Anchronisms in the 12th Century Contemporary Accounts of Becket's Life [the Vitae]

Anachronism An anachronism is a chronological inconsistency in which an object, event, or linguistic term is placed outside its proper historical context. Derived from the Greek ana (against) and khronos (time), it represents a temporal displacement that disrupts the continuity of a historical narrative.

In academic discourse, anachronisms are categorised as:

Parachronisms: Items appearing later than their true historical era.

Prochronisms: Items appearing before they existed in reality (e.g., a Renaissance painting featuring a wristwatch).

While often dismissed as authorial error, deliberate anachronism serves and is used as a potent rhetorical tool in literature and film to bridge the gap between contemporary audiences and the past. Seven Examples of Anachronism in the hagiographies of Thomas Becket that were composed in the 12th century

Chroniclers such as Roger (not John) of Howden are generally regarded as “more accurate” than the Becket vitae because of their purpose, methods, and source‑base, not because they are neutral or infallible.

Genre and purpose

• Becket’s Latin vitae are overtly hagiographical and written to edify, vindicate Canterbury, and construct a martyr‑saint; the narrative arc is shaped around sanctity, miracle, and providential meaning.

• Howden writes annalistic and political history; his aim is to record the business of kings, churches, and courts year by year, which pushes him toward chronology, procedure, and documentation.

Use of documents and eyewitness material

• Howden stuffs his works (the Gesta Henrici Secundi et Gesta Regis Ricardi, and its reworking in the Chronica) with documents copied in extenso: charters, letters, treaties, tax measures, council decrees, and set speeches. These often preserve the only surviving text of key royal and administrative acts.

• His career as a royal clerk gave him access to chancery and diplomatic material, and for some episodes (e.g. parts of the Becket affair, later Angevin taxation) he writes close to events and sometimes as an eyewitness, which anchors his narrative in the contemporaneous record in a way the Becket biographers, writing from a monastic centre and with a cultic agenda, often do not.

Chronology and narrative technique

• Hagiographers freely compress and rearrange events (e.g. Clarendon and Northampton) to heighten moral contrast and to stage the martyr‑bishop vs. tyrant‑king drama; the order of events serves the exemplum.

• Howden’s annalistic framework forces him to situate embassies, quarrels, reconciliations, excommunications, and royal journeys in a year‑by‑year sequence, which modern historians can cross‑check against dated letters and papal registers. Even when his interpretation is tendentious, the scaffolding of dates and procedural steps is often more reliable.

Attitude and authorial stance

• The Becket hagiographers write from within a cause: they argue the case for Becket’s sanctity and for ecclesiastical liberties, so they consistently polarise motives and outcomes.

• Howden is still partisan (he is no less a royal clerk for being critical at times), but his prose is plainer, his authorial “I” less intrusive, and he sometimes records material that reflects badly on royal policy. That relative restraint, plus his heavy use of documents, has given him the reputation of an “administrative” or “civil service” historian whose factual scaffolding can usually be trusted even when his judgments cannot.

How historians use them together

• For reconstructing the political and legal mechanics of the Becket conflict—what was agreed at Clarendon, how the exile worked, what papal mandates said—historians typically start from letters, papal registers, and chronicles like Howden, then read the vitae against that framework.

• For reconstructing how Becket was remembered, canonised, and turned into a symbol of episcopal liberty, they privilege the vitae and miracle collections, recognising that their “inaccuracies” about events are precisely what make them accurate evidence for the construction of Becket’s sanctity.

References The Cult of Thomas Becket — Website Review of Kay Brainerd Slocum: The Cult of Thomas Becket. History and Historiography through Eight Centuries (reviewed by Katherine Harvey)

Time, Change and History in Herbert of Bosham's Historia (Chapter 6) - Herbert of Bosham

John Howden (bishop) - Wikipedia