Besides being chief custodian of the king’s seal, Becket had other duties as chancellor, including managing the royal scriptorium or ‘writing office’ and sitting in the Exchequer and the royal courts of justice. In the Exchequer (its name was derived from the black chequered cloth spread over the table on which the sheriffs’ accounts were audited) he had to work alongside one or other of the two chief barons, but he could authorize payments in his own name. He was also in charge of the king’s chapel, where the royal collection of saints’ relics, some of them going back to the pre-Conquest era, was kept. When Henry travelled around the countryside, these relics went with him, carried in special coffers, because for all his lack of genuine piety, he was anxious to invoke the miraculous powers and sacral mystique surrounding English kingship, making a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Edmund, the ninth-century king of the East Angles killed in battle fighting the heathen Vikings, and vigorously supporting the efforts of the monks of Westminster Abbey to secure the canonization of King Edward the Confessor.
Although there had been a king’s seal and a chaplain or keeper in charge of it since the tenth century, it was Becket who would transform the chancellorship into something far closer to the great office of state it afterwards became, dramatically increasing the number of clerks in the scriptorium, where he was in charge of translating the king’s will into charters, letters and writs. Before 1154, the chancery clerks – no more than two to four during Henry I’s reign and a maximum of eleven during Stephen’s – were often called away at the direction of the king or his senior officials to other tasks, imperceptibly merging with other clerks who had no fixed duties. Beginning with sixteen clerks after he was appointed chancellor, Becket poached scribes from the Church and its courts, making them his own loyal servants and familiars, until the number rose as high as fifty-two. Aware of their potential as future diplomats and royal bureaucrats, Thomas looked for bright young men whom he lodged and trained in his own household. He also brought back several of the best of the older clerks whom Stephen had ousted, notably ‘Peter the Scribe’, a masterful calligrapher who had migrated to Archbishop Theobald’s service, which is where Thomas had first got to know him.
Like many a talented bureaucrat, Becket was eager to raise the status of the office he held, making it ‘second only to the king’. After living in Paris as a student for just over two years, he was fully aware of the pomp and pageantry of the Capetian chancellor, which he clearly sought to imitate. His programme of building repairs and improvements at the palace of Westminster – said to have been completed within six weeks by a vast army of masons and carpenters specially conscripted for the purpose – may chiefly have been intended to provide Henry and Eleanor with lodgings comparable in luxury and sophistication to those of the French king on the Île de la Cité in Paris. But these renovations almost certainly included the provision of dedicated workspace for himself and his clerks when they were in London. Up until now, the chancellor’s clerks had worked largely from home or wherever they could find a vacant spot in the great hall of a royal palace or the refectory of a monastery to set down their pens, penknives and inkhorns. In France, the chancellor was already providing his clerks with basic office accommodation and Becket may have aimed to do the same.
The Exchequer, where by custom the chancellor gave precedence to one of the chief barons, was the place where the regular tax or ‘farm’ from the shires and towns was collected, besides other taxes such as scutage, feudal dues or fines and amercements. Each sheriff came twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas to account for what he owed, once to make a payment and afterwards to be audited and settle the balance of his account. Sometimes the Exchequer sat at Winchester or at Oxford, Northampton or Gloucester, but more often it was based at Westminster.
Becket’s baronial colleagues there were both much older than he was. Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, sixteen years older, was the son of a Norman knight ennobled and richly rewarded by William the Conqueror after fighting valiantly at the battle of Hastings. A genuine heavyweight with an aristocratic lineage going back several generations, he was one of the most powerful barons on either side of the Channel. Educated at Abingdon Abbey, where he had studied more than enough Latin and moral philosophy to astonish the diplomats and cardinals of Pope Calixtus II on the eve of the sinking of the White Ship, he had become one of King Stephen’s staunchest supporters, but was among the first to come to terms with the Angevins in the spring of 1153, which is when Becket first encountered him. His relations with the new chancellor were good, even warm, but his unusually vocal support for the theory of the divine right of kings – his favourite phrase was that the king ruled ‘in the image of God himself’ and he told anyone who would listen – meant that he held views about kingship closely resembling Henry’s own that would lead him one day to clash diametrically with Thomas.
Richard de Lucy was of a different type. Six years younger than de Beaumont, he was harder, more unflinching, less flexible, remaining loyal to Stephen after many of his fellow-barons had switched sides. A self-made man, he lacked a pedigree and a formal education: his wealth and achievements owed everything to his own efforts and almost nothing to those of his ancestors. First granted land in Suffolk by Henry’s grandfather, he was the son of an ordinary Norman knight and had risen high mainly through his military skills, ably supported by his kinsmen, who had their own semi-independent network of clients and hangers-on. From the very beginning there was a degree of tension between him and Thomas, for de Lucy was none other than the chief henchman whom Stephen had sent to demand Theobald’s submission after he had defied the king and attended the Council of Rheims with Becket in tow.
