Part Two

In an important passage found early on in the collection, Benedict informed his readers that “we will tell the story only of these miracles: those which we saw with our own eyes, or we heard from the actual ill people already healed and their witnesses, or those things we learned from the testimony of religious men, who had seen them with their own eyes” (I.7). When one looks at the Miracles as a whole, it becomes clear that he really did view the stories he heard in these three categories, and that he assessed stories differently depending on which category they were in.

The first category, “those which we saw with our own eyes,” meant, in essence, miracles happening within the cathedral – the kind of miracles that had first “consoled” and “revived” the monks after Becket’s death (II.6). The “we” of this statement should be underlined: gathering miracles was often a group project. Benedict frequently refers to “we who were there” to hear or see something, “we” meaning the brothers and their servants, and “there” meaning Becket’s tomb in the crypt.2 See, for example, II.32, II.40, and III.9. Benedict must have spent many hours in the crypt, but he was not present every minute of every day, and probably not often on duty alone. He wrote of a monk named Roger who was also “assigned to the care of the sacred body,” described how Robert, the monastery’s sacrist, cured a man with Becket’s belt, and refers to other unnamed monks and servants at work in the crypt chapel.3 See IV.59, II.38, III.1, III.19, and III.20 and Biographical Notes, Roger, monk of Christ Church and Robert, sacrist of Christ Church. In one chapter, Benedict described himself as traveling by night with a servant (IV.58), a story that underlines the fact that he was not always at the cathedral, much less in the crypt. There must be stories in the Miracles that he heard about from his brothers and/or their servants rather than being there himself.

The “seeing with our own eyes” rhetoric, meanwhile, should not be taken too literally. There certainly were occasions when the monks felt they had personally eyewitnessed a miracle, such as when a monk and a servant were in the process of getting a girl’s candle relit at Becket’s tomb when it flamed up of its own accord (III.1), or the time Benedict saw a lame man kneel to pray at Becket’s tomb, get up, fall down, and then get up and stand without using a crutch (III.8). What the monks more commonly saw, though, were people who were visibly ill who, some time later, appeared to be improved. Some miracles would not have been visible no matter how carefully they watched. One man regained his sense of smell when he entered the church (II.15), while a woman was freed from something like tinnitus when she prayed at the tomb (III.16). Complicating matters further was the fact that people experienced miracles in other places in the cathedral, not just at the tomb.4 For miracles at the “doors of the church,” see II.1, II.38, III.3, and III.33; for miracles at the martyrdom site, see II.33 and II.40; for a miracle at the “marble pavement,” see III.7; and for miracles simply “in the church,” see II.53 and IV.83.

Whether or not the monks and/or their servants caught a glimpse of something, stories still needed to be told. The crucial importance of what we might term an exit interview is underlined by Benedict’s frustration that not everyone who felt themselves healed in the cathedral came forward to tell the monks about it. He frets about these lost stories more than once.5 See II.34, III.39, and III.46. For those who did present themselves, not all interviews were satisfactory. Benedict wrote that one boy claiming he had been enabled to see did not satisfy him because “he produced no witness or person to attest to his blindness” and “I did not see him blind when he came” (IV.56). In other cases, Benedict felt that people left the cathedral before the monks could be certain about their recoveries.6 See IV.23, IV.33, and IV.35. Still, cathedral miracles allowed Benedict and his fellows to question people very close in time to their experiences, as well bystanders who may have seen things they had not. Cathedral miracles make up a significant portion of the Miracles, about 30% of the whole, with many of them appearing at the beginnings of Books II and III.7 The percentages of stories I cite for cathedral miracles, outside miracles, and religious men’s miracles are from my count of the number of chapters devoted to each category. Another person’s count might be slightly different from my own. Not all chapters concern a specific individual’s story, and for those that do, it is not always clear to which category a chapter belongs. For a more in-depth discussion of Benedict’s treatment of stories in these three categories, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, pp. 159–80 and 282 n. 8. Benedict was so comfortable vouching for these stories that he even devoted two chapters to non-miracles, cases in which ill boys did not find healing at the tomb (II.16–17).

Benedict’s second category of stories, those “we heard from the actual ill people already healed and their witnesses,” encompassed an extremely broad range of stories: in effect, any miracle experienced by a lay person that happened outside of the cathedral. About 45% of the chapters in the Miracles fall into this category. Outside miracles could be far more spectacular than anything the monks had seen inside the cathedral, including resurrection miracles and the amazing story of the blinded and castrated Eilward of Westoning.8 See IV.2, IV.62–6, and IV.94. However, they were not easy to authenticate. Nearly all the people telling these stories were strangers. Aside from inspecting objects that these visitors brought with them, examining their bodies for signs of illness and healing, and noting what kinds of gifts they gave, the monks and their servants could not claim any degree of eyewitness for their miracles.

In this situation, Benedict assured his readers, they sought out “witnesses.” He rarely named such witnesses in the Miracles (doing so would have taken time and bulked out the text considerably), but he did attach comments to certain miracles to reassure his readers that he and his brothers did not blindly accept everything they heard. One of the most interesting of these is a coda he added to the story of Beatrice, a pauper who claimed to have been healed of blindness partly on her way to Canterbury and partly after a vigil at the tomb. Beatrice wore poor clothing and her only witness was a girl, and Benedict openly doubted her story: “now I demanded more harshly for witnesses, now I presented to her an unmerciful appearance as if I were contradicting her. She answered back with hard and bitter words” (III.31). Beatrice convinced Benedict in the end, but there must have been other low-status, poor individuals who did not.

Benedict was also careful to state that they gathered stories from “the actual ill people.” What he meant was that they did not accept secondhand stories. The person who experienced a miracle had to be the one who told them about it. In practice, Benedict recorded miracles involving infants and very young children who could not have told their stories themselves, and he may have silently bent this rule on other occasions. Still, the content of the Miracles strongly suggests that the monks did indeed wave off stories that people could have told them about their relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Dismissing hearsay strengthened the credibility of the Miracles, and it also freed the monks from a great deal of labor. The time they spent listening to people would have ballooned alarmingly if they had opened the gate to such stories.

There were certain people, though, from whom Benedict would gladly hear secondhand stories. His third category of stories was “those things we learned from the testimony of religious men, who had seen them with their own eyes.” While a person like Beatrice had a hard time being believed when she described her own cure, Benedict felt that men dedicated to the religious life – men like himself – could be counted on to tell true stories not only about themselves, but also about others. Benedict knew that nearly all of his readers would be religious men (that is, monks, clerks, canons, priors, abbots, and bishops), so he was effectively saying that he trusted them to know and tell the truth. In practice, Benedict extended this same trust to high-ranking laymen and women, such as Earl Simon, who told about the cure of his baker (IV.29), and Countess Rohese de Vere, who told a story about a canon of Bedford (IV.51). Religious women do not seem to have come into Benedict’s calculations. His collection contains only two miracles concerning nuns. One story was told at Canterbury by the nun’s high-ranking mother, while the other may well have been conveyed by letter.9 See III.58 and IV.10. Priests were also in a more marginal group. They often came from quite humble source origins, and while Benedict did include priests’ secondhand stories, he also often added statements testifying to their veracity.

About 25% of the Miracles is made up of stories from religious men, the secular elite, and priests, and a remarkable two-thirds of these stories are secondhand – that is, stories about people other than the speaker. Benedict was writing at a time when most high-ranking members of English society, both secular and religious, had to be convinced of Becket’s sanctity. In this context, one can imagine the excitement at Christ Church when someone of standing, such as an abbot, venerable knight, or countess, appeared at the monastery with stories of miracles to tell. These early adopters of Becket’s cult were key witnesses, and Benedict was keen to hear and record their stories. Such valued guests must have been warmly received, hosted in comfortable quarters, and listened to with deference and delight. An unarticulated but clearly crucial subcategory of stories that Benedict also wanted to hear were those that showed Becket’s enemies the errors of their ways, such as the story of a certain Simeon, described three times in a short chapter as an “enemy of a martyr,” who was punished for mocking the efficacy of the water, or the miracle of a leprous boy who had connections to Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Godfrey, Bishop of St. Asaph, and Jocelin, Bishop of Salisbury.10 See III.25 and IV.74. See also I.14, III.17, and III.45. Demonstrating that people of distinction testified to or were forced to confront the truth of Becket’s miracles was a central goal of his project.

