This manuscript contains a Life of Thomas Becket by the monk William of Canterbury, and an account of the miracles performed after his shrine became a place of pilgrimage. The complete version of William’s account of Becket survives only in this manuscript. It belonged to William of Wykeham and was bequeathed to the College on his death in 1404. An inventory of the library drawn up in 1428/29 describes it as ‘ex dono domini Fundatoris’.

William joined the monks of Canterbury after Becket had fled England in 1164 and only met the archbishop – who ordained him as deacon – on his return in November 1170. Of the nine authors who wrote full lives of Becket, William was one of only four who witnessed his murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29th December 1170 by the knights Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton. In life, Becket had been post-conquest England’s most controversial prelate; in death, he instantly became England’s best-selling saint. William of Canterbury wrote his Passion of the Glorious Martyr Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1173-4, as a preface to his own collection of Becket’s miracles which is nearly three times longer than the biography and forms the second component of this manuscript.

Becket had already been canonised by Pope Alexander III by the time William wrote his life, although not before he began editing the collection of miracles, so the biography cannot have been conceived as part of a forensic dossier to persuade an ecclesiastical commission of Thomas’s claims to sanctity. William sets out his purpose in writing at the end of the prologue, immediately before the illuminated initial which may represent Becket himself. Readers were to be inspired by the struggle of this ‘strong athlete’, presented here as an example for all to follow such that, having seen where, how and why Thomas ran his race, they too would not flee the challenge should the Lord call them into the stadium.

The manuscript contains several rare passages in early Middle English.

 

Literature: Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1697), p. 31, no. 1351; William H. Gunner, ‘Catalogue of books belonging to the college of St Mary, Winchester, in the reign of Henry VI’, Archaeological Journal, vol. xv (1858), pp. 1–16, 3, 10; Neil R. Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, Volume IV: Paisley–York (Oxford, 1969), p. 605; Paul Yeats-Edwards, Winchester College (Warden and Fellows’ Library) Medieval Manuscript Collection: Brief History and Catalogue (London, 1978), p. 3; Roger Dahood, ‘The Middle English warning in William of Canterbury’s Life of Becket’, Parergon, 11:1 (June 1993), pp. 21–33; James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Vol. 2 (London, 2013), pp. 617, 624; Magnus Ryan, ‘A Life of Thomas Becket’, in R. Foster (ed.), Fifty Treasures from Winchester College (London, 2019), pp. 40–41.

Provenance: Bequeathed by William of Wykeham, 1404

Location: Fellows’ Library