Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/177

 once strongly marked and refined. A mosaic in the cathedral of Monreale (Sicily), though obviously conventional in general treatment, may very likely be correct in its colouring of dark grey eyes, dark brown beard, and somewhat lighter (possibly grizzled) hair, for it is part of a series of decorations completed within twenty years of Thomas's death, under the superintendence of King William the Good, whose queen, married in 1177, was a daughter of Henry II. A sculptured representation of the martyrdom, over the south door of Bayeux Cathedral, dates from the same period.

In England the surviving memorials of the martyr are mostly, from the nature of the case, only recognisable as such when their history is known. One of the most interesting is St. Thomas's Hospital in Southwark. The present hospital is historically identical with one established by the citizens of London in 1552, in the place of an Augustinian house, devoted to the like charitable work, which they had bought of the king on its dissolution in 1538. The new foundation was for a time called ‘the king's hospital;’ but it soon resumed a part, at least, of the title of its Augustinian predecessor, which had been founded on the same site in 1228, under the invocation of S. Thomas the Martyr, and whose first beginnings twenty-one years earlier still, on another site, may possibly have been connected with a yet older ‘Xenodochium’ begun, ‘in honour of God and the blessed martyr Thomas, at Southwark in London,’ within seventeen years of his death (, Not. Mon., Surrey, xx. 2; Ann. Monast. iii. 451, 457; Materials, vii. 579–580). Another hospital, established by Thomas's own sister on the site of the Beckets' old home in Cheapside, and served by canons who were also knights, of the order of St. Thomas of Acre, was purchased, on its dissolution in 1538, by the Mercers' Company, and the birthplace of the saint is now marked by their hall and chapel (Monast. Angl. vi. pt. ii. pp. 645–7;, St. Thomas of Acon, pp. 118–40). Many of our older churches now nominally dedicated to St. Thomas the Apostle are in reality dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, the title of the patron saint having been merely changed to evade Henry VIII's proclamation. One indirect commemoration of St. Thomas, which did not fall within the terms of the proclamation, still holds its place in the calendar and services of the English as well as of the Roman church. In his time, and for a century and a half after him, the festival of the Holy Trinity was kept on different days in different parts of Christendom. Thomas, immediately after his consecration, ordered that it should thenceforth be kept in England on that day, the first Sunday after Pentecost, and in 1333 this English usage was adopted throughout the whole western church by order of Pope John XXII.

One of the most singular features in what may be called the posthumous history of Thomas Becket is the interest which he inspired at the farthest end of Christendom. The contemporary historian of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, William of Tyre, breaks the thread of his narrative of the wars of King Amalric and Saladin to wind up the story of the year 1170 with a short account of the new English martyr ( l. xx. c. 21). The order of knights of St. Thomas (see above) sprang up in Palestine very soon after the martyr's death. Possibly it may have originated in the penance imposed on his murderers, of serving for fourteen years under the Templars in Holy Land; possibly in that imposed on Henry II, of maintaining, in defence of the same land, five hundred knights for a year at his own expense. The later tradition which ascribed its foundation to Richard I (, pref. to Itin. Ricardi, vol. i. pp. cxii–xiii) seems to have grown up out of the fact that Hubert Walter [q. v.] ‘constituted the order of canons’ (or knights, for they were both) ‘at St. Thomas the Martyr in Acon’ (Ann. Monast. iii. 126), i.e. established them in a chapel which Richard had ‘ordered to be built’ there in 1192 (, Hist. Angl. ii. 38), and which itself seems to have been merely an enlargement or restoration of one founded two years earlier, under the same invocation, by William, a chaplain of Ralph de Diceto [q. v.] (, i. 80–1). It is further possible that the origin of this order may have been in some way connected with that of the famous legend which represents the mother of Thomas as a Saracen emir's daughter, converted to christianity by love of Gilbert Becket, who, when a pilgrim in Holy Land, had become her father's captive, and whom, on his escape, she followed across land and sea till she found him in London and became his wife. This tale in Latin, followed by the heading and first sentence of the same story in French, occurs among the miscellaneous contents of Harleian MS. 978 (fols. 114 b–116). The portion of the manuscript in which these two items are included dates from 1264 to 1270 (, Song of Lewes, introd. pp. xi, xvi–xvii); and the words with which the story opens in the Latin version—‘Nunc autem ut paulo altius sermonem historiæ repetamus’—as they refer to nothing in the preceding pages, indicate that this was not