Gone Medieval - The Cult of Becket

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Almost immediately after Thomas Becket’s murder, reports of miraculous healings and divine interventions spread like wildfire. Canterbury witnessed a huge influx of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe, boosting the city’s wealth.In this final episode of our series about Becket, Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. John Jenkins to look at the cult of Becket, how it spread across the continent and continues to this day to keep Canterbury up there among the UK’s top destinations, exactly 850 years since King Henry II went to do penance for his involvement in Becket’s murder in the cathedral.John Jenkins, of the University of York, recently edited and translated The Customary of the Shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, a fifteenth-century 'operating manual' to Britain's most important shrine available as an Open Access ebook and in paperback from Arc Humanities Press.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Ella Blaxill, the producers are Rob Weinberg and Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's February 1173, three years since the brutal and bloody murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett. And word reaches England that Pope Alexander has canonised the fallen Archbishop. Almost immediately after Beckett's murder, reports of miraculous healings and divine interventions spread like wildfire, and Canterbury has since witnessed a huge influx of pilgrims. In the first year alone after Beckett's death,

some 100,000 visitors travelled to the shrine from all over the European continent. Now, tens of thousands more will make this journey of faith. Some are seeking healing, others to do penance. Many simply wish to strengthen their devotion to God. Groups of pilgrims gather in Southwark, just south of London Bridge, to meet their fellow travellers and set off on the by now well-trodden route. Some higher horses, but many are travelling on foot, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs and a few provisions. They come from every walk of life, united together in one purpose, showing their devotion to St Thomas.

The road is long and can be arduous. In the winter rain and mud weighs them down. But their camaraderie provides the determined pilgrims with comfort and encouragement. They recount stories to one another, sing hymns and pray together. This is more than just a physical journey. It's a spiritual quest. As the bustling streets of London give way to the rolling hills and picturesque villages of Kent,

inns and hospices offer the pilgrims rest and sustenance along the way. After four days, the city comes into view and Canterbury's towering cathedral stands tall, beckoning pilgrims closer. People stream forward from all directions, converging on this sacred site. Beneath the cathedral's lofty arches, the shrine of Thomas Beckett is a glittering, testament to his sanctity. The air is thick with incense and the murmur of prayers. Some pilgrims lay down the offerings they have carried with them which will boost the cathedral's

coffers. The monks swarm around their visitors, eager to sell small vessels filled, they say, with a mixture of Beckett's blood and water. The faithful, no matter how poor, readily part with their coin to avail themselves of this miraculous. talisman. The cathedral's treasury is exploding with wealth. The city's economy is booming from the overflowing lodging houses and inns. Badges depicting Beckett's image are also on sale, a cherished souvenir that offers proof that a pilgrim has made the journey and received this singular blessing. In a few short years, Beckett's relics, including shards of bone and fragments of his bloodstained garments, have found their way across England.

England and intercontinental Europe. From Normandy to Saxony and Castile, the veneration of the martyred archbishop takes hold. Churches, monasteries, and even aristocratic patrons dedicate works of art, liturgy and architecture to his memory. The cult of St Thomas of Canterbury has captivated Europe. I'm Matt Lewis and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit. Over the past three special episodes, we've charted the rise of Beckett,

his fractious relationship with King Henry II and his brutal murder. If you haven't heard them yet, I urge you to go back and immerse yourself in Beckett's eventful life at Henry II's right hand, as well as his dramatic death. In this final episode in our series, we're looking at the cult of Beckett, how it spread across the European continent and continues to this day to keep Canterbury, up there among the UK's top destinations. Exactly 850 years since King Henry II went to do penance for his involvement in Beckett's murder in the cathedral.

To explore this phenomenon further, I'm joined by Dr John Jenkins, who is the assistant director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies at the University of York. His work focuses on the relationship between cathedrals, saints, cults and pilgrimage from the medieval period to the present day. He's particularly focused on Thomas Beckett's cult in Canterbury and London, and his work on the digital reconstruction of Thomas Beckett's medieval shrine in Canterbury Cathedral received international media coverage in 2020.

Welcome to Gone Medieval, John. Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me. We have in this series left Beckett dead on the floor of his cathedral. How quickly after that does the cult of Thomas Beckett begin to emerge? So the murder of a bishop, an archbishop, in his own cathedral, is an incredibly shocking thing. We know from the accounts that Canterbury Cathedral is packed with locals. They're not just there to hear Christmas-tied vespers. They're there because the whole day and proceeding there is very clear that something's going to happen.

And the locals are nervous and they're scared and they go to the cathedral to effectively find out what's happening and also for safety. So when the murder happens, we know the monks take the body, put it before the high altar, but there are people, lay people who come and they dip their handkerchiefs and other clothes and get receptacles and scoop up the blood. It depends on which miracle story. There are miracles happening almost instantly. It would seem possibly the first miracles happening in Canterbury on the very night or shortly after where people are taking those blood-soaked garments, these relics, and giving them to sick people to drink a mixture of blood and water, beg its blood and water, it cures them. So pretty much instantly in some quarters, Beckett is revered as a saint,

or he's certainly being promoted as this martyr saint. It sounds like people who were on the spot, if they're immediately going to look to collect the blood, they clearly have a view of what's just happened as something that is going to lead to Beckett's martyrdom. There's a reason they're collecting that blood because it's about to become the blood of a saint. They must have been aware even in the moment of how important this was. Yeah. And it's also, about these people, they are medieval Christians, they are very aware of the stories of martyrs. They know what martyrdom looks like because they've heard about it, because they've heard all these stories of saints. And what they've just seen, a bishop being murdered in a cathedral,

looks to them like martyrdom. It looks like something saintly has happened. They're not necessarily looking forward to being, oh, like this guy will get pronounced a saint. It's worth remembering as well that this is the time when the idea of canonisation, the idea that the Pope makes saints through some sort of process is really only just coming into being. There's only been a couple of instances before this where the Pope has decreed that someone is always not a saint. Prior to that, all saints are made by essentially local acclamation. If someone looks like a saint, all it takes for them to be a saint is enough people to believe that they are a saint. And it looks very much like Beckett has been marty. And as such,

he is going to be a saint. And the proof of that is that he, performs miracles after his death, which he clearly does in the view of those people who have taken away bits of his blood relic and drunk it or smeared it on their eyes or whatever. And people are collecting blood as a kind of early relic. Presumably, if Thomas's body is recovered and is then sent for burial, it's very difficult for people to get hold of any further relics. But do we see the idea of more relics than just the blood emerging, or does the relic law around him really centre on the blood? So there are huge numbers of becket relics. One of the things about Beckett's cult is how quickly it spreads. This is not just an English cult. This is not just a contemporary cult. He's popular in Iceland, in Hungary, in Norway, in Spain, in Italy. He's known about beyond the bounds of Europe, really, as well, very quickly. And relics spread that cult. So, for example, the plus-stained clothes he was wearing, a cut-up, and bits of those are distributed all over the place. The swords of the murderers end up in Carlisle Cathedral and the Temple Church in London. One of them ends up there.

Beckett's body is complete. The monks initially, he's very hastily buried because while some people think Beckett's a saint, there's a lot of people who still think Beckett is a traitor and that he deserve this. So the monks have to very quickly bury Beckett in the crypt in a really inconvenient deepest, darkest chapel, which makes the first years of the cult quite difficult because you're trying to get pilgrims into this tiny little chapel space downstairs. There's a huge explosion in the number of availability, the availability of Beckett relics in 1220, 50, 50. years after his death, after his martyrdom, when the monks re-burry him. So they go down to the crypt, they open up his tomb, which had served as a focal point for his cult, where Pilgrims go.

And they take out his body, inspect it, put it in a new coffin, and take that upstairs to the highest point of the specially rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral in what's called a Trinity Chapel, and they put it in a golden casket on top of a rose-pink marble basin. It becomes a real focal point of the whole cathedral. That way is, that's his shrine from 1220. The Archbishop at the time takes the opportunity to remove lots of little bones that have become disassociated, disarticulated, and he gives them out as present. So the bones end up, there's a Beckett relic in Hungary. There's quite a lot in Italy that still exist today. Their bones end up all over Europe. Yes, and the blood, particularly, the blood is a very important feature of the early cult, but it's quite an unusual one.

no other saint has ever had their blood drunk. You drink Christ's blood. You don't drink saints' blood. It's too Eucharistic. It's too dangerously close to saying that Beckett is as good as Jesus Christ. And the monk's always a little bit wary of this. So probably by about 1220, they stop writing about it as blood and start talking about it as terms of water that turned into the colour of blood.

So while we think of the blood relic as being a really important part of that is actually only a feature of the very early cult where they would dull out this blood. Later on, yeah, they just claim its blood coloured water and not actually Beckett's blood because that's a little bit close to the wind on being a bit theologically dodgy, basically. Yeah, and a little bit gross. With my cynical 21st century head on as well, I'm thinking as soon as they open the tomb and they let it be known that a few small bones are available as relics, then almost anything that appears could be a relic of Beckett. And presumably you could reach the point where there are thousands and thousands and thousands of small pieces of bone that could be Beckett because you've opened a can of

worms and made all of those available. Presumably, the cult of Beckett then is something that Canterbury are really, really keen to harness from a religious perspective, but also from a financial one. It must provide their economy with a significant boost. Yes and no. So Canterbury isn't the only centre of Beckett's cult. He was born in London. He's the patron saint of London, and London Bridge is rebuilt with a Beckett Chapel as the centrepiece. His birthplace, which is now the Merchant Adventurers, the Mercer Company Hall on cheap side. That is turned into a hospital, the place of his birth and another pilgrimage sites. There are pilgrimage sites to Beckett's outside of Canterbury, but Canterbury is, of course, the main one because it has his body.

There's a pretty common misconception about medieval pilgrimage, and this comes from actually one of the most popular overview books on medieval pilgrimages is by Jonathan Sumpchin called medieval pilgrimage. And he takes a rather Protestant view that all the pilgrims are rather sort of gullible rubs who are just being fleeced by these avaricious churchmen because pilgrimage is such big business. And this sort of hangs around. But it basically just post-Reformation Protestant propaganda about pilgrimage being something the church uses to pray on these gullible, superstitious pilgrims and ordinary Christians. When you actually look at what happens to the money coming in, the money that Canterbury gets from pilgrimage to Beckett Shrine, and it is the number one

pilgrimage site in England. It is the only Premier League saint that England ever produces. This is the big one. It barely covers the outgoings. And in fact, what they do get from the money pales in comparison to what they get from Canterbury Cathedral's landed resources, a huge number of manners and things like that that they have. They bring in far more income than the Pilgrimage, the cult or anything like that. What they do with the excess income from pilgrimage receipts, they tend to spend on little luxuries for themselves, like sweets and luxury fish or little tidbits or things that they can have with their evening repast. A lot of it actually gets spent on food and wine and stuff like that. They're not using this as a core income stream because, you know, apart from a handful of big years,

is not actually in the grand scheme of things compared to the amount of the making from the land that much, to be honest. And there's a huge amount of expense involved in running a major pilgrimage shrine. Staffing costs, cost of candles, of wax, the cost of repairing and cleaning the shrine and things like this. So it's not actually that greater money spinner. It's a sort of myth that's been perpetuated

through Protestant-leaning ideas of medieval pilgrimage. Yeah, that's really interesting. Here's a bit of a chicken and egg question for you. Beckett is canonised a couple of years after his murder, so fairly quickly becomes a saint. Is the Pope canonising him because he's being recognised as a saint, or does the fact that the Pope canonises him accelerate the cult of Beckett? The cult of Beckett is pretty firmly established by the time Pope Alexander actually officially recognises him. And canonisation is more of a political thing in the Middle Ages than it is after. the Middle Ages as well. Canaanization has always really been more of a political recognition of a saint

than necessarily reflective of how popular any given saintly figure is. By the time that Alexander canonises Beckett, Henry II has paid penance for his death. Henry the second is recognizing Beckett as basically a saint, which makes it politically expedient for the Pope to go, oh, fine, yes, I'll recognize that. When Henry, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, and Henry is not recognizing Beckett as a saint, his bets about whether this is all going to blow over or not. The Pope wouldn't dare to recognize Beckett as a saint in such a politically fibrillian atmosphere. So, yeah, the canonisation itself is more just one of these sort of, it's a recognition of a fate of complete, really. You know, there's already been Benedict of Peterborough has pretty much written his massive great

book of miracles. You know, there's already thousands and thousands of people going to Canterbury on pilgrimage at this point. The genie is out of the bottle in that regard. And I guess there's a good example of a parallel of that idea of political canonisation, maybe with Joan of Arc, you know, hundreds of years after her death, but immediately after the First World War, she becomes patron saint of France because she represents French rebirth, resistance and all of that kind of thing. So she's capable of delivering a political message in the present atmosphere, I guess. You mentioned then that accounts of miracles were being compiled.

