The Cult of st Thomas Becket in the Thirteenth Century

Abstract

At first sight there seems to be little to link St Thomas of Canterbury with St Thomas of Hereford, save for the superficial similarities of name, occupation of the office of chancellor, episcopal rank, and exile. Becket was a parvenu, Cantilupe a member of an established administrative family, whose path was smoothed by the patronage of his influential uncle, Bishop Walter of Worcester, the life-long supporter of Simon de Montfort. Becket, though educated sufficiently well to be clerk to archbishop Theobald and chancellor to Henry II, was neither a scholar nor of scholarly disposition; Cantilupe spent the greater part of his adult life learning and teaching in Oxford and Paris, proceeding through the faculties of Arts, Canon Law, Civil Law, and Theology. Becket was murdered in his own cathedral by four knights of the king’s immediate entourage, in the course of a major dispute about the respective rights of church and state; Cantilupe died near Montefiascone while pursuing a technical legal dispute with Becket’s successor, John Pecham. Becket’s claim to sanctity rested on his martyrdom and the cause for which he died, Cantilupe’s on his life and character. Each immediately became the centre of a cult, but Becket’s was on a European scale, whereas Cantilupe’s rested largely on his local reputation in Hereford and the assiduous devotion of Richard Swinfield, his successor in the see; and, while the Canterbury saint retained a powerful grasp on the popular imagination for the rest of the middle ages, Hereford’s saint slowly declined in popularity from the time of his canonization in 1320. The second Thomas did not inherit the mantle of the first—nor did he seek to assume it—but neither he nor any other conscientious English bishop could escape the influence of the long shadow cast by the heroic martyr; and his admirers made what they could of the coincidences between his life and Becket’s to find in St Thomas of Hereford some echoes at least of St Thomas of Canterbury. This desire resulted from more than the natural inclination to link and compare two saints who bore the same name; it reflected the pre-eminence still enjoyed by the cult of Becket more than a century after his death, and the survival of a particular pattern of sanctity which his life, and especially the manner of his death, was thought to exemplify.

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