The written sources Benedict utilized in the Miracles are a subset of the “religious men” category. Benedict copied nine letters, salutation and all, into his collection.11 See II.52, IV.2, IV.4, IV.11, IV.65, IV.84–5, IV.87, and Addition 7. See also IV.86, which we know is the text of a letter from a monk of Reading Abbey because William copied the letter directly into his collection, including its salutation: see Parallel Miracles no. 12. Religious men wrote eight of these. The ninth was written by the burgesses of Bedford (IV.2), but, as Benedict carefully explained, it was solicited by the high-born Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, so it came with his impressive imprimatur. Benedict’s inclusion of these letters was clearly promotional, advertising that men like Albinus, the Abbot of Darley, Bishop William Turbe of Norwich, and Geoffrey, the Dean of Gloucester, had all testified to Becket’s miracles in writing.12 See IV.11, IV.65, and Addition 7. Some of the letters were carried to Canterbury by the very people who had experienced the miracle.13 See IV.4, IV.65, IV.84, Addition 7. Benedict mentions receiving letters from priests, but – underlining their more marginal authority – he does not copy their letters directly into his collection.14 See IV.64 and IV.66. He also stated that William son of Ranulf, the Lord of Whitchurch, notified the monks of miracles via letter (see III.40: either the letter or Benedict’s introduction to it had some remarkably harsh inventive about the ‘uncouth’ and ‘savage’ Welsh population). Benedict may well have plagiarized from the Whitchurch letter, and he very likely lifted text from other letters in ways that cannot now be traced.15 There are very close verbal correspondences between Benedict’s and William’s account of the miracles of Cecilia of Plumstock (see IV.65 and Appendix no. 8). It seems they were both cribbing from a letter written by a local priest. For more analysis of the letters found in Benedict’s and William’s collections, see Rachel Koopmans, “Testimonial Letters in the Late-Twelfth Century Collections of Thomas Becket’s Miracles,” in David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (eds.), Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen (Notre Dame, 2014), 168–201.

Gathering material for the Miracles, then, meant countless hours of listening and questioning, leavened with an exciting flash of seeing something remarkable or a welcome visit from an honored guest. On a number of occasions Benedict mentions sending out messengers to check up on rumors of miracles or to discover how someone fared after they left the cathedral.16 See IV.4, IV.11, IV.21, and IV.87. In the case of certain miracles that happened in Kent near Canterbury, he appears to have gone out himself to investigate.17 See II.2, IV.34, IV.63, and Addition 8. All of these miracles, though, were ones that Benedict had first heard about at Canterbury. He did not go to London or Rouen or further afield to find out what people were saying in the way a modern investigative reporter might. He stayed put: the stories came to him. The only set of stories that Benedict might have heard about outside of Canterbury is the long block of stories concerning a cross set up in the martyr’s honor at Newington, Kent, found at the close of Book III (III.64–78). Even here, though, it is more likely that Benedict was drawing on a letter or written account rather than collecting stories there himself.

Benedict was discriminating. The people with (by far) the best chance of having their stories recorded were religious men and the secular elite, followed by people who experienced miracles under the eye of the monks in the cathedral, with those who came to give thanks about miracles that happened elsewhere in last place, especially if such pilgrims ranked low in social hierarchies or otherwise struck Benedict as unreliable or uninteresting. He likely had other ways of ranking, sorting, and discarding stories that are now more difficult to discern. The clerk William FitzStephen heard the collection being read aloud, and he complained that “the writer fails to commend to memory” the miracles that the martyr was performing in France, Ireland, and elsewhere.18 FitzStephen, Vita, p. 151. This is in fact a fair criticism of Benedict’s Miracles, which does indeed concentrate very heavily on stories from English tellers.19 Benedict devotes two blocks of stories in Book IV to miracles in France (IV.17–23 and IV.60–1), and there are some individual stories concern French tellers: see, for instance, IV.21, the story of Mary of Rouen. He includes one story of a German (Matilda of Cologne, IV.37), and one of a Scot (John of Roxburgh, Addition 9). William would include far more non-English miracles, including discussion of Ireland: see Marcus Bull, “Criticism of Henry II’s Expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury’s Miracles of St Thomas Becket,” Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007): 107–29. In the earliest year or so of the cult, English pilgrims no doubt predominated, but later on, it could be that Benedict simply felt more comfortable with stories told by people residing in England.

For all its length, then, the Miracles is a subjective and highly limited account of Becket’s early miracles. Still, for the most part, we can trust that the people named in the collection really did exist. Benedict wanted the people in his text to be traceable, and he takes care to tell the reader their names, family relationships, places of origin, and, in the case of children, their ages. To manage this across the entire collection, listening must have been accompanied by note-taking.

Benedict never explicitly stated that he used notes. William did, and he was clearly picking up on a process that was underway when Benedict was creating the Miracles. In the prologue to his Life of Becket, William explained that when he was asked by the brothers to collect Becket’s miracles (in June 1172), there were many that were “concealed in uncorrected and defective notes [in schedulis occultabat incorrecta et imperfecta].” He then had a vision of Becket telling him to “choose what you will,” which he interpreted to mean that he could pick and choose among the stories, concerning himself only with the ones he thought deserved to be heard.20 William of Canterbury, Vita, pp. 2–3. Late in his collection, just before taking a break from collecting, William spoke of notes again, stating that though there were stories about resurrections “noted down in our tablets [in tabulis nostris praenotentur],” the times were difficult, and so “they must await another pen than mine.”21 William of Canterbury, Miracula, VI.90, p. 484.

Notes, tablets – these were evidently notations about miracles written on scrap pieces of parchment, a roll or rolls, and/or wax tablets. In one chapter, William had a couple conclude their story by saying, “We ask that we be recorded in the register [matricula] and dismissed quickly, lest our return home be slowed, since we have traveled from the territory of York.”22 William of Canterbury, Miracula, V.30, p. 396. This all suggests a process of notation immediately on hearing someone’s miracle story, with the writing of the miracle collection a separate activity, an activity made especially challenging if the miracle collector had to deal with inadequate notes or sort through great masses of them. A contemporary example of note-taking as a preliminary step to writing a miracle collection is found with the collection compiled from 1172–3 at the shrine of the Virgin at Rocamadour in south-central France. At one point, the collection’s anonymous writer stated that a number of miracles could not be described in full because “the notary was unwell on the days when these things became known, and so he did not write down [the miracles] in the correct manner and with proper headings.”23 The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation, trans. Marcus Bull (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 137. At the beginning of Book IV, Benedict contrasted the writing speed of a scribe with that of a notary, stating that the miracles were so numerous that “if I were given hands that could write not just speedily like a scribe, but record most rapidly like a notary, my talent would nevertheless be overcome, my tongue would fail, and my fingers become senseless” (IV.1). Though this passage does not prove that Benedict enlisted the help of a notary, the Christ Church monks certainly had the wherewithal to hire notaries or enlist literate servants to help them. Note-taking could have changed over time. Benedict might have relied on his memory at first, started note-taking himself, and then sought aid as the number of stories needing to be noted down increased.

However note-taking was being managed, by June 1172 there were clearly many notes that Benedict had not utilized, so much so that William felt oppressed by their number and their quality. In terms of the contents of the notes, the name of the male head of household seems always to have been noted. Women could go unnamed even if they were the key players in the story. A place of origin or a family name was also noted, however obscure it might be. The basic circumstances of people’s illnesses and their cures must also have been noted down, including how long someone had suffered: eight months, for instance, or three years, or whatever the individual said. Some of the extremely short chapters in Benedict’s collection may reflect the content of such notes. One chapter, for instance, reads in total: “What I relate happened in the house of the knight Hugh de Bodebi. A seven-year-old boy, Alexander, could not hear in one of his ears. When the water was poured in his ear, he recovered perfect hearing” (IV.82). Benedict so often provides the age of children that it must have been standard to ask how old a child was. For speakers beyond childhood, he might say that the person was adolescent or elderly, but age was otherwise unimportant.

That the notes were inadequate, or that Benedict relied on his memory for certain details or entire stories, is clear from his occasional admissions that he had forgotten certain details, such as the name of a village, the extent of an illness, the range of infirmities, the name of a peasant, or the circumstances of a cure.24 See I.15, II.37, II.67, III.28, and IV.53. One case in which Benedict’s notes seem to have failed him is the pair of chapters concerning miracles experienced by Constance, a nun of Stixwould (III.58), and the nun’s ill sister-in-law, Matilda (III.59). Benedict stated that the patriarch of the family was the deceased Robert son of Gilbert in the diocese of Lincoln, a man who appears in a number of contemporary documents (see Biographical Notes). These documents show that Robert had a daughter-in-law named Matilda – the Matilda of Benedict’s story. So far so good, but the documents record the name of Robert’s widow as Matilda, whereas Benedict called her Constance, and the name of the ill Matilda’s husband as William, whereas Benedict called him Robert. One way to explain this is that Benedict’s notes only provided the names of the deceased patriarch of the family, Robert, and the two people who experienced miracles, Constance and Matilda. When he came to write down this story, perhaps he surmised that Robert’s son would most likely be named Robert and Constance’s mother would most likely be named Constance.

This mix-up is visible only because we have enough documentation about Robert son of Gilbert to be able to fill in the names of the family ourselves. There is another case of the same problem later on in the collection. Benedict gives a father and his son the same name (Ingelram), though we know from other documentary records that the father was in fact named Stephen (IV.52).25 William gives the father his correct name in his version of the story: see Parallel Miracles no. 6. There must have been other problems moving from notes to the Miracles that are now not possible to trace. Some notes must have been so garbled, or the stories themselves uninteresting to the collectors, that neither monk decided to put them into their collections.

When people told their stories at Canterbury, questions were asked, notes were taken, and any letters were received. Actually composing the Miracles was a more deliberative process, when Benedict sat down to sort through notes, letters, and his memories of conversations. The material he had to choose from would have been constantly shifting as he selected and wrote up certain stories and gathered notes on more and still more. Composing would have required concentration, and Benedict very likely wrote the Miracles in the monastery’s scriptorium rather than the hubbub of the crypt chapel. Whereas he seems to have plenty of help with the gathering process, the composition was on him, and it is here where his vision and skills as a writer really came into play.

Benedict matched up stories from the very beginning to the very end of the Miracles. Though one can find some long runs of similar miracles, such as seven vision stories, six stories about perils at sea, and a particularly notable set of five child resurrection miracles, most of his matches are in sets of two or three. He found an extraordinary number of ways to do this matching. He often linked up miracles by type of illness (blindness, leprosy, fistula, dropsy, mental illness, etc.), by type of disability (lameness, deafness, problems with arms, bent back feet, etc.), and/or by severity, such as a complete inability to walk, near-death illness, and long-term blindness. He matched up miracles by type of accident or rescue, such as drownings, fires, and judicial trials, or by the strange behaviour of material objects such as coins, candles, wooden pyxes, and metal ampullas. The use of specific relics often links together stories, most often the drinking of the water relic, but also the application of items of Becket’s clothing. He also employed the place of a miracle as a binding device, matching together miracles about the openings in Becket’s tomb, miracles at the martyrdom site, miracles happening at Newington, miracles in France, and miracles happening more generally inside or outside of the cathedral. He connected other miracles by their timing, devoting sets of chapters to miracles that happened in Lent, at Easter, at Pentecost, and others that he says happened in quick succession.

The type of person experiencing a miracle also served as a binding device, such as dropsical women or drowned boys. Reflecting his desire to record stories from religious men and high-status tellers, another very common way he linked together chapters was by teller, such as the stories told by John of Kinstan and Master Henry of Houghton towards the end of Book III. There are many inventive pairings, such as the two stories about monks invoking the name of the martyr, two about religious men who cured themselves and then cured others using the same method, two about boys denied healing, two about knights who died good deaths after drinking the water relic, and two about dangerous abnormalities in menstrual flow, one woman having none and coughing up blood, while the other had too much.

In addition to coupling and placing similar miracles together, Benedict often provided introductions or conclusions to chapters that were designed to link stories together, including otherwise unmatched miracles. For example, in Book II, he wrote about a lame woman with a painful knee who was brought to Becket’s tomb and was not entirely healed (II.7). He began the next chapter by writing “We know that he who strengthened her disabled knee could also have fully restored the bases and soles of her feet so that she could step correctly again, because we know without doubt that he granted this to Wlviva of Canterbury” (II.8). After telling the story of the lame Wlviva, who prayed before Becket’s tomb, he turned next to the story of Edmund, who “had brought himself there as well.” This Edmund lacked sight in one eye and had felt something painful in his chest for a long time. After drinking the water relic, he regained the sight in the eye and the thing inside of him ruptured and came up through his mouth (II.9). This story led Benedict to tell another about someone with something stuck inside of them, the first sentence of the chapter reading, “There was no less praise or glory in what we know to have happened to a woman named Muriel.” After being gravely ill, Muriel received a drink of the water relic, and was close to death when she began to vomit up cherry, plum, and acorn pits (II.10). Benedict transitioned to the next story, about a woman with a painful arm, with this reflection, “To these things the Lord added another miracle, concerning a lesser illness – though why do I say lesser? No-one thinks that the illness he or she suffers is small” (II.11). He began the following by writing “A blacksmith of the Isle of Thanet, Robert, also found the grace of healing” (II.12). And on and on it goes, with Benedict carefully tying stories together in one way or another.

Benedict had at least two reasons for putting so much effort into linking and matching miracles. The first is that it gives the Miracles a great deal of forward momentum, pulling the reader on from the next story to the next. The way Benedict constructed the Miracles replicates the way people exchange stories in conversation, with one story provoking thoughts of a similar one, prompting the memory of another and then another. We know from two sources that, even as Benedict was in the process of composing the Miracles, it was read aloud to his brother monks and their elite guests in the chapterhouse, the monks’ daily gathering place.26 See FitzStephen, Vita, p. 151, and William of Canterbury, Miracula, p. 138. Such readings, very likely performed by Benedict himself, were no doubt intended as a means to keep all the brothers informed about the saint’s ongoing marvels, but they also must have encouraged Benedict to please and engage his listeners. By matching up miracles and recreating some of the natural connectiveness of conversation, he made his text easier and more pleasurable to listen to, and later, easier and more pleasurable to read. He was careful not to put too many miracles of the same type together, fearing, as he said in one chapter, that “distaste would be produced by the constant repetition of the same miracle” (IV.4). He aimed to “ward off distaste, as it were, by a variety of dishes” (IV.64).

The second reason Benedict matched together miracles was to give his text more credence. He believed that a repeat miracle made the first more convincing, a point he makes many times. After describing how a woman found that the blood of Becket that she had wiped out of a vessel had returned the next day, Benedict added on a similar miracle, so that “those who do not give much weight to the first sign might marvel at the second” (I.17). A miracle of a relighting candle happened a second time “so that a subsequent miracle would confirm the earlier one” (III.3). In the case of a man who found coins in his purse that he had given away, Benedict argued that he was “more faithfully and firmly to be believed,” because another man “asserts that something similar happened to him” (IV.40).27 For similar statements, see also IV.62 and IV.85. The logic here – that a story of one miracle should be believed if someone claimed that a similar miracle had occurred – may not seem very sound today. For Benedict and his readers, repetition made it clear that the first miracle was no aberration and could be trusted.

Benedict played miracle Mah-jongg in order to make his text more engaging, interesting, and convincing. Readers interested in a specific story are advised to check if Benedict linked it with others, and if so, how the stories might build on or contrast with each other. “Thematic” is a term that is frequently used to describe the composition of a miracle collection, but it does not sit well with the Miracles. “Connective” is better, highlighting Benedict’s efforts to shape, organize, and fuse together a large mass of unwieldly and disparate material. To return to the analogy of beads and thread, his intent was to string together a long and beautiful necklace that would be enjoyed and admired by his audience as it pulled them from one story to the next. Besides matching together miracles by type, there was another kind of linking that enthused Benedict. He was determined to rivet Becket’s miracles to the Bible and the Bible to Becket’s miracles.

