W48 through 52 Part II: Becket's Wedding Ring
Thomas Becket's Day of Assassination is December 29
After absorbing, in my customary crash session, the life of Thomas Becket, I decided to use the symbol of the wedding ring for his handle. But before I explain that, let me quickly summarize his life for those of you who don’t know him or may not have his CV hovering nearby in your brain.
Thomas Becket, born in 1120, was the son of middle-class London merchants. He found his niche in finance and then in the household of the most powerful archbishop of England, Theobald of Canterbury. And, as Theobald and King Henry II of England had much work to do together, and as Becket was wont to make his presence known to the powerful, he became Henry’s chancellor in 1155. Under normal circumstances a chancellor serves as a highly placed assistant to a ruler, but this circumstance exceeded the norm and the two men quickly developed a fierce friendship. And when Archbishop Theobald died in 1161, Becket was Henry’s choice for his successor. The voting monks and bishops’ hands were forced, Becket took the necessary steps to catch up on his religious training, and bingo! He became the second most powerful man in England in 1162 at the age of 42. Henry, who was 29 at this time, had already made a name for himself by, among other things, marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine shortly after her divorce from King Louis VII in 1152. Politically this put Henry in a prime spot on the chessboard as Eleanor came to their marriage with the land called Aquitaine, a substantial chunk of what we now think of as France and much more real estate than the King of France owned.
Now Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket quit his job as chancellor for the king, creating the first political crisis for the two men. Henry was embarrassed; the German Emperor had an archbishop/chancellor in the same man and this split frustrated his desire to consolidate power. Becket, freed of his duties as chancellor, began to insist on juridical immunity for clerics, at a time when the Church was notoriously lax in punishing temporal matters. King Henry, on the other hand, was determined to create written rules of law that addressed the mounting number of crimes committed by churchmen. The matter came to a head in 1164 when Henry presented the Constitutions of Clarendon, a blueprint for communication between Church and State. To put this act into context, this was one of the first proposals for written law in England. Before Henry, customs were based on mutual trust. Henry demanded that Becket and the bishops sign the document, and after a brief standoff they finally agreed. But the demands for apology for past insults went unresolved, the kisses of peace were repelled, anger simmered, and not long after Henry found occasion to foil Becket at his own game when a noble claimed land on an archbishop’s manor. The trial limped forward; Becket was called to testify and refused. He was charged with contempt of court and when he finally did arrive at Northampton Castle in October, Henry refused to see him. The next day Becket left for France, where he was warmly welcomed by King Louis VII as a refugee and a useful pawn in Louis’ game with Henry.
Thus began six years of kaleidoscopic drama centered around the self-exiled Becket, involving the four head honchos of Europe at the time: Henry II, Pope Alexander III, the Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), and Louis VII of France. Becket milked his exile to nurture his role as injured archbishop and symbol of a Church threatened by secular power, and his posturing earned him international notoriety. He was seen alternatively as a martyr for the cause of Church and a threat to the delicate balance between the two entities.
Becket’s time in France wasn’t all about politics however; he had some architectural enlightenment as well. He spent four of his six years there in Sens (about 125 kilometers SE of Paris), where an architect named William of Sens (hold that name!) had worked on the new cathedral, which was built between 1135 and 1148. This cathedral was revolutionary in its vaulting and unique for the geometry of its east end, where a nine-sided figure, an enneagon, was used to simplify and centralize the space of the eastern ambulatory. The work at Sens took place during a period of intense creativity in northern France, where several cathedrals were re-built in the style we call Gothic, many of them influenced by the innovations at Saint Denis in Paris, publicized by the Abbot Suger in 1144 when he threw a party for forty bishops. Among the invited was a lone Englishman, Archbishop Theobald, Becket’s old boss. So, when Becket went to Sens and began consulting with William about the design of a new church—incidentally not at Canterbury but a little way away at Hackington—he was picking up a thread left hanging, the idea being to bring England’s architecture up to snuff with the most modern work in France.
By the time Becket and Henry finally reached an accord in 1170, Becket had the twelfth-century equivalent of a multi-million Instagram fan club. He sailed back to England on December 1, 1170, somehow finding time during the voyage to excommunicate the three bishops who had crowned the King’s son in his absence. He was greeted by a mix of hostile nobles and worshipping commoners, he rode to Canterbury, dismounted at the town gate and walked barefoot to the cathedral, not the first time he had posed as a Christ figure. Twenty-eight days later he was murdered at the altar by four of Henry’s knights who were not the sharpest tools in the shed, and who had interpreted Henry’s cry “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” as “Russia, are you listening?” They made a butcher job of the murder. Becket’s skull was fractured, and his brains were ripped out and thrown on the floor, a detail that offered later hagiographers the opportunity to cook up rich metaphors from the gory mixture. Bone and brain (white), and blood (red) became water and wine, or the lily and the rose, and Becket’s blood was mixed with water to be sold as miraculous “Becket Water” to pilgrims. The monks present at the murder were prescient relic-wise and wasted no time in setting aside whatever blood and bits of bone they could gather, and then hustled what was left of Becket into the crypt to protect him from further vandalism.
The public clamored for Becket to be made a saint, Prior Odo of Canterbury who had hated him said nothing, Henry reacted with shock and dismay, then prevaricated, then finally made a dramatic public penance in 1172. It was the Louis VII of France who petitioned for Becket’s sainthood in February of 1173, and it was immediately granted. Becket, however, rested in the crypt for fifty years, briefly in a wooden coffin, which was soon covered with a marble enclosure that nevertheless was designed with openings that allowed his thousands of visitors to lean in and kiss the coffin. Miracles abounded. And up above in the cathedral, the architectural high jinx began.
But now, let’s back up a bit. Becket’s glory was thanks in no small part to the cathedral with which he was associated, and to the powerful king who loved him. Henry’s role in Becket’s life leads back to the idea of the wedding ring, which will in turn lead us to the cathedral. A wedding ring is a perfect and pure form, a small object that perhaps more than any other symbol is out of scale with the complexity it represents. Thomas Becket and King Henry, to all appearances, were deeply attracted to each other with the same force we attribute to passionate love; in our times they might even have been a married couple. And the same passion drove them to destroy each other. I felt a little risqué in projecting this attraction on them, but I was vindicated when I read in Cantor’s review of Barlow’s book the suggestion that there was indeed a psychosexual tension between the two. The Corona, or “Becket’s Crown,” the circular chapel that terminates the east end of Canterbury Cathedral, is a ring—although appropriately open at one end like the lid of Pandora’s Box through which all evil and mischievousness escapes. Like the wedding ring, the tip of a messy iceberg, this dernier cri of the cathedral at the east end is Becket’s Crown.
The perfection of the Corona followed on centuries of building projects at the most important cathedral in England, starting in the late sixth century. In 596, Pope Gregory the Great sent forty monks to the British Isles as missionaries, and among them one Augustine, whose boat landed on the coast of Kent near Canterbury, the seat of Ethelbert, a powerful Anglo-Saxon king. Ethelbert was friendly to Christians, and he allowed Augustine to use an existing church dedicated to Saint Martin as his base of operations. Later, Augustine was promoted to serve as both archbishop and abbot, thereby starting a trend that would be fully exploited after the Norman Invasion. The years roll on, the Danes invade (remember Cuthbert and Lindisfarne? W35-39), a second wave of saintly building takes place at Canterbury under Dunstan (bishop/abbot 959-988), and in 1066 William the Conqueror arrives at Hastings with his bishop Lanfranc, who served as archbishop at Canterbury from 1070 to 1089, and now we can begin to relate history to physical fabric in the cathedral. Part of the messiness of English cathedrals, in comparison to those on the Continent, is due to their functioning as both monastery churches and cathedrals, and arrangement that Lanfranc promoted vigorously. Canterbury was already an embodiment of a united Church and State, and under Lanfranc it became the place where kings were crowned, and whose archbishop was the king’s man, and had an appropriately-sized palace separate from the cathedral grounds. Between 1096 and 1130, the cathedral was almost doubled in size by the Archbishop Anselm and his prior Ernulph, adding a massive choir (or quire) and crypt (the longest crypt in England at 290 feet). The prior who succeeded Ernulph, Conrad, made a name for himself by commissioning the decoration of the choir, which became known as “Conrad’s Glorious Choir.”
Thirty years later, in 1160, Prior Wilbert (1151-1167) decided that the cathedral and monastery needed a new water supply, and thanks to him we have one of the two detailed medieval plan documents in existence (the other being the monastery plan of Saint Gall). It shows us five pumping stations and the water lines, all underground, serving most of the buildings, and exiting bottom right towards the River Stour.
Two years after this utilities project was completed, Becket became archbishop. Then left to exile himself. Then returned to be murdered. And while he was peacefully sleeping in the crypt, enjoying the kisses of all those pilgrims and oblivious to the arguments about his sanctity and what if any sort of monument should be built for him that were going on above his head….
