I am No Traitor and I am Ready to Die: The Murder of an Archbishop that Shocked the Medieval World in 1170

 December 29, 1170 Canterbury Cathedral.

Four heavily armed and armored knights dismount their horses outside the large oak and iron reinforced doors that lead into the heart of the church.

They burst inside with swords drawn and shout, “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to King and country?”

The man named Thomas Becket who the four knights are so zealously seeking is the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral.  He is just over fifty years of age and he is a devout and holy monk whose piety and patriotism, up until that very moment at least, have always been without question.  In the years immediately following his death, Pope Alexander III will canonize Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral and make him a Saint and a Martyr.  He will go on to be one of the most widely revered and adored Saints in all of Europe during the High Middle Ages--but all of that remains, for the time being anyway, in the not too distant future.

For now, four heavily armed knights are looking to kill Thomas Becket right there inside the Cathedral in cold blood.  And Becket himself knew that this moment would be coming too…

Saint Thomas Becket

Earlier that morning on December 29, 1170 those same four knights had first arrived at Canterbury Cathedral.  According to Becket’s friend and fellow monk Gervase of Canterbury, and to devout Catholic Edward Grim who happened to be an eyewitness to the startling events of that day, the four knights upon first arriving had originally peacefully dismounted their horses and stacked their weapons beneath a tree outside the church before entering.

That day the knights had told Becket prior to the start of morning Mass that he was to leave with them at once and go to the Royal English capital city of Winchester, about sixty miles from London, and present himself before King Henry II to give an account of his actions.

Becket promptly refused.

It was only after Becket refused to go with them in the morning that the knights sent by King Henry II returned later that day armed and looking for blood.

After the morning Mass, and the first confrontation with the four knights sent on behalf of King Henry II, the other monks and worshippers inside Canterbury Cathedral had urged the Archbishop to securely bolt shut all of the doors and windows and to even go so far as to hunker down underground in the church’s basement for protection.

But Becket refused to take any precautions to protect himself and instead simply remarked that, “It is not right to make a fortress out of a house of prayer.”  He then ordered that all of the doors to the Cathedral be left open.

And just before Vespers (evening prayers) that night the four knights returned looking for Becket’s head.

Canterbury Cathedral

The knights found the holy Archbishop standing out in the open after they burst through the Cathedral doors.  He was  standing alone next to a door that led to the monastic cloister.  As his armed assailants approached, Becket said calmly, “I am no traitor and I am ready to die.”

Then according to a contemporary account, “The impious knights suddenly set upon him and shaved off the crown of his head…then he received another blow to the head but remained firm.”

This account of Becket’s murder, most likely written by eyewitness Edward Grim goes on to record that the Archbishop received a third blow to the head and, “[B]ent his knees and elbows offering himself as a living sacrifice to God, saying in a low voice, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’”

After the knights had landed five blows to the head of the Archbishop with their swords, the top of Becket’s skull finally separated from the rest of his head and Edward Grim, who himself was wounded in the attack, goes on to recount how, “the blood turned white from the brain matter.”  And he also says that a fifth attacker, apparently a priest who had entered the church just behind the four armed knights, “[P]laced his foot on the neck of the Holy Martyr  and (it is horrible to say) scattered the brains with the blood across the floor, exclaiming to the rest, ‘We can leave this place, knights, he will not get up again!”

In the account of Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder written by Edward Grim in the immediate aftermath of his assassination we can definitely get a sense of the fascination with violence and death that so gripped the medieval mind, but we are also left wondering--How did such a brutal and bloodthirsty crime befall such an apparently holy and reverend man as the Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury Cathedral in the year 1170?

Earliest visual depiction of Becket's murder

The events that led up to the bloody murder of Thomas Becket had actually been set in motion eight years earlier in the year 1162.  For it was, on May 23rd of that year to be exact, that Becket was elected as the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral by a Royal council of Bishops and noblemen.  

This electoral process for choosing an Archbishop was not one that the Vatican would approve of today and it definitely did blur the lines between Church and State.  At that time King Henry II pulled all the strings when it came to the Catholic Church in England, however, with the ascension of Thomas Becket to the Archbishopric all of that was about to change.

For one thing, unlike his predecessor, a royal official who had been named Theobald, and who had simply been ordained a priest as a matter of course and political expediency, Thomas Becket who became an ordained priest in June of 1162, took his Holy Orders very seriously.

Becket sought not to be a puppet to the King of England as Henry II had hoped upon his election, but rather Archbishop Thomas Becket sought to increase the influence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church in England as he believed he had been commissioned by God to do.

