Guy - Thomas becket : warrior, priest, rebel

ALSO BY JOHN GUY

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Contributor to The Oxford History of Britain, The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Sixteenth Century, The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain

Copyright 2012 by John Guy

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in the United Kingdom by Viking, a division of Penguin Books Ltd.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Guy, John
Thomas Becket: warrior, priest, rebel / John Guy.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60341-2
1. Thomas, ? Becket, Saint, 1118?1170. 2. Great BritainHistoryHenry II, 11541189Biography. 3. Christian martyrsEnglandBiography. 4. Christian saintsEnglandBiography. 5. StatesmenGreat BritainBiography. I. Title.
DA 209. T 4 G 89 2011 942.031092dc23 2011042794

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Genealogical Table
The Normans and Angevins

I N CITING UNITS OF CURRENCY, THE OLD STERLING DENOMINATIONS of pounds, shillings, and pence have been retained. There are 12 pence (12d.) in a shilling (1s.), twenty shillings in a pound (1), and so on. A mark is roughly 13s. 4d., although the precise correlation would depend entirely on the silver content of the coins tendered in payment, so conversions are not feasible. The sum of 100, the equivalent of around 60,000 (US $96,000) today, is the amount needed to pay the household expenses of an average baron for a year. One thousand silver marks would be worth around 400,000 (US $640,000) today. Some rough estimates of the contemporary purchasing equivalents for Anglo-Norman and Angevin units of currency, where applicable, are given in the text.

S HORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON NOVEMBER 25, 1120, LESS THAN a month before Thomas Becket was born, a swift, sleek, newly refitted longship slipped out of the port of Barfleur in Normandy and entered the English Channel with fifty or so crew members and up to three hundred passengers on board. The vessels high pointed ends, its single central mast and rectangular sail, and most of all its distinctive side rudder echoed Normandys debt to the Vikings, who in the ninth and tenth centuries had overrun large areas of the British Isles and Flanders and, after sailing up the Seine, occupied much of northwestern France.

In or about the year 911, the weak King Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks, had made terms with Hrlf, a Viking lord said to be so huge that no horse could carry him. Charles salvaged the rest of his dominions by ceding to Hrlf the lands about the lower Seine and the city of Rouen that the Norsemen had already settled, turning poachers into gamekeepers and allowing them to carve out a fief that would evolve into the duchy of Normandy. Hrlf, in return, was baptized a Christian and did homage and fealty to Charles, placing his hands on the Gospels or the relics of a saint and swearing to be Charless man and to preserve his life, limbs, and earthly honor. Better known to his successors as Count Rollo, Hrlf founded a powerful dynasty through intermarriage with the local inhabitants, shaping a people as famous for their courage, ingenuity, sociability, and piety as they were notorious for their wanderlust, violence, ambition, and greed. From the legacy of the Carolingians, Count Rollos successors gleaned lingering concepts of ducal sovereignty, and from their Viking inheritance expertise in seafaring and trading. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is that within three weeks of annihilating the Viking invaders of Northumbria, King Harold II, the last of the Old English kings, lost his throne to William the Conqueror, great-great-great-grandson of Hrlf.

The night of November 25 was bitterly cold. A hard frost covered the ground, but visibility was good. The sky was cloudless, and no mist or fog obscured the exit to the harbor and the open sea. Orderic Vitalis, a monk from the abbey of Saint-Evroult in Normandy, one of several contemporary chroniclers who did their best to uncover the true facts, erroneously reports that there were nine hours of moonlight. In reality it was closer to the new moon, so relatively dark. The stars, however, shone brightly, and since mariners set their course by the polestar, which they called stella maris (star of the sea), there were no good grounds on which the skipper could delay sailing. A modern expert has calculated that high water was at 10:43 P.M . that night. By midnight (continues Orderic) the surface of the sea was relatively calm, lapping against the shore, and there was a southerly breeze.

But this was to be no ordinary Channel crossing. In fact another chronicler, William of Malmesbury, scarcely exaggerates when he says, No ship ever brought so much misery to England. Thomas fitz Stephen, whose father had been William the Conquerors master steersman in 1066, was the skipper. Hearing that King Henry I, the ablest and youngest of the late conquerors sons, planned a voyage from Normandy to England with his whole court, this seasoned mariner had obtained an audience with the king and begged to have his fathers old job. He offered Henry his finest vessel, the White Ship, and the king decided that his sons William and Richard and his daughter Countess Matilda of La Perche should travel on it. Prince William, an ebullient, spoiled, fun-loving teenager, just seventeen and recently married, was the kings only legitimate son, on whom he doted. His elder siblings were bastards, for Henry was one of the most promiscuous kings of England, fathering at least twenty illegitimate offspring by a parade of mistresses (effortlessly beating Charles II, who sired a mere fourteen). He gave way too easily to the sin of lust, says Orderic drily. From boyhood to old age he was sinfully enslaved by this vice.

With his ship detailed to carry only passengers, without horses or heavy cargo apart from the royal treasure and some casks of wine, fitz Stephens task looked easy. The kings children were to be accompanied by many leading courtiers and their retinues, and the crew members were elated at the prospect. When Prince William arrived at the quay, the sailors greeted him with cheers and shouts of glee. They asked for drink to toast him and were granted three muids of wine from the casks on board, amounting to roughly two hundred litersfar too much for fifty menbut fitz Stephen was unable or unwilling to interfere.