What kind of miracles are attributed to Thomas Beckett in the aftermath of his death? All saints in a sense do all miracles. That is the mark of their sainthood. To be a saint is basically to represent Christ's life for a current age. That's one of the definitions of medieval sainthood that's bandied around. But it's quite a nice one. So essentially you know someone's a saint because you can recognize in them Christ's miracles and way of life from the Bible and which is being repackaged. So everyone raises people from the dead and everyone does exorcisms of demons and everyone. All the All saints have to do these healing miracles, miracles of justice as well, where you've been falsely imprisoned and your chains fall off and allow you to escape. But Beckett is particularly associated with healing miracles. So when in the early years, in the 1170s, 1180s, pilgrims are coming to Canterbury to get some of that, still at the time, believe it's be blood water, in a little lead flasks that are made. You can buy them in Canterbury the town called Ampullo, Ampulli. On some of those, and also in the miracle windows, the windows in

Canterbury Cathedral, many of which still survive showing the miracles in pictorial form. You get this slogan about Beckett, which is that he's the best doctor of the worthy sick. So he definitely specialises as a healing saint. And that is one of the main things about him. Rachel Coopman has argued that actually this sort of creates a shift in miracle collections generally that Beckett's medical miracles are so popular that other saints who are having miracle collections that written at that time start to include way more medical miracles because they're emulating Beckett. Beckett creates a kind of new sainthood that is really centered on miraculous healing. And that's what he becomes very popular with, not just at Canterbury,

not just for people who come to his shrine, but miracles happen all over England, France, and further afield. Iceland, he's very popular in Iceland. So these miracles are spreading out, and then people are coming to the cathedral to tell Benedict and the monks that they were cured. But so many more miracles would have happened that we don't know about because they didn't come to the cathedral. They weren't written down, which is too generic to be bothered to be recorded. So he's just pumping out miracles, really. I quite like the slogan as an advertising tagline as well. You can imagine that on somebody's adage. Firk, can't you? Do we have a sense of the furthest reach of the cult of Beckett during this period? You mentioned it spreading all across Europe. Do we have any kind of idea of what the farthest away recorded miracle is? Good question. It's one of my favourite little stories. So I say, we know he's very

popular in Iceland. We know he's very popular in Norway. One of the first representations of the martyrdom comes from a font in Norway. Henry II's children carry him to Spain in Italy. He's very popular in Hungary because the message of fighting between church and state. That conflict between church and state resonates over there in a country where the church is trying to establish itself. His cult is taken to the Holy Land on Richard I First Crusade where an order is set up, the order of St. Thomas of Acre in his name, an order of knights. But in 15, I want to say no six, but I haven't got the exact date. It's early 16th century. Three travellers from India come to the Pope and get a letter.

of permission to travel through Europe because they've come with the express decision to go on pilgrimage to Rome, to St James at Compostella and to St Thomas at Canterbury. So in the early 16th century, we have pilgrims from India, presumably northern Indian Christians coming, or maybe from India could cover quite a large area in the 16th century, but they're definitely coming from beyond the Middle East to see St Thomas of Canterbury. That's pretty incredible. Is Thomas unique? in becoming this really international figure, or do we see lots of saints' cults spreading in the same sort of way? In England, he's unique.

In England, he is utterly unique in that sense. And it's one of the things that I think is really interesting about Thomas Beckett. Beckett is unique in that he's the only medieval saint, really, that most people might have heard of today. He's the only one with a lasting legacy. He's the best known, the most widely known. And he was, as I say, he was the only Premier League saint that England ever produced.

The only one that had that massive popularity. And that's the uniqueness of his death. You know, he's an archbishop murdered in his own cathedral by knights that came from his own king. It's a shocking thing. And it comes at a time when church and state rivalries are, the balance between church and state is such a hot issue that it really taps into the topic of the day.

But it's interesting that now we don't think of him really as a saint. Now we think of him as a figure. of political or legal or constitutional importance. You've done three episodes on his life, whereas in the medieval period, if they were doing this podcast, they might do one episode on his life, and then about 10 on his cult, because to the medieval period, he was a saint. And one of the reasons that we don't think of him as a saint, but he is really still widely known, is because at the very end, this incredibly successful propaganda campaign by Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII to erase the memory of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the same, to erase the memory of St. Thomas

saint and replace it with one of Thomas Beckett, the complex and flawed man. Even now, historians will sort of underplay how important Beckett was as a saint because he was so effectively erased. But yeah, no other saint that England produced had this European wide reach at all. And presumably that effort to erase his saintly cult is particularly from Thomas Cromwell, a Protestant desire to get away from the veneration of saints, and the fact that they target Thomas in that way speaks to his popularity more than 300 years after his murder, he is still considered maybe one of the most important saints in England. It's also what he stands for.

