On the back cover of the book that accompanies the British Museum’s exhibition Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint the eminent medievalist Christopher de Hamel is quoted: ‘A marvellous and consistently enthralling account . . . its realisation during the time of latter-day plague is a further miracle attributable to the fame of the saint’.(1) The fact that the exhibition, designed to mark the 850th anniversary of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29th December 1170, has happened at all may indeed suggest direct intervention from on high.(2) But given all the obstacles that the pandemic put in their way, it is the exhibition’s young curators, Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman, who deserve every praise for having seen to completion such a visually rewarding and intellectually stimulating tribute to one of the few medieval English people of whom almost everybody has heard.

Inevitably there were disappointments about cancelled overseas loans, particularly from France, where Becket spent his exile between 1164 and 1170, following the breakdown of his relations with Henry II. Nonetheless, the exhibition powerfully conveys the international nature of the martyr’s cult by loans of objects from further afield that will be known only to specialists. Two memorable depictions of Becket’s death have been borrowed from Scandinavian churches – a large gilt-copper reliquary casket crowned by dragon’s heads from Hedalen Stave Church in Norway, made c.1220–50, and a limestone baptismal font from Lyngsjö Church, Sweden, carved c.1191. There are also outstanding little-known works in private hands, such as a Mosan enamel triptych of c.1160–70, from the Wyvern Collection. Designed to contain a relic of the True Cross, its personifications of Justice, Piety and Mercy embody some of the issues that divided the king from his archbishop.

Other works have an almost uncanny immediacy: here, from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a Psalter illuminated c.1000 that Becket almost certainly owned; and here is a fragment of his shrine, a rose-pink marble capital discovered in 1984 on the bed of the River Stour, where it had lain ever since Henry VIII ordered the shrine’s destruction in 1538. The exhibit that is likely to linger longest in most visitors’ memories is one of the windows depicting miracles associated with Becket that were made between the completion of the setting for the shrine, the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, in 1184 and the installation of Becket’s body there in 1220. It is an extraordinary privilege to be able to inspect at eye level the panels from the window, which, like all the glass in the Trinity Chapel, have recently been restored. These works of art are elegantly displayed in the gallery’s awkwardly shaped space using warm but muted colours – beige and brown – against which the objects shine. This greatly helps the exhibition’s major achievement, the lucidity with which it takes the visitor, like a pilgrim, through the story of Becket’s life and afterlife.

One reason why the glass is so absorbingly interesting is the emphasis it places on stories connected with the miraculous healing powers of Becket’s remains. As a result, the windows depict a cross section of medieval society that pre-echoes by almost two centuries the most famous of all accounts of English life in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The curators have taken seriously the imperative to explain the significance of Becket to a generation for whom he is likely to seem a remote figure. It is possible that the exhibition will perpetuate his reputation in a way that will match T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, first performed in 1935, or the 1964 film Becket, in which Richard Burton portrayed Becket as a Saxon rebel against Norman overlords (in fact he was as Norman as they come) – and let us not forget Alfred Tennyson’s verse drama Becket, published in 1884, especially as the present state of the stained glass in the Trinity Chapel is such a tribute to the superb skill of its Victorian restorers.

The exhibition firmly roots the story of Becket’s career, from London merchant’s son to archbishop and eventually sainthood, in the everyday life of his time. This is justified by the fact that his cult was driven by popular feeling. Shocking although Becket’s murder was, it was initially not clear, even to the monks at Canterbury who witnessed the crime, that the archbishop had been martyred: as St Augustine remarked, a martyr is made not by his death but by the cause in which he died, and Becket’s causes were mostly controversial. Unsure how to proceed, the monks locked the cathedral’s doors and hastily buried Becket in the crypt. It was the widespread public acclamation of him as a martyr – no doubt encouraged by the clergy who had supported the archbishop – that started the process that led with remarkable speed to his canonisation in 1173 and Henry II doing penance at his tomb a year later. Becket’s cult remained popular for the next four hundred years thanks to the recognition of him as England’s national saint and there is no evidence of widespread public support for the enforced termination of his cult by Henry VIII, for whom any reminder of resistance to royal demands was deeply unwelcome.

The exhibition may also be remembered – as De Hamel hinted – for its own historical circumstances, in the midst of an epidemic that closed places of worship around the world. In England, the government order of closure in March 2020 was accepted by every faith as a temporary necessity in a pandemic but its consequences will take years to play out. This Magazine does not involve itself in religious debate, but there is an uncomfortable feeling that as far as the Church of England is concerned the seemingly ready acquiescence of its leadership in the closure of churches – in the face of widespread public demand for them to remain open – reflects the priorities of a part of the Church that for theological reasons is happy to accept a state of affairs that allows the significance of buildings to be downplayed, with potentially worrying implications for their preservation. That the Archbishop of Canterbury chose to celebrate Holy Communion at Easter 2020 in his kitchen by Zoom seemed to many as much a statement of long-term priorities as it was a temporary necessity. Ideas about the relationship between physical and spiritual reality have changed greatly since the Middle Ages, but it is not that fanciful to argue that the people of twelfth-century Canterbury who demanded that the monks provide access to Becket’s tomb have distant descendants in the many people today who have felt deprived by being denied their places of worship. It is perhaps a feeling that can be understood even by those of us who are not religious but have joyfully greeted the reopening of museums and exhibitions, which has enabled us at last to experience once more the physical presence of works of art rather than their digital simulacra.

1. Catalogue: Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint. By Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman. 272 pp. incl. 197 col. ills. (British Museum, London, 2021), £35. ISBN 978–0–7141–2838–2.
2. The exhibition closes on 22nd August. For more information, and to book tickets, visit https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/thomas-becket-murder-andmaking-saint, accessed 18th July 2021.