A fragment of skull bone set in gold traveled around Europe for centuries as one of the most valuable objects a church could own. Pilgrims paid to kneel near it. Kings detourred their journeys to see it. The bone had been cut from the top of a man’s head by a sword that swung so hard it snapped against the stone floor underneath. And the man it belonged to had been alive and praying when the blade came down. His name was Thomas Beckett. And the reason that piece of him became holy rather than simply discarded is a story that runs through cold cathedral stone. A hair shirt crawling with vermin and four armed men who could not quite decide even at the last second whether they meant to do it.
Thomas Beckett was not born to any of this. His father was a London merchant, a man named Gilbert, comfortable enough but not noble, and Beckett climbed the way clever men climbed in the 12th century through the church and through sheer usefulness through being the most capable man in any room. He caught the eye of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was sent to study, was given responsibilities, proved himself, and rose to become Chancellor of England under Henry II, the second most powerful office in the kingdom.
And in that role, he became something more than a minister to Henry. The two men were close in a way that went well past politics. They hunted together. They drank together. They argued and joked and rode and feasted together. And Beckett, as chancellor, lived in a style so lavish it outshone the king’s own household, throwing banquets, leading soldiers in the field during Henry’s wars, dressing in silks and furs. There is a famous scene where the two of them are riding through London in winter. And Henry, seeing a beggar shivering in thin rags, suggests to Beckett that it would be a fine charitable act to give the poor man a warm cloak and then wrestles the expensive fur-lined cloak off Beckett’s own back, laughing, and hands it to the astonished beggar. That was the texture of the friendship, rough and intimate and full of play.
Henry trusted him without reservation. So when the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the most senior position in the entire English church, came open in 1162, Henry handed it to his friend over Beckett’s own reluctance, fully expecting that he had just installed a loyal ally at the head of the church, a man who would smooth the path for royal power, who would let the king have his way in the long grinding quarrel between the royal courts and the church courts over who had the right to judge a clergyman accused of a crime. He thought he was placing his own man in the chair. He could not have been more wrong about what would happen next.
That expectation died fast. Beckett took the archbishop’s office and seemed to become a different man, or perhaps the man he had always meant to be. Once he had the excuse, he resigned the chancellorship without asking, which already unsettled Henry, who had wanted his man holding both offices at once. The church and the royal administration bundled into one loyal pair of hands. Beckett gave the second one back and kept only the one that would let him oppose the king. He started defending the church’s privileges with the same stubborn energy he had once spent serving the crown. And the change seems to have felt to Henry like a personal betrayal rather than a policy disagreement because the two things were never really separate between them.
The argument hardened around a document called the Constitutions of Clarendon drawn up in 1164 which tried to pin down royal authority over the clergy in writing. The piece that mattered most concerned what people called criminous clerks: clergymen accused of serious crimes, even murder, who could claim trial in church courts where the worst punishment was usually defrocking rather than death. Henry wanted those men handed over to royal justice to the rope and the block like anyone else. Beckett, after first seeming to bend and accept the constitutions, pulled back and refused them. And the refusal was the thing that turned a quarrel into a war between two stubborn men who had once loved each other.
There was a council at Northampton where Beckett was hit with crushing financial demands clearly designed to break him. And rather than submit, he fled, crossing in disguise to France and throwing himself on the protection of the French king and the pope. The exile lasted 6 years. 6 years of letters and threats and failed reconciliations conducted across the channel. Two former friends unable either to make peace or to let each other go.
When he finally came back to England in December of 1170, it was not a piece. It was a man returning to a country that no longer had room for him, and he seems to have known it. There had been a meeting in France earlier that year, a supposed reconciliation between him and Henry, but it was a hollow thing that settled none of the real grievances, and both men seemed to have understood it would not hold.
