Barlow: Thomas Becket (Cloth) [Hardcover]

Although I had to read this book for a presentation at university, I became hooked. I had read other books on the same subject and to be honest they were just boring. Barlow gives an extensive amount of information on Becket. He concentrates on his character and his relationship with the King. Barlow makes you look on Becket with a different perspective. The detail in which the book was written is second to none. I honestly believe that this is the best historical book on the market about Becket. Barlow has made a subject which is generally considered boring a interesting one.

Fran Barlow's assessment of Thomas Becket is an invaluable study aid to anyone working on this unlikely saint, or is a perfect read for the interested layman. One note of caution-- and this is why the star review is not higher-- this book is a beautiful edition produced for the Folio Society, but it does not contain the footnotes from the original edition! It also has different page numbers, meaning as a reference work for those studying Becket, it is perhaps not as useful as a copy of the original edition. Overall though, as an introduction to Becket this text is good, and is presented in a beautiful binding.

The author has read all documents, all letters and memoranda, all notes and chronicles from eye-witnesses and other people around Thomas Becket. Maybe even too much or too many. He tries to rebuild a full biography with all personal intentions and meanings from this imbroglio and forest of testimonies. He succeeds quite well, though at times he seems to be overwhelmed with details. Yet he clears up a few facts. Becket was of Norman extract by both his parents and his father was a merchant in London. Jean Anouilh's myth of a Saxon father and a Saracen mother is clearly ousted. The book is also clear about Thomas Becket's life. He sure was the friend of Henry II, in spite or because of a ten years age difference. But this did not mean he took part in Henry's drinking and womanizing. In fact he appears to be a very serious and tedious person who does not really like the pleasures of life, even if, as the Chancellor, he is obliged to have an apparently ritzy life. The point is he was a good Chancellor and had a good influence on Henry, though as the Chancellor, he had no real power, except on church services for the King and the copying service of the crown. He probably taught Henry his job and kept him within some limits. When he was the Chancellor he did all he could to impose and improve the King's power, and limit and contain the Church's. He forced the Church to accept to pay the various taxes the King needed for his wars. But Henry tricked him. Was it with his agreement or against his will? We will never know. Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the church in England. This enabled Thomas Becket to finally lead the life of austerity and rule-governed behavior he desired. He was able to wear the monastic underwear under his archiepiscopal dress. This will determine in his new life intransigence and exaction for himself and the others, including the king. He became the best defender of the church and refused the king's power in the judicial field that was encroaching on the church's courts of justice. He refused criminal clerks to be tried by lay royal or feudal courts, monks who became such to escape serfdom to be in any way recaptured, and his appointing priests to be in any way questioned by local feudal barons. The book though never enters the question of the contradiction between Saxons and Normans. The author uses the word English and we do not know if he means Saxons or Normans born in England. Barlow thus avoids questioning the main problem of that time: the colonization of England by the Normans and the integration of the Saxons in the new emerging English society. From this moment though Thomas Becket became Henry's archenemy. The king will do all he can to destroy him. Thomas Becket will go in exile and use the French church and the Pope to get a reconciliation, though he must have thought it was a foolish bargain knowing the king the way he did. But he accepted against all odds to go back to Canterbury where he will be assassinated within days after his return, just after Christmas 1170 in the cathedral itself. This death will start a popular pilgrimage and myth, and the King will come on his own repentance pilgrimage there in 1174 in order to recapture the support of the Church in England against the rebellion led by his eldest son he had had the carelessness to have crowned before his own death, though against the will of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in exile at the time. Actually on this question, in this situation the book is by far too short concerning the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine, his wife. But the main shortcoming of the book is that his conclusion is factually right but historically short. Thomas Becket will have helped the church to stand against old feudal customs imposed onto the church, thus appearing as if defending the freedom of the church, what will appear later in the Magna Carta, and yet that made the church stand against the King in his attempt to build a more centralized political order with one single tax system and one single royal judicial system. And at that level the King is going in the right direction since such reforms are needed to guarantee equality to all and a more centralized society, a less divided and exploded society, in a way one "rule of law" in the whole kingdom. This will also appear in the Magna Carta, though less clearly and it will take a few centuries for it to become a reality. These two directions, civil liberties and a more unified just and fair territory and political system, will be the very basis of the political organization that will finally emerge, for the first time in the western world, after the Glorious Revolution. Barlow does not see this perspective though he notes the great improvements that will appear in the judicial system after Thomas Becket's death, the church essentially yielding to the King's justice.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne