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- [00:01]
Narrator
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Morteza Hajizadeh
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Morteza Hajizadeh
The danger the camp is under is.
- [00:34]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters.
- [00:42]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's go do the impossible.
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Dr. Michael Staunton
I'm not gonna let some stupid monsters stand in my way.
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Dr. Michael Staunton
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Dr. Michael Staunton
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- [01:26]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Michael Staunton about his most recent book that was published with Reaction Publishers. The book is called Thomas Beckett and His World, which was published just this year. Dr. Michael Staunton is professor of Medieval History at University College, Dublin. He's an internationally recognized expert on Thomas Beckett. Michael, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:05]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Thank you, Mortesa. Thank you for having me on.
- [02:08]
Morteza Hajizadeh
This is another wonderful book published by Reaction in that famous series Medieval Lives, and this one is on Thomas Beckett, which I'm guessing is one of the most famous or let's say most recognizable medieval figures. But before we get to talk about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and how you became interested in that, and then tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:35]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So I suppose the main two fields of interest I have had are Thomas Becket and biography.
- [02:44]
My PhD was on the subject of Thomas Becket and his biographers. Since then, I've written on historical writing in the 12th century. Currently I'm writing on biography. So when I was invited to be part of this series, I thought, well, this is a great opportunity to bring two of those interests together. Thomas Beckett and biography. And I thought there's something that I can do different here because a lot of biographies have been written of Thomas Becket. People started writing about him from as soon as he was killed in December 1170 right up to the present day. But I thought there was an opportunity here to talk not only about Thomas himself, but about the world that he lived in.
- [03:30]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I think this is a great way of framing it because like I said, I English, I studied English literature and I came across Thomas Beckett through English literature, watched movies about him. But you're right, it's all about, or it's mostly what led to his death and what brought about his end. And I was curious to ask you, how is this book a bit different? How does it approach Thomas Beckett differently? And you kind of opened the book by framing it, by framing Beckett as the product of the 12th century world, which is a rapidly changing world in England. How do you approach him differently and what sort of misconceptions about him?
- [04:14]
Let's say, are you keen to, or do you, in this book, try to correct.
- [04:19]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So I think most people who have an interest in history, they'd know the name Thomas Becket. They would know that he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. They might know that this was the result of an angry outburst by the King, King Henry ii, where he supposedly said, who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Or who will rid me of this troublesome priest? They might know that it was about a clash between the Church and the Crown. They might know something about a personal friendship between the King and Thomas the Archbishop that went wrong. But there's a lot more to it. And one of the things is that we know more about Thomas Becket than anybody from England during the Middle Ages. There's such a volume of material about him and there's such an interesting life that preceded the death. So that's one part of it. But it's also, I thought that when you try to explain the life of Thomas Becket to somebody today, you have to also, if you're to understand it, you have to also understand the world that he lived in, the social and economic world he lived in. You have to understand something about what medieval historians called the 12th century Renaissance that is an intellectual flourishing of the time, developments in things like law, in writing. You have to understand something about the Church and the papacy at this time. You have to understand something about the Kingdom of England and its relationship to other parts of Europe. So very few people know all of those things. And it struck me that this is actually a Very good way of explaining many of those aspects of life, that the story of Thomas Beckett is both an interesting story in itself. It's a dramatic story. There's a very strong personal aspect to it. But it also gives us a way into England and Europe at a time of really dramatic change. I think as well, sometimes if people have just a vague notion of the Middle Ages, they might think of it as being quite monolithic. They might think of not an awful lot changing between the year 500 and the year 1500, say. But there were times when history seems to speed up, and the 12th century was one of those times. So that was really what I was trying to do in this book.
- [06:59]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And when I was reading your book, in your introduction, I came across, I mean, you lay out a problem that exists about Beckett, Thomas Beckett, But I never thought about it myself. And that is the problem and what you call the problem of partisanship, especially when it comes to sources about his life.
- [07:26]
There are obviously different sources, such as letters, hierarchies, royal writs, chronicles. But you say that you're all steeped in partisanship. What do you mean by that? What do you mean that all these sources are steeped in partisanship? And how do you approach or how do you try to get over this problem?
- [07:46]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yeah, I think it's a central element to all of this.
- [07:50]
Biography. In the Middle Ages, virtually all biography was partisan. Now you can say that today biography is also partisan quite often, or that there's unconscious bias. But it's different in the Middle Ages in that there is no.