Benedict infused the Passion with comparisons between Becket and Christ,31 See above, pp. 11–12. and in the Miracles, he was forever seeking resonances and harmonies between a miracle story and biblical events, figures, and passages. For example, after describing how a lame woman was healed at Becket’s tomb, he wrote that “the people saw her walking about and praising the Lord, and they were full of wonder and elation because of what had happened to her [Acts 3:9–10]” (II.7). The italicized phrases, drawn from the Book of Acts in the New Testament, describe the reaction of a crowd of onlookers to the healing of a lame man by the Apostle Peter. Another good example is found a few chapters later, where Benedict introduced a story by stating “It was the feast day when the Invention of the Cross is celebrated every year [Jn 5:1], and lying here and there in the church of Canterbury was a great multitude of the sick, the blind, the lame, the withered, those awaiting and asking for health [Jn 5:3], and the power of the martyr was there to heal them [Lk 5:17].” Here Benedict drew from the description of healing cures on a Jewish feast day at a place called the pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, adding on a phrase from the Gospel of Luke about Christ’s healing of a paralyzed man. Benedict was especially fond of citing phrases from the Psalms, poetic songs found in the Hebrew Scriptures. To take one of many examples, when he described how an elderly, paralyzed knight decided to seek help at Becket’s tomb, he lifted favourite passages from two different Psalms: “Finally, realizing that there is no salvation in men [Ps 107:13], and that it would be good for him to cling to God and put his hope in the Lord God [Ps 72:28], he asked to be put on his horse and brought to Canterbury” (II.23).

For the most part, Benedict would not have had to look up such passages in order to cite them. Benedictine monks sang the Psalms multiple times a day every day of their lives. Novices would soon have them all memorized. Other books of the Bible were not memorized wholesale in the same way, but passages and stories from them would have been deeply embedded in the minds of religious men and women as a result of their education, private reading, and most especially from participating in tens of thousands of church services over the course of their lifetimes. Each service had its own defined liturgy, a set of spoken prayers, chants, lessons, rites, and readings that were largely made up of passages and phrases drawn from the Bible. These liturgies were in Latin, and so their full meaning was only accessible to those who knew the language well. For those who did and spent hours every day hearing and participating in such liturgies, constant aural repetition stocked their minds with biblical images, stories, phrases, and events.32 For further analysis of this phenomenon, see Frans van Liere, “The Bible in Worship and Preaching,” in Frans van Liere (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 208–36. On the medieval liturgy, see Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge, 2009); M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, 2017), esp. pp. 4–7 for an excellent explanation of medieval liturgy; and Heather Blurton, Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 (Philadelphia, 2022), esp. pp. 24–34. For a study of iconography and liturgy at Canterbury Cathedral, see Marie-Pierre Gelin, “Lumen ad revelationem genium”: Iconographie et liturgie à Christ Church, Canterbury, 1175–1220 (Turnhout, 2006).

Most of the biblical echoes found throughout the Miracles probably simply occurred to Benedict as he was writing. He must have put more work into the sections of the Miracles thick with biblical echoes (such as the Prologue, where there are numerous citations from the book of Lamentations), but most of what he needed was in his head. Nearly all of Benedict’s medieval readers, in turn, were so well versed in liturgical and biblical texts that such phrases would have sounded chords deep within them. It would have worked rather in the same way that someone who today brings up a famous line from a pop song does not have to explain where it came from or what it means. When religious men read, “lying here and there in the church of Canterbury was a great multitude of the sick, the blind, the lame, the withered, those awaiting and asking for health,” Benedict did not have to say, “readers, looking around the cathedral, it was just like the pool of Bethesda in New Testament times.” They would have known what he meant without the need of any of the italics and citations I have provided below.

The point of biblical parallelism in the Miracles was to lift stories of Becket’s miracles into an elevated religious register, heightening their significance with phrases and allusions instantly recognizable to Benedict’s reading audience. Many medieval writers and hagiographers engaged in this kind of echoing, but did not always employ it so cleverly or to such an extent. Benedict, who would prove himself to be a talented liturgical composer, did it particularly well, adding great depth and richness to his text. What especially enthused Benedict were the times he could draw similarities between Becket’s miracles and Christ’s miracles. For instance, in the Prologue he writes “By [Becket’s] merits, the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are risen up, the mute speak, the poor are evangelized [Mt 11:5], the paralytic healed, the dropsical cease to swell, the mad return to their senses, the epileptic are cured, the feverish recover, and, to conclude in brief, all manner of infirmity is cured.” Medieval readers would have understood that Benedict was echoing a well-known listing of Christ’s miracles found in the Gospel of Matthew, and that by adding more miracle types, he was declaring, in effect, that Becket’s miracles did not just replicate but expanded upon Christ’s. While Christ attended to those who were blind, lame, leprous, deaf, and dead, Becket did this and also cured the mute, the paralyzed, the dropsical, the mad, the epileptic, the feverish, and “all manner of infirmity.”

Another example of such linking of Becket to Christ is found in Benedict’s description of Becket’s first miracle. The story concerns a blind woman named Emma, in Sussex, who recovered her sight three days after Becket’s death. Christ’s resurrection was three days after his death, and Benedict found this parallel “quite beautiful” (I.8). He may also have been thinking of the story of Mary Magdalene, the first person to see the resurrected Christ on that third day (Jn 20:11–18), as a parallel to the blind woman Emma, the first to recover her sight and experience a miracle after Becket’s death. He came up with a particularly striking adaptation of verses to describe Emma’s story, writing, “This was the beginning of the signs of Jesus in Sussex of England, and the glory of his martyr was manifested to his disciples [Jn 2:11], to us, who had eaten and drunk with him [Acts 10:41], before he had been killed in the womb of the virgin and mother church.” The full verse from the Gospel of John reads, “This was the beginning of the signs of Jesus in Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him,” while the passage in Acts describes how Christ’s resurrection was shown “to us [i.e., Christ’s disciples], who had eaten and drunk with him, after he arose again from the dead.” By echoing and adding his own phrases into these verses, Benedict was declaring that Becket’s death and miracles were like Christ’s and that Benedict and his fellow monks were like Jesus’s disciples.

A modern Christian might find such connections to be audacious, even blasphemous, but to Benedict, they were beautiful. Hearing harmonies, rhymes, resonances, and echoes between the Bible and Becket’s miracles made them more meaningful and emotionally rewarding, creating a dense web of interconnections that Benedict expected to his readers to find pleasurable on an aesthetic level and persuasive on an intellectual one. Readers interested in a specific story or section of the Miracles containing such citations are advised to look up the passages and register the subtexts. This is important not only in order to grasp the full import of Benedict’s account, but also because this echoing can lead a reader astray. For instance, Benedict concludes his story of how a woman named Wekerilda was cured of a number of ailments by writing “Up to ten people recovered from various infirmities that day, but we were not able to call back those who had slipped away and we drove out those without witnesses” (II.34). This looks like a straightforward factual statement, but Benedict was likely thinking of a story in the Gospel of Luke about ten lepers cured by Christ of whom only one came back to give thanks (Lk 17:12–17). It is especially critical to understand how frequently Benedict sought out and employed biblical parallelism when considering when and why he provided specific dates for some miracles.

