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The Becket Controversy in Recent Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
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December twenty-ninth of this year will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury. There will be no such superfluity of books as commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Conquest, the one hundredth of the American Civil War, or the fiftieth of the Soviet Revolution. Few will even recall the murder, since the propers have been deleted from the general calendar of the Roman Church. If Thomas's feast has been quietly dropped from the missal, his career has by no means been neglected by historians in recent years. New editions of the writings of participants in the dispute have appeared, new interpretations of the quarrel are numerous, and important new studies in the history of canon law have altered traditional perspectives on the dramatic confrontation. Now is therefore an opportune time to survey modern scholarship on the Becket controversy and to indicate fruitful directions for further research.
There is, first, the problem of context. The most recent scholarly study of the dispute is that of H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles. The eccentricities of the provocative, peppery, and erratic Governance of Mediaeval England have been amply, if cautiously, alluded to by reviewers. Richardson and Sayles commence their discussion of the relations of regnum and sacerdotium in the later twelfth century with the reign of Stephen, neglecting questions of continuity from the reigns of earlier Norman kings. They dispute the received interpretation of Stephen's Second Charter, of which the central clause has been generally interpreted to mean that this King granted benefit of clergy in some form to the English church.
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References
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77. Jolliffe, , Angevin Kingship, p. 106Google Scholar: “It was of the essence of these processes of coercive mischief that they should create a state of extra-legal tension, that they should be as ambiguous as they were intolerable, hinted to royal bailiffs, conveyed without words, put out of sight and abandoned if they became likely to embroil the King further than he cared to go. It was a kind of calculated playing with fire, such as frightened Becket out of England and allowed Henry's Kentish servants to believe that they could receive him on his return as the King's enemy; the same which Henry confessed to Pope Alexander in the first shock of the martyrdom.”
78. Richardson, and Sayles, , Governance, p. 310Google Scholar, where the agreement is wrongly dated 1178.
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81. Richardson, and Sayles, , Governance, p. 268Google Scholar.
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83. Ibid., CLI, 154-55.
84. Duggan, , “Reception of Canon Law,” Congress of Medieval Canon Law, p. 360Google Scholar; but cf. Richardson, and Sayles, , Law and Legislation, p. 62Google Scholar, n. 7. Shaw, , “Ecclesiastical Policy,” Church Quarterly Rev., CLI, 146–47Google Scholar.
85. Richardson, and Sayles, , Governance, p. 312Google Scholar.
86. Round, John Horace (ed.), Calendar of Documents Preserved in France (London, 1899), IGoogle Scholar, No. 1318.
87. Richardson, and Sayles, , Governance, pp. 312Google Scholar, 268 and n. 1.
88. Mayr-Harting, , “Henry II and the Papacy,” Jour. of Eccles. Hist., XVI, 52–53Google Scholar.
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90. Cheney, Becket to Langton, passim, esp. chs. iii, iv.
91. Morey, Adrian, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist (Cambridge, 1937), p. 77Google Scholar; see also Knowles, , Epıscopal Colleagues, p. 134Google Scholar.
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94. Southern, St. Anselm, which is definitive; Cantor, Church, Kingship, and Lay Investiture; Barlow, English Church; Cheney, Becket to Langton. Foreville, L'Église et la royauté, does not live up to the promise of its title, despite its author's vast learning; the history of the church under Henry II remains to be written.
95. For the conflicts under Anselm, see Southern, St. Anselm, ch. iv, “Anselm as Archbishop.”
96. Ibid., pp. 150-51.
97. Ibid., p. 162.
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