Thomas Becket

This scholarly biography reconstructs the life of Thomas Becket from clerk in Theobald's household to royal chancellor and then archbishop of Canterbury. Barlow follows his friendship and rupture with Henry II over church courts, criminous clerks, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, the years of exile in France, the return of 1170, and the murder in the cathedral by four knights. He weighs charters, letters, and the early lives against later legend, and he treats Becket's cult only as it grows from the death. The book is a medieval political and ecclesiastical life, not a modern novel of the shrine.

Bound in purple buckram blocked with a gilt design. Dark purple slipcase.