"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.

“The Relics of Thomas Becket” by John Butler

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.

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.