As could be imagined this difference of opinion caused immense and unceasing tension between King Henry II, who felt that his royal will as the crowned King of England and the will of the Holy Roman Church were one and the same, and the holy man of God Thomas Becket who felt that he was on earth to best represent the interests of the Catholic Church.

After his election to the Archbishopric during the 1160’s there were unending conflicts between Thomas Becket and King Henry II of England over both matters of Church and State.

Finally, seeking to turn other Bishops and priests against Thomas Becket, King Henry  passed a series of legislative rulings called the Constitutions of Clarendon.  The Constitutions of Clarendon sought to severely curtail ecclesiastical authority throughout England and to make the will of the Holy Roman Catholic Church subordinate to King Henry II’s own edicts.

There was immediate push-back by Thomas Becket and his supporters against the rulings in the Constitutions of Clarendon.  Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury Cathedral largely refused to even acknowledge their existence altogether and he also refused to sign what he believed to be an ungodly and evil edict of the King.

Given Becket’s unwillingness to sign or to even adhere to the royal laws as codified in the Constitutions of Clarendon--King Henry II considered the Archbishop to be a traitor and a fugitive from the law.

King Henry II of England

For two years Becket was forced to live in exile at a Cistercian abbey in France under the protection of King Louis VII.  But in 1167 Pope Alexander III (the same Pope who after his murder would make Thomas Becket a Saint) sent delegates from the Vatican to act as intermediaries between Becket and King Henry II of England to help negotiate a settlement to their disagreements.  After all, Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral, and technically, his rightful place as a representative of the Church was in England, although the Pope did in theory at least agree with Becket.

An agreement was reached and in early 1170 Thomas Becket returned to England as the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral once again.

It was at this time, upon the return of Thomas Becket to England, that tradition has it that King Henry was known to utter the words, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”  

And upon hearing these words being exclaimed by their King four zealous knights took it upon themselves to head to Canterbury Cathedral and apprehend the so-called “turbulent priest” and bring him before Henry to give an account of himself before their sovereign.

However, today most historians based on research into the contemporary sources of the twelfth century believe that King Henry said instead, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt by such a low-born cleric?”

What is known is that after King Henry either called his knights drones or traitors, or after he accused Thomas Becket of being a turbulent priest, four of his knights headed to Canterbury Cathedral with the apparent intent to arrest the Archbishop, but instead the knights let their anger get the better of them and they murdered the priest in cold blood.

In the process the knights of King Henry II unwittingly killed one of the holiest men of the Middle Ages and created a cult of devotion that would span centuries.  Upon his death, as monks were preparing his body for burial, it was found that Thomas Becket had been wearing a hair shirt as a sign of penance beneath his garments.

Faithful Catholics all across Europe, upon hearing reports of how bravely he stood for Christ before the sword blows of his would-be assassins, began to venerate Thomas Becket as a holy Christian Martyr.  In 1173, only a little over two years after his murder, Becket was canonized as a Saint by Pope Alexander III, and a holy military order of warrior monks, all of whom were Englishmen called the Knights of St. Thomas was commissioned and charged with defense of the Holy Land.

Even the knights who had murdered Becket went on a pilgrimage to Rome to seek forgiveness from the Pope for their actions after the Pope had excommunicated them.  Pope Alexander told them that as penance for what they had done that they had to serve as knights in the Holy Land during the Crusades for a period of fourteen years.

Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

For centuries during the Medieval period thousands of miracles were attributed to visiting and praying before St. Thomas’ tomb at Canterbury Cathedral.  It was said that to pray before the bones of St. Thomas could heal the sick in both mind and body.  No more famous a writer of English letters than Geoffrey Chaucer himself begins The Canterbury Tales written sometime between 1387 and 1400, two full centuries after St. Thomas’ murder with these famous lines in his Prologue to the Tales:

“Then people long to go on pilgrimages

And palmers long to seek the stranger strands

Of far-off Saints, hallowed in sundry lands,

And especially, from every shire’s end

Of England, down to Canterbury they wend

To seek the holy blissful Martyr, quick

To give his help to them when they are sick.”

-from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: Translated by Nevill Coghill (Pub. Penguin Books 1951)

To Chaucer, as to most devout men and women in Europe during the Middle Ages, there was no Christian Martyr quite as blissful, nor Saint quite as holy as Saint Thomas Becket who had been so cruelly murdered on December 29, 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral…