A Story of St Thomas Becket

The site of St Thomas' shrine, Canterbury Cathedral

Today is the summer feast of St Thomas Becket - the feast of his translation, which took place on 7 July 1220. On that day (in the fiftieth year after his murder in 1170, a carefully chosen date), his relics were moved into a splendid new shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, where for three centuries they remained the destination of many pilgrims' journeys.

This would be a good day to read some of the medieval English songs and poems in Becket's honour, but here's a more modern Becket-themed story for the day. I found it in a fabulous book, The Lore of the Land, by Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood - a magnificently comprehensive guide to English legends and local folklore which has given me many happy hours in the past few months. They say this story comes from a guidebook of 1907, and I suspect it is no older than that, though it's set in medieval Canterbury! Here's the story:

It seems that in the days when Canterbury was a great centre for pilgrimage, its inhabitants grew so rich and sinful that the Devil reckoned he would be justified in carrying the whole town off to Hell. On the other hand, so long as prayers were being said at the shrine of Thomas Becket he did not dare go near the place.

Eventually, one night the cathedral priests were too tired to keep vigil round the shrine, so the Devil swooped down, seized a large number of houses, and dropped them into the sea off the north coast of Kent. He then returned for a second armful, which he treated in the same way. But then St Thomas himself roused the Sacristan in a vision, urging him to ring Great Harry, the largest of the cathedral bells. This he did (the bell miraculously becoming so light that one man alone could move it), and the sound frightened the Devil into dropping his third armful of houses on the coast. Those whose inhabitants were more good than bad formed the town now called Whitstable, but the homes of the wicked fell into the sea just offshore and can still be seen there underwater.

Good work, St Thomas (and congratulations to the virtuous people of Whitstable!). Drowned villages and bells go together in legend - think of all those stories of villages drowned by lakes or the sea where the ghostly church bell can still be heard ringing beneath the waves - and perhaps that was part of the inspiration for this little story. On the topic of bishops and bells, I have to point out that the largest of Canterbury Cathedral's bells is actually not called Great Harry, but Great Dunstan - and since medieval sources tell us that St Dunstan was a bell-maker and a devil-fighter himself, the devil might well falter at the sound of his bell. Here he is on Youtube, even. (Bell Harry is the name of one of the smaller bells and of the tower where it hangs; it's named after the medieval prior Henry of Eastry.)

The other part of the inspiration for this story is probably the fact that the north Kent coast, where Whitstable lies, is prone to erosion, and the remains of drowned villages can indeed be seen out at sea. In 1907, when this story was recorded, the lost village of Hampton-on-Sea, between Whitstable and Herne Bay, was in the process of being rapidly swallowed up by the sea - though what can be seen there are not the wrecked homes of the wicked inhabitants of medieval Canterbury, but an ill-fated attempt to develop the local oyster industry.

 Reculver

A little further down the coast are the remains of another drowned settlement, in this case one which goes back thousands of years. The towers above are the ruins of the medieval church of Reculver, which was the site of a Roman fort, and then by the seventh century a royal estate belonging to the kings of Kent. An abbey was founded there in 669, where some of the early Christian Kentish kings were buried. By the later Middle Ages it was a thriving town, but already losing a battle with the encroaching sea. The town dwindled to a village, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the church had to be pulled down - only these towers remain, standing on a shore which is still being eaten away beneath them. Out at sea, somewhere, are the remains of the Roman fort and the medieval town. It's a faintly spooky place, at the end of a long and narrow road which leads here and nowhere else; persistent local legends tell stories of ghostly Roman soldiers on patrol, or the cries of unseen babies heard among the ruins.

The church bell doesn't sound beneath the waves; instead, Reculver's bell now hangs in the sweet little church at Badlesmere. Two columns from the original church - said to date from the 670s - were left for a while in an orchard, but were eventually rescued and translated to the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. They don't hold anything up, but stand stranded near the place where Thomas Becket's body lay in the years between his death in 1170 and his own translation on this day in 1220. They are a relic of a church five years hundred years older than Becket - and they bring us full circle.

Some Thoughts on Canterbury Cathedral and Community

If you're in the UK, you may have been watching the recent BBC series of programmes about Canterbury Cathedral. If you haven't been, I recommend it - the series is on iplayer here. I grew up near Canterbury and know the cathedral well - and I study its medieval history, as you will have gathered if you've been reading this blog any length of time - but this series has nonetheless been full of surprises, showing a friendly side of the place which is usually kept hidden from the public behind high and forbidding walls. Away from the cathedral, the highlight for me was seeing the boys' choir visit a shrine to St Thomas Becket in Norway, continuing testament to the great popularity of St Thomas in Scandinavia - in the Middle Ages the English and Scandinavian churches had very close links, and after his murder Becket rapidly became a popular saint in the north. There's an Old Norse translation of Thomas's life, and sagas contain various references to Norwegian and Icelandic pilgrims to St Thomas' tomb: my favourite example to cite is Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, who visited Canterbury in the late twelfth century and presented the tusk of a walrus at St Thomas' shrine to thank the saint for a good catch. It was nice to see these links still valued by the present-day church.

The series is a look at the life of the cathedral, not a historical documentary, and some of its way of talking about the cathedral's history set this medievalist's teeth on edge; that's only to be expected in a programme of this kind. (At one point the narrator says the monks 'disappeared' in the sixteenth century, which is a pretty facile euphemism for what actually happened to the thousand-year-old community when Henry VIII came along.) But it's thought-provoking for a medievalist, too. I'm currently working on history-writing at Canterbury in the late eleventh/early twelfth centuries, looking at texts which provide fascinating snapshots of the cathedral community in that period. This series' focus on community has therefore been helpful for me in thinking about the context within which the texts I'm interested in were produced; as an academic it's often easy to forget that medieval writers, especially monks, were not (like me) hidden away in a library, consorting mostly with other scholars, but were working in the middle of busy communities among people who didn't necessarily care that much about history or the things which preoccupy historians. A medieval monk-historian did not get to spend his hours at will on books and writing, but had to share in the life around him, all its concerns and business, big and small. A monastic community is different from a cathedral one, of course, but there's still all the stuff of daily life to deal with: maintaining the building, managing visitors, trying to raise funds, balancing conflicting priorities.

My favourite Canterbury historians are Osbern and Eadmer, two English monks who entered the cathedral community as children, in the decade or so before the Norman Conquest. (Osbern was born probably c.1050, Eadmer c.1060.) They both grew up in the monastic community at Canterbury, and spent most of their lives there. In that period they saw a huge amount of change at the cathedral, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest: the English archbishop was deposed, new Norman monks imported into the community, and even its physical fabric collapsed around them when a fire in 1067 destroyed the Anglo-Saxon church (most of what we know about that building comes from Eadmer's memories). By the time Osbern and Eadmer reached adulthood, all the certainties with which they had grown up had been called into question. They wrote, in part, to defend the good things about Canterbury's Anglo-Saxon history against ignorant or sceptical incomers. They had no doubt that Canterbury was the oldest and the most important of the English churches, which had been the home of saints and scholars for centuries. Osbern interprets Canterbury's pre-Saxon name Dorobernia (that is, Durovernum) as if it were an Old English compound meaning 'door of the barn', because it is, he says, the very door to the kingdom of England. (This etymology is hilariously wrong, because it's not an Old English word, but you can't really blame him for not knowing that - and it neatly encapsulates how important he believed Canterbury was.) By the late eleventh century Canterbury already had a roll-call of great men to be honoured, chief among them the incomparable tenth-century archbishop, scholar and administrator St Dunstan, and St Alphege, the saintly archbishop who had been martyred by Vikings in 1012. Osbern, who grew up to be a talented musician and precentor of the cathedral, wrote only about these two saints, but Eadmer was much more prolific: he wrote lives of several more of Canterbury's Anglo-Saxon saints, and much else. After Anselm was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093 Eadmer became his companion and friend and eventually wrote a wonderful biography of Anselm - as well as a 'history of recent times in England' which is of inestimable value. With Anselm, Eadmer travelled through Europe and saw many great churches and many great people, but Canterbury always had the first place in his heart.

Contrary to the impression given by the BBC series, Canterbury was a destination for pilgrims long before St Thomas Becket's death in 1170, and the stories Osbern and Eadmer tell about visiting pilgrims vividly conjure up the busy life of the eleventh-century cathedral. There are touching stories of old blind women and sick children coming to be healed at St Dunstan's shrine, typical of the genre but endearingly precise in their everyday details: the little blind girl whose mother found out she could see when she ran off to chase an apple rolling away into the church, or the monk who had been paralysed for thirty years and, when cured and able to stand up, turned out to be unusually tall. The monks, of course, interacted with these pilgrims, and Osbern describes two miracles he witnessed in the cathedral when he was a child which clearly made a lasting impression on him. One day, he says, he was singing with the boys in the choir when he witnessed a young girl being healed of blindness by Dunstan's intercession, blood pouring from her eyes as the boys looked on in amazement; on another occasion he was in the church tending an altar and was asked by a sick woman to direct her to Dunstan's tomb, where she was healed - Osbern's first foray into guiding people towards St Dunstan, which was to be his life's work. And it's not just the pilgrims who are brought to life in these texts: we see glimpses of the fractured state of the cathedral community under Lanfranc, Anselm longing to stay at home at Canterbury with his monks like an owl among her chicks, monks having visions inspired by the cathedral's own saints.