Beckett crossed the channel anyway, and the manner of his return reads, in hindsight, like a man walking deliberately towards something he had already accepted. He sent word ahead, settled his affairs, and behaved in several accounts like someone who did not expect to live very long, even speaking openly of his coming death. As he made his way toward Canterbury, crowds of common people came out to line the road and greet him, which can only have sharpened the alarm of his enemies. And almost as soon as his feet touched English soil, before any of the old wounds could begin to close, he confirmed the excommunication of the bishops who had taken part in his absence in crowning Henry’s eldest son as junior king.
That coronation had been Canterbury’s ancient and jealously guarded right to perform, and it had been carried out instead by the Archbishop of York and others deliberately as a calculated insult to Beckett while he was stuck powerless in France. Excommunication was not a small or symbolic thing. It cut a man off from the sacraments, from the company of other Christians, from any hope of salvation in the eyes of everyone around him, and it could be lifted only by the authority that had imposed it. Beckett had just done it and confirmed it against some of the most powerful churchmen in the kingdom very publicly within days of landing.
The excommunicated bishops did not wait around to plead with him. They sailed straight for Normandy to lay their complaint before the king. And they reached Henry’s Christmas court, carrying exactly the sort of grievance most likely to detonate the king’s temper, and they delivered it into his ear. The news reached Henry in Normandy during the Christmas court carried by the excommunicated bishops who had every reason to make it sound as black as possible and Henry came apart.
You have probably heard the version where he cries out, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” And I have to be straight with you about that line because it is one of the most famous sentences in English history and Henry almost certainly never said it. The wording we all know is a Polish job smoothed into that neat shape centuries later in the 1700s.
The men who were actually present recorded something raw and angrier and far less quotable. Edward Grim, the clerk we are going to be leaning on heavily today because he was about to watch the murder happen with his own eyes, set down a version in which Henry rages that he has nourished and promoted in his own household, a pack of cowards and traitors, faithless men who would stand by and let their lord be treated with such contempt by a single lowborn clerk.
There was no clean order in it. No name was spoken, no instruction to kill. It was the venting of a furious, betrayed, exhausted king in front of the armed men who served him, the way powerful men have always vented when they want a thing done, but cannot afford to be heard asking for it. And four of the men in that room decided or chose to hear a command inside the rage. Whether Henry meant one is a question that has never been settled and never will be. The knights who acted on it would later be able to say truthfully that the king had given no order. The king would be able to say truthfully that he had commanded nothing and a man would still be dead on a cathedral floor. Four of those knights took it as enough.
Reginald Fitzers, Hugh Deorville, William Dracy, and Richard Labretton. They were not nobodies, not hired thugs, but men of standing, some of them former vassals of Beckett himself from his days as chancellor, which adds a layer of the personal to what they did. They did not ride out together in a dramatic column. They crossed the channel separately, quietly by different routes, and reconverged at Saltwood Castle in Kent, which belonged to Ranol de Brock, a man with his own long list of grievances against Beckett. There on the night of the 28th of December, they seemed to have planned what they meant to do, or at least what they meant to demand.
And from there they rode the short distance to Canterbury the next day, gathering a few more armed men along the way, men of the De Brock household and others, and they arrived in the early afternoon of the 29th. Here is a detail that tells you something about the strange hesitation running underneath the whole day. The sense that even the killers were not quite sure how far they meant to go. They did not storm in with weapons drawn. They left their mail coats and their swords outside, hidden under a mulberry tree in the courtyard, and walked into the archbishop’s hall as men come to talk.
Beckett was finishing his dinner. They sat down with him on the floor among his clerks and would not return his greeting. And then Fitzers began to deliver the king’s demands that Beckett go to Winchester to answer for himself that he absolve the excommunicated bishops. Beckett refused, and as the exchange went on, his refusals grew sharper, and the knight’s threats grew louder until the room was full of shouting, the knights warning him and Beckett telling them he did not fear their swords, that he had not come back from exile to run again.
The knights sprang up, told the monks present to guard the archbishop and keep him from fleeing, and stormed back out to arm themselves, Fitzers calling out the old Norman war cry as he went. Whatever they had told themselves on the boat over, the line had been crossed now, and everyone in that hall knew it. It was getting toward dusk, and the monks around Beckett were frantic, trying to move him into the cathedral for the vesper’s service, partly out of routine, and partly, you suspect, in the desperate hope that the sanctity of the great church might shield him where words could not.
