Who Put the ‘a’ in ‘Thomas a Becket’? The History of a Name from the Angevins to the 18th Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
Music, Politics, and Sanctity: The Cult of Thomas Becket, 1170-1580
Unpublished PhD, 2021
The role of the liturgy in establishing the iconographic nature of a saint was fundamental during the medieval period; to date, though, the liturgies of Thomas Becket have rarely been considered for their role in the creation of Thomas’ cult. While work by musicologists such as Andrew Hughes and Kay Brainerd Slocum, and literary scholar Sherry L. Reames has done much to establish the chronology of Thomas’ liturgies and the context of their creation, questions about the liturgies as texted, melodied, and performed statements of Becket’s sanctity remain. My thesis builds on that work while also developing its own methodological framework by locating the Becket liturgies within the political, cultural, and social histories of the institutions for which they were created. It begins with an overview of the sources, addressing their virtues and limitations (especially in terms of using manuscript sources that are not contemporaneous with composition date of the liturgies they represent), while also addressing how the interdisciplinary approach of the thesis - which incorporates analysis of textual, musical, and artistic sources - fits within current historiographical trends. The thesis emphasises performance practices at Canterbury itself and with the liturgy as a musical, audible practice, in turn, it engages with a wider range of sources, placing liturgical texts in dialogue with other non-musicological material. For example, it utilises architectural evidence at Canterbury in conjunction with chronicles and customaries to present an experiential history of Becket’s cult. Doing so will allow the exploration of the "dissemination" of liturgy beyond the textual and demonstrate how liturgy moved to new institutions already embedded with pre-set performative and spatial requirements that needed to be re-imagined in new spaces. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part A (consisting of Chapters One and Two), discusses the creation of the offices for Becket’s passion and translation at Canterbury in the years after his death. The first chapter explores how the office was composed in 1173 by Benedict of Peterborough (d. 1193), one of the feretrarians for Becket’s shrine, and how Benedict’s place at the heart of a network of early Becket hagiographers shaped the liturgy. It then examines how Benedict’s liturgy influenced the rebuilding of the east end of Canterbury Cathedral after the devastating fire in 1174, and how the internal politics of Christ Church meant that the enlarged Trinity Chapel was built to house Becket’s cult (and his liturgy). Chapter Two’s focus is the creation of the office for Becket’s Translation by the clerical familia of Archbishop Stephen Langton during the 1220s. It explains why Canterbury appears so prominently in that liturgy; namely, after years of wrangling with the monks over where Becket should be buried, Langton desired to reconcile with the community by indicating that Becket’s new shrine was to be his permanent home. Part B examines how Becket’s liturgies were spread beyond Canterbury and follows three lines of inquiry. Chapter Three explores how Becket’s liturgy was adapted, re-imagined, and re-compiled in new institutions that required something different to the original Canterbury plan. Such an aim will not be approached diachronically but will provide snapshots of how the process of adaptation occurred at different places across the centuries. Chapter Four surveys how Becket’s liturgies were utilised as the basis for new non-liturgical music, particularly in Parisian and English motets and conductuses of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries. The final chapter explores how the Lancastrian dynasty used music to promote Becket as a symbol of England and of themselves, which was to imbue the Becket cult with new ideological undertones. The conclusion then takes a brief look at the end of the Becket cult during the reign of Henry VIII, and argues that long-standing tensions in Becket’s hagiography, beginning in the liturgies, ultimately meant he was replaced by Reformation martyrs in the Catholic imagination during the sixteenth century.
History
In July 1220, the boy king Henry III attended the Translation of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, whereby the saint's body was transferred from its original tomb in the crypt of Canterbury cathedral to a splendid new shrine in the main body of the church. This article explores the continuing appeal of Becket's cult at Canterbury for elite ecclesiastical and lay circles in thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century England. It argues that the Englishmen, or holders of ecclesiastical office in England, who were canonised as saints in the thirteenth century were associated with St Thomas and his cult. Drawing on the records of the English royal household and wardrobe, alongside letters and charters, this article then examines the reception of Becket's cult at the royal court. Although Henry III was more famous for his adult devotion to St Edward the Confessor, Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Provence, still paid their respects to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. Royal interest in St Thomas of Canterbury, or St Thomas the Martyr, continued, but with added vigour, under Edward I, his wives and his children. Despite St Thomas's appeal for opponents of the English crown, Becket's cult remained firmly connected to the English ruling dynasty. T he cult of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the most popular saints' cults in western Europe in the Middle Ages. The stories of Becket's murder at the hands of four knights in Canterbury cathedral on 29 December 1170 and of the posthumous miracles associated with him circulated widely at home and abroad. Their transmission was assisted by the many works of hagiography written by witnesses to the martyrdom and by men associated with Becket, as well as the reports carried away by visitors to Becket's tomb. 1 Such was the damage to King Henry II's prestige as the man who uttered the words that led to Becket's death, especially after Becket was canonised I am grateful to Paul Webster for his helpful comments on a draft of this article.