Eadmer and Osbern create such a vivid sense of eleventh-century Canterbury and the people who inhabited it that it feels very real to me, as if I had seen it myself; and it was nice to watch the BBC series and think of the clergy, administrators, gardeners, stonemasons, choirboys (and now girls) filling the places of their medieval forebears. It gave me quite a different sense of the cathedral community to the one you get if you actually visit it. I love Canterbury Cathedral, but it's not a particularly welcoming place; the set-up is designed for big groups of tourists rather than visitors who want to take their time, and it's the kind of church where very posh guides hover disapprovingly around the lone wanderer while allowing hordes of schoolchildren to rampage around unchecked. The guides get uncomfortable if you look at things which don't have big signs next to them to tell you they're important. Unfortunately I care more about the Anglo-Saxon history of the place than the history they have decided tourists ought to care about, and there are no big signs pointing out the highlights of Canterbury's distinguished Anglo-Saxon history. Those six centuries of which Eadmer and Osbern were so proud are hard to find there unless you know what you're searching for; the cathedral seems to have concluded that Thomas Becket is the big tourist draw, and not much else gets a look-in. I find it particularly striking that the sites of the tombs of St Dunstan and St Alphege are marked only by small inscriptions flat on the floor beside the high altar, at the top of steps you're not allowed up - at least, I think there are inscriptions there, but since you're not allowed close enough to see them I can't actually be sure. (They're beside the high altar because they were once perceived to be central to the cathedral's history, of course.) Meanwhile, the site of Becket's tomb has an ever-burning candle and a big sign. No candle burns for Dunstan or Alphege - not even for St Anselm. Alphege did get a bit of attention for the 1000th anniversary of his death a few years ago, but on an ordinary visit to the cathedral there's really nothing. If you walked into Canterbury Cathedral today and asked for the way to Dunstan's tomb, as the sick woman did when young Osbern was tending the altar, I wonder if they could tell you; but the guides would only give you a rude answer, anyway. (The ones on TV looked so friendly, but they're not like that in real life! I wonder if churches have any idea how much unpleasant guides can damage the atmosphere of a place, or how it leaves a bad taste in your mouth to be snapped at like a suspicious character when you are trying to feel like a pilgrim. Do they care? Maybe not; you've already paid by that point.)

It intrigues me that the pre-Thomas Becket history of the cathedral should be thus largely ignored. Priorities change, and our view of the past is always shaped by the needs of the present; that's the whole story of Canterbury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, too, which is one reason I take note of these things. I take an interest (as you may have noticed on this blog) in how English churches remember their Anglo-Saxon history, and while there's always a bit of me that's not surprised when they overlook it, it's remarkable to see how sensitively and creatively some places are prepared to respond to this part of their past. When I visited Worcester in September, for instance, they had a thoughtful exhibition about the cathedral's early history, including descriptions and images of manuscripts produced at the monastery and quotations from Old English texts, and reflections on Anglo-Saxon spirituality (the spirit of John of Worcester lives on there, perhaps). In the summer I visited Ely and Bury St Edmunds for the first time and was impressed by the quiet certainty in both cathedrals that visitors would be ready to learn about St Etheldreda and St Edmund, and their provision of outward signs of devotion (candles, prayer cards) to encourage serious reflection on the saints' lives and significance. But at Canterbury, that doesn't fit with the story the cathedral wants to promote about its medieval history. Thomas Becket is easy to sell, and a mildly cynical précis of Chaucer's worldly pilgrims entertains the tourists. (Don't get me started on the irony of perpetuating any kind of 'worldly pilgrims/greedy medieval monks fleecing their visitors' story in a church which charges a hefty entrance fee.) There's something sadly appropriate in Canterbury's readiness to forget its Anglo-Saxon past, since the very reason Osbern and Eadmer wrote about Dunstan and Alphege was, they thought, to save them from oblivion.

I don't mean to sound too critical; I want to love Canterbury as much as Eadmer and Osbern did, but the people sometimes make it difficult. This documentary series has been a nice insight into an otherwise invisible world: behind the scenes, away from the snappish guides who are the public face of the cathedral, there are many dedicated and apparently lovely staff and volunteers keeping the place alive. There always have been, even when those dedicated and lovely people were chiefly monks. (Some of the monks probably weren't that friendly to visitors, either.) It's important to be reminded that communities always have difficult people in them, and that good work is often produced amid trying circumstances. This was true in the eleventh century, and it's true today.

