To avoid potential data charges from your carrier, we recommend making sure your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network before downloading. Willem Vrelant Flemish, died , active - Attributed to Willem Vrelant Flemish, died , active - Thomas Becket about , chancellor of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, devoutly prays before the altar in Canterbury Cathedral while three knights approach him from behind, one with his sword raised menacingly.
Becket had been a trusted friend of Henry II, King of England, but they became entangled in a quarrel over the rights of the Church. That dispute ended bitterly in when a group of Henry's knights, incited by their king's anger at the archbishop, killed Becket at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral.
Becket was officially proclaimed a saint within three years, and was heralded as a hero who had defied a tyrant for the Church. He remained one of the most popular English saints until Henry VIII , during the Protestant Reformation, desecrated his shrine, destroyed his bones, and ordered that all mention of his name be obliterated.
The erasures on the page below this illumination were almost certainly a result of Henry's decree. Field Projects Dept. On the evening of December 29, , London suffers its most devastating air raid when Germans firebomb the city.
Hundreds of fires caused by the exploding bombs engulfed areas of London, but firefighters showed a valiant indifference to the bombs falling around them and saved Six months after the congress of the Republic of Texas accepts U.
After gaining independence from Spain in the s, Mexico welcomed foreign settlers to sparsely populated Texas, and a Throughout , the U. Her strangled body was recovered two weeks later. Although the perpetrator had attacked and raped many women since , this was his first murder. Henry had broken with Rome. Anne J. It all depends on the perspective. Without the violent and bloody murder in the cathedral on 29 December , it is unlikely that Becket would have been canonised.
Henry II was no constitutional monarch. He ruled as much by force and fear as by lawful process and his imposition of his chancellor as Archbishop of Canterbury was part of a plan to add control of the English Church to his political armoury. The four barons who attacked him claimed they were acting on a royal mandate that sanctioned his arrest and transfer to Normandy, but their armed pursuit of the archbishop into the sacred precincts of the cathedral, followed by the brutal murder of the English primate, had no justification.
No law sanctioned such outrageous sacrilege. Thomas Becket became a canonised saint because he was a troublemaker: little else qualified him for that role. The medieval church took many uncompromising stances, at least in theory, and it is hard to know how an ecclesiastical authority could have satisfied all the theoretical demands of office without being a troublemaker. The clergy strongly supported such punishments for laypeople and acknowledged that priests and other clerics sometimes committed heinous crimes, but insisted that preserving the untouched sacral status of the clerical body was so important that clerics should be exempt from physical penalties.
Since views about the sacred character of the clerical body also served as the foundation for demanding celibacy, this was not simply a self-serving stance, but it met with little sympathy from the laity. Henry offered a compromise whereby defrocking preceded physical punishment, which many found reasonable, but for purists like Becket this was an unacceptable legal dodge.
So Becket was a troublemaker.
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