- [08:11]
There's no idea that biography should be objective. There's a sense it should be truthful, but that's not the same as being detached. Notion of a critical biography, isn't there? So how do we deal with that? Does that mean that we're just getting the position of people who want to promote Thomas? Who are his cheerleaders? Well, they are his cheerleaders. They are promoting him. But the fact is, first of all, we've simply got so many. So at least 10 biographies which written of Thomas within the first decade of his death. So there's a lot of them that haven't even survived. Beyond the many that have survived, there's apparently even one that was written by a woman, which is very unusual at the time, that has not survived. These sources will. A lot of what they're trying to do is they're saying he's been hailed as a saint because of the manner of his death, but we want to show that his life was also that of a saint. Now, that was a difficult thing to do. Even in the wave of outpouring of emotion and hailing him as a saint after his murder, it was difficult because he was a really controversial individual during his lifetime, and there were a lot of things about his life that really did not seem to smack of sainthood. So they try to recreate a picture or to create a picture that brings together the life and the death, but at the same time, the writing with potential readers who knew Thomas, who knew he was controversial, who knew that he did things that didn't fit the idea of a saint, they had to acknowledge this. And as well as that, in the wake of Thomas murder and canonization, there was a certain confidence to these writers where they felt that they could acknowledge the very many criticisms that were made of him during his life. So they will refer to how the Bishop of London said about Thomas, the man's a fool and he always will be. They refer to people who, even after his death, doubted that he was a saint. They'll refer to his lavish lifestyle before he became archbishop. They'll refer to the fact that he was criticized even by those close to him, and he had moments when he didn't live up to his own expectations of himself, because they feel they can do that responding to lingering criticism and still make their case for him. So that means that you have a more nuanced picture than you will often have in a life of a saint that is purely there to praise him. As well as that, we have a huge number of letters that survive from the time. So we have all of these letters. Many of them are supportive of him, many of them are critical. And as well as that, we've just got so many writers that we can often check at least the details against each other. Five of these people were there in the cathedral when he was murdered. They saw it. So the details are very similar. Their interpretations might be somewhat different, but that's a lot of the enjoyment of looking at Thomas, the fact that we have so many sources we can pick through them to see, okay, what's most believable here? What here is the writers trying to lead us in some way.
- [11:43]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You explained it really beautifully. And.
- [11:48]
There'S a topic you approach in the introduction, but again, you try to flush it out throughout the book. But I'm keen to ask you more about it now. And that's obviously the conflict between Beckett and Henry ii.
- [12:03]
You kind of, in your introduction, say that this story is not really a morality tale of good versus evil. There's a complex interaction between these two figures, two powerful personalities, Henry II and Beckett.
- [12:17]
And this kind of complex relationship operates within this overlapping but increasingly rigid institutional systems as well. I'm interested to know if how you frame that conflict. Was it a clash of personalities, institutions, ideologies, or was it a mix of all?
- [12:36]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yeah, I mean, I think it was a mix of all. And to explain that, I suppose I should say a little bit about the background about Thomas and Henry.
- [12:44]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Absolutely, yeah.
- [12:45]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Thomas was born around 1118. He was born in London. His parents were Normans.
- [12:55]
A Norman merchant family. So this is in the wake of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, of course. So they had moved over to England, established themselves, made quite a success of themselves. His father, Gilbert Becket, was a successful merchant, his mother was named Matilda. So he grew up in a well off background, but not. He didn't come from noble family. And that's something unusual in terms of the people that we know about in this, or at least up to this period. Most people whose lives we know about in some detail do come from noble family. And he instead he made his way up the ranks by, first of all, education, but also working for various people. He was an accountant's assistant in the City of London. He was a clerk to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Theobald. So this is where he came from. It's very characteristic of the time. This is a time when you had greater possibility of social mobility than before. Still the case that the vast majority of people are peasantry, they will die in the place where they grew up. But for some people in between.
- [14:19]
Who are not noble, this is a time of opportunity. And Thomas is one of the best examples you have of this. Henry II's grandfather was king Henry I. His mother, Matilda was passed over as successor. Her father had nominated her as successor. But on his death, the throne was taken by another relative called Stephen. So Henry was a bit younger than Thomas. He grew up in Anjou and in Normandy, and he grew up with this sense all through his life that the throne had been taken away from his mother. And this is something that he must.
- [15:05]
Gain for himself and he must restore to its former glory. So how the two encounter each other is that by the mid-1150s, Thomas is this.
- [15:22]
He's a clerk, senior administrative figure in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's somebody who has very much been made it his own way, climbing the steps of power to get to that position. Henry comes to the throne as the successor to Stephen. He's this very energetic figure. He wants A lot.
- [15:53]
For himself and for the power of monarchy. And initially they're agreed on this. Thomas joins his administration as Royal Chancellor and that's a very important position in the kingdom. And they work together in reforming the kingdom. But then eventually when Henry appoints him Archbishop of Canterbury, they have a falling out. So there's a personal element which I think we'll talk about a little bit more. But there's also underlying this, there are structural issues. One is the status of the monarchy in England. We sometimes think of England as having always been this hugely important power. It wasn't, it wasn't really before, certainly before the Norman Conquest. But Henry is determined to extend the power of the King. Meanwhile, you've had for 60, 70, 80 years the Papacy gaining greater power, gaining further influence in England. And these are the main things that clash. The expanding power of the papacy, the expanding power of the monarchy. There was probably bound to be some kind of a clash there, but it was the, the personal element that sparked it and made it so divisive. And a lot of the people who got caught up in the dispute, they said, look, there's always going to be problems around this. But the real issue here is that these two people, as one of Thomas's biographers said, the kingdom simply isn't big enough for both of them.
- [17:40]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And were they really close friends or was it maybe a later romanticization of their relationship?
- [17:48]
Dr. Michael Staunton
I think to some extent it is a later romanticization, but there's no doubt that they did work well together. So when Thomas becomes Royal Chancellor, he's introduced to this kind of a lifestyle that he hasn't seen before.
