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Thomas Becket and His Biographers

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Thomas Becket and His Biographers THOMAS BECKET AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS Michael Staunton THE BOYDELL PRESS BECKET.indb 3 21/7/06 11:13:30 am Contents Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations vii 1 Introduction: The Lives and their context 1 2 The forerunner: John of Salisbury 19 3 Telling the story: Edward Grim, Guernes and Anonymous I 28 4 Criticism and vindication: Anonymous II and Alan of Tewkesbury 38 5 The view from Canterbury: Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury 49 6 Observation and reflection: illiamW Fitzstephen 56 7 Breaking the rules of history: Herbert of Bosham 63 8 Conversion 75 9 Conflict 97 10 Trial 129 11 Exile 153 12 Martyrdom 184 Conclusion 216 Bibliography 220 Index 242 BECKET.indb 5 21/7/06 11:13:31 am 9 Conflict Undergraduate students of the Becket conflict will be familiar with an examination question of this kind: ‘ “The Becket conflict was primarily a clash of personalities”. Discuss.’ The word ‘personalities’ may be replaced by ‘jurisdictions’ or even ‘ideologies’, but the question remains essentially the same: What was the Becket dispute about? A thoughtful answer will usually acknowledge the participation of all these elements in the dispute to varying degrees, and might also discuss the role of Canterbury rights. Such a question recurs because no matter how many times it is asked, a definitive answer will never be given. But a question much less frequently asked is: What did the participants in the Becket dispute think it was about? That this question is not asked more often is surprising, first, in that there is a wealth of mate- rial to draw on from letters written in the thick of it, and from posthumous reflection on the dispute in the Lives, but also in that a central feature of the dispute was the very fact that its participants disagreed as to what the dispute was about. In many ways, of course, the twelfth-century perspective is more limited than ours. It was less easy for contemporaries to place the dispute within the context of the legal and administrative developments of the Angevin era, or the simultaneous expansion of papal power. The king’s refusal of the kiss of peace to his archbishop or his usurpation of Canterbury’s right to crown a king seem more trivial to us. Also, the twelfth-century discussions of the Constitutions of Clarendon or Thomas’s murder can seem to overinflate their importance when we consider that their consequences for relations between the Church and the Crown turned out to be more modest than might have been expected. Still, a modern perspective can be limited too. A tendency to see it as a dispute between archbishop and king, or between Church and Crown may obscure the fact that the debate was carried out primarily among churchmen, and that the greatest bitterness was between those ostensibly on the same side. The fact that Henry’s attempt to reform Church–Crown rela- tions ended in failure can unfairly diminish the significance of his introduc- tion of the ancestral customs. Some biographers, notably John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham, were actively involved in the dispute, but the issues involved were of great concern to all writers, and this is reflected in their work. BECKET.indb 97 21/7/06 11:14:26 am 98 thomas becket and his biographers The dispute Though the dispute between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV and that between Thomas Becket and Henry II were in many ways very different, there are some interesting parallels. Both involved a headstrong and con- troversial churchman pitted against a monarch determined to reassert royal authority after a childhood dominated by the perception of its loss. Both con- flicts expressed the explosion of long-simmering tensions, prompted in large part by the personalities involved, especially the personalities of the eccle- siastics in question. In both cases, the dispute began as a show of strength between the two parties, and became more involved as it progressed and resisted resolution. But also, both disputes had a central point of issue at stake: in one, lay investiture; in the other, the Constitutions of Clarendon. In the former case, the central issue gave historians a name for the dispute, and although this is not so in the case of Thomas and Henry, the Constitutions played at least as strong a role in their conflict. All Thomas’s biographers saw it as such. Many writers insert the text of the Constitutions, or at least the contentious clauses, into their works, and most give them prominence. Her- bert of Bosham, with uncharacteristic succinctness, calls them ‘the full cause of dissension … the reason for exile and martyrdom’.1 To the