"The Book in the Cathedral" by Christopher de Hamel

It’s a small book about a significant topic. 

Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 by underlings of King Henry II. The archbishop, once a close confidante of the king, had shown himself stubbornly a man of the church once Henry had named him archbishop. He was struck down in a side chapel of Canterbury Cathedral on Dec. 29.

 

Becket became an instant martyr, and three later he was made a saint. For hundreds of years, Christians made their way to the martyr’s shrine, like the fictional pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For many years, a number of relics were associated with the saint. Some were real, and some were undoubtedly invented for the pilgrims (and their coins). 

 

Also associated was Becket’s library, a list of whose contents could be found in the 14^th century library catalogue of Canterbury Cathedral Priory. A few of the books had eventually made their way into the hands of British university libraries and private collectors. The disposition of Becket’s most treasured book, a psalter, was unknown. It was likely in his hands when he was struck down with a sword.

 

With an impressive bit of detective work, Christopher de Hamel tracked it down. The psalter still existed, and it was almost hiding in plain sight. He tells the story and its context in The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket. 

 

Christopher de Hamel

De Hamel does more than explain the find. He succinctly (the book is all of 58 pages, including index) describes how an object came to be considered a relic, the story of Becket’s martyrdom, the known contents of the man’s library, and how, over the course of a lunch with a Biblical historian in Cambridge, realized that a particular book was Becket’s long-lost psalter. It’s a fascinating story, well and concisely told. 

 

A fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, de Hamel (born 1950) is a librarian and expert on medieval manuscripts. He received the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize for his book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. Before his university career, he worked for Sotheby’s Western Manuscripts Department. He’s published numerous books and studies on manuscripts, and he’s formed a manuscript collection under his own name at Cambridge. 

 

The Book in the Cathedral is a fascinating tale of detective scholarship around one of the major saints of the medieval church in England. 

 

Related:

 

The Relics of Thomas Becket by John Butler.

 

Augustine of Canterbury by Robin Macintosh. 

 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

November Poem a Day 2023, Week 3 – Kelly Belmonte at All Nine.

 

Aedmund of England – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

How to Win the Fight for America – Katherine Boyle at The Free Press.

A Strangely Contemporary Verse Play: “Murder in the Cathedral” by T.S. Eliot

In 1934, T.S. Eliot worked with the produced E. Martin Browne to produce a verse play called The Rock. If the idea of a verse play or verse drama sounds strange, it’s how plays have been written for most of human history. The famous tragedies of ancient Greece are verse plays, as are the plays of William Shakespeare. Eliot and Browne wrote produced the play, and it was successful enough that they were asked to write one for the Canterbury Festival in 1935.

Eliot chose the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket by agents of Henry II in 1170 as the play’s subject. He relied heavily on the account of the murder by Edward Grim, a clerk from Cambridge who was at Canterbury Cathedral on the night of December 29 when the murder occurred. Grim’s account of Becket’s death is a short one, included in his biography of St. Thomas published some 10 years after the event. But Grim was there, and it was an eyewitness account.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: T.S. Eliot in 1934, shortly before writingMurder in the Cathedral.

We Are the Church (Part 1)

Earlier this month, we had the privilege and blessing to spend two weeks in London. And on one day, we took the train to Canterbury.

In my ignorance or perhaps arrogance, I thought I would prepare for our Canterbury visit by reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (modern-day prose version; I’m not into Old English).

It’s one of the seminal works of the English language, and Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the King James Version of the Bible largely accomplished what we know today as English. And I had a new purchase on my Kindle – Peter Ackroyd’s translation of Chuacer’s great stories.

I started reading on the plane to London, and continued reading once we arrived. But it took actually going to Canterbury to realize I had read the wrong thing. Chaucer might be a preparation for taking the trip to Canterbury,a nd our train from London stopped at so many places that I might have read the entire work in the time it took to get there. (I exaggerate.) (Slightly.)

The temptation is to think, especially in a place like England, that Canterbury would be “just another cathedral.” And cathedral it is, and a beautiful one that managed to survive Henry the VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe. It might be argued which one was the more destructive; the cathderal’s audio tour made it clear that Cromwell will never be forgiven.)

But Canterbury turned out to be more than the cathedral it is, much more.

At 3 p.m., as I stood in the choir of this great cathedral, a voice came over the loudspeaker, asking everyone to remain in place for a short prayer. Hundreds of people stopped whatever they were doing or looking at, and we listened.

It was a short prayer, followed by a request to join in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. And in that moment, hundreds of voices began to recite the well known words.

We were British, American, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, various African nationalities, Russian, Eastern European, Spanish, Italian – and we all recited the Lord’s Prayer together. In English. I was standing next to a sizeable group of Japanese tourists, and they all recited the prayer in English.

We were all in the middle of this beautiful edifice called Canterbury Cathedral, hundreds and thousands of miles away from our homes.

And in the moment, we were the church.

Photograph: The choir of Canterbury Cathedral, where I stood during the prayer time.

The brother was walking

The brother was walking

   to the side chapel when

   the air split in half knocking

   him to the stone floor.

On his back he looked up

   to see faces peering down

   but not seeing him instead

   seeing what the brother

Could see: a ruin of stones.

   Looking up from where he lay

   In the grass he sees the ruins

   around him, only foundation stones

Visible, the walls and windows

   gone, the shrines vanished,

   the towers crumbled, the altar

   gone, the statues of the saints

Disappeared. He watched the sky

   change colors, dark and light

   tumbling one after another in frenetic

   speed, suns and moons rising and

Waning, seasons changing, time

   exploding 0ver his forehead,

   He expected to feel terror but

   Only sensed the rain falling, lightly.

Photograph of St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, courtesy Britain Express.