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He's introduced to the life of the nobility and that involves hunting, hawking, playing aristocratic games, feasting, display of wealth, elegant clothes, all of this. And he clearly enjoys that. The way the biographers speak about it, they say there were never two greater friends in the Christian world than Henry and Thomas. And I think there is a certain amount of building this up as a dramatic way of then accentuating the clash between them. But on the other hand, they certainly did work in alliance with each other. And we can see that by the fact that when the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important ecclesiastical office in the country, when that becomes vacant, Henry chooses Thomas. He doesn't choose him because Thomas is especially religious, he chooses them because he seems to be his loyal right hand man and that this is something.
- [19:15]
That will benefit him. So clearly there was a very good working relationship. How personal it was, it's maybe a little exaggerated.
- [19:28]
By the biographers and also in popular, the popular notion of it, it was certainly exaggerated in the, the film from 1960s, Beckett, which, which really centered it around this, this personal relationship. So, so I think there is a good deal of romanticization there.
- [19:49]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's talk about some, some, some aspects that has not really been so much discussed. And you mentioned it at the beginning, but most of the biographies or most of the discussions about Beckett start after his death. But let's talk about London's social and economic environment and how influential it was or what was its impact on Beckett's ambitions and personality when it was growing up there.
- [20:16]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So one of the biographers of Beckett, he starts not with Beckett's birth or his childhood. He said name is William Fitzstephen. And he says, I, like Thomas, am a Londoner. So I'm going to begin by telling you about London. And he gives this amazing description of the city, of the kinds of games that children played skating on the rivers.
- [20:47]
During winter. He talks about the various trades, how you hear all kinds of languages coming from all over the known world. He talks about the wealth, he talks about the poverty. He talks about where Thomas grew up, all of the sounds of the church bells that you would hear around it. So Thomas was born right in the heart of London. So London today, that area is known as the City. It was the financial part of the centre of London until a few decades ago. It's the oldest part of the city. It's the part that was surrounded by the medieval walls. And you can see in the street names still.
- [21:36]
The kinds of place that Thomas grew up in.
- [21:41]
You've got streets that are named after, say, Bread street or they would have sold bread. So you have this.
- [21:49]
Sense of growing up in a commercial center. You can still, you can go and see where he was born to this day, it's on this street called Cheapside, which ran right through the city. So he's right there in the center. Next door to him there's a street called Old Jewelry. And that was the place where there was a synagogue there. And at that time, until the expulsion of London's Jewish population.
- [22:24]
Nearly 200 years later. So he was within easy walking distance of the Tower of London, the symbol of the crown. He was close to St. Paul's Cathedral. It didn't look like St. Paul's Cathedral does now. That was built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London, but it was in fact an even larger structure. And the population of London at this point was really taking off. It still was nothing like the size of Great cities like Constantinople. But it was becoming for the first time a major city and also a place that was very open to the rest of the world. And Thomas himself, his family were, you know, as I said, they came from quite a well off. They did quite well in the textile industry. But their fortunes were in decline by the time Thomas came of age. So he grew up against this background of declining fortunes for his family and the necessity of really going beyond London and exploring the rest of the world. There's in one of the lives of Thomas, it begins with a miracle. Various miracles that are omens of Thomas's birth. And one of them has the closing line. It talks about how London is not big enough to contain Thomas. There's an image of a cloth that Thomas mother tried to unfold and it's impossible to unfold within the city of London because it's so great. And this also gives the image of Thomas was from London. He was very much a Londoner, but he also transcended London and he spent most of his life outside of London.
- [24:22]
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Morteza Hajizadeh
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Dr. Michael Staunton
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Dr. Michael Staunton
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- [25:29]
Dr. Michael Staunton
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- [25:50]
Morteza Hajizadeh
What about the chapter three? I specifically love chapter three myself, because that's where you examine Beckett's dramatic transition from that royal chancellor to Archbishop of Canterbury. And.
- [26:08]
You emphasize that kind of. Henry II expected him to act as a compliant archbishop, but.
- [26:17]
Becket sort of underwent what you call conversion. He more or less identified strongly with the ecclesiastical autonomy there, and he positioned himself as the defender of church liberties.
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Let's see.
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Do you think that.
- [26:39]
The conflict that he had with Henry was like a matter of principle or personal grievance? And also, I'm interested to know more about the growing power of canon law and how that contributed to that confrontation these two had.
- [26:54]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yeah, so the change was certainly a kind of a political change, if you want to put it like that. It also was obviously a personal change, too. So how it came about was that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald Thomas, former employer, he's very elderly.
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During Henry's early reign, and he dies in 1161, and so the position is vacant. Henry's early years in collaboration with Thomas had been all about trying to assert the power of the king. And he's doing this by going back, trying to turn back the clock 35 years to the time of his grandfather and saying, you know, my grandfather had these powers as against the nobility, he had these rights, all of this. Henry is also interested in reforming the Church so that there's a similar relationship to the way things were during his grandfather's time. So he thinks that Thomas is the obvious person. Now, a number of the accounts, and again, this could be, as you said earlier, a romanticization of that. But certain accounts talk about how when Thomas hears the news that he's to be appointed archbishop, he's dressed in these elegant clothes with long sleeves, playing chess, very aristocratic game, and he says, really, you want to appoint me somebody? Look at me, look at my clothes, look at my life. How could I possibly take on this position as head of the English Church when he does become Archbishop? Something clearly did change, there's no doubt about that. But historians ever since have been trying to figure out what exactly that was.
