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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
In the late twelfth century, the practice of hawking and falconry was symbolically ambiguous, associated powerfully with the secular life yet also open to mystical interpretation. This paper suggests that the authors of St Thomas Becket’s miracle collections, as well as his contemporary biographers, appropriated this ambiguity as a means of reconciling some of the contradictions of Becket’s career. Henry II was himself an avid enthusiast for hunting with birds, and records show a marked increase in the number of transactions involving birds of prey, and the number of falconers employed to handle them, during his reign (1154–1189).
I would like to thank the Nicholas Vincent for his helpful comments and suggestions.
1 Oggins, Robin S., The Kings and their Hawks (New Haven, CT, 2004), 54–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; my paper is indebted to Oggins’s detailed research into the practice of hawking and falconry under Henry II. Cf.Cummins, John, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (London, 1988).Google Scholar
2 Rachel Hands, ed., English Hawking and Hunting in the Boke of St. Albans: A Facsimile Edition of sigs. a2-f8 of the Boke of St. Albans [1486] (Oxford, 1975), 54, lines 1172–74.
3 Oggins, Kings and their Hawks, 12.
4 Ibid. 60–61.
5 fitzStephen, William, ‘Vita Sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris’, in Robertson, James Craigie, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (Canonized by Pope Alexander III. A.D. 1173), 7 vols (London, 1876), 3: 1–154, at 23Google Scholar. See also The Lives of Thomas Becket, ed. and trans. Michael Staunton (Manchester, 2001), 51.
6 Staunton, Michael, Thomas Becket and his Biographers (Woodbridge, 2006), 79 Google Scholar; Robertson, ed., Materials, 3: 183.
7 Barlow, Frank, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), 62.Google Scholar
8 Anonymous, I, ‘Vita Sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris’, in Robertson, ed.. Materials, 4: 1–179 Google Scholar, at 3–12; Lives, ed. and trans. Staunton, 43.
9 On the bias of the extant material, see Oggins, Kings and their Hawks, 109. For the description of Thomas, see Grim, Edward, ‘Vita S. Thomae, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris’, in Robertson, ed., Materials, 2: 353–450, at 429Google Scholar.
10 Oggins, Robin S., ‘Falconry and MedievalViews of Nature’, in Salisbury, Joyce E., ed., The Medieval World of Nature (London, 1993), 47–60, at 47Google Scholar.
11 John of Salisbury, Policraticus: The Statement’s Book, ed. Markland, Murray F. (New York, 1979), 6 Google Scholar. Nederman’s more recent edition abridges this part of the first book: John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprint of Philosophers, ed. and trans. Nederman, Cary J. (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.
12 fitzStephen, ‘Vita Sancti Thomae’, 20.
13 Raptors would be trained to attack heron and crane, far larger and more dangerous targets than they would naturally have attempted. See Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s standard work describing this grisly process: The Art of Falconry, being the De Arte Venandi cum Avibus of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, ed. and trans. C. A. Wood and F M. Fyfe (Stanford, CA, 1981), 256–57.
14 Adelard of Bath, De avibus tractatus, in Adelard of Bath: Conversations with his Nephew; On the Same and Different, Questions on Natural Science and On Birds, ed. and trans. Burnett, Charles (Cambridge, 1998), 238–76 Google Scholar, at 241.
15 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. Markland, 6.
16 Map, Walter, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’Trifles, ed. and trans. James, Montague R., revised by Brooke, C. N. L. and Mynors, R. A. B. (Oxford, 1983), 477 Google Scholar.
17 Friedmann, Mira, ‘The Falcon and the Hunt: Symbolic Love Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Art’, in Lazar, Moshe and Lacy, Norris J., eds, The Poetics of Love (Fairfax,VA, 1989), 157–75 Google Scholar, at 158.
18 Adelard of Bath, ed. and trans. Burnett, 241.
19 The Bestiary: being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 764, ed. and trans. Richard Barber (Woodbridge, 1999), 156 and 155. This manuscript dates from between 1220 and 1250.
20 Birds had also played an important role in divination since antiquity, an influence deriving in part from Cicero; while they came not as high as demons, birds were believed to be nearer God than men, and were thus treated as augurs:Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991), 103, 116–26.
21 The Bestiary, ed. and trans. Barber, 156.
22 Ibid. 154.
23 fitzStephen,‘Vita Sancti Thomae’, 25–26; Lives, ed. and trans. Staunton, 58–59.
24 See especially Gilbert Foliot’s famous letter, ‘Multiplicem nobis’, sent on behalf of the royalist bishops to Becket in September 1166: The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, ed. and trans. Anne Duggan, 2 vols (Oxford, 2000), 1: 498–537 (no. 109); The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Dom Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge, 1967), 229–43 (no. 170).
