Learning and training

Abstract

In 1158, while on an embassy to the French king, Henry II's chancellor Thomas Becket took up temporary residence with the Templars in Paris, where he received among others the English scholars in the city – masters, students and the Parisian citizens from whom the evidently cash-strapped English scholars had borrowed money. By entertaining on a royal scale Becket consciously usurped the role of host, deliberately flouting the wishes of the king of France, who had tried to ensure that his guest paid for nothing, but the opportunities for social display proved irresistible. A graduate of the university himself, he embodied all the opulence and, indeed, social aggrandizement that new learning might promise. Brought up in a Cheapside residence, the son of an immigrant merchant who had himself risen socially in his adoptive town of London, the future chancellor had been educated at a priory school at Merton and later at a London grammar school, before moving to Paris and later Bologna to continue his studies. Received into the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, he had then entered royal service, and in 1158, when he embarked for France, he was almost at the summit of his career.

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