More often than de Beaumont, de Lucy presided in the Exchequer, although both took their turns, sitting at the head of the table flanked by Becket, two chamberlains and the marshal. To their right sat the treasurer and his scribe, the chancellor’s scribe and one of the chancellor’s clerks. To their left sat the senior clerk and another official appropriately known as the ‘calculator’. Spread over the table in front of all of them was a black cloth divided by lines into rows or columns, representing pounds (in rows of tens, twenties, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands), shillings and pence. When a sheriff or other debtor came to render his account, the ‘calculator’ placed silver pennies used as counters in piles in the appropriate columns to indicate how much in total was owed, with a second set of counters placed to indicate the payments that had already been made. This made it easy to work out everyone’s debit or credit balance. The chancellor’s scribe and the treasurer’s scribe recorded every aspect of the day’s business on long, narrow parchment sheets, and Becket’s principal duty was to challenge any entry that he believed to be mistaken or ambiguous.
Thomas also sat with the barons and bishops to decide legal cases in the curia regis (or ‘king’s court’, meaning both a court of law and the central administration as a whole), also serving during Lent and in the summer as one of the so-called ‘itinerant justices’ – panels of circuit judges – travelling around the countryside. Henry intended to resume his grandfather’s attack on serious crime and disorder, increasingly claiming an exclusive jurisdiction over treason, homicide, theft and rape, and seeking at least to oversee, if not actively monopolize yet, other types of litigation usually heard in the feudal or local courts that he believed affected his rights, chiefly land disputes. As in France, where the activities of an energetic chancellor, Hugh de Champfleury, had greatly expanded the work of the judiciary in a relatively brief period and so increased royal income from fines, Henry expected Becket to blaze a trail.
Very few judicial records survive before the reign of King John, allowing only occasional snapshots of Becket’s attitude to justice. But in the few reports that remain, he appears more as a peacemaker than as a ruthless manipulator, prepared to help in reconciling to Henry those who had somehow offended the king, rather than seeking their prosecution and punishment to the extremity of the law. If this was indeed the chancellor’s approach to justice, it resonates with the principles of ‘equity and reason’ that he had learned while studying Roman law at the law schools of Bologna and Auxerre. Thus in one of the very few cases he decided for which written evidence is available, he successfully reconciled a litigant to the king after Henry had sequestered his property and padlocked his house so that he and his family were cast on to the street. After Thomas intervened to propose a settlement, the man’s property was fully restored to him.
Another case, the most important heard while he was chancellor, appears to show him in a markedly less favourable light. Begun in May 1157, while Henry and Becket were travelling around East Anglia, the plaintiff was Richard de Lucy’s brother Walter, abbot of Battle, who sought a remedy against Bishop Hilary of Chichester. Bad blood had long existed between the parties, whose attitude to justice is typical of what any independent-minded judge would be up against in Henry’s law courts if he wished to act fairly and honestly. Walter, a Norman monk who had followed his brother across the Channel in Stephen’s reign, had been appointed to the plum post of abbot of Battle, the Sussex monastery founded as William the Conqueror’s penance for the blood spilt at the battle of Hastings. Later, he had been a candidate for the bishopric of London, from which he hoped one day to leap into the primate’s chair – but Bishop Hilary had refused to recommend him. And then Hilary had claimed a right of supervision over the morals and discipline of the abbey, which lay within his diocese, greatly annoying Walter and his monks and provoking them to resist him tooth and nail.
By 1157, their dispute had long reached fever pitch, with the bishop excommunicating Walter for refusing to obey him and the abbot exploiting his political connections to denounce him for exceeding his authority. The abbot’s trump card was a charter he claimed had been granted by William the Conqueror, exempting Battle Abbey from all episcopal interference. There was indeed a copy of a charter to this effect, which it seemed both William Rufus and Henry I had confirmed. All the abbey’s early charters had been preserved in pristine condition, which, with hindsight, is hardly surprising, since it turns out that all of them were ingenious forgeries. But at the time, nobody suspected this; the Battle Abbey charters were not denounced as forgeries until 1234, a verdict that was not to be scientifically proved until 1932. The issue for the judges was therefore simple, but explosive: did the king of England have the power to exempt the monks from the bishop’s jurisdiction? The abbot and his brother believed that he did. The bishop, although in other matters loyal to Henry, insisted that this right was the pope’s alone.