The Translation of St Thomas Becket: 'As storys wryght and specyfy'

The murder of Thomas Becket, BL Stowe 12, f.27v

7 July is one of the two feasts of St Thomas Becket which were celebrated in medieval England, commemorating the date in 1220 when his relics were translated to a splendid tomb behind the high altar in Canterbury Cathedral. This seems as good a reason as any to look at another of the medieval English carols celebrating St Thomas, of which I've previously posted five (!):

'Holy Thomas of heoueriche' and 'Clangat tuba'

'Listeneth, lordings, both great and small, I shall you tell a wonder tale'
 
'Saint Thomas honour we, through whose blood Holy Church is made free'

'I pray you, sirs, all in fere, worship St Thomas, this holy martyr'

And here's a sixth:

Pastor cesus in gregys medio
Pacem emit cruorys precio.

As storys wryght and specyfy,
Sent Thomas, thorow Goddes sond,
Beyng a byschop of Canturbery,
Was martyrd for the ryght of Englond.

Hys moder be blyssyd that hym bar,
And also hys fader that hym begatt,
For war we wel kep fro sorow and care
Thorow the deth of the prelat.

Thys holy mane of God was accept,
For whatsoever that he ded prayd,
Vs frome the daunger conseruyd and kepte.
Of the ransom we xuld haue payd.

To and fyfty poyntes onresonabyll,
Consentyd of byschoppes many on,
Thou wast no[th]yng thereto agreabyll,
Therfor thou sufferyd thi passyon.

Of knytes cruell and also wykyd
Thou sufferyd thi deth with mylde mod;
Wherefor the Chyrch is gloryfyyd
In the schedy[n]g of this blod.

To Cryst therefor lat vs prey,
That for vs deyyd on the rood,
Conserue vs al both nyght and day,
Thorow the schedying of Thomas blood.

This text is from Richard Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford, 1977), p. 61. The version printed by Wright has an additional English refrain:

Make we joy both more and lesse,
On the dey of Sent Thomas.

The song survives in two manuscripts, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. poet. e.1 (SC 29734) and British Library Additional MS. 25478. According to Greene, in the Bodleian manuscript this carol is 'defaced by a single stroke through each line' - the result of Henry VIII's 1538 decree that St Thomas should be "rased and put out of all the books", his shrine at Canterbury suppressed and all images of the martyr destroyed. Fortunately, this attempt to obliterate the memory of perhaps the most popular English saint of the Middle Ages did not succeed in robbing us of a huge number of images of St Thomas, or of these fascinating carols.

Here's a translation of the carol; the Latin text of its refrain - 'Pastor cesus in gregis medio, pacem emit cruoris precio' - is the antiphon used at First Vespers of the feast of the martyrdom of St Thomas (December 29), and means 'The shepherd, slain in the midst of his flock, purchases peace at the cost of blood'. For more on the liturgies of St Thomas, see Kay Brainerd Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket (Toronto, 2004), where the antiphon 'Pastor cesus' can be found at p.169.

Pastor cesus in gregis medio
Pacem emit cruoris precio.

As histories write and plainly say,
Saint Thomas, through God's command,
Who was bishop of Canterbury,
Was martyred for the rights of England.

Blessed be his mother who him bore,
And also his father who him begat!
Protected we were from sorrow and care
Through the death of the prelate.

This holy man was heard by God,
Whatever it was for which he prayed:
From that harm he us preserved and kept
Of the ransom we would have paid.

Two and fifty points unreasonable,
Agreed by bishops many a one,
You would not in any way consent to them;
For that you suffered your passion.

At the hands of knights cruel and wicked,
You suffered your death in humble manner,
And for that the Church is glorified
In the shedding of your blood.

To Christ therefore let us pray,
Who for us died on the Rood,
Preserve us all both night and day,
Through the shedding of Thomas' blood.

The 'fifty-two points' were the list of legislative points to which St Thomas refused to assent because they gave the king too much power over the church. They are regularly mentioned in the carols about the saint, and Richard Greene notes that these 'points' became a subject of contention again at the time of the Reformation:

A curious survival of the tradition of fifty-two points as late as 1532 is found in the petition to Cromwell of William Umpton, one of the grooms of the King's Hall, who had been a prisoner in the Tower for fourteen months, 'loaded with irons'. According to poor Umpton, 'a pardoner of St. Thomas' hospital at Woodstock said that St. Thomas of Canterbury died for 52 points concerning the commonwealth; "which 52 your said orator denied, one excepted for the clergy, and that the said 52 points were a dance called Robin Hood [apparently equivalent to frivolous nonsense]." Then the pardoner asked him if he would compare Robin Hood with St. Thomas before my lord of Lincoln; on which he fortuned to ask the same pardoner why St. Thomas was a saint rather than Robin Hood? For this he was accused of heresy...' (James Gairdner, ed., Letters and Papers... of the Reign of Henry VIII, London, 1880, v. 551). Umpton was ahead of his time, and his petition was fruitless.

Greene, The Early English Carols, p. 370.

This is a depiction of the translation of Thomas Becket in a fourteenth-century Breviary, BL Stowe 12, f. 270 (spot the words 'Pastor cesus' in the right-hand column!). Note the empty space in the rubric beside the initial, where Thomas' name has been removed, so that it now reads 'De translatione sancti... martyr'. The site of Thomas' tomb in Canterbury Cathedral is also now an empty space, its position marked by a candle:

This is the spot behind the high altar which was so carefully selected for Thomas' tomb in 1220 - this part of the cathedral was rebuilt around it, confirming Thomas' place as Canterbury's new foremost saint. It was this spot which was the destination of many thousands of medieval travellers, from Chaucer's pilgrims to (perhaps my favourite of Canterbury's medieval visitors) the Icelander Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, who presented the tusk of a narwahl at Thomas' shrine to thank the saint for a good catch. (Part of me really hopes they still have a narwahl tusk in a cupboard somewhere at Canterbury...)

Given how fiercely Thomas' cult was targeted at the Reformation, we're fortunate that so many tokens of his medieval popularity survive - from the carols to the various images of him I posted here (and many, many more). But the absences are in some ways still more eloquent. This, for instance, is what remains of a roof boss in the cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral, which depicted the murder of Becket:

A nearby reconstruction shows how it might have looked (based on this, I think):

St Thomas was not the only one to suffer from this particular purge; nearby roof-boss depictions of the murder of St Ælfheah by Vikings and St Dunstan's nose-nipping encounter with the devil were similarly destroyed, making it a clean sweep of Canterbury's best saints.

I find these absences, these scars, moving wherever I encounter them, and a day like today makes me wonder why. Partly it's because they show so vividly how we are cut off from the medieval world in which I (mentally) spend so much of my time. It can be difficult to explain my interest in medieval saints, and although I usually don't feel the need to defend it - if you didn't like it, you really wouldn't be reading my blog! - I sometimes reflect on the purpose and value of blogging about them for the public. Being interested in medieval saints is completely normal in academia, but it looks very odd outside that context - I sometimes get the impression that people think I'm a religious fanatic for blogging about saints and their feasts, and it's rather wearing to have to explain that you can take something seriously, and think it's important, without necessarily believing it to be true (however you want to interpret 'true').

Translation feasts like today's are particularly tricky to explain to a modern audience. It's easy to be cynical about their original motivation, since the practical benefits are usually so obvious as to make the whole idea seem like nothing more than a money-grab: building a bigger or more prominent tomb to attract and accommodate pilgrims, providing a saint with an extra feast to celebrate (often at a more convenient time of year for travel or liturgical commemoration - as clearly illustrated in the case of Becket, whose December feast, awkwardly close to Christmas, was supplemented by a summer translation one), claiming a saint as belonging to one church rather than a rival, and so on. Some medievalists get very sniffy about the pragmatism of it all, their high-minded idealism clearly offended by the idea of churches trying to make money off their saints. There's a lingering Puritanism in some circles (even within academia, but certainly outside it) which can't quite allow that medieval cults of saints were ever anything but a big con - that the saints of the Middle Ages were mostly a bunch of obscure people who were praised far beyond their merits, credited with patently invented miracles, and lauded in tiresome hagiography, with the aim of extracting money from gullible pilgrims. Some of this is not entirely without foundation, but I tend to feel it's an unhelpful way of discussing this historical situation; gleefully dissecting pious frauds of centuries ago is just not a very interesting way of approaching the past. It's marginally more helpful than some other favourite modern strategies for engaging with medieval saints - laughing at their funny names, for instance, my particular bugbear when it comes to the Anglo-Saxons - but not much. To commemorate these saints' feasts today, and to blog about them, without a religious motive, might seem foolish or naive; why should we mark such dates, if they're just artificial creations? Well, it's partly because an awareness of the liturgical calendar is a simple necessity for understanding many medieval texts; to blog through the year helps me in thinking about my work, and many people really seem to like it. But to me it's also an attempt to take the medieval past seriously on its own terms. At the risk of seeming completely humourless, I'm not a fan of the jokey, Horrible Histories-type approach to medieval saints (which was how I was taught about Thomas Becket in school, 'gullible pilgrims' and all); I can't bring myself to laugh at 'funny names' which are stigmatised because a violent conquest made them unfashionable, and I think it's important to remember that however silly a miracle-story may seem to us, it often has behind it a tale of real need or suffering in an age where saints might be a desperate person's only hope. What's more, in many cases (as with St Dunstan and the devil) the absurdities of the legends are meant to be laughed with, not at, if we could only allow ourselves to believe that medieval authors and audiences were capable of understanding fun and irony rather than being merely credulous fools. It's important to me in blogging (and even more so on Twitter, which is full of this stuff) not to be getting laughs out of anything which really mattered to real people, even if those people had unfamiliar names and died hundreds of years ago. It's that attempt to take the past seriously which makes me look like a religious fanatic, I fear!