… a fire in 1174 destroyed Conrad’s Glorious Choir, and we have all the details thanks to the monk Gervase, who is famous as one of the few medievals to give us detailed written descriptions of architectural ideas and construction methods. But wait…do we have all the details? I’ll let you be the judge. His description suggests that after the fire, several architects were interviewed for the re-building, but guess who was immediately selected? William of Sens! The guy who would have known exactly what Becket would like to see built in his honor at Canterbury. And the fire? Really an accident? Had Becket not wanted to build a new church in the latest French style elsewhere, at Hackington, to rival Christ Church Canterbury and the monks’ ability to elect their archbishop? A fire would force rebuilding Christ Church Canterbury, a place that now housed relics with some powerful mojo. Much scholarly ink has been spilled on this discussion, notably in the articles by Draper and Kidson noted below.
William of Sens was hired and he had his work cut out for him, the challenge of making a modern Gothic building out of a Romanesque dinosaur. Until the work moved east of Conrad’s “gloriously skewed” Choir, there was no way he could hide the awkward joints. And in fact, he didn’t have the chance to be responsible for the final glory, because in 1179 he fell from the presbytery scaffolding, and it was William the Englishman who finished the job. It seems, however, that the French William’s plans were respected, because the geometry of the Trinity Chapel and the Corona is remarkably similar to that of the Cathedral of Sens. There is a pleasing sense of unity and clarity in this eastern termination. A gleaming architectural wedding ring that sweeps away all past sins. The work was finished in 1184 but Becket’s body was not translated into his shrine in Trinity Chapel until 1220, and parts of his skull were kept in a reliquary in the Corona. Pilgrims continued to visit the site of his tomb in the crypt as part of a four-stage journey that included the place of martyrdom off the north choir aisle as well. With the Dissolution in 1538 Becket’s shrine was destroyed and his bones with it. But the pilgrimages never stopped.
The leverage of Becket’s short life was enormous. In the forty years after his death more than a dozen biographies were written. His shrine at Canterbury became the third most-visited pilgrimage site after Rome and Compostela in Spain. Among the more sensational visits was one from an Icelandic chief named Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson (Becket already had his own Icelandic sage) who visited c. 1200 with two walrus teeth which the monks happily added to their raw materials library for relic production. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a fitting testimony to the utility of myth. His pilgrims, telling their stories while on their way to Becket’s Shrine at Canterbury, never actually arrive—just like Becket’s life the story matters more than the facts—but they give Chaucer an opportunity to criticize the secular Church and the commercialization of pilgrimage through his Pardoner (the man who sells indulgences, or time subtracted from your sentence in Purgatory) and his Summoner, a man who would bring you to trial for a tidy sum from your persecutor (think Texas and abortion law). Becket was also the Lux Londoniarum (or “light of Londoners”) and the patron saint of the city. Two major London sites are associated with him, London Bridge and the Tower. The bridge, built in stone after the wooden one burned, was funded in good part by donations made in Becket’s name.
Jumping to the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, written in 1935, uses Becket as a vehicle to explore internal moral conflict, ultimately valorizing an evangelical Church. In 1964 Richard Burton was Becket and Peter O’Toole Henry II in a film by Peter Glenville which plays freely with established facts. Burton’s Becket pouts and broods as the injured victim; his “conversion” seems laughable and I couldn’t stop thinking about Trump. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds parallels in Becket representations and contemporary political figures; take as example the 2018 book by Kay Brainerd Slocum (The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries, Routledge) that includes James Comey in her list of people who have used Becket as a model for their own experiences. Her book is reviewed by Harvey, below.
I knew it wouldn’t be difficult to present you with Becket’s significance to architecture, but I wasn’t prepared for the links to current events. I suppose the conflict of Church and State will be a battlefield as long as religion and politics exist. I can’t say that it’s a comfort to learn that human nature doesn’t change, but historical parallels do help me negotiate the complexities of the present.
References for Weeks 48 through 52 Part II: Becket’s Wedding Ring
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Binski, Paul. Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Braunfels, Wolfgang. Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Cantor, Norman F. Review: “Thomas Becket by Frank Barlow”, in The American Historical Review, April 1989, Vol. 94, No. 2 (April), pp 421-422.
Draper, Peter. “Interpretations of the Rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral, 1174-1186, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56:2 (June 1997), pp 184-203.
Harvey, Katherine. Review: “The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries” in Reviews in History, 31 January 2019, Review No. 2303.
Jenkins, John. “St Thomas Becket and Medieval London,” in History, Vol 105 (367) pp 652-672, 2020.
Kidson, Peter. “Gervase, Becket, and William of Sens,” in Speculum, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct 1993), 969-991.
Warren, W. L. Henry II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.