He resisted at first, unwilling to look as though he were fleeing. And they half pushed, half carried him through the cloister and in through a side door as the knights came back armed in mail now, swords drawn with an axe among them taken up to break down doors if they had to. The monks tried to bar the heavy door of the cathedral behind them. Beckett would not allow it. He turned and ordered the door opened.
And the line he is supposed to have said, recorded by more than one of the witnesses, is that “it is not right to make a fortress out of a house of prayer, that the church should not be barred like a castle.”
The door came open. The knights came through into the dim half-lit transcept in the failing winter light calling out for the traitor. Fitzers shouting into the gloom, “Where is Thomas Beckett? Traitor to the king and the kingdom.”
And out of the shadows, Beckett answered them, came down a few steps from the stair toward the altar rather than hiding, and said, “Here I am, no traitor to the king, but a priest of God.”
He could have hidden. The cathedral was a warren of crypts and side chapels and dark corners, and the monks were begging him to hide. He walked toward the voices instead. What happens next? We know with a level of detail almost unheard of for the 12th century because five separate eyewitnesses wrote accounts and several of them were standing within arms reach of the killing. Edward Grim, the visiting clerk, was the closest. William Fitz Steven who had served Beckett for years and wrote one of the fullest lives of him was there in the cathedral. John of Salsbury the great scholar was nearby.
Between them they preserved the scene almost minute by minute and the accounts agree on the essentials in a way that makes the whole thing unusually solid for the period. The knights did not kill him immediately. They first tried to seize him to drag him out of the cathedral because even now there seems to have been some idea of arresting him rather than butchering him on consecrated ground or perhaps of killing him outside so the murder would not pollute the church.
They laid hands on him, tried to hoist him onto Fitzers’s back or shoulders to carry him out. And Beckett, who was a big strong man, fought them. He grabbed Fitzers, shoved him back, called him a pander, a pimp, told him he owed him fealty, and in the struggle nearly threw one of the armored knights to the floor. He would not be moved. He clung to a pillar, set his feet, and refused to be carried out of his own cathedral, bowing his head and commending himself to God and St. Deni and the saints of the church.
And it was that refusal, that immovable resistance that seems to have tipped the knights from manhandling into killing. If they could not take him out, they would do it where he stood. Edward Grim was the only one who did not flee or shrink back when the swords finally came up. He had only arrived at Canterbury a few days earlier. A clerk from Cambridge come to visit the famous Archbishop. And when the first blade swung, he did something most people would not have the nerve to do. He threw his own body and his own arm into the path of the sword to shield Beckett.
The first blow was aimed at Beckett’s bowed head. Grimm threw his arm up into its path. The sword sheared into Grim’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder, very nearly severing it, an injury that would trouble him for the rest of his life. And the blade continued on with enough remaining force to slice into the crown of Beckett’s head, drawing the first blood, cutting the tonsure, the exact place that had been anointed with holy chrism at his consecration as archbishop. Beckett did not fall. He felt the blood run down over his face and eyes, and he wiped it away with his forearm.
And when he saw the red on his sleeve, he is recorded as saying that he commended himself and the cause of the church to God, to the blessed Mary, and to the patron saints of the cathedral. A second blow struck him on the head in the same place, and still he kept his feet swaying. Then he sank slowly, deliberately to his knees and then onto his elbows, folding himself down toward the pavement, composing his body as if for prayer. And as he went down, he was heard to murmur that “for the name of Jesus and for the protection of the church, I am willing to embrace death.”
He was down now, kneeling and bent forward over the cold stone, no longer resisting, his hands folded, his head bowed and exposed. And the third blow is the one Edward Grim could not stop describing for the rest of his life, the image that fixed itself behind his eyes. One of the knights, generally identified as Richard Labretton, struck Beckett’s lowered head so violently that the sword sheared clean through and continued down and shattered against the stone floor beneath him. The blade snapping in two on the pavement, the force of it that great.
