2. Upbringing

Said by his earliest biographers to have been deeply attached to his mother from an early age, Thomas spent his early childhood among women. Up until the age of six or seven, he had his three sisters, Agnes, Rose and Mary, for playmates. Almost nothing is known about them other than that the elder pair would one day marry and have sons, at least three of whom became priests. The youngest sister, Mary, became a nun, ending her days as the abbess of Barking in Essex, a position to which she would be called three years after her brother’s shocking murder. One of Agnes’s married children, a son called Theobald, became her heir and would inherit the family house in Cheapside, which a century later his descendants bequeathed to the crusading knights of the Order of St Thomas of Acre as their London headquarters. Thomas would keep in contact with his sisters throughout his life and would sometimes help them financially, but their relationship was never especially close.

The Beckets, like all Norman immigrants, would have spoken French among themselves, but their servants would have been English and Thomas would have been familiar with their conversations at an early age. After half a century or so, the initial culture shock of the Conquest had subsided. Normans and English were growing closer together through intermarriage, continuing the process begun before 1066, when large influxes of Danish and Norse settlers had been assimilated. Iconic of this intermingling would be King Henry I’s marriage to his first wife, Matilda. A daughter of the king of Scots, she was descended on her mother’s side from the Old English kings of Wessex and named Edith at birth. On marrying Henry, she changed her name to Matilda, one of the most popular Norman girl’s names, for which the chroniclers, notably William of Malmesbury, acclaimed her as a living exemplar of the union between the old and new royal families.

Becket’s mother was the driving force in his education and most likely first taught him to read. As a draper’s merchant’s wife, she can be expected to have been semi-literate, teaching him his ABC and how to use the abacus or counting-frame at home. When reciting the alphabet, Thomas would have begun by making the sign of the cross and then saying, ‘Christ’s cross me speed’, as all children were taught to do. Around the age of seven, he may have attended a parish school or ‘song-school’, where choristers were taught basic literacy by the local priest. He was also taken regularly to church. More than conventionally pious, his mother was a devotee of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom she taught her son to pray. Frequently and generously giving alms to the poor, she is said to have habitually weighed her young son on the scales using bread, meat, clothes and anything else useful for the poor instead of metal weights, after which she would distribute these goods as alms, hoping in this way to commend her son to God and the Blessed Virgin.

Around the age of ten, Thomas was sent to school at the Augustinian priory of Merton in Surrey. Founded as recently as 1115 by Gilbert Norman, sheriff of Surrey, whom Gilbert Becket may have known personally, the priory had recently moved from its original site to a picturesque new location beside the River Wandle. A well-regarded foundation, Henry I had given it a charter and granted it the manor of Merton to enable a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary to be built. Some fifteen miles from London, about half a day’s riding distance away, the priory was too far for Thomas to commute daily, so he boarded during term time. His earliest biographers assumed that a priory school was chosen because of some miraculous and holy qualities that his father had seen in him, but this is overly romantic. Far more likely is that Gilbert Becket had run across its founder in connection with his role as a civic or guild official in London and had the place recommended to him. Maybe a deciding factor for Thomas’s mother was the intense devotion of these monks to the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

After settling in, Thomas joined the other pupils who were learning Latin from a textbook by the fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus. A classic work used by schoolmasters throughout western Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century and in central Europe until the middle of the eighteenth, the Ars Minor was intended for the youngest students and conveys, in the manner of a catechism, information on the eight parts of speech. Thomas and his teacher repeated their lines again and again, until Thomas knew his by heart.

The boys practised their exercises daily and, on becoming proficient, tried their hands at simple translation, first working from Latin into English and afterwards retranslating their English versions back into Latin and comparing these with the original author’s text to improve their style. The older pupils would then have been set carefully selected passages from Latin verse to learn and translate before moving on to ‘disputations’ in grammar.

Afterwards said to have a highly retentive memory, Thomas would sometimes have spoken a little hesitantly, because he suffered from a youthful tendency to stammer. His physical appearance may have helped to compensate, boosting his self-confidence. Unusually tall, growing eventually to over six feet in full age, he was good-looking with a broad brow and thin face, large, lustrous eyes, a fair complexion and dark hair. But if clever and quick-witted, he lacked intellectual ambition and did not want to be stretched. His approach at school tended to be casual: nobody placed him in the top rank of pupils or reckoned him a natural scholar. Since, however, nothing is said about punishments, he cannot have been completely idle and must have done at least the minimum amount of work, well aware that schoolmasters instilled knowledge as much through beating as through teaching. Probably he coasted in class, but for all that he must have had some refreshingly happy memories of his teachers at Merton, as he would send for one of them, Brother Robert – an ‘honest man’ – to become his chaplain and confessor soon after his appointment as the king’s chancellor.

