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Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral during Vespers on 29 December 1170, an act which sent shock waves through the Western Church. Yet, although Becket’s familia, the king of France, the count of Blois, and William of the White Hands, archbishop of Sens demanded severe action against the English king, whom they held morally responsible for the murder of the archbishop in his own cathedral, within six months of the solemn peace of Fré-teval, Henry II escaped excommunication and England escaped interdict. Ecclesiastical censures were issued against the actual murderers (un-named) and their aiders and abettors on 25 March 1171 and a general interdict was laid on all Henry’s continental lands, but Pope Alexander III merely called on the king to abstain from entering a church until legates should come to observe his humility and impose due penance for the outrage, this c. 21 April 1171. There followed two sets of penances: the first, undertaken at Avranches in May 1172, with the king’s purgation and acceptance of terms promulgated before a larger and more representative assembly of ecclesiastics and nobles at Caen on 30 May 1 ; the second, the famous penitential pilgrimage performed at Canterbury in July 1174, during the course of the great rebellion of 1173-4.
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