- [28:50]
You do see a gradual, it's not sudden, much more gradual falling out with Henry over a number of minor things, initially about taxation, and then it starts to build up.
- [29:06]
And I'll talk about some of the particular in a minute. How the biographers explain it is that when he became archbishop, Thomas underwent a transformation. They talk about it being he was touched by the hand of God. He put off the old man he put off on the new man. So this is all the kind of biblical imagery of conversion. And they say that he began to live a different lifestyle, that he would wear under his elegant archbishop's robes, he had a monk's habit. And beneath that there was a hair shirt, which is kind of a sharp, biting costume cutting into the flesh. So nobody could see this. Now this is of course, a claim that nobody can deny that, you know, he underwent this great change, but nobody could actually see it. And some people see this as just retrospective after his murder, trying to explain his falling out with the King. But even if we don't believe that he.
- [30:19]
Developed some new sort of spiritual.
- [30:23]
Intention, we can certainly see that he started to believe that, well, now I'm head of the English Church, I must stand up for its rights. And this developed so that it went beyond just say, refusing to accept certain taxes that the King was imposing. He started, for example, excommunicating some of the King's most senior vassals. So that is, you know, a very serious thing. It means that people are not supposed to talk to them, it's kind of boycotting them. And then it comes to more serious issues. And the issue here is about the King wants Thomas and the rest of the Church to agree to what he calls the customs of the realm, or his ancestral customs. So he says these are all the rights that the King had as regards the Church in my grandfather's day. I want you to agree to these. And most of these are about jurisdiction. So probably the most important one was about the punishment of members of the clergy who had committed a serious crime like murder. Up until this point.
- [31:37]
Those clergy who had been cited for a serious crime like this, they answered in a church court and they often got off with a very light sentence. You know, maybe they, they just had to verbally acknowledge what they had done, do some mild penance. The King was insisting that.
- [31:59]
These people be handed over to his court, but he also had maybe some more far reaching.
- [32:06]
Wishes in this regard. You mentioned canon law. Canon law is the law of the Church. And canon law had always existed as long as the Church had existed. But in the 12th century, it's being codified. This is all part of the expansion of papal influence. So it was always possible that you could appeal to the Pope for judgment, but it was completely impractical. People would have to wade through the laws. You'd have to maybe go and visit Rome yourself. Now, there are all kinds of mechanisms by which you could appeal to the Pope for judgment. At the same Time you've got what we call the English common law developing under Henry ii. Again, it had been the case that in theory, you could always appeal to the King's judgment. But how could you do that if you were living a few hundred miles away? Now, what Henry is doing is he's also, he has lawyers who are.
- [33:07]
Systemizing the law and also establishing, for example, traveling justices. So very similar to, you know, it is the basis of.
- [33:19]
The law in much of the English speaking world to this day. And these two things clash inevitably. The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot say, okay, I'll stop appealing to the Pope. I will agree that our churchmen can be handed over to a royal court, or I will accept that the King. I need to get the King's permission to travel outside of the kingdom. These things may have been the case a few decades earlier, but times had moved on since then. And here, Thomas and Henry are stuck in the middle of those two de wagons, but particularly Thomas, not knowing what she should do here.
- [34:05]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And as a result of all that conflict we had that they had, Beckett, you know, had to. And it led to Beckett's trial and then it culminated in his flight into exile. What was the impact of the exile, Beckett's political strategy, and also on his identity, his spiritual identity.
- [34:28]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Right. So just to explain how he ended up having to go into exile. And you mentioned the trial.
- [34:36]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah.
- [34:36]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Eventually, when relations between Thomas and Henry become so difficult that they cannot continue, Henry is trying to get Thomas to resign his office, to put so much pressure on him that he will resign his office. So he summons them to trial in Northampton, and this trial goes on for days. And initially, Thomas is very much under pressure. He accepts certain kinds of technical.
- [35:08]
Points where he is at fault. But then Henry starts introducing new charges, for example, claiming that he embezzled money when he was Chancellor, that some money that was meant for building projects like the Tower of London, you know, repairing the Tower of London, that Thomas had embezzled it. This is really just a way of putting unbearable pressure on him. There's a lot of threats from people in the hall, the nobility, many of those within the church are remonstrating with them and saying, just, you know, accept what the King wants or resign. But on the last day of the trial, Thomas comes into the chamber carrying his cross in his arms, this big processional cross. He's already said the mass that morning, not the Mass that you would normally say on that day, but the Mass of King Stephen. King Stephen was the first Christian martyr. And The Mass of St Stephen says kings and princes have spoken against me. So he is presenting himself now as the successor of the early Christian martyrs, even the successor of Jesus himself. And he's taking things beyond simply a personal dispute or even a dispute that's about jurisdiction, and he's making it one that is between good and evil.
- [36:40]
Or God and his enemies. This is, of course, infuriating to both Henry and to a lot of people in the Church around Thomas, but. But anyway. So he refuses to hear sentence, storms out of the trial, and in the middle of the night he leaves his lodgings and he goes in disguise, makes his way to the southeastern coast of England, gets into a small ship with a couple of companions and makes his way to Flanders first and then France. So what this does is it opens up the conflict beyond England. So many more people come to be involved. So first of all, he's welcomed warmly by the King of France, King Louis VII of France. Now, King Louis, his attitude was.