Returning to London after a year or two, Thomas was sent to one of the city’s three grammar schools. Attached to important churches and usually providing a subsidized education apart from the cost of books and writing materials, which parents had to finance, these schools were run by the clergy and most of the boys were likely to be destined for careers in the Church. Students, who had to provide their own candles in winter, had to be able to read Latin and English before they arrived. William fitz Stephen, who also attended one of these city schools, names the ones from which Gilbert and Matilda Becket would have made their choice: St Paul’s, St Mary-le-Grand and St Mary-le-Bow. All were within less than half a mile of their home, and St Mary-le-Bow was the nearest.

Once there at whichever school they chose, Thomas would have worked to improve his Latin style and composition and studied rudimentary logic and rhetoric. Depending on his level of attainment, he may have dabbled in astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and music, although the level to which these were taken depended entirely on the pupils and the school. For middle-class students like Thomas who would sooner or later need to begin a career, rhetoric, next to grammar and logic, was the most important subject and the cornerstone of the liberal arts, teaching them how to read letters or official documents critically and structure their responses; how to master the relevant arguments; how to speak clearly and persuasively in public.

When Thomas learned to write is harder to judge. Writing on parchment with a quill pen or with a stylus or sharp dry point on wooden writing tablets overlaid with coloured wax is unlikely to have been taught to pupils at Merton Priory, but may have been taught to abler pupils at a grammar school. That said, the usual way of putting words into writing while Thomas was alive was by dictating them to a professional scribe. Composition, even for a majority of the most brilliant scholars, was the ‘art of dictation’ and taught as a branch of rhetoric. The physical act of setting words on to parchment was regarded as a separate skill. ‘Reading and dictating’ were coupled together, not ‘reading and writing’. It is possible that writing was hardly taught outside the emerging universities and that Thomas would learn to write only while studying later in Paris. Practical considerations also came into play, for penmanship was a seasonal occupation, almost impossible in winter, when the ink took too long to dry. Orderic Vitalis, one of the very few chroniclers to pen his own manuscripts, points this out, adding that his fingers were once so numbed by frost, he was abandoning his narrative until the spring. When scribes and copyists sent for hot coals, it was often to warm their handiwork rather than themselves.

But Thomas was somewhere taught how to write. He needed tools for ruling the lines: a stylus, a pencil or charcoal stick, a ruler, a plumb line and an awl for pricking the tiny holes that a scribe made in his parchment to mark the beginning of every line. Also required was a knife or razor for scraping the parchment, pumice for cleaning and smoothing it, and a boar’s or goat’s tooth for polishing the surface to stop the ink from splattering. As for writing equipment, quill pens, a penknife, ink and an inkhorn were standard. Made from the feathers of geese or ravens cut away at the tip with a penknife to make a nib, quills had to be held gingerly so as not to let them blot or scratch the parchment, which was made from sheepskin.

Once the surface of the skin had been made ready and lines ruled in pencil, beginners would be taught how to grip the pen gently while letting their hands glide easily across the page, how to keep the letters on the line, how to size the letters in proportion to each other, and how to space letters and words evenly using a cursive script. Ordinary parchment (although not the finest vellum made of calf skin, which was used by monastic scribes) was relatively cheap, but students tended not to work that way. Instead, they took notes with a stylus on wax tablets, which was faster and easier, and could be done in the rain, or even on horseback. It was also possible for students to buy ready-made tablets that folded into a diptych and were worn on a belt. When a note was required, the diptych was opened, exposing the waxed writing surfaces.

Young adolescents in London were especially privileged, enjoying unusual freedoms regardless of their position in society. Despite living in a densely packed city with its narrow streets, roaming animals, including hens and pigs, and its open sewers, Londoners had access to green spaces of often Arcadian beauty, filled with trees and shrubs belonging to religious houses or churches, while citizens of middling status like the Beckets had their own private gardens. Boys played games of bowls and quayles (quilles in French), in which a number of pins were set up in a line and the players had to knock them down with a stick. Blood sports involving dogs, hawks and cross-bows were strictly forbidden in the built-up area, but the city was surrounded by open fields, where the citizens enjoyed customary rights to hunt. Boys would trap rabbits, hares and fowl in gins, snares and nets, while their fathers hunted for wild boars.

Just outside the city walls to the north lay Smithfield, where a thriving market for livestock was held on weekdays and horses were sold on Fridays. Martial exercises were integral to Anglo-Norman male bonding, and mock tournaments would be held every Sunday in Lent at Smithfield in which young riders, armed with shields and lances and divided into teams, would engage in sham combat. On Midsummer Day, teenage boys would wrestle, fence and shoot with bows and arrows, while their sisters would dance to music until long after midnight, rattling their tambourines. Common throughout the year were horse races for boys in which two or three galloped around an improvised course. Later in life Thomas Becket would be regarded as an accomplished horseman, and it was at Smithfield that he first learned to ride.