St. Anselm Journal 10.2, 2015
Upon his election to the see of Canterbury in 1162, one of Thomas Becket's first acts as archbishop was to seek a papal canonization for his predecessor Anselm from Alexander III. Responding to Becket's request, Alexander ordered Becket to convene a council of English prelates to decide the issue. Whatever this council determined, the pope would confirm. Shortly thereafter, however, Becket was forced to tend to more pressing concerns. The archbishop's relationship with King Henry II of England had quickly deteriorated, and he was forced to flee into exile. Contemporary accounts speak no more about Becket's council, and it has been presumed that it was never even called. Through an examination of the surviving twelfth-century copies of Anselm's hagiography, this paper will argue that Becket had indeed begun to take steps to call a council in accordance with the pope's command, behavior which not only sheds new light on Becket's relationship to Anselm, but also provides a case study for the political dimension of the developing process of papal canonization.
Anglia, 2017
Starting in the mid nineteen-seventies, Fran Colman has produced a considerable body of research, chiefly, but not entirely, on the linguistic features of the moneyers' names of the Anglo-Saxon period. The work reviewed here can be regarded as an attempt to fit the results of these anthroponymic studies into some sort of theoretical context. It has received important impulses from the work of John Anderson, which the author freely acknowledges. The book is opened by a fairly lengthy introduction (1-18). Dr Colman defines the (mental) onomasticon as "the repository for lexical information about names" (1). At the same time, she takes the view that there is "no such thing as The Old English Onomasticon" (ibid), since the onomasticon will vary from speaker to speaker and be subject to diachronic variation. On the other hand, the individual variation from speaker to speaker is subject to the constraints of a collective onomastic consensus among the body of the speakers. Her survey is based on the personal nomenclature of the period between the eighth and the eleventh century and her material is taken from the corpus of Anglo-Saxon moneyers' names supplemented by written records (see 9-10). The moneyers' names are unequivocally contemporary sources and form a primary record for the study of historical phonology and anthroponymic lexis. The introduction includes full discussion of gender and the name data (10-18), and she is rightly sceptical, despite the existence of moneyers named G GIFU IFU and H HILD ILD, about the possibility of female membership of the corps of Anglo-Saxon moneyers. As Colman suggests (13), Gifu may be a nickname derived from the substantive OE ġi(e)fu f. 'gift' which had replaced the original baptismal name. Hild is more straightforward. Despite it being known as the name of the famous Abbess Hild of Whitby (ob. 680), it may also be interpreted as a short form of such masculine names as OE Hildefrið, ON Hildólfr, ContGerm Hildebert. Colman follows conventional notions on the structure of Germanic personal nomenclature in that she uses the categories of dithematic, monothematic and extended monothematic names. This is an acceptable morphological taxonymy, but, in the case of monothematic and extended monothematic names, it fails to deal with semantic ambiguities. For example, she links the monothematic names Lēofa, Swēta, Brorda and Wulf to OE lēof 'beloved', OE swēte 'sweet', OE brord m.
The Language of Persecution: John of Salisbury and the early phase of the Becket Dispute (1163–66)
Studies in Church History, 1984
Medieval churchmen who became involved in ecclesiastical disputes or in disputes with secular authority, had access to a rich ‘language’ of phrase and imagery with which to strengthen their case. This ‘language’, drawing on Scriptural sources and on standard interpretations of Scripture, could be used to depict almost any dispute as a struggle between good and evil, as the persecution of pious men by the impious, as the renewed persecution of the Church Universal, as a latterday trial and passion of Christ, or as an assault on church liberties.
2018
Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury (1120-70) is one of the iconic figures in British history-a man who most people have not only heard of, but also have an opinion on. Yet, despite the brutality of his murder, such opinions are not always positive. In fact, this medieval archbishop is an unusually divisive figure, and always has been. In the 12th century, he was both revered as a saint and dismissed (by his fellow bishop Gilbert Foliot) with the famous line '[he] always was a fool and always will be'. More recently, he has been included in lists of both the greatest and the worst Britons of all time. Notably, in 2005, he was runner-up to Jack the Ripper in a BBC History Magazine poll-above King John and Oswald Mosley. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the strength of feeling he is capable of provoking, he has also been the subject of vast quantities of writing in the eight centuries since his death.