Benedict’s reasons for including dating references in some chapters are easiest to discern with a full listing, provided below. Some of his time references refer to the date a miracle occurred, while others concern the beginning, duration, or stages of an illness. It is the former type – dated miracles – that have most interested scholars and will be the focus of my discussion below, but to be comprehensive I have listed both types. I have also included the handful of occasions in which Benedict stated that a story or stories should have appeared earlier or would appear later in the text. He usually referred to a date by means of the Christian liturgical calendar (for example, “the day of the Lord’s Supper” or “the Sunday before the first Ascension of the Lord”), though on occasion he used the Roman calendar (“the fourth nones of April”). Anno Domini (“year of our Lord”) dating appears only once, at the end of the Passion, where Benedict provided a very precise accounting of the day, month, year, and hour of Becket’s death. Otherwise, Benedict rarely specifies a year. For stories found in the early parts of the Miracles, it is obvious that the year is 1171, but later on, especially in Book IV, the year can only be determined where we now have a means of cross-referencing with other texts. The most important stories in Book IV for which cross-­referencing can provide dates are those of Eilward of Westoning, who must have arrived at Canterbury in late 1171 or early 1172; Jordan Fitz-Eisulf, who came on pilgrimage to Canterbury with his family shortly after Easter 1172; and James, the young son of Roger de Clare, Earl of Hertford, who was brought to Canterbury by his mother twice, once on Candlemas (February 2) 1173, and again in the later parts of Lent or around Easter of that same year, that is, late March/early April 1173.35 For these stories, see IV.2, IV.64, and IV.94 below. I provide a detailed account of the dating of these miracles in Koopmans, “Benedict of Peterborough’s Compositions,” pp. 252–8.

For ease of reference, I have included renderings of Benedict’s dates in a day/month/year format. Where the year can only be determined by cross-referencing, I have indicated this by brackets and italics. Most stories have no dating references.

At the start of Book II, Benedict carried on in the same vein, tying all but one of the first seven chapters to Easter or the time period around Easter (March 28, 1171). After this, though, the number of dated miracles falls off dramatically. Book II is twice as long as Book I, but after the Easter stories, Benedict pegged just two further miracles to specific dates, namely to the Invention of the Cross (May 3, 1171) and Ascension Day (May 6, 1171). At the beginning of Book III, Benedict reverted back to what he had done in Book I and the beginning of Book II, fixing the occurrence of four miracles to a specific date, namely, the time around Pentecost (May 16, 1171). But that is it – nearly all the other dating references found the rest of the Miracles concern the duration of an illness. There is just one miracle in the remainder of Book III that Benedict tied to a date, namely a vision that he stated occurred on May 2, 1171 and that he said he wished he had told earlier (III.18). Another chapter connecting miracles to specific dates in Book III (III.40) looks very much like it was derived from a letter. Book IV, the longest of the collection, has no blocks of stories tied to a date and only one chapter (IV.5) in which the year something occurred can be identified without seeking cross-references or making assumptions from context.

Thus, after Book I and the initial chapters of Book II, Benedict’s chief organizational principle was not chronological, but the connective, matching and linking aesthetic described above (and indeed, even in Book I, he matched up miracles in non-chronological ways).36 See p. 30 above. Though we today might find it incompatible to construct one section of a text within a defined chronological time frame and then not construct the rest of the text in the same way, or to organize a few chapters by tying them to a specific date and then silently shift over to nonchronological ways of tying stories together, for Benedict, this was fine. When one looks closely at the dated miracles, it becomes clear that while Benedict seems to have been genuinely curious about the miracles that happened before Easter, the big point of the dated miracles in the Miracles was biblical parallelism, not chronology. Benedict was working to put Becket’s miracles within Christian chronological frameworks in both big and small ways. The overall chronological framework he gave the Miracles replicates the three main seasons of the Christian liturgical calendar: the pre-Easter period, the time around Easter, and the time around Pentecost. Importantly, Benedict did not just date miracles to these times. He also made the mood of the miracles replicate the mood of the liturgical seasons. The monks are plunged in anguish and unhappiness in the “first days of miracles.” His readers were to understand the time after Becket’s death not just as running (in part) over the period of Lent, but as a kind of Lent, a time of grief and darkness (Book I). Then comes Easter, which Benedict portrayed as a period of joyous rebirth and the outpouring of miracles, like to the glory of Christ’s resurrection (beginning of Book II). At the beginning of Book III, he tied miracles to Pentecost. All of his readers would have known the biblical story of tongues of fire appearing above the heads of Christ’s apostles on Pentecost, and that this event marked the coming of the Holy Spirit and the launch and spread of Christianity. For Benedict, the relighting of candles in the cathedral replicated the tongues of fire miracle, and from there, Becket’s miracles go from one splendor to the next, spreading the same way that Christianity spread after Pentecost.

With dated stories in the first part of the Miracles, Benedict produced a chronology of Becket’s posthumous cult that duplicated the grand liturgical narrative played out in Christian churches every year, from desolation in Lent to the joy of Easter and the spread of the gospel at Pentecost. In my reading, I do not doubt that it truly was a difficult time at Canterbury before Easter, nor that the events Benedict said happened in the cathedral around Easter and Pentecost did indeed happen in some shape or form. But would a modern historian whisked back to 1171 have highlighted the same events or framed the story in the same way? Was Easter/Pentecost 1171 the major pivot point in the development of Becket’s cult? In my view, Easter/Pentecost 1171 is far too early to view Becket’s cult as firmly established. When one considers political and religious developments during the period Benedict was writing, it seems highly likely that the cult’s tipping point, that is, the point when it took on an unstoppable momentum of its own, occurred well after the spring of 1171.

Benedict himself said little about post-murder political and religious developments. He did mention an early vision through which news arrived about Pope Alexander III’s censures of the murderers (I.14), and spoke frequently about the “enemies” of Becket, who are very much live threats in the text. He pounced on stories of miracles happening to or witnessed by kinsmen of the de Brocs and Gilbert Foliot, as well as miracles happening on territories owned by Becket’s enemies, which he clearly felt were meant to show them the truth.37 See III.17, III.45, III.65, and IV.2. Yet he did not provide dates for these miracles, nor provide any account of how the major players acted in the wake of the murder. Though he had to have known about King Henry’s decision to go on campaign in Ireland in the fall of 1171 and his reconciliation with the papal legates at Avranches in May 1172, nothing about this appears in the Miracles.38 William’s collection would have much more direct discussion of Henry II, some of it negative, some of it very positive: see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, pp. 156–7, and Bull, “Criticism of Henry II’s Expedition to Ireland.” Benedict also must have known about the monks’ early failed canonization petition, and he surely rejoiced when news arrived in Canterbury in the spring of 1173 that Becket was canonized, but again, there is no account of this in the Miracles. It is especially interesting that Benedict never mentioned the reconsecration of Canterbury Cathedral on December 21, 1171, despite repeatedly complaining early in the text about the monks’ inability to conduct services in the desecrated cathedral. Even the cultic developments he did mention, such as the reinforcement of Becket’s tomb (II.29) or the switch-over from wooden pyxes to metal ampullas (III.22), he did not this it was important to date.

Pegging stories to the pre-Easter period, to Easter, and to Pentecost was more important to Benedict than any of this. Indeed, if he had provided dates and discussion of political and religious developments, it would have muddied the grand narrative he wanted to construct. Benedict’s efforts to put Becket’s miracles on Christ’s chronological track created pitfalls for the unwary reader. One of the main ones is the dating of stories in Book II. Since this book starts with Easter miracles and Book III starts with Pentecost miracles, one might think that all of Book II’s miracles date to the fifty-day period between Easter and Pentecost 1171. When one reads through the book, however, it is clear that this simply cannot be the case. Book II is full of pairs and sets of miracles, with nothing of the careful chronologizing that one sees in Book I. Benedict surely did not worry whether the miracles he described of two young men suffering torments from fistula (II.48–9), or the three men suffering from severe headaches (II.62–4), all fell within that fifty-day period. When one looks closely at the two non-Easter miracles that Benedict aligned to a specific day, namely to the Invention of the Cross (May 3, II.33) and Ascension Day (May 6, II.66), it is clear that he again had biblical parallelism in mind. He saw the Invention of the Cross miracle as a parallel to the story of the pool of Bethesda, and the entrance of a dying man into heaven with Christ’s Ascension into heaven. Benedict placed no less than thirty-two stories between these two chapters: he certainly did not expect his readers to think that they all occurred on May 4 and 5. Many of the stories in Book II likely date to mid to late 1171.

The most chronologically oriented section of the entire Miracles is Benedict’s account of Becket’s first five miracles in the week after his death (I.8–12). Benedict stated that these miracles happened in Sussex, Gloucester, Berkshire, Canterbury, and inside Canterbury Cathedral. Only the last of these stories was definitely known to him at the time. Like so much else in Book I, this set of chapters represents a painstaking reconstruction of a sequence of events well after the fact. When one looks these stories with a critical eye, it is clear that he did not make this effort for the benefit of later historians. In both the “first” and the “fifth” miracle, Benedict made fervent arguments for viewing Becket as a second Christ, and the sequence as a whole makes an argument for the liturgical celebration of Becket as a saint.