But if we take translation feasts as an example, trying to understand rather than to condemn or mock, they can tell us fascinating things about the communities who organised them. They can help us trace, for instance, which parts of a community's history were most important to its identity at any point in time, or how a community defined itself against other nearby houses - the translation of Thomas Becket marked the moment when he became Canterbury's most famous saint (as he remains today), surpassing the Anglo-Saxon archbishop-saints, who were still venerated but no longer as culturally useful as they had been for the community in the period immediately following the Norman Conquest (on which see this post on Dunstan and this on Ælfheah). A translation tells us not all that much about the saint whose physical body is its focus, but a great deal about what a saint's memory meant to the people who venerated him or her. What is really commemorated today, then, is not just Thomas Becket but his importance to Canterbury and to the wider world: the fame which brought pilgrims to his shrine, the political charge which made him important enough for his name to be scratched out and his carols cancelled in the sixteenth century, and, yes, the income which built Canterbury Cathedral, a treasure-house of medieval art which still draws thousands of tourists and pilgrims every year. All this deserves to be remembered - and even blogged about.

St Thomas Becket, 'Holy Thomas of heoueriche'

Thomas Becket at Nackington, Kent

Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered before his altar in Canterbury Cathedral late in the winter afternoon of 29 December 1170, quickly became one of the most popular saints in medieval England. He was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to die by violence, nor would he be the last, but unlike St Alphege, martyred after long captivity in a Viking camp amidst the Greenwich marshes, or Simon Sudbury, killed by an angry mob on Tower Hill, Thomas died within his own church, in the middle of Vespers, and his sudden and dramatic death captured the imagination. There are a number of ways of measuring a saint's popularity, and along with the speed of his canonisation (just two years after his death), the proliferation of depictions of his martyrdom, and the evidence of the many pilgrims like Chaucer's who 'from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury... wende, the hooly blisful martir for to seke', we can see tokens of St Thomas' impact in the number of surviving vernacular poems about him. I've previously posted four different songs about St Thomas:

'Listeneth, lordings, both great and small, I shall you tell a wonder tale'
 
'Saint Thomas honour we, through whose blood Holy Church is made free'

'I pray you, sirs, all in fere, worship St Thomas, this holy martyr'

'As stories write and specify'

But there are still more, and today I'll post two of them. They are especially to be treasured, because memorials of Thomas Becket were targeted for suppression at the Reformation, as this British Library blogpost explains; everything we have of Thomas Becket in art or in song has survived against the odds.

The murder of St Thomas

So this is 'Clangat tuba, martir Thoma':

Clangat tuba, martir Thoma,
ut libera sit Cristi vinea.

Oute of the chaffe was pured this corn
And else the church had ben forlorne;
To Godes grange now were thow borne,
O martir Thoma, O martir Thoma, O martir Thoma.

In London was bore this martir sothely;
Of Caunterbury hadde he primacy,
To whom we syng deuotely:
O martir Thoma, O martir Thoma, O martir Thoma.

This means:

Let the trumpet resound, Thomas the martyr,
so that the vine of Christ may be free.

Out of the chaff was sifted this corn
And else the church had been forlorn;
To God's grange now wert thou borne, [i.e. carried]
O martyr Thomas, O martyr Thomas, O martyr Thomas.

In London was born this martyr, truly;
He held the primacy of Canterbury,
To whom we sing devoutly:
O martyr Thomas, O martyr Thomas, O martyr Thomas.

