He was murdered at this spot.
He had been at odds with King Henry II for several years.
When Henry made a comment (or a series of comments) before his knights about wishing to be rid of the nuisance priest, his knights took his comments as an order to assassinate Becket.
In later years, an apologetic Henry publicly asked for penance before Becket’s shrine. The stairs leading up to the shrine were trodden by so many pilgrims that the stone became worn.
An excellent novel that takes place during the 12th century, and includes a fictionalization of Becket’s murder and the events leading up to it, is Ken Follett's book The Pillars of the Earth. You’ll notice this book in my Must Read Books list. It’s one of my all time favorites. Reading it was sort of like watching the movie Titanic...it was so engrossing that you didn’t realize how long it was.
Today should be an extraordinarily slow day at work, so I’ll try to see if I can’t write a poem or two to post on The Writing Desk for your reading enjoyment.
P.S. – I spent much of yesterday attempting to get my blogs a bit more traffic from the web. I submitted them for indexing on the major search engines, and I set up feeds for both blogs. You may notice a bunch of new buttons on the sidebars of Serene Musings and The Writing Desk. For any of you who have personalized Yahoo! or Google homepages, you can now add my blog feeds to your homepage. Simply click on the button, then follow the instructions. By doing so, you can have a tab on your Yahoo! or Google homepage with my blogs, and it will show the updated headlines of any new posts that I put up. I also have buttons for Google Reader, MSN, and several other homepage websites, in case you use any of those.
You may also notice a counter now at the bottom of both my blogs. Now I’ll be able to see just how much traffic I’m getting (of course, right now, the majority of those views are from me going to my pages to add buttons and links).
1 comment:
When I was a little girl, Ma and Pa had a booklet on Thomas that they got during their trip to Canterbury in the early '70s.
Or maybe it was actually a booklet on Canterbury that mentioned Thomas.
Either way, I was pretty horrified. Scarred me for life.
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