- [37:34]
The King of England's disadvantage is my advantage. So there's always a kind of a tension between King Louis, who is in many ways much weaker than Henry. Henry rules over almost half of France. He's inherited this or much of it through his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor of Aquitaine had earlier been the wife of King Louis. So there's all kinds of tensions there. So he gives his support to Thomas. The next thing is that Thomas makes his way to the Pope. The Pope is also in exile at this time. He's in France because there's a papal schism. The Emperor of Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, has set up an anti pope that is a rival pope. So he's depending on King Louis for protection, and he's also depending on King Henry II for support. So Henry sends his embassy to the Pope and says, more or less threatening, says this guy, Thomas Becket is a troublemaker.
- [38:39]
You know how loyal our King Henry has been to you. You don't want to damage that. So by the time Thomas meets the Pope, the Pope is in a very difficult position. Obviously, he has to support the rights of the Church, but also he's very afraid of losing the support of the King of England. So when Thomas meets him, he says to Thomas, you are absolutely fighting the good fight. I am supportive of your cause. But then he also says, now is the time for you to retreat and spend some time just with a few companions. And he sends them off to a remote and austere monastery called Pontini. So he's trying to have things both ways. He's trying to stand up for the rights of the Church as any Pope would. But he's also trying to keep this dangerous character, Thomas. In some ways, it's quiet him down a bit. So it starts to be the case that the Becket dispute involves people well beyond England. Thomas was in exile for six years and he was murdered a month after his return to England. So this is the time where we get the letters, we have all of these collections of letters where Thomas was writing to his supporters, he was negotiating with various people, he was trying to get the Pope on side. The Pope was at one point restraining him, at one point encouraging him. You have letters from the King complaining about Thomas, you have letters from other people within the Church writing to the Pope saying, it's time for you to abandon Thomas. We can carry on with the Church better without him. So in all of these ways, the exile explodes the conflict and makes it something that is not just about England.
- [40:43]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I'm glad you mentioned the sort of international scope of it. I mean, how other people in France and papacy were involved. I'm guessing this is also one aspect that hasn't really been discussed much when it comes to Thomas Beckett. It's more or less seen as a domest.
- [41:01]
English, let's say, issue rather than more, more of an international one. When France and papacy got involved.
- [41:09]
Do you, do you think that.
- [41:12]
You know, Beckett was more effective when he was in exile, even symbolically, as opposed to the time that he was an Archie shop in England? Do you think he had more power or more.
- [41:26]
Authority, let's say, when it was in exile?
- [41:29]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yeah, I think that's an interesting issue. And it also ties in with something that is very characteristic of the time, which is the 12th century was a time of great mobility. And one of the fascinating things you see in the story of Thomas, especially at this time, is just the movement of people across Europe in difficult circumstances. And, you know, Thomas himself.
- [41:58]
He'D been educated in Paris. When he was 20, he dropped out of.
- [42:05]
School in Paris, came back to England, but later he was sent by Archbishop Theobald to study in Bologna, to study in other places. So, you know, he had travelled a lot, he had traveled a lot. As chancellor, he, he actually led an army in France when he was royal Chancellor for the King of England, as archbishop, he also did a certain amount of traveling. So this was a world also in which we think of these firm borders of maybe England, France, Germany. It was all a lot more porous. You know, as I said, King Henry II had extensive lands in France. He ruled from the North Sea to the Pyrenees. So the world was somewhat more. The fates of people were more intertwined in this period than maybe they had been in earlier centuries of the Middle Ages, more than most people imagine. And there's also the fact of writing, writing being such an important aspect of the Beckett dispute and of this time, the development of a more literate culture. So Thomas is able to, you know, be there in this remote monastery, but he can still send letters. He can send propaganda letters making his case. He can say, well, look, I have been expelled from the country. I'm not running away. I have actually, I'm persecuted.
- [43:41]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I'm.
- [43:42]
Dr. Michael Staunton
I'm a persecuted exile. He's got closer proximity to people like the pope who, you know, Henry has his own friends within the papal curia, among the cardinals. But Thomas has a network of spies, of propagandists who will take this, you know, his message of how he is being.
- [44:06]
Persecuted throughout the Christian world. And a lot of these kinds of ideas, the image of Thomas as the suffering figure, they are later integrated into his biography. This is the time when they really start to think about, okay, what is this dispute about? Can we take it above the level of.
- [44:29]
The individual issues? How can we associate ourselves with. With the great saints of the early church and say that just as they were persecuted, so Thomas is being persecuted? So in all of that way, it did move things on. It also made it more difficult. It made it more difficult for a compromise to be made. And it meant that when a compromise was eventually made, there was so much bitterness there. There were people who, when Thomas was about to return to Canterbury, people who had been given his lands while he was in exile, they were now bound to.
- [45:10]
Lose out. Other people who were exiled because of their support for Thomas, they were also involved. So it brought so many more people into it, and.
- [45:21]
It increased the bitterness between the various parties.
- [45:25]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. And.
- [45:29]
Was there a time where.
- [45:33]
Beckett felt that his martyrdom was a real possibility? Was he aware that he might be killed?