The song appears in the late fifteenth-century Ritson Manuscript, BL Additional 5665, together with a large number of other English carols and songs (there's a list here). The imagery of the wheat and the chaff which occurs in this song echoes the Sarum liturgy for St Thomas' Day, which describes Thomas' murder in these terms: 'sic itaque granum frumenti oppresit palea' ('thus the chaff overwhelms the grain of the fields') and 'iacet granum oppressum palea' ('the grain lies overwhelmed by the chaff'; for the medieval liturgies in honour of St Thomas, see this book). But the song proclaims that the grain will be sifted from the chaff, and will spring up to glory, when carried to God's 'grange' (that is, granary). The imagery is developed still further in the song 'Saint Thomas honour we', which contains the lines:

The corn is cast down, the chaff lies low:
The king in his ost is overthrown:
The tiller on the ground his brayn hath sown;
As Christ said to him at Pontigny,
'My church with thy blood hallowed shall be.'

There is wordplay here on the word 'brayn', which refers both to grain (like bran) and to the fact (which I vividly recall learning on a primary-school trip to Canterbury Cathedral!) that Thomas' brains were scattered across the ground by his murderers. 'Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.'

BL Yates Thompson 13, f. 85v

Just because I like it, this is 'Saint Thomas honour we' (words here):



An earlier poem about St Thomas survives in a manuscript of the second half of the thirteenth century (Jesus College Oxford MS. 29).

Haly thomas of heoueriche
alle apostles eueliche,
þe martyrs þe vnderstone
godfullyche in heore honde.
Selcuþ dude vre dryhtin,
þat he water wende to win;
þu ert help in engelaunde
vre stephne vnderstonde.
þu ert froure among monkunne,
help vs nv of vre sunne. Amen.

This series of rhyming couplets is older than the other poems by more than a century, and the language is noticeably more archaic; words like dryhtin 'Lord', selcuþ 'miracle' and froure 'comfort' belong to the traditional diction of Old English religious writing, which survived the Norman Conquest but was not to survive into Modern English. This would be my rendering:

Holy Thomas of the heavenly kingdom,
equal to all the apostles,
the martyrs receive thee
graciously in their hands.
Our Lord performed a miracle,
when he turned water to wine.
Thou art our help in England,
hear our prayers.
Thou art comforter among mankind,
help us now from our sins. Amen.

BL Harley 5102, f. 32

Here's the fifteenth-century carol 'Listeneth, lordings' (unmodernised text here):

A, a, a, a,
Now the Church rejoices.

Listen, lords, both great and small,
I shall you tell a wondrous tale,
How Holy Church was brought in bale [into sorrow]
By a great wrong.

The greatest cleric in all this land,
Of Canterbury, you understand,
Slain he was with wicked hand,
By the power of the devil.

Knights came from Henry the king,
Wicked men, without lying;
There they did a terrible thing,
Raging in madness.

They sought for him all about,
Within the palace and without;
Of Jesu Christ had they no thought
In their wickedness.

They opened their mouths very wide:
To Thomas they spoke in their great pride,
'Here, traitor, thou shalt abide,
To suffer the pain of death.

Thomas answered with mild chere, [in a meek manner]
'If ye will me slay in this manner,
Let them go, all those who are here,
Without injury.'

Before his altar he kneeled down;
There they began to cut off his crown;
They stirred the brains up and down;
He hoped for the joys of heaven.

The tormentors began their work;
With deadly wounds they began to hurt.
Thomas died in Mother Church
Attaining to heaven.

Mothers, clerics, widows and wives,
Worship Thomas all your lives;
For 52 points he lost his life,
Against the king's counsels.

BL Harley 1251, f. 48

This afternoon I'll be attending Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral in commemoration of St Thomas and of the service of Vespers which was so violently interrupted by the four knights acting in the name of Henry II. Every year the events of this fateful evening are liturgically re-enacted. It's a particularly dramatic service: it begins in the lighted choir, in the presence of the current Archbishop, and the opening of Vespers is sung in plainchant. Then it is interrupted, as on the day of Thomas' death, by a crashing on the doors. Bearing lighted candles, the clerics, choir and congregation process, as Thomas fled, to the site of his martyrdom below, and pause for a moment. Then all move into the crypt, where his body was taken, and the service concludes with joyful polyphony in honour of the martyr, still by candlelight. A few years ago I took some photographs of the darkened cathedral after this service, which you can see here. On this occasion the cathedral is always crowded with people; who would have thought on that December evening in 1170, or when Henry VIII was doing his best to ensure Thomas was forgotten, that this would be possible?

