During the Middle Ages it was considered a very worthy act of Christian devotion to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of a saint. Not only could the saint, from his or her privileged position in heaven, pray for an individual Christian more effectively, but numerous pilgrims had evidence to show that at this or that shrine they had been healed of bodily infirmities.
The most popular place of pilgrimage in all England was the shrine of St Thomas in Canterbury Cathedral. Thomas was looked upon by Londoners (along with Erkenwald) as their very own saint. The son of Gilbert Becket, a wealthy, devout London merchant, Thomas was a brilliant and handsome young churchman with an Oxford education behind him when Henry II came to the throne in 1154. The king was intent on restoring order in England after the disastrous reign of Stephen, his predecessor. Recognizing young Thomas’s potential, the king appointed him to the high office of chancellor. After eight years Henry wanted to make Thomas archbishop, thinking that he would thus be able to control the growing power of the church. Thomas at first refused, but then accepted under the king’s insistence. However, he also resigned the chancellorship and soon became the champion of the church against the king.
When Thomas left England under pressure from Henry, the king seized his properties. Returning, Thomas excommunicated several of his enemies, including the bishop of London, without permission from Henry. When the king heard this news he was in Normandy, and is said to have cried out in a rage, ‘Will no one avenge me of this turbulent priest?’ Four knights took Henry literally and, crossing the Channel, slew Thomas in the transept of Canterbury Cathedral as he was saying the evening office. Thomas’s murder fired the imagination of the faithful all over Europe, and the magnificent shrine that was built was visited by untold thousands until it was destroyed by Henry VIII. As Chaucer illustrates by his wide cross-section of pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, it would have been difficult to find any devout Londoner in medieval times who had not made the fifty-mile pilgrimage to Canterbury.