So, yes, there is a general, at the Reformation, a general going after of saints and pilgrimages, the Protestants are taking control, and Cromwell in particular. but Beckett died for the liberties of the church against the power of the state. So when Henry VIII becomes head of the Church of England and the Church of England becomes a state church, Beckett cannot exist within that because Beckett is standing for a free church that is free from state control. So Beckett just cannot exist within that system. He is an affront to that system. And so when you think about what Beckett stood for, it was the opposite.

of what Henry and Thomas Cromwell want. So they have to recast him as a traitor. They put him on trial and they burn his bones. They utterly destroy his shrine and they completely rewrite it. In the medieval period, he was known as Thomas of Canterbury. He would never have been really known as Beckett. But it's Thomas Cromwell's proclamation in November 1538 that says, he shall henceforth not be known as St. Thomas of Canterbury, but as Bishop Beckett. And it was incredibly successful. overnight, people stopped calling him Thomas of Canterbury and started calling him Beckett, even spelling it the exact same way that it was in the Royal Proclamation, because previous to that, it was always spelled B-E-K-E-T, no C.

But in the Royal Proclamation, they spelled it with a C, and everyone started calling him Thomas Beckett. And actually, just as an aside, while I'm on this, I've written something on why he's sometimes called Thomas A-Beket. And the first usage of Thomas A-Beket that I can find is 1594. Thomas Nash calls him Thomas A-Beket as a bit of a joke, and it sticks. basically. That's fascinating. I was trying to work out

because I got Thomas Cromwell having his Protestant interests, but Henry the 8th never really moved towards Protestantism, kind of remained a Catholic, albeit not a Roman Catholic. So that idea that it was what Thomas represented as standing for the church against his king, it was that that Henry VIII was willing to go along with being erased.

I mean, Cromwell, when they are destroying Beckett Shrine in September 1538. And the build-up to that, the destruction of Beckett Shrine, Cromwell puts on an incredibly strong pressure campaign on Henry. Henry is wavering about whether or not they should take this big step of destroying this incredible shrine that has stood there for 300 years.

It has half a ton of gold on it. What they take off the shrine is half a ton of gold. I mean, when it's being put together in the 1220, 20s, in back 12, 15, 12, 16, when it's being put together, it basically causes a gold shortage in England, the making of this thing. So Cromwell is putting immense pressure on Henry. You could do something with all that gold, all those jewels. He sends a French woman that Henry's sort of interested in the opinion of because he wants her to find a suitor for him to replace Jane Seymour. So he sends this French woman to go and look at it and be very sort of, oh, this old thing. No, no one's

interested in Saints anymore. And it's like, I'll tell Henry that. And then he gets John Bale, or Cromwell's favourite Protestant playwright to write a play, which is basically the trial on the treasons of Thomas Beckett and performs it for Henry in Canterbury the night before the shrine comes down. Basically, he is putting huge amounts of pressure on King Henry to agree that Beckett is a traitor and his shrine should be destroyed. And then they smash it all up and chuck it in the river star. All the marble, all the gold goes off to the tower.

Typical Tudors. I think we've spent far too long outside of the medieval period with the Tudors who are clearly destroying everything that was important in the medieval period, which is a really good excuse to take a step right back. And if we think about, you've mentioned the shrine a couple of times and it's rebuilding in the 1220s, Canterbury Cathedral is sort of remodeled and the Trinity Chapel is built to house this shrine which you were involved in a digital reconstruction of. If you and I were pilgrims to Canterbury in 1220 and we went to visit Thomas's shrine, what would we look at? What would we see? Well, in 12,

20, it's a bit difficult because there's quite a lot of changes happen to the shrine of the early 14th century. But the shrine itself actually remains largely the same. When we did the digital models, which you can see on YouTube, and on the Beckett Story.org, if anybody wants to go to that, we modelled them in the early 15th century because there's quite good evidence for them. But generally, what you'd see, you would go into the cathedral either through the nave door or the south transep door, depending on whether there's building work going on. It's often said that there was a sort of route around the cathedral that you go first to the place of the martyrdom, then to his original tomb site, then up to the shrine. That's a Victorian invention. As so much

of medieval history turns out to be a Victorian invention, almost no pilgrims would have done that route. Instead, they wanted to go to the shrine. So you go straight up the South Choir Isle. From the 14th century onwards, the South Choir Isle is populated by the tombs of other archbishops as well. So you're going up past the Archbishop Sudbury. and Archbishop Winchell see, both of whom have small cults attached them as well. So you're passing other sort of venerated archbishops. And then you go up the steps and in this sort of half oval shaped marble-shaped marble-pillared chapel, there are probably, we put grills around the shrine in our reconstruction,

but it's really not clear. Actually, there must have been something around it, protecting it, but it's not clear it would have looked like that. But there were definitely some sort of way of roping it off. But you've got in the middle of that chapel on the... three red marble steps, a pink marble base, about seven foot high, about seven foot long, with prayer niches in the side where you can kneel and put your head in and pray, a sort of tabletop. And on top of that, you've got a sort of two foot by six foot golden casket with an arched

roof. And that would be, depending on the time of day, concealed by a wooden, a painted wooden cover that could be lifted and lowered and have bells on it. So when it was lifted, you could hear the bells and everyone would know the covers being lifted. And that golden casket in there would have been Thomas Beckett's bones. And it was covered in gems and gifts to the shrine. If you gave a ring or a brooch or a gem, it would be attached to the shrine. And you'd be remembered as the donor.

So you could say, oh, that's my gem or whatever, something sentimental of high value. In pride of place, the thing that everyone liked to look at was a ruby, supposedly. It wasn't a ruby. It was a spinnall, a large red gemstone called the Rew. Regal of France, which in later years was said to be, it grew under a unicorn's horn, it was purchased by Charlemagne, it was part of the French crown jewels, glowed in the dark and did magical tricks. It was said to be given by Louis the seventh, but it was actually given by his son, Philip the second, to the shrine. And that was in pride of place, mounted in a golden setting with a golden

statue of an angel pointing at it. So it really marked it out. And that's one of the things that most people remember. And one of the things I was trying to get across is quite how golden, quite how bling this thing was. We sort of get the idea that all medieval shrines are just going to be like vast agglomerations of gold. But even when we read the accounts of seasoned travelers, the ambassador from Bohemia, a Venetian ambassador, an Irish friar who went all the way through Rome to Jerusalem, a Venetian merchant, you know, all of these in the 16th century, all these incredibly well-traveled people. When they talk about Canterbury, they talk about it as being the biggest collection of gold and jewels and precious things they have ever seen in their entire life. It's just,

it's described as being like the gates of Jerusalem or the gates of heaven or ever the cheapest part was gold. These are people who have seen every shrine in the world that's worth seeing. And they say this one is ridiculous for the amount of gold and jewels and gems attached to. It's dazzling. Absolutely mind-boggling. And I guess things like the visit of Louis the 7th, you know, not too long after Beckett's murder, must have really helped to foster the idea of the cult as an international thing as well. And because Louis's visit is kind of successful, you know, he goes there to pray for the recovery of his son who then recovers. So you've now got a king saying, blind me, Beckett's medical miracles really do work.

Yeah. And it's also, Beckett is popular in France because essentially it's a slight embarrassment to the English royal family that the English royal family. that the English four family sent him into exile in France. Beckett spent quite a lot of time at Louise Court. Some of the later stories that are told about Louis' visit, he has a vision of Beckett in which it's clear that he's talking to him as someone who is an old friend. So France has a very strong connection. There are places in France where Beckett stayed in exile

that lay claim to his vestments and other relics. The monks of Canterbury have a very strong relationship with a lot of places in France where his relics are sent and also in placing the low countries as well. where supposedly his murderers fled. So, yeah, the cult does spread very quickly. Again, it's not just that it's devotional, it's political as well. Beckett can be a useful thing for the Kings of France.

And it's worth remembering, and this has not been pointed out in any, I'm midway through writing a book on the culture of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral. But when that shrine is being built, when that shrine is being put together, the golden shrine, the shrine base is put together in the 1180s and then work seizes for 30 years as the monks get embroiled in a load of difficulties one way and the other. But that golden casket starts getting put together in 1215, 12, 16 at a point when France is occupying Kent, that Philip Augustus's son is, Prince Louis, is in Kent. So when they're putting that golden shrine together,

and Archbishop Langton, who's putting it together himself has been in exile at the court of the King of France. So this is actually a sort of cross-channel culture. Again, we like to think, but the English always like to think that English things are just English, but Beckett is a European saint. and the French are quite happy to try and lay claim to him. That's a really interesting connection. To put it in the context of the political events that were going on around the reconstruction of that tomb, kind of puts a new edge on it, as you say,

and adds to that political dimension that the cult always had. It's really interesting. How important were the stained glass windows that were put up in the Trinity Chapel at the same time, too? You mentioned that they tell the story of lots of the miracles of Beckett. What would they have meant to pilgrims

in that space looking at those windows? It's not entirely clear. I am not an art historian and I'm always very wary of stepping into that kind of space. The idea of the reception of stained glass is quite a complex one. The Miracles windows, they're not that easy to interpret. There's been some great work at Canterbury recently by Lenny Seligar, the Glazier and Rachel Coopman's working on putting these back together. And one of those windows, people may know if they went to the Beckett exhibition in the British Museum. A couple of those windows were taken there. We know more about the windows now than we have since they were put in almost. If pilgrims were to interpret the windows, they would have to be talked through them. The particulars of the miracles that are in the windows were not necessarily widely known, but they could have been related by the monks or clergy, clerks who ran the shrine. So I think you would have to be talked through any of that kind of thing, because the miracles are quite specific. There would also have been windows showing his life as well, probably.