Since I grew up near Canterbury I feel a personal interest in St Thomas, and I encounter him in many of the churches I visit in Kent. Here are a few pictures from my collection. Above is a medieval wall-painting of Thomas' murder from Brookland, Kent. and here's one of the earliest depictions of St Thomas, from Godmersham:

From an altarpiece at Elham, Kent:

And from Canterbury Cathedral:

A decapitated statue of St Thomas on the outside of the cathedral:

Pilgrims to St Thomas' shrine:

And the site of Thomas' tomb, destroyed at the Reformation, and now marked by a candle:

A Glow of Colour in a Country Church

Two miles south of Canterbury is a tiny hamlet with the somewhat unappealing (though unimpeachably Anglo-Saxon) name of Nackington. It consists of little more than a church and a few houses, and the church is very small - but it contains a treasure.

Nackington appears in Domesday Book, and early in the twelfth century its church, St Mary's, came into the possession of St Gregory's Priory in Canterbury, Archbishop Lanfranc's new foundation which so annoyed the monks of St Augustine's.  This connection to the city is important, as we will see in a moment.  But first, enjoy the odd shape of this funny up-and-down church, which has nearly fallen down and been rebuilt several times in its history:

Here's the best welcome a church can offer - an unlocked door and a quotation from Julian of Norwich:

'Our courteous Lord willeth that we should be as homely with Him as heart may think or soul may desire. But let us beware that we take not so recklessly this homeliness that we leave courtesy.'

The church is simple on the inside, and I didn't manage to photograph it particularly well, so let's move swiftly on to the church's treasure.  For this we have to go to the north wall of the chancel, beside the altar.  And there we find this:

And this:

These two windows date to the thirteenth century, and are very similar in style to the medieval glass of Canterbury Cathedral; look at these examples for comparison. They've moved around within the church, and were restored in 1935, but otherwise are substantially what they were eight hundred years ago.  I couldn't ascertain whether it's known how and why these windows came here - if they were originally made for the cathedral, or have always been here (different sources suggested various possibilities).  Either way, this is the man who was thirteenth-century Canterbury's saint of the moment, Thomas Becket:

I've posted about other early Kentish depictions of Thomas Becket at Godmersham and Brookland, and this is the cathedral's famous Becket window (which is, incidentally, about three times bigger than Nackington's).

This is just breathtaking in every way - the colours especially, but also the faces and hands.

At Becket's right hand is the penitent Henry II (labelled as such - 'Henricus Rex'):

And an unidentified figure, perhaps another king:

The Becket panel was my favourite, but above it is something hardly less remarkable - the wedding at Cana:

It's interesting to compare this to the same scene at Canterbury Cathedral; only this one has a patterned tablecloth!

The colours are, again, extraordinary; look at the red and blue here:

Above the golden arch which marks out this scene is another unidentified figure, with a book:

The other window has three figures, which seem like the remnant of a more developed composition (a Jesse tree, perhaps?). At the top is a crowned female figure, presumably the Virgin Mary:

Below her the unmistakeable King David, with his harp:

Again you might like to compare the David from Canterbury Cathedral's Jesse tree.  Opposite is Solomon:

Finally, there's this, which is very pretty, but I don't know how old it is:

The colours of these windows are like jewels, and in Canterbury Cathedral, where there are hundreds of them, they dazzle like a king's treasure-house, or like the passage from Isaiah which the cathedral's Stained Glass Studio quotes on their website: 'I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay their foundations with sapphires; and I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.'  You might think that by comparison with that glory, two much smaller windows in a far less impressive setting might lose something of their power.  Somehow the effect was the opposite.  If the riches of the cathedral foreshadow Isaiah's city of God, stumbling across the rubies and sapphires of these windows in a deserted country church, far from the bustling crowds of the ever-busy cathedral, felt like a private and personal discovery - like finding the 'treasure hid in a field'.

One or two more pictures of the little church; here's the bell-tower:

The main altar, and beside it a chapel mostly filled with (stacking chairs and) monuments to the Milles family:

The other windows in the church can't match their medieval companions, though the west window's baby Christ - in a 1920s nightgown! - is endearing:

As is the baby angel above:

There's something 'homely' about all this, not quite in the sense Julian uses that word, but in a way that speaks of the love and care which has gone into preserving this church - even when it was half falling down! - over all the centuries of its life.  The wooden chancel screen is inscribed with the names of the local men who carved it in the early part of last century, and in this book, published in 1800, Nackington church is described as 'kept very neat and in good repair'; and so it is still.  'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also', and this place has much of both.