Between 1170 and 1220 the cult of Thomas Becket had spread widely within Christendom, bearing with it the primary message that the Archbishop was a martyr who had died for the liberties of the Church, and in opposition to royal oppression. But no well-documented medieval cult, and certainly no major cult, is adequately characterized in such as simple and straightforward way. If ‘the causa beati Thome became the symbol of the rights of the church throughout the thirteenth century’ and beyond, this did not prevent it embracing other ideas and aspirations, some of them in apparent tension with each other, from the 1170s onwards. Over much of Europe the image of the Martyr’s fortitude confronting the King’s tyranny, already to some extent pre-sold in the propaganda of the exile years 1164 to 1170, required no qualification. In England, as Beryl Smalley has pointed out, ‘Writers had the more difficult task of combining loyalty to their king with defence of ecclesiastical freedom’, especially after Henry II had achieved a rapprochement with the Church. One way of handling this problem was to universalize the cult, by emphasizing that it ultimately transcended issues of royal-clerical relations, however important. Becket was portrayed as the martyr of the age, whose death had benefited the whole of Christendom. Such beliefs, made more plausible by the extraordinary miracle-working achievements of the tomb at Canterbury, led at their extreme to the systematic comparison of Becket’s death with that of Christ.