The whole upper portion of Beckett’s skull, the crown that had been anointed when he was made archbishop, was severed and came away. And Grim, a clerk, reaching for language to hold something that should never have to be held, wrote the line that has carried down through 8 and a half centuries. He wrote that “the blood white with the brain and the brain no less red with the blood stained and reddened the floor of the cathedral that it painted the pavement with the colors of the lily and the rose, the white of the lily and the red of the rose.”
A man who had just watched his archbishop’s brains spread across the stones, standing there with his own arm half cut through and bleeding, found in the middle of his horror a phrase about flowers, about the white and the red. People remember that sentence not because it is beautiful, though it is, but because it is the sound of a human mind trying to survive what the eyes have just shown it, reaching instinctively for something ordered and lovely to lay over something that has no order and no loveliness in it at all.
That was not quite the end of the desecration. A fifth man had come into the cathedral with the knights. Not one of the four, but a clerk who had attached himself to them. A subdeacon named Hugh of Horsier, remembered by the bitter nickname Hugh Mauclerc, which means something like Hugh the bad clerk, Hugh the evil cleric. He stepped up to the body as it lay there. He set his foot down on Beckett’s neck, planting it on the neck of the man whose blood and brains were still spreading across the floor, using the corpse as a brace. And he put the point of his weapon into the opened skull, and deliberately scraped and scattered the brains out across the pavement, scooping them onto the stones, so that nothing whole would remain to be gathered. And as he did it, he called out to the others that “you can leave now, that this one would not be getting up again, would not be rising.”
Then the knights turned and went, and on their way out of the precinct, they did not flee in horror at what they had done. They looted. They ransacked the Archbishop’s palace, seizing horses, gold and silver plate, vestments, and Beckett’s own documents and papers, loading up what they could carry. And then they rode off north into the winter dark, leaving the monks alone in the cathedral with the broken thing on the floor.
The monks were left with the body, and what they found when they came to prepare it changed everything. Beckett’s reputation up to that moment, even among many churchmen, was that of a proud, worldly, difficult politician who had picked a fight he could have avoided. The monks undressed him for burial, and under the fine outer vestments of an archbishop, they found layer after layer of clothing growing rougher as they went down. And at the very bottom, worn directly against his skin, a hair shirt of coarse goat hair. And the hair shirt was not empty of life. As the body cooled, the lice and vermin that had been living in the garment, feeding on him, began to crawl out of the seams in such numbers that a chronicler describes them seething and boiling over the edges of the cloth, like water boiling over the rim of a pot. The monks watching apparently broke into a kind of helpless weeping and laughing at the same time, an awful overflowing of feeling. Because here in front of them was the evidence that this proud man had been secretly mortifying his own flesh, punishing his own body in private the entire time they had judged him. One historian put it about as plainly as it can be put that “it was the hair shirt and not the murder that truly made the martyr.”
The blood and brain matter on the floor did not get washed away and forgotten. The faithful soaked it up with cloths. It was gathered into a vessel. Before long it was being diluted with water into something they called the water of St. Thomas sold to pilgrims as a healing draft, a literal commodity made from a murdered man’s blood. The monks buried Beckett quickly the very next day down in the crypt, partly out of grief and partly out of fear because there were rumors that the killers might return to drag the body out to behead it again or hang it on a gibbet or fling it in a bog. The treatment reserved for a traitor’s corpse rather than a saint’s.
The news went out from Canterbury and moved across Europe faster than almost any news of that century. And the reaction was something close to universal horror. An archbishop, the highest churchman in England, cut down inside his own cathedral on the steps near the altar during the days of Christmas by knights of the king’s own household. It violated every protection the age believed in at once. The sanctuary of the church, the sanctity of a priest, the truce of the holy season. Churches across England were said to have stopped their services, their bells silenced, their altars stripped until the pollution of the murder could be cleansed and the cathedral reconsecrated because blood had been spilled on holy ground and the place was considered defiled until it was purified.