So the windows that are lost are probably the ones that showed the course of his life. It's hard to know exactly how people interacted with the windows. None of the pilgrim accounts that we have mentioned the windows, apart from one, which is a sort of slight satirical account called a Tale of Berrin, which is a 15th century attempt to finish Chaucer. So Chaucer's pilgrims famously never quite get. to Canterbury. We never see them go in the cathedral. And there's a lot of chores of studies to say, oh yes, but it's all about the life pilgrimates. This is all very satisfying. But in the 15th century,

this wasn't very satisfying to quite a lot of people. And so there were a numerous attempt that you're actually trying to finish the cycle. And the one that's most interesting for historians of Pilgrimates to Becker is called The Tale of Berrin, where the pilgrims do arrive in Canterbury and go to the cathedral. And the one thing that the stained glass is mentioned in there is that two of the more working class, lower class, peasant class pilgrims, attempt. to work out what's going on in the stained glass windows and get it hopelessly wrong. I mean, it makes me feel better because I quite often have to have stained glass windows explained to me, so at least I'm not alone in that.

Medieval visitors may well have had to do the same too. In terms of the kinds of people that went, I guess Chaucer's Canterbury Tales gives us an indication of the kind of variety of backgrounds of pilgrims who might go to Canterbury. Is that a fair reflection? Was this something that all parts of society would have been keen to take part in? Extremely, yeah. Kings regularly went on pilgrimage to Canterbury. English kings and foreign dignitaries as well, foreign kings, very, very regularly went on pilgrimage to Canterbury as part of their

tours around. But yeah, even the lowliest, especially one might think the lowliest beggar would want to come because they would always have a favour to ask from St Thomas. We have an idea in pilgrimage that it creates a society of equals, that the act of going on pilgrimage of some 70s sort of sociology described it as, or anthropology described it as communitas. But what we can see very clearly from Pilgrimich to Beckett Shrine is that it was incredibly rigidly class and status stratified and that if you were a higher class pilgrim, you got much better quality of access, you got much more of a sort of tour, you were able to go into more exclusive space than the lowly peasant effectively. So it is something that everybody would want to do, but also,

depending on how rich or poor or high or low status you were, would very much affect the experience you had in the cathedral. Yeah. And pilgrimage, would visits to Beckett Shrine have really been about strengthening faith? Or did it have other impacts and benefits for people too? People went for all the same reasons that people go on pilgrimage or go to Santiago de Compostela. That's the big famous pilgrimage nowadays.

You do the Camino. There is never one reason. It's an intermingling of all these. People went because they wanted to see it. All this massive pile of gold, it was a draw. People went because you could get what's called an indulgence, which gave you time off from your sins in purgatory after you died. People went because they might have wanted to say thanks for receiving a miracle

or because they wanted a miracle to happen. People might be going on repeat journeys because they'd pledged to go and see St. Thomas once a year or something like that. It was also, for some people, just a rite of passage. Pilgrimage is very rarely a solo activity. It's usually done as part of a group just for safety and also companionship. And you'll get whole villages where the young men who are turning 18, 19, will as a rite of passage go on pilgrimage together. There's as many reasons for going on pilgrimage as there are pilgrims really. But all of those, yeah, there were spiritual and health benefits, but there was also just the sensory aspect of it, the sensory reception of it.

I am conscious that in my terribly Anglican way, I tend to talk about pilgrimage in the past tense when obviously people are actively engaged in pilgrimage very much today. So apologies for occasionally putting pilgrimage in the past tense. Just to end on, I wonder what you think the impact of Beckett's cult was on ideas of English nationalism. So we've talked about him as an international figure and we've talked about the context in which his shrine is being rebuilt when the French are occupying parts of England. But that period around 12, 15, 12, 16, 12, 17 is also a key moment in the birth of the idea of English nationalism. So there is then the effort to fight off the French from people who would previously have considered themselves Norman French.