Nearby lay Moorfields, a marshy area liable to flooding, used in summer for archery and field sports and in winter for skating. Boys would fasten rough skates to their feet made from the leg-bones of animals, then, using poles shod with iron, propel themselves forward at high speed across the ice, tilting at one another until arms or legs were broken. To the north-west lay the fields and springs of Holywell, Clerkenwell and Finsbury, where elms and reeds and willows grew in plentiful abundance. The ground began to rise gently at Clerkenwell, and on a warm summer’s evening the citizens and their families would go for country walks and enjoy the panoramic view across the city.

On Easter Day, water sports took place on the Thames in which adolescent males in boats attempted to strike at targets fixed to a mast set up in the middle of the river with their lances, and without toppling overboard. Then there was a water tournament in which the combatants, playing at knights armed with shields and staves, tilted at each other in boats. On the mornings of saints’ days and other religious festivals, miracle plays would be performed in the city’s parish churches based on Bible stories or the legends of saints. Acted by schoolboys or choristers who took both male and female parts, the plays generally lasted until noon, after which everyone flocked outdoors to enjoy games of football, the favourite sport of schoolboys. Not yet an orderly game with rules or a fixed number of players, it involved a violent struggle between opposing teams regardless of who had possession of the ball. Played mainly in the summer months, it gave way in winter to bloody bull- and bear-baitings, both of which regularly drew large, excited crowds. Other cruel sports included pitching wild boars and fighting dogs against each other while bets were taken. Children tied cocks to a post by their legs and threw sticks at them, while on Shrove Tuesday grammar-school boys like Thomas would be allowed to bring their own fighting cocks to school.

The school day began shortly after dawn and could last for up to twelve hours depending on the season. Midday meals were not provided, but just downstream of London Bridge was a row of cook-shops, the precursors of modern takeaways, where every kind of food – fish, meat, game or fowl – could be roasted, baked, fried or boiled to order. Customers, regardless of age or social status, could eat and mingle freely there, finding dishes to suit every taste and pocket. ‘Gourmets,’ says William fitz Stephen, who had obviously eaten there many times himself, ‘who have a mind to indulge, need not hanker after a sturgeon, a guinea fowl or a woodcock.’ There were, however, the usual health hazards: customers ordering meat pies, in particular, were vulnerable to random attacks of food poisoning.

From a relatively early age, Thomas Becket had a digestive ailment. This first came to light when he was forced to take care with what he drank: the wrong drink could trigger a bad reaction and a groom named Jordan would later remember an incident at Croydon in which he had been forced to scour the district to find supplies of whey for him to drink. Whey, the watery part of milk left behind after the separation of the curd in cheese-making, was considered to be a woman’s drink. So was mead, a low-alcoholic drink made from fermenting water and honey, said to have medicinal and therapeutic values. Londoners of all ages preferred alcoholic drinks to river water for health reasons, not least since the city’s public latrines, even in Roman times, drained directly into the Thames. Men’s drinks were traditionally beer and wine. Claret, popular with courtiers and the richer merchants, was made by mixing wine with a little honey and spices that had been ground to a fine powder and sealed in a linen bag which was removed before the drink was served. As an adult, Thomas Becket drank cider rarely and wine only in moderation. More usually, it seems, he drank beer or wine diluted by a little water. But even these could upset his stomach if he was under pressure.

About the time that he reached the age of puberty, Thomas was introduced to someone leading a very different life from that of a London merchant’s son. Richer de l’Aigle, a Norman aristocrat, made several visits to the city to see to his business affairs, lodging at Gilbert Becket’s house. Already in his mid- to late thirties, Richer was the older brother of Geoffrey de l’Aigle, who had clung for his life to a spar when the White Ship capsized before succumbing to hypothermia and drowning. Since his ancestral estates had long included lands to the north and south of Thierville, near Bec Abbey, the probability is that his father may have known Thomas’s grandfather. A fascinating character, he turns up regularly in the sources as an adventurer – brave, bold and unpredictably dangerous.

That Richer played for high stakes had been proved two years before the White Ship had sailed, when he inherited the honour of Pevensey in Sussex from his father. The site where William the Conqueror had landed with his army in 1066, it included the ruins of an old Roman fort within which a fine Norman castle with a great square keep and a near-impregnable gatehouse had been built. When King Henry had announced that he preferred Richer’s two younger brothers to share their father’s English lands because they served in the royal guard, Richer defied him and made overtures to his dynastic arch-rival, the Capetian ruler Louis VI of France. Always eager to woo Henry’s malcontents, Louis provided Richer with a crack force of sixty knights to garrison his ancestral castle in Normandy, a gesture pitched exactly right to bring Henry to the negotiating table without turning him so violently against Richer that he would seek to destroy him. After a parley the knights returned to France, but the following year Richer went out on the rampage, terrorizing his neighbours and laying waste their lands. Finally a settlement was brokered by Count Rotrou of La Perche, Richer’s uncle on his mother’s side of the family, husband to one of the king’s biological daughters who afterwards lost her life on the White Ship. By its terms Richer’s inheritance would be upheld. Thereafter he would be the living proof that revolt or resistance to the king could sometimes pay dividends in the Anglo-Norman world, but only if you were enough of a gambler and kept your nerve.