The Pope, when word reached him, was said to have shut himself away for days and refused to speak to any Englishmen. Henry II, the king, whose anger had set the whole thing moving, understood at once the scale of what had landed on him. He had not by his own account ordered the killing, and the distance between a furious outburst and an explicit command became the hinge his entire defense would hang on. He shut himself up and fasted and wept, partly from grief for the friend, and partly from sheer political terror, because the most dangerous thing imaginable had just been done in his name.
The miracles started almost at once. Within roughly a decade, the monks of Canterbury had recorded over 700 of them attributed to Beckett. Cures of blindness and paralysis and leprosy and madness. Drownings reversed, the dying called back. And the two monks who kept the official registers, Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury, could barely keep up with the volume of people arriving to swear out their stories. Benedict’s collection alone runs to hundreds of cases from the first two or three years. The water of St. Thomas, that diluted blood, was carried away in small lead flasks called ampullae stamped with the saint’s image. And these became the badges pilgrims wore to prove they had made the journey. A whole industry of pewter and faith built on the contents of that basin.
The speed of his canonization is genuinely startling for the period. He was made a saint by Pope Alexander III in February of 1173, a little over 2 years after the murder, when the wheels of Rome usually ground far slower than that. The murder had handed the church the most useful martyr imaginable, a man killed inside his own cathedral by the agents of a king who had tried to subordinate the clergy and the church made full use of him.
The four knights were excommunicated and after a period in which they sheltered at Hugh de Morville’s castle in the north while the country’s horror settled over them were sent on a 14-year penance to the Holy Land. The records of what became of them are thin and tangled. But the tradition that hardened around them is that none ever came home, that they died abroad in the dust of their penance. And Fitzers in particular is generally said to have ended his days far from England. Their names became a byword to be descended from one of Beckett’s killers was a thing families either hid or strangely sometimes claimed.
And Henry II, the friend who had ranted in that room in Normandy, the man whose words four knights had chosen to hear as a command, eventually made his own pilgrimage of a very different kind. In the summer of 1174, with his sons in revolt against him and his reign seeming to come apart, he came to Canterbury dismounted before he reached the cathedral and walked the last stretch barefoot through the streets as a penitent, his feet cut on the stones. At the tomb he knelt, confessed, and bared his back. And the monks and bishops of the cathedral each took a turn, striking him with a rod, blow after blow, while he prayed at the grave of the man he had helped to kill.
We have several accounts of this from Fitz Steven and others. And whatever mixture of genuine remorse and hard political calculation drove it, the image is its own kind of strange. A king of England scourged at the tomb of his murdered archbishop. A whole economy of pilgrimage grew up over the spot where the brains had been scraped from the floor, an industry of inns and badges and relics that sustained Canterbury for centuries. 200 years later, Chaucer’s pilgrims are still riding toward that exact place, telling stories to pass the miles. All of it grows out of one bad temper. Four armed men who first left their swords under a tree and a sword that broke on the floor of a church.
Beckett’s killers at least meant to leave a recognizable body behind. The next man on our list was not granted even that because the people who killed him set out very deliberately to make sure there was no whole body left to bury at all. Simon DeMontfort, Earl of Leicester, gets remembered now mostly for the respectable part of his career. He summoned commoners to a parliament, an early step on the long road toward representative government. And there are statues of him and plaques bearing his name, and his face once looked down from the wall of the United States House of Representatives as one of history’s great lawgivers. Strip away the later admiration though and put him back in the heat of the summer of 1265. And he is something far simpler and more dangerous. The losing side of a brutal civil war, a man whose enemies had decided that merely defeating him was not enough, that he had to be unmade, obliterated, removed from the world so completely that there would not even be a body left to honor.
The name itself carried weight and menace before this Simon ever set foot in England. His father, also Simon DeMontfort, had been one of the most feared crusading commanders of the age, the military leader of the Albigensian crusade against the heretics of southern France, a campaign remembered for its massacres, and he died with a stone from a siege engine crushing his skull beneath the walls of Toulouse. The son inherited the father’s iron will and the father’s certainty that he was doing the work of God. And he carried both to England where he pressed a claim to the earldom of Leicester through his grandmother, charmed and forced his way into the confidence of King Henry III, and then married the king’s own widowed sister, Eleanor, in a secret ceremony that scandalized the court and broke a vow of chastity she had taken.