Does Thomas play a role in that emergence of English nationalism? Is he someone who can appeal to Norman aristocrats and English commoners too? Does he contribute anything to that idea of Englishness and an English nation? Yeah, so the key moment really is Henry II's acceptance. His penance, this is the anniversary, but his penance is key to that because after that, Henry adopts him as the patron saint of the Angevins. And so he then becomes associated very strongly with that ruling family. He is the patron saint of the English ships when they go on crusade, you know, 1191, that he is the patron saint of London as well, you know, itself building this identity as the English city. And he's the patron saint of mariners, English mariners, always

pray to Thomas Beckett, so they're carrying him away. Different kings respond differently to him, but none of them ever miss him out. Henry III tries to promote Edward the Confessor and the holy blood that he buys, gets in, but he still doesn't miss out on Thomas Beckett. Edward I, the first, deciduously promotes the cult of Thomas Beckett. And there's no real such thing as a national patron saint, but Beckett's occupies that position much more popularly than the confessor does, who is very much a royal saint. Beckett is a saint that presents a model for the relationship between church and state that should exist in England if conditions were ideal. And that's how he's often promoted, particularly by the church, obviously, but often also by

kings. And he is, you know, he is in every single church in England, pretty much. There's an altar or an image or some nod to Thomas Beckett. In pretty much every parish church, every major church, every monastery will have something about Thomas Beckett. To what extent is it fair to say then? Because Henry III does try to make Edward the confessor England's national saint, doesn't he? He's the one he really champions. Is Edward the confessor then held back by the fact that he is royal? You know, he has to be born, he's a king to become that saint, whereas Thomas is, He's an every man. He's an example that anybody,

no matter where you're born or what you're born into, can become a saint. And he is someone that it's easier for people to connect to than they can to a king like Edward the Confessor. Quite possibly. We can sort of attempt to read the runes on why some saints get really popular and others don't. And there is no hard and fast answer to that.

I look at Edward the Confessor and think he's quite dull. Maybe people did at the time and thought, you know, he's quite a dull saint. St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, is a very exciting saint, but he's a martyr. Some kings do get very popular. In Edmund, he gets very popular in the 15th century in London. Not necessarily the royal status of it. It's just one of those things that Edward, the confessor is not really, as far as I can tell,

or far as we can tell, that widely popular. In the same reason, there's no, you know, Henry III, by or gets in this relic of the holy blood for Westminster Abbey and spends an awful lot of time and effort trying to promoted and it basically fails. No one is interested in it, but why? We can't possibly tell. It's just one of those things that doesn't work. One of the things that I think does work in Beckett's favour is that he is great at having stories collect around him. People can reinvent him and they can retell stories about him. He's got an interesting life that we know a lot about. But even then, one of the most enduring stories about Beckett is in the 12th,

40s probably, a story springs up in London that Beckett's mother, where they would call a Saracen Princess, and that Beckett's father, Gilbert Beckett, who was a sheriff of London, had gone on crusade, he never went on Crusade, but he went on crusade, or he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which is the same thing. And this Saracen, pagan princess fell in love with him while he was a prisoner of her father, the Emir. He broke out with her help and went back to England, and she escaped from her father and knowing only two words of English, which were Beckett and London, hitched a ride on a ship, got all the way back to London, fell down in front of his house in Cheapside, and then she converted to Christianity, they married and produced Thomas Beckett.

It's a sort of like fairy tale of romance, but that was the accepted story of Beckett's parentage for most of the Middle Ages down to the 19th and early 20th century. And in the 19th century, it was said that Beckett was recast, getting back to the point about how does this create a sense of Englishness? Beckett in the 19th century was said to be half Anglo-Saxon through his father and half Saracen or Middle Eastern through his mother. And that this accounted, this sort of Victorian genetic theory accounted for his actions because he had the stubbornness of the Anglo-Saxons throwing off the Norman yoke of King Henry,

but the passionate nature of his Middle Eastern mother. this was the Victorian gene theory as to why Thomas Beckett was like he was. But yeah, in that sense, he was very much a figure of an emerging English bourgeois middle class. He's a middle class merchant property owners, landlord's son from London. And he is someone around whom, you know, Londoners and kings and commoners, city people and rural dwellers and everyone can unite as being this central figure of English history. Yeah, it's kind of like he's relatable and exciting, which makes him, you know, the perfect storm to become such a prominent figure, I guess. Well, thank you so much, John, for joining us to talk about the cult of Beckett. It's been absolutely fascinating to explore some of the different facets of what was going on all throughout the medieval period with him and maybe beyond too.

And we will very much look forward to your book when that comes out, which we will hopefully have you back for it and plug it a little bit further. It's been great to talk to you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed exploring the afterlife of St Thomas Beckett. If you missed the previous three episodes in this series, you can find out about his early life, his relationship with Henry II, and then his murder,

all of which set the scene for the explosion of his cult across the Christian world. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can give us a listen on Spotify, where you'll find our entire back catalogue. If you have a moment as well, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. You can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, add free and

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