Thomas was dazzled by Richer, whose father had been a prominent courtier and who clearly conversed with kings and princes as easily as with his own Norman friends. They went out hawking and hunting together in his school holidays, staying for one whole summer at Richer’s castle at Pevensey, where they rode daily to the chase with hounds and hawks. At ease in the streets of London, Thomas was suddenly brought face to face with the reality of power and might – this really was another world for the young Londoner. Even now, 900 years later, the ruins of Pevensey Castle dominate the gentle Sussex countryside and the small town that has grown up close by. The stone circuit wall around the castle’s inner bailey with its three majestic round towers had not yet been built, but the Norman keep, where Thomas would have lodged, now the home of birds that peer down inquisitively on the visitors below them, was buzzing with life, with horses being led in and out of the stables, the fires of blacksmiths and armourers blazing beside an old Roman bastion, the sun flashing on the weapons of Richer’s retainers amid the chatter of the falconers and servants.

Soon falconry would become one of Thomas’s chief pleasures; later in his career he would be renowned for his mews, where the birds were kept. So expensive was falconry, nothing more signalled a person’s high status than the sight of a hawk with its leather hood on, perching on the owner’s glove, and Thomas was seduced by the sense of power that the sport gave him. While in Richer’s company, he would sample for the first time the recreations of the aristocracy and learn to enjoy and appreciate them. Fit and athletic, he had already found his aptitude for riding and martial exercises on the fields at Smithfield. Said as late as his mid-thirties to be slim and lithe, supple as a willow, he would also one day acquire a reputation as a champion wrestler and fencer, sports which Richer may have taught him too.

In exile after his sudden flight from England in 1164, Thomas would tell his followers of an accident he had suffered while riding out one day through the Sussex countryside with Richer. One version of the anecdote is that his horse lost its footing while taking a short cut across a narrow footbridge above a millstream which his companion had passed in safety: both horse and rider were toppled into the roaring current and swept towards the mill, where they could have been crushed. A slightly different version has Thomas carrying a prize hawk on his wrist when his horse stumbled. Falling into the water, the bird somehow became trapped, and it was through diving in to save its life that he was carried away. In each retelling, the millwheel stops just in time. But whereas in the second variant it stops spontaneously, in the first the miller intervenes. Either way, Becket had the narrowest of escapes: the tale provides a graphic illustration of his adolescent recklessness.

What the sources fail to encompass is the nature of Richer’s affection for this impressionable teenager. Did their friendship become too intense? A tantalizing question also arises about just how and when it began. Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide’s, Oxford, whose biography of Thomas was completed in 1173–4, two or three years after the bad leg he had acquired on a pilgrimage to Sicily was providentially cured following a visit to the murdered archbishop’s tomb, says that Becket formally entered Richer’s household as his secretary after leaving his grammar school rather than meeting him in his school holidays. Gilbert Becket and Richer, says Robert, had been ‘fast friends and fellows’ for years and one day agreed that ‘Thomas should betake himself away and become Richer’s secretary’. It was thus as Richer’s protégé that Thomas ‘cometh for the first time into the king’s court and amid courtly manners’.

But if this is correct and Thomas was indeed introduced into Richer’s more glamorous adult circle, mingling with the great and the good at this early point in his life, things did not work out. Someone, most likely his mother, intervened and sent her son off to Paris to continue his education in the ‘schools’ there, even though there is no evidence that he had any ambition or desire of his own to pursue his studies at a higher level. Clearly troubled by Thomas’s vulnerability to an older man’s subversive influence, Prior Robert chooses his words with studied ambiguity, saying that in Richer’s company ‘the world offered him her sweetness somewhat more freely than before’, but that he remained ‘of pure conversation in all things on which there lieth most’.

As significant a hint as one can expect from a man writing the biography of a canonized saint, this observation is highly suggestive. We will never know for sure what happened in Becket’s adolescent relationship with Richer, but it is entirely possible that his mother, worried that their friendship was becoming too intimate, stepped in to separate them. By the time she did so, however, dramatic events were taking place in London and England that would fast spiral the city and the country into chaos. It may have been as much to escape danger as to escape Richer that Matilda Becket sent her son to Paris, since at least he would be safe there.