Thomas Becket

Frank Barlow's Thomas Becket, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London in 1986, is a scholarly biography of the twelfth century Archbishop of Canterbury whose murder in his own cathedral in 1170 made him one of medieval England's most venerated saints. Barlow was a historian of medieval England whose earlier work on the period underlies this biography. Its strength is that it is grounded in the substantial surviving contemporary documentary record of Becket's conflict with Henry II, treated with the critical distance of an academic historian rather than a hagiographer. Its limit is that it is a single, now decades-old biography of a figure whose historical reputation has continued to be reassessed, so a claim resting on Barlow's specific interpretation of Becket's motives or character should be checked against more recent biographical scholarship as well.