The first miracle, already discussed above, concerns the blind and ill Emma, wife of a knight in Sussex, who heard the news of the murder, appealed to Becket, and recovered her sight “most beautifully” on the third day after Becket’s death, which Benedict explicitly states is a parallel to Christ’s resurrection on the third day after his death (I.8).39 See above, pp. 39–40. I believe it is safe to assume that Emma did exist, that she was blind, and that she did indeed experience some kind of recovery of her sight shortly after Becket’s murder. What is extremely doubtful, though, is Benedict’s labeling of Emma’s miracle as Becket’s first. Given the nature of a cult, it was (and is) next to impossible for anyone to identify the first person to attribute a miracle to a given saint. Most medieval miracle collectors steered clear of identifying “first” miracles, much less the first five. William FitzStephen was the only contemporary besides Benedict who tried to pinpoint Becket’s first miracle. He placed it in Canterbury on the very night of the martyrdom, stating that a woman was healed by means of drinking water containing some of the blood that her husband had gathered in the cathedral.40 FitzStephen, Vita, pp. 149–50. While we cannot trust that this was Becket’s first miracle either (there could have been other people who did something similar before this particular woman did, or other scenarios in which a first person invoked Becket’s aid), it is inherently far more probable that a woman at Canterbury with access to Becket’s blood on the night of the murder experienced a “first” miracle rather than someone in Sussex a couple days later.

The chances are very good that Benedict knew of stories like the one William FitzStephen related, but decided to bypass them. He chose to tell a “third day” miracle instead. What this suggests is that we cannot rely on Benedict to tell the whole truth as he knew it, especially if other motives, especially a terrific opportunity to trumpet biblical parallelism, came into play. Turning to the miracles that Benedict labeled Becket’s second, third, fourth, and fifth, I think it highly likely that the people of these stories – a girl in Gloucester named Huelina, a knight of Berkshire named William Belet, a blind woman in Canterbury named Brithiva, and William the priest of London (I.9–12) – all existed and all had experiences that were at least somewhat similar to those Benedict describes. Indeed, two of these individuals (the knight William Belet and William, the priest of London) appear in other contemporary documents, underlining Benedict’s basic credibility as a recorder. But were these stories the only ones Benedict had heard regarding this very early period? How probable is it that miracles were experienced at the pace of one per day? Why would he bother to line up stories like this, informing the reader about miracles supposedly happening on the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth days after Becket’s death?

He had at least two reasons. First, the liturgical celebration of a saint occurred in an octave, counting the day of the saint’s death as the first day with the octave falling eight days later. Dating miracles within Becket’s very first octave was a flashing beacon that he thought that the dead Becket was a saint deserving of liturgical celebration. He dated early visions to this octave as well (see I.1–4). The second reason was to build a crescendo to the “fifth” miracle, about William, a priest of London, which he places on the day of the octave (January 5, which was also the last day of the Christmas liturgical season). As discussed above, Benedict saw tremendous significance in William of London’s miracle, which he states was the first instance of anyone drinking Becket’s blood in pursuit of a cure, like to the drinking of Christ’s blood in the Eucharist (I.12).41 See above, pp. 17–18.

The point of counting out and describing the first five miracles, then, was almost the exact opposite of what one might think today. Benedict’s goal was not to provide disinterested historical information. Where he was the most chronological, he was also the most interested in swaying and influencing his readers, giving them more reasons to think of Becket as Christ-like and a great saint worthy of veneration. Historical reconstruction with something as inherently nebulous as people’s stories about miracles was no easy task, and Benedict was unusual among miracle collectors to put so much effort into it. But one must be careful not to over-read the results. Outside of the short Book I and the beginnings of Book II and III, Benedict was not engaged in historical reconstruction, and even there, his idea was to link Becket’s posthumous history to Christ’s history and the rhythm of the Christian liturgical calendar. Benedict’s work is often more complex than it may first appear. This is certainly the case when one considers how and when he wrapped up and finished the Miracles.

The Prologue, too, was clearly composed by Benedict after a considerable portion of the Miracles was complete. In it, Benedict referred to the miracle of Eilward of Westoning: “new eyes and new genitals were created for a certain one who constantly invoked the martyr, his eyes and genitals having been mutilated.” Eilward’s story is found at the beginning of Book IV (IV.2), and would have been known to the monks in late 1171 or early 1172. The Prologue also contains a notable reference to the vacancy of the archbishopric of Canterbury: “Whoever succeeds our martyr in the seat of Canterbury should not fear to fight again for its dignities which the martyr defended to the death.” Negotiations for the election of a new archbishop, in which the monks of Christ Church were deeply involved, started in the fall of 1172. Benedict had to have written the Prologue before these matters were resolved with the election of Richard of Dover, a former Christ Church monk, in June 1173.

Late 1172 or early 1173 is the most likely time frame for the composition of the Prologue. It was right around this time that the monks prepared and sent a second canonization petition to Alexander III. We know of this petition from William of Canterbury’s miracle collection. He described how the Christ Church monks sent the cleric William of Monkton to the curia “in order to petition the lord pope in the name of the brothers of Canterbury” to canonize Becket. However, William added, the clerk set off not knowing that Becket “had already been enrolled in the catalogue of martyrs.”43 See William of Canterbury, Miracula, IV.9–10, pp. 321–3, at p. 321: “de celebranda solennitate martyris nomine fratrum Cantuariensium dominum papam petiturus; quem jam ipsis ignorantibus catalogo martyrum ascripserat.”

Pope Alexander canonized Becket on February 21, 1173. His letter to the papal legates Albert and Theodwin announcing the canonization is dated March 10, and his letters to the Christ Church monks and the people of England March 12.44 The texts of the canonization letters are found in MTB, vol. 7, nos. 784–6, pp. 545–8. William of Monkton, then, must have left for the papal curia sometime in the early part of 1173. We do not know what the monks’ second petition looked like, nor whether William of Monkton brought along portions of the Miracles for the pope’s inspection. When one looks at the Prologue, though, it is striking how much Benedict dwelled on the papal schism between Alexander and Octaviano Monticelli, the Italian cardinal who took the title Pope Victor IV. Benedict argued forcefully that since Becket supported Pope Alexander, and Becket was performing miracles, that proved Alexander to be the rightful pope and the schismatics to be wrong. Towards the end of the Prologue, Benedict came close to addressing the pope directly: “let the holy fatherhood of the highest see rejoice to have had such a son [i.e., Becket] at the ends of the earth and the end of the ages.”

There is so much in the Prologue that Pope Alexander would have liked to hear that it is possible Benedict had drafted or was drawing upon a letter that was part of the second canonization bid. The effort that Benedict put into the Prologue is evident from its extraordinary exuberance of biblical references. Prologues were places for medieval authors to show off their literary prowess, and Benedict took full advantage of the opportunity, perhaps with a specific important reader in mind. To be clear, I do not think that it is safe to assume that what we have with the Prologue is identical to the petition carried by William of Monkton, but rather that it has the ring of something composed at that time and for that particular audience. Whatever William of Monkton brought with him, the pope was once again uninterested in accounts of Becket’s miracles compiled by Christ Church monks. Not only did he canonize Becket without having seen the monks’ second petition, but he stressed in his canonization letters that it was the papal legates’ account of Becket’s miracles – Albert and Theodwin’s – that had made up his mind to canonize Becket.45 See MTB, vol. 7, nos. 784–6, pp. 545–8.

The news of the Becket’s canonization would have taken approximately six weeks to travel from the papal curia to Canterbury. The monks likely heard the good news sometime in April or early May 1173. Soon, Benedict was chosen (or nominated himself) to write Becket’s liturgical Office. This new task included writing both the music and the texts (readings, antiphons, etc.) that would be used to celebrate Becket’s feast day. Benedict had taken on a heavy new burden, but one that was particularly suited to his talents. It may well have seemed providential that right around this time, in early April 1173, Matilda de St. Hilary, wife of the earl Roger de Clare, arrived in Canterbury celebrating what she believed to be Becket’s resurrection of her young son James. This miracle, concerning such a high-ranking family, was an ideal story with which to bring the Miracles to an (initial) close (IV.94).

