Becket

The Currency of Love

~ Jim Hindle ~ 1 Comment

In the late summer of 1157, troops mustered by Henry II gathered on the saltings south of Chester to make their way up the coast of the Dee estuary.  They were attempting to crush the most northern Welsh princes who had run amok, in the eyes of the English, during ‘the Anarchy’ of the reign of King Stephen.  Thomas Becket, then still chancellor, had consulted soothsayers about the best time to launch the assault but they can’t have been much good given the problems the expedition ran into – Henry’s accompanying fleet mauled when it put into Anglesey, the king himself ambushed with his army in Flintshire, bombarded in a narrow pass by rocks and arrows, a massacre only avoided by Henry managing to fight his way out of a thicket.

Eventually the Welsh sued for peace as Henry advanced into Snowdonia.  Becket was busy handling paperwork in Chester at the time and the chroniclers do not mention any role he played in the combat itself.  But some of them stated he reinvented himself as a warrior from the time of the Welsh campaign.  Their views speak of the inconsistencies of medieval life where it was far from unheard of for chancellors and other high-status clerics to don chainmail and fight.  Becket certainly played his part in a later campaign that culminated in the siege of Toulouse where castles, towns and large swathes of land were razed to the ground and despoiled.  He personally led a cohort of some 700 knights from his own household, taking great personal risk and endangering his elite troops unnecessarily, an impulsiveness which some said first showed itself when he fell into a millstream when hunting as a teenager, possibly while trying to impress his aristocratic friend Richer de l’Aigle.

It all speaks of the juxtaposition of roles and ironies of the life of the man who consorted great controversy during his life if not necessarily its wake.  Becket we know could be stubborn and wilful, not unlike Henry, whose story forms the twin lodestar of the then archbishop’s fate.  Speaking of both of their lives it is easy to judge or jump to easy answers.  Becket after all had had a profound galvanisation of belief when made archbishop, possibly borne of insecurity regarding his fitness for the new role.  We know it marked a turning point, that the worldly, even sometimes violent life of chancellorship was now behind him.

If he could be set in his ways, religious to a fault, in some eyes almost fanatical at times, we can say too his actions spoke of a very real courage.  We know for instance that, even if some of his intuitions could be overblown, he certainly came to conceive that, in obstructing Henry, he was fighting a very real autocracy, even an actual tyrant and that he personally constituted the Church’s best defence in a struggle for supremacy that formed one of the themes of medieval governments for centuries either side of his life.

If any of that sounds abstract, we can consider that his messengers were sometimes tortured, swathes of his family and followers, including babes in arms, were cast out of their homes in the middle of winter in a fit of public retribution by the king, a whole religious order that had offered Becket shelter was threatened with expulsion, his bishops were menaced with threats of imprisonment or mutilation to speed along negotiations and his final days took place amid a climate of abuse and paranoia where his properties and followers in Canterbury were seized and harassed respectively and he was accused of inciting civil war.  He didn’t flinch in the face of any of this and, when the time came, while he very easily could have hidden, he chose to stand his ground in the face of men whose capabilities and intent could not have been hard to surmise.  Perhaps he was tired of pursuit.  Perhaps he could simply see where it was going and probably had been for years.

In England, it sometimes feels we can be too disposed towards an ingrained cynicism, resent success or can be too willing to knock a good man down.  What other country would take its national bard and undermine his achievements by accusations of collusion and ghost writing, his national holiday hidden away on St George’s Day (the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) as if he doesn’t quite deserve a celebration of his own?

Perhaps the same can be said of our treatment of Becket; that, where there is doubt, it can go against him, that notions of Saints in any case are about as credible as a moon made of cheese and the very essence of religion is the stuff of fairy stories better relegated to a simpler, recalcitrant age.  We are all the bold enlightened now and ought to have no place for superstition, castigate at every turn the high and mighty even if such grandness was never a thing that they sought.  

But perhaps, as belief systems go, we can remember that, for all our modern cleverness, the most important things cannot be cut and dried and comprehended in a solely intellectual way.  Love itself, the fabric that binds the very world together, is not a thing of equations, that the best and truest alchemy is one first and foremost of psychology, that we cannot comprehend our most intrinsic gifts by seeking to pull them apart.

Becket then can stand as an icon for a world we should not let slip through our fingers.  While it can feel at times we haven’t learnt a thing since the eleven hundreds, can we be lit up at all by the things which ought to provide foundations for our lives – love, fidelity and principles; qualities Becket so surely helped embody?

The story goes, the day he fell into the stream at Michelham, the miller – oblivious to his presence – stopped the wheel in its motion just in time to avoid calamity by sheer feat of serendipity, an occurrence that was meant to have instilled in Becket a greater sense of providence and faith.  Can we, even now, cultivate a belief in the more mysterious aspects of this world, the kind of mysteries that can underpin it all; a language not forgotten of the currency of love, the human heart, where discoveries only lead to a better understanding of the sense that it is all still much bigger than us, that we still have so much that we can learn?