Henry convened his judges to decide the case at Colchester Abbey in Essex on the morning of Friday 24 May 1157, after mass. Founded by Eudo the Steward in 1096 and consecrated in 1104, the abbey was dedicated to St John the Baptist and sat in fourteen acres of grounds. Presiding himself in the chapter-house, situated off the cloister on the south side of the abbey-church away from the noise and bustle of the town, Henry was flanked by Robert de Beaumont and Richard de Lucy, Becket and Richard de Humez, the constable of Normandy. From this point onwards, the Battle Abbey chronicler becomes the chief, often the only source for the proceedings. First, Richard de Lucy, who acted as his brother’s legal advocate while retaining his seat on the bench, gave the opening speech, after which Henry told the abbot to produce his charters, which Becket read out to the court. After closely inspecting them, Henry swore, ‘By God’s eyes, if ever I were to found an abbey, I would have for it none other than the liberties and privileges of Battle Abbey.’ Becket then asked the abbot if he had anything further to say. Walter denied that he had done anything to offend the bishop and was supported from the bench by his brother, who ended the first day’s hearing with a long panegyric praising Battle Abbey as a monument to Norman daring and achievement.
The case resumed on the following Tuesday with Theobald, Roger of Pont l’Évêque and several other bishops and abbots now reinforcing the permanent judges. Becket brought everyone up to speed by reading once again the abbey’s charters, before inviting the bishop to set out his defence. Hilary’s speech instantly touched a nerve with Henry, since he delivered a lecture extolling the values of the ascetic reform movement in the Church and the power of the papacy. Although a brilliant canon lawyer who had made a reputation for himself in cases heard before the pope, Hilary had one major failing: he could never stop himself from saying too much. And now he claimed that the Church and the bishops should be free of all secular control, remarks that enraged Henry. ‘The Church of Rome,’ Hilary said, ‘marked out by the ordained successors of the Prince of the Apostles, has achieved so great and so marvellous a pre-eminence throughout the world that no bishop, no ecclesiastical person at all, may be deposed from his position without its judgement and permission.’
‘Very true,’ snarled Henry through his teeth. ‘A bishop may not be deposed, but see (and at this he gave a violent shove with his hands), with a really good push, he could be thrown out!’ Everyone burst out laughing. But Hilary was unabashed. And he bravely reiterated his main argument that it was impossible for any layman, even for the king, to dictate the terms of the privileges and exemptions to be allowed to churches or monasteries except by the pope’s permission.
Henry had heard enough. ‘You are plotting,’ he accused Hilary, ‘to attack the royal prerogatives given to me by God with your crafty arguments. So by your fealty and your binding oath to me, I command that you undergo just legal judgement for presumptuous words against my crown and royal prerogative.’
A buzz instantly went around the room. Would Henry now accuse Hilary of treason? The Battle Abbey chronicler’s story is that Becket sharply rounded on the bishop, saying, ‘You have forgotten your allegiance to the king, to whom you have, we know, taken an oath of fealty. You should therefore be prudent.’ Hilary, realizing he had crossed the line, began again. ‘My lord,’ he said, addressing Henry, ‘if I have been tactless towards your royal majesty, I declare before God in heaven and your royal dignity that I meant no crafty attack upon you or your royal prerogative.’ But the king was unmoved. ‘As everyone is aware,’ he retorted, ‘your fawning, lying words are meant to destroy the prerogative that by God’s grace has been handed down to me from the kings, my ancestors, in hereditary right.’
Hilary stumbled through the rest of his case, but Henry cut him short, declaring, ‘We have heard something of a marvel here: something to be exceedingly wondered at, that the charters of the kings my predecessors … have been adjudged too drastic by you, lord bishop.’ And he issued a warning: ‘May it not come to this. May the splendour of my reign never see a time when things I decree, as dictated by reason and by the counsel of my archbishops, bishops and barons, are to be criticized or judged by you and your ilk.’
Seeing the king and the judges about to retire, Walter spoke again, for his rival had made serious allegations against him and he wished to clear his name. But Henry silenced him. This case was no longer to be about the privileges of Battle Abbey. ‘From now on,’ the king retorted, ‘it is I who must defend this case as my own personal and royal business.’
Hearing this, Richard de Lucy asked permission to withdraw and take counsel with his brother while Henry went to mass. And by the time the service was over, at least if the Battle Abbey chronicler is to be believed, Becket as the king’s chancellor had taken de Lucy’s place as the prosecutor, purportedly introducing devastating new evidence exposing Hilary as a hypocrite who professed his fealty to the king, but who, three months before, had appealed to Rome behind Henry’s back and obtained a papal decree imposing canonical obedience on the abbot, which Walter had refused to obey.