Mid-1173 is a safe estimation for when Benedict wrapped up the Miracles and the first manuscript copies began to be made and circulated. Finishing the text meant writing through the story of young James, completing the Prologue, if he hadn’t already done so, and stitching the Passion and the Prologue onto the body of the text. Part of this stitching may well have included composing and/or reworking parts or even all of Book I. There are striking echoes of the vision stories Benedict recounts at the beginning of Book I (I.1–7) in the Office, so much so it seems likely there was some overlap in the composition or reworking of these vision stories and Benedict’s composition of the liturgy. In one remarkable case, Benedict utilized – to the letter – the responsory and verse heard in an early vision as a responsory and verse in the Office (see I.5).46 See Reames, “Liturgical Offices,” pp. 570–1 and Slocum, Liturgies, p. 188; for more overlaps between the Miracles and the Office, see the notes provided with the stories below and Koopmans, “Benedict of Peterborough’s Compositions,” pp. 262–7. It might be, too, that this finishing-up stage was when Benedict decided to enumerate and describe Becket’s first first miracles in the form we now have them (I.8–12). That a considerable amount of time had elapsed from the early days of the cult to Benedict’s composition (and/or reworking) of Book I is shown in a story about a religious woman named Wlviva. Since the time of her miracle, Wlviva had made not one but two career changes: “At this time, this woman was the custodian of an almshouse ministering to the poor and pilgrims. Afterwards, she took upon herself the chains of a harsher service, given over to the service of lepers, until at length she transferred herself to the repose of an anchorage” (I.17). It could well be that Wlviva became an anchorite in 1172 or early 1173.

Once the Miracles began to circulate in mid-1173, the Office was Benedict’s primary task. It had to be completed by the time of Becket’s first feast day as a canonized saint, December 29, 1173, and he wanted it to be impressive.47 For this dating of the Office, see Anne Duggan, “A Becket Office at Stavelot: London, British Library, Additional Ms 16964,” in Anne J. Duggan, Joan Greatrex, and Brenda Bolton (eds.), Omnia Disce: Medieval Studies in Memory of Leonard Boyle, O.P. (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 161–82, at pp. 163–7. Sherry Reames has noted that Benedict put much more effort into writing this Office than many contemporary composers: “Benedict’s chant texts are newly written poems in demanding kinds of accentual verse, using very regular meters and difficult rhyme schemes” that are “full of surprises as well – paradoxes, wordplay, [and] unexpectedly rich combinations of images and allusions.”48 Reames, “Liturgical Offices,” p. 561. Andrew Hughes termed it “a particularly interesting and superior office, both textually and musically, characterized by regularly rhymed and accentual verse set to music with features rather distinctive in themselves.”49 Andrew Hughes, “The Story of O: A Variant in the Becket Office,” in Maureen Epp and Brian E. Power (eds.), The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee (Farnham, 2009), pp. 27–59, at p. 28. Today, the Office survives in hundreds of medieval manuscripts that were made and used throughout Latin Christendom.50 See ibid., p. 30, as well as Andrew Hughes, ed. by Kate Helson, The Becket Offices: Paradigms for Liturgical Research (Lions Bay, 2014). Part of the reason it is so good is that Benedict worked out many of its ideas and themes in the Passion and Miracles.51 See Koopmans, “Benedict of Peterborough’s Compositions,” pp. 262–7; for discussion of the wide influence of the Office, see Duggan, “Becket is Dead!” pp. 28–36 and Estelle Joubert, “New Music in the Office of Thomas Becket from the Diocese of Trier,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 18:1 (2009): 33–60, at pp. 33–4. See also Katherine Emery, “Architecture, Space, and Memory: Liturgical Representation of Thomas Becket, 1170–1220,” in Tom Nickson (ed.), The Cult of Thomas Becket: Art, Relics, and Liturgy in Britain and Europe, special issue of the Journal of the British Archaeological Association 173:1 (2020): 61–77, at pp. 61–7.

By mid to late 1173, Benedict very likely knew that Archbishop Richard of Dover (elected but not yet consecrated) intended to appoint him as his chancellor, and he may have already begun to serve in that post. Meanwhile, William carried on with his independent collection of miracles. He would work until c.1175, when he halted for a time. He made a final, very lengthy addition to his text c.1176–7.52 For this dating of William’s collection, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, pp. 153–5. For the most part, Benedict was content to leave miracle collecting to William. He made just two short additions to his Miracles, one addition consisting of two stories and a second of seven.53 See above, pp. xi–xii and 2. These stories can be dated to the second half of 1173 from their overlaps with William’s collection. All four of the last stories (numbered below as Additions 6–9) are also found in William’s Miracles. Benedict told these stories at length and clearly thought they were particularly important. In one story, Benedict states that he himself went and measured the well that a young woman had thrown herself down in a fit of despair (Addition 8). Another is about a workman who was buried by a landslide, but survived after calling on the martyr. This struck Benedict as a “new” kind of miracle, and he could not resist a bit of glib biblical parallelism in his introduction to the story: “We longed for something new, for by something new we are kindled to new love of the new martyr of the English. The Lord has done a new thing on the earth [Jer 31:22] – or rather, under the earth” (Addition 7).

It looks as if Benedict could not bear to leave these stories to William, despite the fact that his collection was already in circulation. He appended them to his Miracles and put his own spin on them. But with that, he had finished. He never gave the Miracles a conclusion. He may have thought that he would come back to it again, but his time was consumed by administration and collecting miracles became William’s sole job.

For the reader’s convenience, I have summarized my suggested date ranges of components of the Passion and Miracles below.

One wonders how Benedict felt on December 29, 1174, the second time his Becket Office was performed in the cathedral, when he and his fellow monks had to sing in the nave rather than in their beloved, now fire-damaged choir. He would soon take on the primary responsibility for its rebuilding. In 1175, Prior Odo left Canterbury to become the abbot of Battle Abbey, and in July of that year, the monks elected Benedict as their new prior. Benedict’s writing of the Miracles and the Office, and the enthusiastic reception of these compositions outside of Canterbury, must have been major factors in his selection.

Two particularly interesting stories from Benedict’s tenure as prior show how important Becket’s miracles and relics continued to be for him. One concerns an encounter between Prior Benedict and King Henry II. In versions of the story found in Edward Grim’s Life and the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, the king became angry at Benedict for some unnamed offense.56 Grim, Vita, pp. 448–50; The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, trans. and ed. Eleanor Searle, OMT (Oxford, 1980), pp. 308–9. In another version, found in William of Canterbury’s Miracles, the king had not fulfilled his promises to protect the liberties of Christ Church and Prior Benedict was trying to get him to do so.57 William of Canterbury, Miracula, IV.97, pp. 493–4. In the Battle Abbey account, Odo, the former prior of Christ Church, steps in, soothes the king’s anger, and reconciles him to Prior Benedict (the story is found in a section singing Odo’s praises). But in Edward Grim’s and William’s accounts, the king had a vision in which he was walking across a bridge and fell through a hole. Hanging onto the bridge, he invoked a number of saints until finally calling on Becket, at which point Prior Benedict appeared and saved him from his predicament. The next day, the king was reconciled to Benedict and granted him what he wished.58 See the interesting discussion of this vision in Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, “The Emperor’s Robe: Thomas Becket and Angevin Political Culture,” ANS 37 (2014): 205–19, at pp. 218–19. For the charter confirming the liberties of Christ Church, see The Letters and Charters of Henry II, King of England 1154–1189, ed. Nicholas Vincent, OMT, 7 vols. (Oxford, 2022), vol. 1, no. 464, pp. 461–4. Both Grim’s and William’s accounts appear to have been written in very close proximity to the events, and there seems little reason to doubt that the outlines of the story are true. This is the only known instance in which Henry II had a vision of Becket, and it must have seemed fitting that the man who had described so many visions in the Miracles would reap such benefits from this one.

