Every account of Thomas Becket’s life begins with his death. Michael Staunton opens this biography with a description of one of the most widespread images in medieval Christian art, represented in all kinds of visual media: an archbishop kneeling before an altar as armed knights raise their swords to strike him dead. The murder of the archbishop of Canterbury within his own cathedral, by men claiming to be acting on the wishes of the king, became a potent symbol of violence and sacrifice, of confrontation between the sacred and the agents of secular power. It provided the starting point for a saintly cult on a scale unprecedented in England, as the healing power ascribed to Becket’s relics attracted vast numbers of pilgrims to Canterbury.

It also generated a huge amount of writing about Becket’s life and miracles. Within a few years of his death in 1170, Becket had already become the subject of numerous biographies, all written under the shadow of his murder. Michael Staunton has considerable expertise in this hagiographical material: he has previously published an edition of extracts, The Lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester University Press, 2001), as well as a detailed study, Thomas Becket and His Biographers (Boydell, 2006), and an edited collection of essays about one of Becket’s biographers, Herbert of Bosham: A Medieval Polymath (York Medieval Press, 2019). In his own biography, Staunton distils the mass of information provided by the medieval sources into an assured and cogent telling of Becket’s story. The book is part of the Medieval Lives series from Reaktion, which offers fairly concise biographies of medieval figures designed to be accessible to the general reader, but the thorough scholarship underlying Staunton’s narrative will make it valuable for specialist readers, too.

The first two chapters, covering Thomas’ life up to his appointment as archbishop in 1162, deal swiftly with his rise to prominence. Thomas was a Londoner, from a Norman family. Later medieval legends romanticised his parentage: one claimed he was the son of a Crusader and a Saracen princess, who followed her lover to England from the Holy Land with only the words ‘Becket’ and ‘London’ to guide her. Sadly, this is a myth. Becket’s father was simply a Norman textile merchant who migrated from Rouen to London in the early twelfth century. Though the family were prosperous, these were not aristocratic origins, as Thomas Becket’s enemies would remind him in later life. During his education, young Thomas’ primary interests seem to have been hunting and sport, and it was not any notable piety or dedication to learning which led him to a career in the church. As Staunton describes, the twelfth century was a time of greatly expanding bureaucracy, and the best way to advance was through a career as some kind of administrative clerk. This was how Becket got his start, first in London and then in the household of Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald conveniently happened to come from the same region of Normandy as Becket’s father, and employed Thomas on business associated with the archbishop’s lands and estates.

It was through his work for Theobald that Thomas came into contact with Henry II. Henry’s accession to the throne in 1154 brought an end to a long period of civil war, and the king was keen to re-establish a strong royal government. He swiftly chose Thomas, who had proved himself a successful administrator through his service to the archbishop, as his chancellor. This made Becket one of the most powerful figures in England, the king’s right-hand man, with wide-ranging responsibilities over royal finance and administration. Thomas made the most of the wealth and privileges that came with his new position. Despite his clerical status, he adopted a lavish lifestyle, fought enthusiastically in Henry’s wars, and continued to pursue his passion for hunting. He also developed a close friendship with the young king, who regarded him as a loyal ally.

All this meant that when the see of Canterbury fell vacant in 1161 and the king proposed to make Thomas archbishop, there were misgivings: it was hardly proper, some said, ‘to place a follower of hounds and hawks in charge of a flock of sheep’. But the king got his way. This was an important turning point, and it is telling that the last eight years of Thomas’ life, between his appointment as archbishop and his murder, occupy a full two-thirds of the book. Staunton offers interesting reflections on the idea, prevalent in medieval accounts of his life, that Thomas experienced a significant alteration in character after he became archbishop. Some of his hagiographers claimed he underwent a profound religious conversion, but little changed in his lifestyle, and many contemporaries were sceptical whether the worldly chancellor had really had a change of heart. In many ways, Thomas remained an unlikely saint up to the very moment of his death.

Over four chapters, Staunton tracks the progress of the dispute between king and archbishop which ultimately led to that violent act in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It is a tangled story, but Staunton’s account is a very clear and useful guide to the conflict. Tension between the former friends grew through a series of clashes between royal authority and the rights of the church, on issues such as whether clerics who had committed crimes should be tried in secular or ecclesiastical courts. Thomas’ behaviour was often provocative. In the heat of a dispute with the king at Northampton in October 1164, Thomas used the liturgy to make a point: he shunned the royal saint of the day, Henry’s favourite Edward the Confessor, and chose instead to celebrate the Mass of St Stephen, protomartyr, symbol of resistance to unjust authority. Was Thomas already asking for martyrdom himself?

Soon after this Thomas fled into exile, and for the next few years, king and archbishop continued to wrangle with each other from a distance. Their exchange of threats and appeals to papal authority made the argument a subject of international interest. When it reached an unexpected climax in Thomas’ sudden murder, just weeks after he finally returned to England in December 1170, the impact was felt far beyond Canterbury. Whatever Thomas’ personal character – and he certainly had plenty of detractors – the sacrilege of his murder was deeply shocking. ‘The sons slew their father in the womb of their mother’, one contemporary wrote, and those who had witnessed his death immediately began to hail him as a martyr.

This biography is an excellent introduction to Becket’s life, providing a balanced account of the medieval sources and skilfully placing him within the context of his time. Ending soon after Becket’s death, it keeps close to its stated remit by not looking much beyond the twelfth century. Some assessment of Becket’s later legacy would have been a useful addition: his cultural impact as a miracle-working saint is undeniable, but did his actions have any lasting influence on the relationship between the English church and state? His post-medieval afterlife, beginning with the targeted obliteration of his tomb at the Reformation, has been almost as contested as his reputation in his own time, and even today he still attracts both praise and criticism of an intensity unusual for a medieval saint. A brief commentary on these aspects of his story would have been welcome. Nonetheless, for anyone wanting to understand what Becket’s contemporaries made of the controversial archbishop, Staunton’s book is an ideal place to start.