The dramatic life and spectacular demise of Thomas Becket engendered an expansive discourse in both text and image. Depictions of the archbishop's murder appeared in manuscripts soon after his death and were widely disseminated on enamelled reliquaries produced in Limoges. While this first generation of Becket imagery focused almost exclusively on the saint's murder, a shift to more elaborate renderings occurred at Canterbury Cathedral, where twelve aisle windows depicting Thomas's life and miracles encircled the magnificent shrine to which his relics were translated in 1220. Four windows appeared before and soon after the Canterbury glass installation, in the French cathedrals of Sens, Chartres, Coutances and Angers. They are among the earliest surviving works of public, narrative art devoted to Becket outside of Canterbury. All four expand the visual biography of Becket's life beyond his murder and vary dramatically in form and content from one to the other. Finally, all were produced in a short period of time surrounding the translation of the saint's relics in 1220. The windows thus compose intriguing case studies of the ways in which stories of Thomas Becket were re-presented and re-told at a seminal moment in the expansion of his cult.

This essay explores the diverse, even oppositional, stories crafted around the archbishop's life and death in the Coutances and Angers Becket narratives. The windows of Coutances and Angers differ from those of Sens and Chartres in significant ways. With its emphasis on quotidian episcopal duties, such as preaching, confirming children and celebrating Mass, the Sens window inscribes the final weeks of Becket's life within a paradigm of exemplary ecclesiastical activities. At Chartres, the ideological conflicts between Church and State which drove the archbishop into exile, and for which he ultimately died, are foregrounded through a series of recurrent encounters between prelates, pontiffs and monarchs. While the windows of Sens and Chartres offer distinct versions of Becket's life, both fall within the framework of the saint's venerable and venerated legacy. The windows of Coutances and Angers, by contrast, proffer more ambiguous biographies, accounts I seek here to illuminate through recourse both to historical contextualisation and theoretical interpretation.