For years, he was the king’s brother-in-law, an intimate of the royal family, sometimes favored and sometimes furiously at odds with Henry over money and lands and command. He served as the king’s governor in Gascony, where his harshness generated a flood of complaints. He was by every account brilliant, rigid, devout, abrasive, physically and morally fearless, a man who inspired fierce loyalty in some and pure hatred in others, with very little space in between. He had risen high and he had made bitter enemies on the way up which matters for understanding what was done to his corpse.
Montfort was not even English by birth. He was French, a younger son of a famous and ferocious crusading father, and he had come to England to claim the earldom of Leicester through his grandmother, charming and clawing his way into the inner circle of Henry III, even marrying the king’s own sister, Eleanor, in a match that scandalized the court. For years, he was the king’s brother-in-law and sometime favorite. And then, as Henry’s misrule and favoritism toward foreign relatives curdled the barons against him, Montfort became the hard uncompromising leader of the opposition, a man with a reputation for rigid principle, fierce temper, and a conviction that he was carrying out God’s will.
The men who came to hate him, Prince Edward chief among them, did not hate him as a stranger. They hated him as a former intimate who had humiliated the crown, beaten the royal family in battle and held the king and the heir as prisoners. That kind of hatred, the hatred for someone who was once inside the family, is the kind that does not stop at killing.
At the Battle of Lewes in May of 1264, Montfort, outnumbered, won an extraordinary victory through a surprise dawn march and a disciplined attack, breaking the royal army and capturing King Henry III in open battle along with the king’s brother Richard, the king of the Romans, who was famously dragged out of a windmill where he had taken refuge and mocked in a popular song for it. And most valuable of all, the king’s son and heir, Prince Edward. A tall, hard, physically imposing young man who would one day become Edward I, the king they would call the hammer of the Scots and the Conqueror of Wales. With the king and the heir both held in his custody, Montfort effectively ruled England for more than a year through a governing council. The captured royals serving as his living guarantee against a royalist resurgence. The king reduced to a figurehead signing whatever was put in front of him. It was the high water mark of his life, an English baron holding the crown itself in his hand.
But holding a prince hostage is a fragile and temporary kind of power. Princes are clever, dangerous, and surrounded at all hours by men working day and night to free them. And in the spring of 1265, Edward escaped. The story, and it has the ring of the prince’s own cleverness about it, is that during one of his permitted rides under guard, he asked to try the paces of his keeper’s horses one after another, racing each mount in turn until every animal was blown and exhausted, and then at the agreed moment swung up onto a fresh horse that had been held in readiness, and simply rode away to allies waiting at the edge of the field, leaving his winded guards unable to follow. The escape plan is often credited to the wife of a powerful marcher lord named Roger Mortimer, a woman named Maud de Braose. And I want you to hold that name lightly for now because she is going to come back into this story near the end of it in a way you will not enjoy.
With Edward loose, the royalist cause came roaring back together. Allies peeled away from Montfort. His own son, also named Simon, was caught off guard with part of the army at Kenilworth. His men surprised and scattered or captured while some were reportedly bathing. An embarrassment that crippled the reinforcement Montfort was counting on. And on the 4th of August 1265, the elder Montfort found himself near the town of Evesham, hemmed into a tight loop of the river Avon, with the only bridge out of the loop at Bengeworth, blocked by Mortimer’s men, facing a royal army roughly twice the size of his own. He had also been deceived in the cruelest possible way. Edward’s forces had captured the banners of Montfort’s son at Kenilworth, and they came marching up under those very banners, so that Montfort and his lookouts at first believed the relief column had arrived, and only realized, as the troops drew close, and the wrong faces resolved under the familiar flags, that they were looking at their own deaths, dressed in the sun’s colors. A storm was gathering over the fie…