- [45:43]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So this is something that a lot of people in recent times have debated about. Thomas posed as a martyr for much of his last few years, to the extent that, you know, one of his sharpest enemies within the church said, you know, you claim to be acting as a martyr, but you have to realize that it's the cause that makes the martyr. And what is your cause really, apart from your personal ambition and difficulty? So people recognize that he was, you know, in talking about his persecution, that he was posing as a martyr. The other thing is, 12th century world is a dangerous world, but it's safer. It's a lot safer than a century earlier, as this kind of travel shows you that there were dangers on the road as people travel, but there was a lot of traveling being done. And this is also to do with, ironically, the kinds of reforms that kings like Henry II are doing of making it a safer world, if also in some ways more oppressive in terms of taxation and all of those things. When they patched up.
- [46:59]
An agreement in 1170 which allowed Thomas to return to England, he clearly was nervous. And before he traveled to England.
- [47:13]
He got letters back from people who had gone in advance saying, there's a very dangerous atmosphere here. You need to be very, very careful. The other thing is that Thomas did so much.
- [47:28]
That seemed to be inviting martyrdom. So the thing that broke the deadlock between them in 1170 and brought about a peace agreement was that Henry, King Henry, had decided to have his son crowned, also called Henry, in his own lifetime. The problem was that the person who was supposed to crown a king was the Archbishop of Canterbury. So Henry went ahead and violated all custom by having other ecclesiastics crown his son. So he had Thomas's arch enemies, the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London and another, the Bishop of Salisbury, crown the son. This caused outrage throughout Europe and Henry made certain concessions that allowed Thomas to return home. But just before Thomas sailed back to England, he did one last thing. He sent ahead letters that either excommunicated or suspended those ecclesiastics who were involved in the coronation of the the King's son. And this, as was said of somebody else many centuries later in doing this, he had signed his own death warrant because this was the thing that caused outrage to the king.
- [48:53]
And that's led a lot of people to say that Thomas really knew he was going to face martyrdom. He actually even wanted martyrdom itself. This is T.S. eliot and his murder in the cathedral. The last temptation that Thomas is approached by is the temptation to become a martyr and glory in it. I don't think that's entirely true. I think that he was returning to a dangerous situation. But you can see by his daily letters in that last phase, you can see that he's just conducting normal business. So I think he acted rashly and I think he posed as a martyr, but I don't think he actually felt that he was going to be murdered. Hablas espanol spries du dzoich.
- [49:39]
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- [50:06]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And do you think that papacy ultimately.
- [50:11]
Supported or restrained Beckett in his final phase?
- [50:15]
Dr. Michael Staunton
You know, so the papacy had restrained him repeatedly, but he was able to excommunicate these people because the Pope had given him the power to do so. But the Pope probably didn't realize that he was, you know, he might have used it, but I don't think the Pope could have expected that he would excommunicate with people so quickly. He was given this general power, which is that if the king decides to have his son crowned, because they knew that this was a possibility, that any ecclesiastic who participated in it could be disciplined. So it's basically the Pope gives this letter that Becket can use. And so I think the Pope did as much as he could have to restrain him, but nobody could restrain Becket, as this showed. And, I mean, this was such an unexpected and extreme act to completely open up again the conflict that, you know, the bishops who had been, who were the victims of Thomas's condemnation or the subjects of his condemnation, they made their way to the king, who at this time was in Normandy, and they said what had happened. And this is where Henry exploded into rage. And he didn't actually say, who will rid me of this troublesome priest or turbulent priest. He said he's reported as saying something along these lines. This man, Thomas, who came into my court carrying a knapsack over his shoulder and with a limping mule. And I raised him from nothing and I gave him the highest office in the land. And then he turns to the knights that are sitting around him and he says, and you drones, you will do nothing to avenge me. And this was apparently the spark for the murder, but it was built on the fact that Thomas had done something that even people who knew Thomas well could not have expected.
- [52:22]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And in your assessment, how direct was Henry II's responsibility or role for the murder? For his murder, Beckett's murder.
- [52:31]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So this is something that was investigated. After the murder, there were prolonged negotiations between papal agents and Henry over what penance he was going to do. And Henry eventually accepted. He said that he did not wish for the murder, he did not arrange the murder, but he bore culpability for his angry and rash words which provoked the murder. I've given you an impression already that this is a very legalistic world, and that's a very legalistic formula that was negotiated over a very, very long time. But I also think it's probably right. And just to talk about the murder and how that came about, it's four of four knights. I mean, they're actually quite, quite successful nobles. And they heard these words of King Henry, they set out for England, they made their way directly to Canterbury. They arrived in Canterbury.
- [53:39]
They were given an interview in the Archbishop's palace. They accosted him and they said, look.
- [53:47]
Why did you condemn these ecclesiastics? Do you want to take away the crown from the young king? And he said, no, I don't want to take away the crown from the young king, I'm perfectly loyal to him. And they say, well, you need to absolve these ecclesiastics. He says, I can't absolve them. Wasn't my excommunication, it was actually the Pope's excommunication. I was simply the agent. Then they go and arm themselves.
- [54:14]
Becket is dragged into the cathedral by his clerks. He comes into the cathedral, they close the doors, and.
