This is a story about dates.
The first date is 1170. Thomas Becket was about 50 years old when either a careless or calculated remark by Henry II led to the archbishop’s death at the hands of Henry’s henchmen. Becket was killed in a side chapel of Canterbury Cathedral, marked today by a rather striking wall sculpture and memorial.
In 1220, the second date, the remains of Becket were moved from a grave in the cathedral’s crypt to a shrine behind the choir on the church’s main level. There it sat, venerated by likely hundreds of thousands of pilgrims (like those in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) for more than 300 years.
The spot where Becket died
The third date is 1538 and the English Reformation. Another King Henry, this time Henry VIII, authorizes his right-hand man Thomas Cromwell to dissolve the monasteries and abbeys, destroy designated churches, gather the wealth for the crown, and get rid of all those shrines containing alleged bones and related items designed to separate pilgrims from their money. Included on that list was the shrine of Thomas Becket. The shrine was destroyed; the bones it contained (including what was likely a faked skull) were burnt, Or pulverized. Or dispersed among other graves. Or something. (Accounts vary widely.) Whatever happened, the relic bones of the saint disappeared.
Fast forward to the next date, 1888. A group of Canterbury officials exhume a grave in the cathedral’s crypt, have the bones examined, and determine that they are likely the bones of Becket. The bones are reburied and the grave resealed. In 1949, the bones are exhumed a second time and examined using the then-current state of forensic science. And they were most emphatically determined to be not the bones of Becket. Instead, scientists could see that the bones had once been buried in the ground and mixed with animal bones.
So, were the bones of Thomas Becket indeed destroyed or dispersed in 1538?
In The Relics of Thomas Becket: A True-Life Mystery, John Butler sifts through all of the accounts, reports, theories, investigation files, and other materials to attempt to answer that question. The short answer is, no one knows what really happened to the bones. But there’s enough reports and speculation to suggest that the cathedral’s monks in 1538 knew what was going to happen to the shrine, and like at other cathedrals, hid the saint’s bones in some other part of the cathedral. It had happened with other significant saints in other English Cathedrals, so why not Canterbury.
It's a fascinating read about a story for which we will most likely never know the ending. Butler writes in an engaging, straightforward style, avoiding the melodrama that the story naturally evokes. Instead, he lays out his case for the bone’s secreted somewhere else in the cathedral, most likely another grave. The evidence for their destruction at the hands of Cromwell and his agents is too riddled with inconsistencies and conflicting reports.
Butler is an emeritus professor at the University of Kent and an expert of the history of Canterbury Cathedral. He previously published The Quest for Becket’s Bones (1995) and The Red Dean of Canterbury (2011).
Today, a simply candle marks the spot behind Canterbury’s choir where the original shrine sat. Somehow, it’s the best kind of memorial.
Top photograph: The site in Canterbury Cathedral where Archbishop Thomas Becket was struck down.
A candle marks where the shrine stood
Some Monday Readings
Video Analysis Shows Gaza Hospital Hit by Failed Rocket Meant for Israel – Wall Street Journal.
Stories our libraries tell us, if we listen – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Missing the Manhattan Project – Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis.
New Harriet and Dred Scott Memorial, Calvary Cemetery – Chris Naffziger at St. Louis Patina.
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