Murder of an Archbishop: Thomas Becket

One of the reasons that Canterbury is famous is that it was here that four knights, acting on the supposed authority of King Henry II, murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket, subsequently sainted, in his own cathedral. This event caused a scandal in the mediaeval world and led to the archbishop's shrine becoming a place of pilgrimage, making the local church hugely rich, and creating spin-off tourism for the town. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales isn't about Canterbury itself but is a compendium of stories supposedly told by a group of pilgrims travelling to St Thomas's shrine.

Here is a picture of Conquest House:

It's a lovely old building, on Palace Street, just opposite the entrance to the Archbishop's palace, from which you can gain access to the Cathedral precincts and what was then the priory church of Christ Church Canterbury. The significance of all of this is that this is where the four knights are supposed to have rendezvoused (according to Pitkin, undated). Doel & Doel (2018, 79) says that the knights "left their weapons in the house of Gilbert the Citizen, now known as Conquest House. After being enraged by Becket they returned to collect their weapons, before retrning to the cathedral and killing the archbishop." They also record a secret passage "in the surviving Norman undercroft", a possible escape route for the knights. Unfortunately they don't say what is at the other end of the passage.

The four knights were:

• Reginald FitzUrse, the ringleader, who traditionally struck the first blow. 
• Hugh de Morville was Lord of Westmoreland; his father, also Hugh de Morville, had been Constable of Scotland. Assassin Hugh held castles in Appleby (my surname!) and Knaresborough, where the four knights holed up for a year following the murder (they were subsequently excommunicated and sentenced to the Holy Land for 14 years). He died in the Holy Land and was buried either under the door of the temple in Jerusalem or under the portico in front of the Al-Aqsa mosque there or on the island of Brean Down off Weston-Super-Mare.
• William de Tracy was lord of the manors of Bradninch and Moretonhampstead in Devon and Toddington in Gloucestershire. One of the traditions about what happened after the assassination suggests that William died in 1174 of leprosy at Cosenza in southern Italy, possibly on his way to the Holy Land.
• Richard le Breton aka Richard de Brito may have ended up in Jersey and be one of the ancestors of the present Viscount Esher, Christopher Brett.

Until January 2020 Conquest House was being used by Unboxed, a low-packaging food shop.