On December 29 the Church honors St. Thomas Becket (1118/20-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in his own cathedral on December 29, 1170, by four knights of King Henry II who had misread the king's angry cry — "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" — as a command. Becket had defended the Church's liberties against the crown's encroachments, and his murder shocked all Europe. He was canonized barely three years later, in 1173, by Alexander III.
Canterbury Cathedral at Canterbury — the mother church of the Anglican Communion and, in Becket's day, the shrine that drew more medieval pilgrims than any other in England — marks the exact spot of his murder, in the north-west transept, behind the high altar. The shrine of his relics, built in 1220 and one of the richest in Christendom, was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1538 — and the candle on the floor of the martyrdom chapel has burned, since 1982, in reparation. The pilgrims who came to Becket's tomb from 1170 to 1538 — Chaucer's pilgrims among them — made Canterbury the English equivalent of Santiago de Compostela. The Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, still draws pilgrims and visitors in the tradition of those who walked from Southwark to Canterbury in the Canterbury Tales.
Becket is patron of the clergy and of those who defend the Church against the state. His feast is an English Catholic feast of particular weight: a king's man who became God's man, and paid with his life.
