ACCORDING to Herbert of Bosham, when Henry II asked his chancellor Thomas Becket to become archbishop of Canterbury, Becket, drawing attention to his clothes, declared with irony, ‘How religious, how saintly a man you wish to appoint to such a holy see and above such a renowned and holy community of monks! I know most certainly that if by God's arrangement it happened thus, very quickly you would turn your heart and favour away from me, which is now great between us, and replace it with the most savage hatred.’ Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Herbert thus has Becket prophesy the dispute that would see him flee the country, returning only to be murdered in Canterbury cathedral in 1170, and speak well of the monks who would promote his cult. Yet Herbert also demonstrates, and attributes to Becket, an awareness of the power of visual appearances and a fondness for fine things. Herbert's interest in extravagantly decorated objects is also attested by the impressive glossed copies of the Psalter and the Pauline Epistles, which he designed and seems to have intended to dedicate to Becket. These volumes survive in four parts: the two sections of the Psalter are now Trinity College Cambridge MS B.5.4 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. E Infra 6, and the two volumes of the Epistles are Trinity College Cambridge MSS B.5.6 and B.5.7. The four impressive manuscripts were probably once all the same size, measuring a little more than 470 x 325 mm (the size of the largest surviving volume, that in Oxford), but all have been trimmed and rebound. The manuscripts were lavishly decorated, though the Psalter volumes have had parts of the decoration excised. In addition, four quires have been lost from the second volume of the Psalter, and the bifolio that contained Psalm 1 is missing from the first volume. Both parts of the Psalter and the first volume of the Epistles contain prefaces commenting on the circumstances in which the manuscripts were produced, making them remarkably well-documented manuscripts for the second half of the twelfth century. Moreover, the wealth of material about Becket, including Herbert's own account of the saint's life, completed in the 1180s, provides further evidence for the context in which these volumes were executed.