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Copies of ‘The Shrine Way: an English Pilgrimage’ can be ordered at westmarch.co.uk

Each New Leaf

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

850 years ago tomorrow, the 21st February, Thomas Becket, so famously martyred near the quire of Canterbury Cathedral by a clutch of violent social climbers, was canonised by Pope Alexander III in a reflection of the wave of shock and, later, devotion to his memory that swept the Christian world in the wake of his death.  Becket had been a controversial figure for much of his life, something later ameliorated by his posthumous saintly status.  His friendship with Henry II had turned sour long before his murder, probably since the king made him archbishop against the then chancellor’s wishes.  It was a move the king hoped would embed his man in the Church but Becket found a piety in the process that would propel him to great things.

One of the outcomes of his newfound contrition and the stature it somehow brought with it was an increased antagonism and alienation of not just his king but many of his countrymen as well.  Nonetheless many others flocked to him, his story becoming in many minds, perhaps not least his own, one of truth against autocracy.  Towards the end he had become a kind of living legend, a walking cypher for everything he’d come to represent.  Defined by devotion, his story’s conclusion beckoned all the more inevitably as he pursued what many saw as his calling – to defend the Church against oppression from on high.  That this championship was a die that he himself had partly cast was an irony lost to the crowd.

I spent a good amount of time looking at his life in the course of research for my book about the Pilgrims’ Way, that classic route along our southern hills.  His – and Henry’s – stories are central to the history of that particular path of course; Becket’s shrine a magnet for international pilgrims as his cult grew.  But many followed it too in keenness to trace, perhaps even emulate, the penitential steps of their scandalised monarch who made his way, though his route is uncertain, to his former friend’s resting place.

If I’m honest, I’m still sometimes surprised as to why the history of these two men held such immediate traction over me as soon as I began to read about it.  It was more than simply background reading about the history of this given pilgrimage – even if walking it remained the main event.  Was it because Becket’s conflict and conversion to a greater faith seemed to dovetail into questions that felt more pertinent than ever for me; my relationship to the Christian Church, how I might find a deeper sense of belonging within it, how I might find a deeper dimension of faith despite what you might call a former degree of circumspection regarding the merits of formal religion?

All of this certainly resonated and looking at his story became a means to help myself answer more personal questions.  But Henry too you had to feel for – how it all went wrong, the necessity of his eventual journey to pay penance at Becket’s shrine and how that itself may well have changed things.  His story takes its place among other instructive medieval sagas – one recurring theme of those times; however unlikely it may sound, is the apparent wrath visited on those plundering or otherwise disrespecting Holy Ground – just look at King John, or Eustace, or Henry’s own eldest son.

The story fascinates still in its reflection of piety and power – what can happen when either or both threaten to become all consuming.  Henry was a man who liked to get his way.  Becket sometimes appeared to pride himself on rising above – or against – his monarch’s will.  But within it all are other articles of faith; other questions, dimensions and tensions.  Were either men driven by pride?  Was there a kind of glory cloaked in self-deprecation?  Or a humility in striving to be true to duty?  Was Henry’s penance sincere?  We may never know, which is partly what makes the story so iconic; the light it throws on mortal men, the value of searching our hearts.

In some respects, Henry’s and Becket’s stories played out as prolonged tragedies; the hubris amid the reverence, the wrestling of different manifestations of might.  And yet the two men still impress by respective determination if not always necessarily their virtues.  What perhaps is more important for anybody wishing to follow in a literal sense in Henry’s footsteps by walking the ‘Way is that – whether through shock, veneration or the veritable cash cow of pilgrimage infrastructure in the Middle Ages – many pilgrims chose to walk this way and doing so today is act of sympathetic magic with forebears perhaps not quite as distant as we think.

Perhaps, amid the distant echo of former dramas, the instruction given by a king laid low by what all told was still the power of a spiritual intensity, of Becket’s very real courage as he could see all the more clearly just where his convictions were leading, the answers for us all still lie in wait.  Perhaps we can be closer to the ones who’ve gone before not by contrition or stumbling on our knees or keeping something going for the sake of it.  That is not to say some things do not have an inherent worth or that we cannot find, when all the flotsam’s stripped away, a kind of solid bedrock of belief.  But the things we need can still feel more immediate; to step out in the early April sun, to meet the track, to find a little joy in each new leaf.  We may find then that kings and prelates take their place amongst a rich panoply, where every pilgrim walks at one another’s side, where stories settle like the mulch and we find that with nothing but a bag and staff and sense of shared endeavour we are richer than we ever dared believe.