London and Becket’s Pilgrimage

Within weeks of Becket’s murder pilgrims from his native city of London flocked to his tomb, with many reporting miraculous cures.

One of the earliest miracles was effected on a dumb priest who received a vision to go to Canterbury to be cured just eight nights after the murder. A shoemaker called Gilbert was cured of a fistula by St Thomas’ holy water and in thanks walked the fifty miles from London to Canterbury in a day. Another pilgrim named Matilda had given birth to a sickly child after getting drunk with a man named Roger at a London wine tavern. Her child was healed after she tearfully prayed to Becket.

One famous miracle occurred to Solomon, a Londoner nearly 100 years old and blind for around six years, who prayed to Becket that he would be able to see again. His prayer was granted while he was being led to church in London the next day, and in front of crowds of witnesses he declared that it was ‘thanks to our new martyr’.

The numbers of pilgrims from London in the 1170s were so great that a metal-caster called Augustine had the task of melting down the used metal flasks called ampullae, which had carried St Thomas’ holy water back to the city, so they could be re-cast as new devotional items dedicated to Becket.

Pilgrims coming from the City or the north may have stopped at the chapel of Thomas Becket on London Bridge, where there were relics for them to venerate. By the late 14th century pilgrimage from London to Becket’s shrine was so popular that there were dedicated stables at Southwark, Rochester and Canterbury where horses could be hired for the journey, which took between two and four days each way. This was around the time that Chaucer wrote his account of such a pilgrimage in his Canterbury Tales, with his pilgrims gathering at the Tabard Inn in Southwark. 

The best evidence for Becket’s popularity among medieval Londoners are the many pilgrim badges that have been recovered from the Thames. There is much debate about whether these were deliberately thrown into the water as a symbolic gesture, possibly from the chapel on London Bridge, or were dumped into the river as household waste after they had broken or outlived their use.

Some pilgrim badges were devotedly kept as a ‘sign and memory’ of the saint and his shrine, the contemplation of which should draw the pilgrim back for a return visit.

In the late 15th century the children of Miles Freebridge, of Aldermanbury in London, were playing with a badge of St Thomas that Miles had kept for such devotional purposes when the infant child choked on it and had to be rescued by prayers to the late King Henry VI, who was believed to be a saint.

When the monks of Canterbury were looking to promote the major anniversary (‘Jubilee’) of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in 1420, they began by writing a poem listing the benefits of the pilgrimage and nailing it to the doors of St Paul’s Cathedral for Londoners to see. In turn, one of the citizens who went to the Jubilee came up with a short prayer for the saint that pleased the monks of Canterbury so much that they wrote it on the walls around Becket’s shrine.