Originally published at National Catholic Register
Sixty years ago, Richard Burton starred in Becket, a film about today’s saint. The film gets some of the history wrong, e.g., it pretends that Becket was a Saxon (to add to the conflict with King Henry II) when he was, in fact, a Norman. It tends sometimes to favor the monarch (not surprising — when the “Church of England” became a pet lapdog of the monarchy, a bishop like Becket standing for the Church’s rights would not be popular). That said, the film did popularize the story for modern people of this 12th-century English bishop. (T.S. Eliot also wrote a verse drama, “Murder in the Cathedral,” about the slaying.)
Thomas Becket was born about 1119 in what is now London. The family was of Norman origin; his father was a merchant and probably a knight. He was educated in England and studied in Paris, to return to his somewhat poorer family and enter business as a clerk. Among the people for whom he worked was Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him on several missions abroad (including Rome), had him study canon law, and made him an archdeacon. Bec later recommended Becket to be Lord Chancellor of