Glaring straight at Hilary, Henry barked, ‘This decree that was mentioned: did you ask for it? By your oath of fealty to me, I order you to tell me the truth.’
Terrified, the bishop lied. ‘By the oath of fealty which I took to you as my lord,’ he replied, ‘I deny that I or anyone to my knowledge asked for this document.’
Immediately Theobald, who knew differently, crossed himself in holy terror. Henry then retired with his judges and the bishops to the monks’ cemetery, and when they returned the parties stepped forward. No judgement was delivered, because Hilary already knew what he was expected to do. Henry nodded for him to begin, and he read out a written statement in everyone’s hearing amounting to an abject, humiliating surrender. He withdrew all his claims against the abbot, adding at Henry’s express command that he did so ‘voluntarily’ and ‘not under any compulsion’. At Theobald’s urging, the king then gave him the kiss of peace and Hilary did the same to Abbot Walter and his brother. And while everyone kissed, the archbishop made the sign of the cross over them in a final benediction. The Battle Abbey chronicler was exultant: he and his fellow-monks set out home in triumph to Sussex, praising God and St Martin, their patron saint.
And yet not every impression left by written sources created 900 years ago may be true. In 2001, a leading expert, Professor Nicholas Vincent, proved that large chunks of the Battle Abbey chronicle are as spurious as the abbey’s forged charters. Previously thought to be an accurate representation of Abbot Walter’s famous victory over Bishop Hilary, it now turns out that the key passages were manufactured afterwards to provide a context and a background to the forged charters rather than reflecting what was actually said in court. The episode seems to capture exactly Henry’s attitude to the Church and the power of the papacy, but was Thomas Becket just as strident and exacting in his demands?
Writing to the pope ten years later, the former royal chancellor would take a very different view to that put in his mouth by the chronicler, citing Henry’s conduct in this famous case as one of the more scandalous events of recent times. ‘What progress,’ he asks, ‘could the bishop of Chichester make against the abbot of Battle, despite having apostolic privileges on his side?’ Had he not been forced to make a humiliating submission? ‘For thus,’ insists Thomas, ‘it pleased the king and the court, which dared to contradict him in nothing.’
Unlike all the other evidence in this case, Becket’s letter of 1168 is a wholly genuine document. Its provenance has never been challenged or suspected, whereas the Battle Abbey chronicler is now exposed as a forger on the grandest scale. And there are other unresolved puzzles. It seems distinctly odd that Thomas should have introduced such deadly testimony about the papal decree so late in the day when, according to the abbey chronicler – who fails to notice how this jars – Abbot Walter and his brother had known everything about it from the outset but never referred to it in court. Becket’s shock revelation, had he been the one to make it, would have caused a sensation, and yet the abbey chronicler’s account of his lethal strike is uncorroborated. Neither John of Salisbury, usually the most prolific source of news, nor any of Becket’s earliest biographers even mentions the chancellor’s role in the Battle Abbey case or felt the need to explain away his actions or rebuke him. The whole affair is far deeper and murkier than it appears to be.
Such questions become compelling when we realize that the case documents were not copied into the abbey chronicle until long after Becket’s murder, when the old dispute with the bishop of Chichester would reignite. The narrative we now possess is actually a composite version of several different manuscripts, some genuine, some forged, once kept separately, then subsequently edited and recopied, until they were finally bound up together as one consolidated document that has all the appearance of a systematic unity, but which in reality is a hybrid.
Nothing, therefore, about the case as recorded in the chronicle can be accepted as fact. All that can be said with certainty is that Thomas witnessed a document drafted by Theobald recording Bishop Hilary’s ‘voluntary’ submission to the king. After Becket’s murder, what purports to be his speech in their favour gave the monks of Battle the invincible authority of a canonized saint; the fact that he seemed to be arguing the precise opposite of one of the chief points for which he would be assassinated was immaterial to them. Their undivided allegiance was to the king because of their special history as the Conqueror’s foundation. So narrow was their mindset that such a glaring discrepancy was of little concern to them. The long-term result of their spin was one day to make Thomas appear to be an even greater hypocrite than Hilary in the eyes of his detractors, but at the time the monks’ sole purpose was to vindicate their forged charters. Perhaps Thomas did indeed make some sort of speech on their behalf. It can never be known for certain. But even supposing that he had been willing to collude with Henry in what amounted to a show trial, was that something he could go on doing for ever?