25 The fourth canon of the Third Lateran Council stated: ‘Nor should [clergy] set out with hunting dogs and birds, but they should proceed in such a way that they are seen to be seeking [quaerere videantur] not their own but the things of Jesus Christ’: Norman Tanner, ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London, 1990), 1: 213 (Canon 4; my emphasis). This underlined the decision made in 517 at the Council of Epaon, where it was ordered that a bishop could be suspended from communion for three months for owning a falcon or hunting dog, a priest two months and a deacon one: Charles de Clercq, ed., Concilia Galliae, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1963), 2: 25 (canon A.517); collated in ‘Decretum Magistri Gratiani’, CICan, 1: 126 (Decreti Prima Pars Dist[inctio] 34 c.2).
26 Abbott, Edwin A., St Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles, 2 vols (London, 1898), 2: 24 Google Scholar.
27 Anonymous I, ‘Vita Sancti Thomae’, 6–7; Grim, ‘Vita S. Thomae’, 360–61; Garnier’s Becket, Translated from the 12th Century Vie Saint Thomas Le Martyr De Cantorbire of Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, ed. and trans. Janet Shirley (London, 1975), 7, lines 206–30; Thόmas Saga Erkibyskups: A life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, in Icelandic, ed. and trans. Eiríkr Magnússon, 2 vols (London, 1875), 1: 33.
28 Grim, in Robertson, ed., Materials, 2: 360–61.
29 Thόmas Saga Erkibyskups, ed. and trans. Magnússon 1: 33.
30 Anonymous I, ‘Vita Sancti Thomae’, 6–7; cf. Lives, ed. and trans. Staunton, 44.
31 Lives, ed. and trans. Staunton, 44.
32 Cf. John McLoughlin,‘The Language of Persecution: John of Salisbury and the Early Phase of the Becket Dispute (1163–66)’, in W.J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, SCH 21 (Oxford, 1984), 73–87.
33 Jacob, E. E, ‘John of Salisbury and the Policraticus’, in Hearnshaw, F. J. C., ed., The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Political Thinkers: A Series of Lectures delivered at King’s College University of London (London, 1923), 53–84 Google Scholar, at 77–78.
34 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. Nederman, 90–91.
35 Cf. Matt. 7: 13–14; Num. 22: 24.
36 See Staunton’s, Michael important essay, ‘Thomas Becket’s Conversion’, Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1998), 193–211 Google Scholar.
37 Anonymous I and Alan of Tewkesbury both relate how, at an inn at Gravelines after the flight from England in 1164, the disguised Thomas almost gave himself away because of his great interest in a falcon which he saw on a knight’s wrist: Alan of Tewkesbury, ‘Vita S. Thomae’, in Robertson, ed., Materials, 2: 335; Anonymous I, in ibid. 4: 56–7.
38 William of Canterbury, ‘Miraculorum Gloriosi Martyris Thomae, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi’, in Robertson, ed., Materials, i : 137–546, at 388: ‘quia praeda praedonem praedaretur’. There are also several miracles involving the dangers posed to the unwary by mill-wheels: see, e.g., ibid. 348; 499.
39 Ibid. 388–89.
40 Ibid. 389.
41 These are listed by Baudoin van den Abeele, La fauconnerie au Moyen Âge: connaissance, affaitage et médecine des oiseaux de chasse d’après les traités latins (Paris, 1994), 21—26.
42 Adelard of Bath, ed. and trans. Burnett, 259.
43 Robertson, ed., Materials, 1: 528–29.
44 Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket (London, 2004), 62.
45 By offering a choice of kings, Gerald is making a feeble attempt at discretion.
46 Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of Gemma Ecclesiasticus by Giraldus Cambrerais, ed. and trans. Hagen, John J. (Leiden, 1979), 124 Google Scholar, my emphasis. A key symbolic feature of Becket’s martyrdom was the spilling of his brains. See Martin Aurell, ‘Le Meutre de Thomas Becket: Les Gestes d’un Martyre’, in Natalie Fryde and Dirk Reitz, eds, Bischofsmord im Mittelalter (Göttingen, 2003), 187–210, at 204. He supposes the knights’ brutal de-crowning of Becket reflected their disdain for his clerkly status, as signified by his tonsure. As Aureli points out, this act had the unexpected effect of sealing Becket’s symbolic victory, and God’s through him, for in martyrdom one crown was exchanged for another, and the king’s hubris made apparent with a humbling blow.
