Hello! My name is Kathryn Maude and I’m the head of Medieval records at the National Archives.
Today, we’re going to look at some legal documents from our E document collection that shed light on the life of Thomas Becket, the murdered archbishop who became a saint. The documents in this collection, which range from around 1100 to around 1600, were all stored in the Exchequer. The Exchequer was the financial department of medieval and early modern government and it dealt with money coming in and out of government.
So what kind of material can we find in this collection?
The Exchequer material includes records of taxation, deeds which record the exchange of money, property or rights and records of the spending of the royal household and government. For example, you’ll find one of the National Archives oldest public records,
Domesday, the survey of land and land holdings taken after the Norman Conquest of England.
You can also find the tax records of many ordinary people in medieval and early modern England, including those we’ve now
described as first generation immigrants. The collection holds accounts of money spent and received by the medieval
and early government.
Before we look at our example from this collection, notice that our document has a unique reference so we can use our catalogue to find it. That’s E42/527.
Now, let’s take a closer look at our document and work out what it’s about. So, we can see that this record is a small piece of parchment, animal skin with a seal attached on some plaited string. The document is written in Latin, the language of legal documents and the church in the Middle Ages, and it’s very neat and clear. At the bottom, there’s a piece of parchment that has been cut and we can see the remains of a seal, an impression in wax used to sign the document. This seal is the Great Seal of Henry II, which shows the king on his throne on one side and on horseback on the other, to demonstrate his royal power. The document is a deed issued by the king, granting 25 pounds a year to the religious men of Holy Trinity in London. We have this deed at the National Archives because Holy Trinity Priory and its lands came into the king’s hands later in the Middle Ages, when the king came into possession of land or property. The legal documents relating to that property were kept in the treasury of the Receipt, place for valuable objects or documents.
Deeds can tell us about relationships between people, because they need to be witnessed by people present in the room, so that they’re valid. Witness lists to grants and charters were written in order of importance and the king’s wife, Queen Eleanor, is given pride of place here; followed by Thomas Becket, who is described as Thomas, the chancellor. This deed doesn’t have a date but we know that it must have been issued after Thomas became chancellor in 1155 and before he became archbishop in 1162. Thomas’s presence on the witness
list of the king’s deed shows his trusted position at court.
Another document from the series of deeds in the Exchequer – – these documents relating to property that came into royal hands – can help to tell the story of Thomas and the king’s relationship and how Thomas saw himself.
In 1162, King Henry nominated Thomas Becket to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry wanted Becket to remain Lord Chancellor, when he took up the position of archbishop, to combine the most important secular and spiritual positions in the land in one man. To Henry’s shock, Thomas refused.
This document bears witness to Thomas’s refusal. It’s E40/4913.
This document also confirms the rights for the religious men at Holy Trinity Priory. It begins “Thomas, by the grace of God, minister of the Church of Canterbury…” and it’s sealed with Becket’s personal seal. We can see from this document, then, that Becket is archbishop of Canterbury and has given up his secular job as chancellor to Henry.
A seal was very personal in the Middle Ages. It told a story about how someone wanted to be seen. There are few interesting things
about this seal of Thomas Becket. The first is the legend, the writing on the seal. It reads “sigilum tome lund”, the seal of Thomas of London. Although he was now the Archbishop of Canterbury, he hadn’t forgotten the city of his birth.
Also, some of the work done by our Collection care department at the National Archives was able to identify fingerprints
remaining on the seal. The seal matrix will be pressed into the wax while it was still wet which often left fingerprints – a trace of the living man in the archives.
As you can see, the seal is now in a fabric pouch. This might look like modern conservation, but in fact this is a medieval conservation technique to preserve the seal from damage. The fabric dates to around 1300 and is known as panni tartarici or tartar cloths – Eastern Islamic silks woven with gold and silver thread which would have been very expensive. This is a demonstration of the importance
of this seal of Becket to the community that held this grant. They probably put it into this fine fabric case after he was murdered and made a saint by Pope Alexander III. The seal then became what is called a contact relic – an item that had touched a saint.
So these two documents from the series, E40 and E42 to show us Thomas Becket’s two roles as chancellor and then as archbishop, and the importance that he continued to have after his death. But to find out about the end of Thomas Becket’s life, we need to look at a document from another series – DL27/4, records relating to the Duchy of Lancaster. This is the same kind of document – a grant that confirms someone’s rights or privileges. It’s important now because of its seal.
This document was issued by Stephen Langton, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, around 1214. His seal shows Becket’s untimely death
at the hands of Henry’s knights. We can see Becket at the bottom, praying and one of the knights has his sword in Becket’s skull. Stephen Langton wanted to remind anyone who looked at his seal of the murder of his predecessor and the threat to the power of the church that it represented.
Don’t forget, we’ve only looked at one kind of document relating to King Henry II and Thomas Becket’s lives and relationship. Although deeds can tell us a lot about relationships between people and how people wanted to be seen, they won’t tell us about people’s feelings or what they did outside of financial transactions. They certainly give us one way of understanding the past but there were many others.