- [54:28]
December 1170, 29th of December 1170, it's getting dark, the monks are singing vespers. And this is all they cut off, singing vespers when he comes in. Then they hear the knights have gone off, they've gone to arm themselves. You can hear them crashing through the doors. They burst into the cathedral. They're wearing just visors down, so you can only see their eyes. They're wielding their swords. And they. They again accost Thomas. They say to him, absolve the. The ecclesiastics. You're disloyal to. To the King. And then they say they try to drag him out of the cathedral. So clearly what they were doing is they were trying to arrest him. They were trying to arrest him and they're trying to bring him back to face trial before the King. And the King had not asked them by all accounts specifically even to do this, though his words could be interpreted as somebody better do something about this. But the intention, even of the knights does not seem to have been to murder Thomas. That said, if you come into a cathedral with your visors down and your sword wielded and you accost the Archbishop of Canterbury, things can happen. You're again, you're putting yourself in this situation where there can be violence, and there does seems like that they tried to drag him out of the cathedral. He perhaps pushed one of them back, maybe knocked him over, and then.
- [56:07]
They struck out with their swords. And very quickly he was lying dead on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral. This was a shock to Henry as much as anybody else. It's said that Henry locked himself up in his chamber, refused to speak to anybody for days, wouldn't eat or drink anything. And, you know, there could well have been some personal element of sadness about Beckett's murder, but he certainly knew the trouble that he had got himself into from an international, diplomatic perspective. And this is another theme of the whole book about how a king ruled not just by raw power, but by diplomacy, by having people on your side. He knew that this was an absolute disaster for him. And. And so to that extent, in the same way as the knights, by coming into a cathedral fully armed, made it possible even if they didn't intend his murder. Henry's angry words, his fury certainly precipitated it, but I don't think he's fully to blame for it by any means.
- [57:23]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And Baker, after his death, he. He became a martyr quite quickly, despite the fact that he was a controversial figure in his life. How did it come about?
- [57:36]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So I think it was simply because of shock. So this was not only the leader of the English church, this was one of the most famous people in Europe. Everybody who would have followed such things, they followed what was going on in the Beckett dispute. To the ordinary people of Canterbury, who were the first people to venerate him, he seemed to be a voice against an oppressive king, Henry ii. Henry ii, as I said, he's trying to extend his own power. He's trying to revive the power of kingship. People suffer from that. England was a very tightly ruled place. It was a place where people were subject to taxes, where they were subject to quite heavy rule. So there was this spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for Thomas. Then you also have the place where he was killed in that cathedral. And there's also the fact that England was one of the safest places in Europe. Martyrs didn't happen in England occasionally around this time, some decades earlier, a little bit later, you've people claimed as martyrs, but it doesn't really take off. So to have such a senior figure killed, apparently at the instruction of the king, this was a combustible situation. And then you get reports very early of people believing that they've experienced the miraculous power of Thomas. So, you know, you get this story of somebody, a local who happens to be there, dips his.
- [59:22]
Clothes in the blood of Thomas and he brings it home, puts it in his wife's bath and she's cured of paralysis. So you start to get all of these miracles, initially among the ordinary people of Canterbury, but gradually spreading as well, these kinds of networks that had existed that were used during the exile. These start to gear up. So you have. Word goes to the Pope very quickly, you hear that apparently he won't see anybody English for a number of days. He vows that he will take measures against the King and those responsible. So initially, there is an account which is believable, at least in a certain way, that the monks buried Thomas very, very quickly because they were afraid of further reprisals. They themselves hadn't been that enthusiastic about Thomas. They hardly saw him. He was in exile for most of his time. And then they discovered the hair shirt, the monastic habit under his clothes, and they turned to each other and they said.
- [60:31]
This is a sign of a hidden sanctity. How could we have thought that he was still the proud and vain chancellor? This was truly a man of God. This is, one would imagine, a certain amount of license there, of trying to claim the saintly life that went with the martyr's death. But you did nonetheless, clearly have a lot of people revising what they thought about Thomas because. Because Thomas and his supporters could say, we warned you about Henry, we said that you can't trust him. We told you that he was a persecutor of the Archbishop and the Church. What better expression of that can you see than this murder of the Archbishop in his own church? Everything that he said that people disagreed with, or they claimed that he wasn't genuine in his turning to religion when he became archbishop, you can see he was right. We were the ones who were wrong. We doubted him. But now he's proved it. And he's proved not just by the manner of his death, he's proved it by the signs that we see all around us, the miracles that people are talking about, the groups of people who are making their way to Canterbury to venerate his dead body. And that's how it started to build on itself. So it really was spontaneous. It got a bit of a push from some of his supporters, and he was actually canonized within two years of his murder, which is a remarkably quick canonization. One of his main supporters had written, in fact, a letter that was meant to go to the Pope, where it says. It says pretty much he is being hailed by everybody. As a saint, the papacy better get its act together and recognize this because it's the voice of the people and that's unstoppable.
- [62:26]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And how do you think.
- [62:29]
The matter reshaped the political and religious landscape of England after that? What was the legacy?
- [62:36]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yeah, yeah. I think what you might imagine is that this would be something that the Church in England could capitalize on, that they would extend their rights against the King and that the King would be fatally damaged. The King certainly was damaged and this remained a stain on his reputation for the rest of his life. And you can see it immediately with.
- [63:02]
A wide ranging rebellion developing against him. So in 1173, there's a rebellion against him that includes his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, his son Henry, the one that he had crowned his other sons, Richard, Geoffrey, the King of France, the King of Scotland, some of his senior nobility, all of those rebel against him and they rebel against him. They all have their own grievances, they all have their own ambitions. But this is the first time that Henry ever appeared vulnerable. And they say that they are rebelling in the name of Thomas Becket. So there's this huge rebellion that goes on for more than a year, and Henry manages to retain certain alliances, he's militarily successful, but it's still all raging. And then Henry makes a hugely important diplomatic step. He sails back to England. He'd been in Normandy and he makes a beeline for Canterbury and he, he takes off his shoes before he enters the city. He walks barefoot to the city. He is ritually flogged by the monks of Canterbury. And then he spends the night praying before the tomb of St. Thomas. And the accounts tell us that the next morning as he's leaving, he hears the news that the King of Scotland who'd rebelled against him has been captured. And that pretty much marks the end of the rebellion. So what Henry's propagandists can say is that because he did penance to Thomas, Thomas now had returned to being his friend as he was before. And from heaven, he has given him this favor and this victory over his enemies. So from then on, Henry and his family become some of the most staunch promoters of the cult of St. Thomas. Which sounds very strange, but what they're doing is they're co opting it. They're making Thomas England's saint and they're making him a safer kind of saint. He's no longer being venerated so much as the rebel who fought against the King, who stood up for episcopal rites. Instead, he's this miracle worker who supports English people wherever they are. He's somebody who is in alliance with the King, in alliance with the establishment, if you like, and for the Church. A lot of people within the Church, they want to forget about it. They've gone through years of dispute that's torn them apart. Most people within the Church are pretty conservative in the sense that.
- [65:59]
They would have wanted the rights of the Church to be upheld, but not if it meant a conflict with the King. So one of Thomas biographers and one of his closest friends, a man called Herbert, he wrote a life of Thomas sometime after, in the 1180s. So you know, about 16 years after Thomas murder. And he lamented that, he said, the Thomas that I knew, he's been forgotten. The champion of the Church, this radical figure has been forgotten. And instead the person that they talk about is the saint that heals people at his tomb. And they've forgotten what he was really about. So in a way, Thomas continued to be a symbol of the Church's rights, but he was a less dangerous symbol than he had been during life.
- [66:53]
Morteza Hajizadeh
One final question I have.
- [66:56]
Thomas Beckett is one of the most famous, one of the most well known figures in medieval history. What is the source of that fascination, that even 21st century people are interested to know more about him? Why do you think has his legacy has endured throughout all these centuries?
- [67:17]
Dr. Michael Staunton
So I think that this part of it is, there's obviously the dramatic personal story, the friendship that's then shattered and the murder, the drama of all of that. There's the fact that it does represent something ideological. It reflects what was happening at the time, really an early example of the Church and the Crown pulling apart. He was also. There was a lot of interest in Thomas Becket. At the time of the Reformation, King Henry VIII had his tomb destroyed. And thereafter with certain kinds of.
- [67:54]
Catholic, Protestant disputes, Thomas would often be seen as a symbol of Catholicism. So you have all of that. But to me, my interest, and I think it's why he remains such an intriguing figure. He is, because there is so much written about him that involves a lot of positive stuff, but also a lot of, a lot of criticism. I think that what we very often get from the Middle Ages, when we're talking about people, we have a pretty one dimensional picture of them. We don't have the kinds of sources that we have for more modern figures where we can see that, a nuanced picture where we can see that people are complex, they make mistakes, they behave inconsistently, they change their mind. That's the way people actually are. We can't usually see it for those of the Middle Ages in Thomas Becket, we can actually see that. We can see the complexity. We'll never end up figuring him out because there's so much that was written about him and there were so many dimensions to him.
- [69:00]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Before we come to the end of this interview, I know that writing a book takes a long time, and you've recently published this book with Reaction Press. Is there any other books you're currently working on or.
- [69:14]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Yes, I have one.
- [69:16]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah.
- [69:16]
Dr. Michael Staunton
I'm hopefully just about to finish a book that is about biography in the Middle Ages.
- [69:25]
It's about looking at, particularly this kind of period, from about 1100 to the early 13th century, is looking at the nature of biography. And it's trying to look at medieval biography in some ways from a modern perspective, asking the kinds of questions that we would ask of biographers. So what's their idea of what a biography should be? Should it be about praise? Should it be about other things? What's the role of romanticization, as we were talking about earlier? What role does that play? What are the other kinds of literary influences? And also things like, what's the picture of a life that somebody in the 12th century will identify? How can we see this from biography? What does that tell us about a medieval view of childhood? A medieval view of the relationship between inner and outer life?
- [70:24]
An idea of the medieval view of how a life progresses or the nature of death and what that signifies about the person? So it's all of those kinds of things. It's quite a lot, and that's why it's not quite finished yet.
- [70:41]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Hopefully we should be able to speak soon about that book once it's released. I do like to thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about your book. It's a wonderful book that recently been published by Reaction Press. Thomas Beckett and His World, published by Michael Stanton. Thank you very much, Michael, for your time.
- [71:05]
Dr. Michael Staunton
Thank you very much. Mortes.
- [71:12]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Foreign.
- [71:19]
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