The second story is about Roger, the monk of Christ Church whom Benedict describes in the Miracles as being “similarly assigned to the care of the sacred body” (IV.59). In 1176, Roger was elected as the abbot of St. Augustine’s, the large and ancient Benedictine monastery also located in Canterbury. According to a later chronicler, Roger was elected abbot because the monks hoped that through him, St. Augustine’s would acquire relics of Thomas Becket. The chronicler was unimpressed with this motive, but notes that Roger did indeed bring to the monastery “a great part of the blood which [Becket] shed, a certain small portion of his head cut away, along with a considerable part of the brain of the said martyr.”59 William Thorne’s Chronicle of Saint Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury, trans. A. H. Davis (Oxford, 1934), p. 100. He then writes that in order to get these relics, “an agreement was published between us and the prior of the same place, an agreement which was very disadvantageous and inconvenient to us.” That this prior was Benedict is clear from what comes next: the text of a charter issued by Prior Benedict that concerns the exchange of some Christ Church lands for some of St. Augustine’s.60 Ibid., pp. 100–1. For the notification by Roger of the agreement and for confirmations of exchange of lands between St. Augustine’s and Christ Church by Archbishop Richard of Dover and Henry II, see William Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings (London, 1967), nos. 26–8, pp. 405–9; for Henry’s charter, see also LCHII, vol. 1, no. 466, pp. 468–9.

The story regarding this agreement may be a later invention, but Benedict’s ability to do hard-nosed bargaining in pursuit of the rights and privileges of his community was surely part of the reason he found himself elected Abbot of Peterborough in July 1177, after just two years as prior of Christ Church. The chronicler Robert of Swaffham recorded that Benedict secured particularly impressive Becket relics for Peterborough, certainly better than those given to Roger: “He acquired numerous relics of St. Thomas, namely his shirt, his surplice, and a great quantity of his blood in two crystal vessels, and two altars made from the stones on which the holy martyr lay in death.”61 Swaffham, p. 71. Benedict also worked to stock Peterborough Abbey’s library, very likely using manuscripts from Canterbury as exemplars. Swaffham listed a remarkable fifty-five items that he acquired for the library. With his enthusiasm for biblical parallelism, it is no surprise that these gifts included a complete set of glossed manuscripts of the books of the Old and New Testaments as well as legal and scholastic works.62 Swaffham, pp. 65–9 and The Library of Peterborough Abbey, eds. Karsten Friis-Jensen and James M. W. Willoughby, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 8 (London, 2001), pp. 15–22. He also gave them a Life of St. Thomas and copy of his Miracles,63 The Library of Peterborough Abbey, nos. 47–8. and – along with other building projects – he completed a hospital and chapel dedicated to St. Thomas, which were located at the monastery’s gate.64 On Benedict’s building work at Peterborough, see Peter Fergusson, “Architecture during the Rule of Abbot Benedict,” in Ron Baxter, Jackie Hall, and Claudia Marx (eds.), Peterborough and the Soke: Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions XLI (London, 2019), pp. 179–99, and Lisa Reilly, An Architectural History of Peterborough Cathedral (Oxford, 1997), pp. 92–3.

Though he was praised for his accomplishments in Peterborough, Benedict probably regretted having to leave Canterbury as much as Odo had before him. Swaffham described how Abbot Benedict, at a time when he was “in great distress” and weighed down by the difficulties of freeing Peterborough from its debts, “set out for Canterbury, taking just one monk as a companion, and stayed there for some time.”65 Swaffham, p. 65. We know that Benedict was in Canterbury in 1183, 1184, and 1187, and no doubt he travelled there other times as well.66 See Edmund King, “Benedict of Peterborough and the Cult of Thomas Becket,” Northamptonshire Past and Present 9 (1996): 213–20, at pp. 216–17. As someone who was once in charge of the cathedral’s rebuilding after the 1174 fire, he was likely keen to see how the work was progressing. By the mid-1180s, much of the construction of the new eastern arm of Canterbury cathedral was complete. This new construction included not only a magnificent new upper chapel, which was to serve as a home for Becket’s relics, but also an expansion of the crypt chapel in which Becket’s tomb was situated. The fresh, light, and roomy space in the crypt would have looked very different from the chapel in which Benedict, his fellow monks, and their servants had spent so much time and listened to so many stories.

The first stained glass windows of the upper chapel were being installed by the mid-1180s. It is a safe guess that Benedict looked forward to seeing these, as the glaziers’ source text was his own Passion and Miracles.67 On the glazing of the first windows in the ambulatory surrounding Becket’s shrine (Canterbury Cathedral windows nVII, nVI, and nV), see Madeline Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi: Great Britain, Volume II (London, 1981), pp. 175–9; Rachel Koopmans, “Pilgrimage Scenes in Newly Identified Medieval Glass at Canterbury Cathedral,” Burlington Magazine 161 (issue no. 1398, September 2019): 708–15, and Koopmans, “Gifts of Becket’s Clothing.” For surviving panels connected to this early glazing campaign, see notes to I.6, I.12, I.13, III.22, IV.72, and Extract VIII in the Passion. The glazing and other preparations for Becket’s translation were interrupted by a major dispute between the Christ Church monks and their new Archbishop, Baldwin of Forde, starting in 1184.68 For a narrative and analysis of this dispute, which carried on long after Baldwin’s death, see Barnaby, Religious Conflict at Canterbury Cathedral. Benedict was called in to help resolve the dispute in 1187, but he would not see its conclusion before his death in 1193. The dispute dragged on into the thirteenth century, and it was not until c.1213 that glazing could recommence in the ambulatory of the upper chapel designated for Becket’s shrine. They filled its windows with stories drawn almost entirely from Benedict’s Miracles.69 For this glass, see Caviness, Windows, pp. 180–214. Canterbury Cathedral’s windows are numbered according to their position within the church: “n” for north aisle, “s” for south aisle, and a Roman numeral counting back from the east end of the church. For stories pictured in this later glazing campaign (encompassing the windows numbered nIV, nIII, nII, sII, sVI, and sVI), see below, I.22, I.24, II.13, II.23, II.24, III.60, III.62, III.69, III.77, IV.2, IV.3, IV.21, IV.30, IV.62, IV.64, IV.66, IV.76, IV.77, IV.88, IV.94, and Additions 7 and 9. The “miracle windows,” as they are termed, are undergoing a major reexamination. In my notes below, I have included updated assessments of which stories are portrayed in the glass. The translation of Becket’s relics to his glorious new shrine did not occur until 1220. With the translation, and with the deaths of Benedict and the generation that witnessed the beginning of Becket’s cult, the story of Canterbury’s martyr entered a new phase.70 For the cult’s development in this new period, see Louise Wilkinson, “‘Is Still Not the Blood of the Blessed Martyr Thomas Fully Avenged?’: Thomas Becket’s Cult at Canterbury under Henry III and Edward I,” History 105 (2020): 673–90, and Anne Duggan, “The Cult of St. Thomas Becket in the Thirteenth Century,” in Meryl Jancey (ed.), St. Thomas Cantilupe: Essays in His Honour (Hereford, 1982), pp. 21–44. For a well-illustrated overview of the cult through the Tudor period, see Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint (London, 2021), and for a survey that reaches to the present day, see Slocum, The Cult of Thomas Becket.

Nevertheless, when one opens almost any page of the Miracles, it is hard not to be carried away with his descriptions of the people who came to Canterbury rejoicing in or seeking a miracle from the new martyr. Adolescent serving-maids and shepherds, the wives of knights and their children, priors, canons, priests, and clerks, Londoners, town-dwellers and people from the rural regions, minor barons and countesses, bakers and shoemakers, the very young and the very old – so much of the glittering spectacle of medieval society is found in these pages. Robert of Swaffham wrote that Benedict was well named (bene dictus), because he was given the blessing (benedictio) of many graces.71 Swaffham, p. 64. The martyr’s first miracle collector was an administrator, builder, prior, abbot, and friend of kings. However, it is his splendid work from the time when he was still a mere monk, when much remained in doubt about the future of a dead archbishop, that he was and is still most remembered.