biographers, and those after them who have sought to understand the Becket dispute, the Constitutions mark a point of clarity, a statement of clear difference between the parties, before the forces that it unleashed gave the dispute such complexity. But behind the Constitutions were deeper ques- tions about the shifting nature of jurisdictional authority, the respective posi- tions of royal and ecclesiastical power, and the formalization of relationships. More narrowly, they were part of Henry II’s general reform of government, and more narrowly again they were a consequence of his increasingly fraught relationship with Thomas. This is acknowledged by Thomas’s biographers: Henry’s insistence on the Constitutions was the central issue in the dissen- sion between king and archbishop, but it was founded on a pre-existing ‘plot against the Church’, and deteriorating relations reflected in early skirmishes. The breakdown of relations happened gradually, marked by a sequence of increasingly divisive encounters. Most modern observers identify Thomas’s resignation of the office of chancellor as the first cause of dissension between him and his king. It seems likely that Henry intended his new archbishop to continue in his earlier role, a combination of duties which was not unusual in twelfth-century Europe, and his unexpected abandonment of his place in the king’s household must have given a worrying signal to the king. Oddly, only William of Canterbury and Guernes mention it. Guernes, identifying it as the first quarrel, tells us that Thomas sent his seal-bearer, Master Ernulf, to the king, telling him that he was giving up his office because of the burden MTB 3. 286, 287, 341. BECKET.indb 98 21/7/06 11:14:26 am CONFLICT 99 of his own work. The king, furious, declared, ‘He doesn’t care about serving me! That’s very clear.’2 It is likely that this occurred shortly after the receipt from the pope of the pallium in autumn 1162,3 almost a year before any other dispute mentioned by the other biographers. The limited attention paid to this episode could be because the king remained in France until January 1163, and his reaction to the resignation of office may not have been known to the biographers. A number of writers identify the first quarrel as happening in July 1163 at the king’s lodge at Woodstock, when Henry attempted to claim for the exchequer revenues traditionally paid by the Church for the support of his local officials. When Thomas refused to accept this new practice, the king backed down, but not without great resentment.4 William Fitzstephen, uniquely, mentions an early clash over another issue. Thomas had, without informing the king, excommunicated a powerful landlord, William of Eyns- ford, who had expelled some clerks who had recently been intruded into his parish church. This time Henry prevailed, and Thomas absolved William of censure.5 But for almost all the biographers, the most important early point of con- flict was the issue of ‘criminous clerks’: how to try and punish churchmen guilty of serious offences. Henry had increasingly become concerned with what he saw as undue leniency meted out by ecclesiastical courts to those in holy orders. Herbert of Bosham gives one, and William Fitzstephen two, early examples of clerks punished but protected by the archbishop from harsher justice by the king,6 but the case most prominent in the Lives is that of Philip de Broi, a canon of Bedford who had been accused of killing a certain knight. He was freed by an ecclesiastical court, and when a lay justice attempted to reopen the case, Philip verbally abused him. The justice complained to the king, and Philip was brought before a group of bishops and nobles, who imposed a mild sentence for his insult to the judge, but did not convict him on the charge of murder.7 It was this case in particular that prompted Henry to gather together the bishops of the realm at Westminster in October 1164 and demand that clerks convicted of serious crimes be deprived of the Church’s protection and handed over to the secular power.8 When the bishops, led by Thomas, rejected Henry’s demand, citing the distinctive nature of the clergy, the king adopted a different approach, demanding a general observance of his royal customs, that is, the rights which he believed his predecessors had held. The bishops answered that they would only observe the customs ‘saving their Guernes v. 741–50; see MTB 1. 12. Barlow, Becket, p. 82. MTB 1. 12; 2. 373–4; 4. 23–4; Guernes v. 751–70. MTB 3. 43. MTB 3. 264–5, 45–6. MTB 1. 12–13, 2. 374–6; 3. 45, 265–6; 4. 24–5; Guernes v. 771–825. MTB 1. 13; 2. 310; 3. 261, 266–75; 4. 25–7, 95–7, 201–5; Guernes v. 826–920. BECKET.indb 99 21/7/06 11:14:27 am 100 thomas becket and his biographers order’, that is, where they did not conflict with the law of the Church.
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