Murder of Thomas Becket

Becket, Henry II's chancellor, was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury on 3 June 1162 and as archbishop defended the liberties of the Church against the king. The quarrel came to a head over "criminous clerks" — clergy accused of serious crimes, whom the Church claimed the right to try in its own courts, where they could at worst be defrocked. The Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) sought to bring them under royal justice; Becket at first went along with the other bishops, then repudiated the Constitutions. Summoned before a council at Northampton in October 1164, he fled to France and spent six years in exile, nearly two of them at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny. On 14 June 1170 the archbishop of York, with the bishops of London and Salisbury, crowned Henry's heir, Henry the Young King, at Westminster; in November Becket excommunicated all three, and at the beginning of December he returned to England.

On hearing of this, Henry, according to Edward Grim, who witnessed the murder and was wounded in it, railed at the "miserable drones and traitors" of his household who let a low-born cleric treat their lord with contempt (the famous "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" is a version invented in the 18th century). Four knights — Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton — came to Canterbury on 29 December and ordered Becket to go to Winchester to answer for his actions. He refused and went to the cathedral for vespers. The knights, who had left their weapons under a tree outside, fetched them, rushed into the cathedral and cut him down; under his robes the monks found a hair shirt.

Pope Alexander III excommunicated the four knights and ordered them to serve in the Holy Land for fourteen years, and on 21 February 1173 he canonized Becket. On 12 July 1174, during the revolt of 1173–1174, Henry did public penance at the tomb. Pilgrims came to the shrine for centuries — Chaucer's Canterbury Tales follow a company of them from Southwark — until in 1538, during the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII had it destroyed.