowning the king was the traditional right of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Becket regarded the ceremony as a grave insult.

Pressure from the pope and from Louis VII led to a formal reconciliation between king and archbishop at Fréteval on 22 July 1170. The deeper questions were left unresolved. Before landing in England, Becket sent papal letters suspending Roger of York and excommunicating Gilbert Foliot of London and Jocelin of Salisbury.

Becket landed at Sandwich on 1 December 1170 and entered Canterbury to a warm welcome from ordinary people. The excommunicated bishops crossed to Normandy and complained to the king, who was spending Christmas at Bures, near Bayeux.

What happened on 29 December 1170

According to the early biographers, Henry burst into a furious complaint about the men he had fed and promoted who allowed a low-born clerk to insult him. The famous phrase “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” is a later paraphrase rather than his recorded words. Four knights of his household, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton, left secretly for England.

They arrived at Canterbury on the afternoon of 29 December and confronted Becket in his palace, demanding that he lift the sentences on the bishops. He refused. The knights went out to arm themselves, and the monks hurried the archbishop through the cloister into the cathedral, where vespers had begun.

Becket ordered the doors to be left unbarred, saying a church should not be turned into a fortress. The knights entered and found him near the steps in the north-west transept. After a short struggle, in which they tried to drag him outside, they struck him down with their swords. A visiting clerk, Edward Grim, tried to shield him and was badly wounded in the arm. A final blow sliced off the crown of Becket’s head, and a cleric accompanying the knights, Hugh of Horsea, scattered his brains on the floor.

The knights then looted the archbishop’s palace and rode away. The monks, finding a hair shirt crawling with lice beneath Becket’s robes, saw in it proof of hidden holiness. He was buried in the crypt the following day.

Key people

• Thomas Becket (c. 1120–1170): chancellor of England from 1155 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162; proud, combative and, after 1162, deeply committed to the Church’s liberties.
• Henry II (1133–1189): king of England and ruler of the Angevin lands in France, a reforming lawgiver who wanted royal justice to reach everyone.
• Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton: the four knights of the royal household who carried out the killing.
• Edward Grim: a clerk from Cambridge who witnessed the murder, was wounded defending Becket and later wrote one of the most vivid accounts.
• Pope Alexander III (pope 1159–1181): tried to mediate during the exile and canonised Becket in 1173.

Consequences: a saint and a penitent king

News of the murder spread rapidly. Within days, people claimed miracles of healing at the tomb, and the monks of Canterbury began to record them; hundreds were collected within a few years. Pope Alexander III canonised Becket on 21 February 1173.

Henry denied ordering the killing but accepted that his words had caused it. In May 1172, at Avranches in Normandy, he was reconciled with papal legates, promising to allow appeals to Rome and to abandon customs harmful to the Church. In practice royal courts kept much of their power, but the principle that clerics could not be tried in secular courts, later known as “benefit of clergy”, survived in English law for centuries.

In July 1174, facing rebellion by his sons and invasion by the King of Scots, Henry made a public penance at Canterbury. He walked barefoot to the cathedral and was whipped by the bishops and monks at Becket’s tomb. The next day, William the Lion of Scotland was captured at Alnwick, which many contemporaries saw as a sign of the saint’s forgiveness.

The four knights were excommunicated and, according to tradition, were ordered to do penance by serving in the Holy Land. Little reliable is known about their later lives.

Legacy: pilgrimage and memory

After a fire destroyed the cathedral’s choir in 1174, it was rebuilt in the new Gothic style, with the Trinity Chapel designed to house Becket’s relics. They were moved into a shrine covered with gold and jewels on 7 July 1220. Canterbury became one of the leading pilgrimage centres of Europe, and pilgrims took home small lead badges and ampullae, flasks said to contain “Becket’s water” mixed with a trace of his blood.

The pilgrimage gave English literature one of its classics, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the late fourteenth century. Images of the murder spread across Europe, from Limoges enamel caskets to wall paintings and stained glass in Spain, Italy and Scandinavia.

In 1538 Henry VIII, who had broken with Rome, ordered the shrine destroyed and Becket’s images removed. Becket, a churchman who had defied a king, was an uncomfortable symbol for a monarch making himself head of the Church. The spot of the murder is still marked in the cathedral, and T. S. Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) brought the story to modern audiences.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Henry II openly ordered the murder. Fact: No evidence shows a direct order. Most historians think the knights acted on their own reading of the king’s angry words.
• Myth: Becket was killed at the high altar. Fact: He died in the north-west transept, near the cloister door, not at the main altar in the choir.
• Myth: Becket was Saxon and his quarrel was Saxon against Norman. Fact: This idea comes from nineteenth-century romantic history; his parents were Normans settled in London.

Timeline

• 1155: Henry II appoints Thomas Becket chancellor of England.
• 1162, 3 June: Becket is consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury.
• 1164, January: Henry issues the Constitutions of Clarendon.
• 1164, November: After the Council of Northampton, Becket flees to France.
• 1170, 14 June: Henry the Young King is crowned by the Archbishop of York.
• 1170, 22 July: King and archbishop are reconciled at Fréteval.
• 1170, 1 December: Becket lands at Sandwich and returns to Canterbury.
• 1170, 29 December: Four knights kill Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
• 1173, 21 February: Pope Alexander III canonises Becket.
• 1174, 12 July: Henry II does public penance at Becket’s tomb.

Why it matters

The murder of Thomas Becket dramatised one of the defining questions of medieval Europe: how far a king’s power reached over the Church. It forced Henry II to give ground, created a saint venerated from Iceland to Sicily and shaped English devotion, art and literature until the Reformation. The story of the archbishop cut down in his cathedral remains one of the best-known episodes of English history.