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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Identifiable, discrete “anachronisms” in the strict sense (e.g. use of obviously later institutions, phrases or objects) are not a central theme in modern scholarship on the Becket vitae, and you will not find set-piece lists like those available for, say, the Passio Perpetuae or some Carolingian saints’ lives. Nonetheless, the 1170s Becket dossier contains several narrative and conceptual moves that are anachronistic either relative to the historical Becket or relative to the juridical‑political configurations of the 1160s, and these can be framed as “examples” for teaching purposes.
Below are seven such examples, formulated for an academic audience and meant as prompts for closer primary-source work (William of Canterbury, Benedict of Peterborough, Herbert of Bosham, John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, the two later “quadrilogues,” etc.) rather than as a definitive taxonomy.
1. Retrojection of a fully formed “liberties of the Church” ideology
Many vitae cast Becket from the outset as the self-conscious champion of a coherent, almost programmatic set of “liberties of the Church,” in a way that mirrors the more elaborated ecclesiologies of the later 12th and even 13th centuries rather than the messy, ad hoc negotiations of the 1160s. In legal‑historical terms this projects back onto the 1163–70 conflict the kind of conceptual clarity later generated in canonistic debates and conciliar rhetoric. The result is anachronistic both to Becket’s own recorded arguments in the pre‑Angevin reform context and to the more tentative, compromise‑ridden language of contemporary royal and papal documents about jurisdiction. For students of genre, this reveals how hagiography assimilates a recent event to a familiar template of the episcopus libertatum ecclesiae defensor known from earlier Gregorian narratives.
2. Transposition of Becket into a pre‑scripted martyr‑bishop typology
The vitae routinely slot Becket into a typology whose classical instances are figures like Thomas of Canterbury’s near‑namesake Thomas of Verona, or, more canonically, Ambrose and Cyprian: a bishop who stands solus contra regem and dies rather than concede sacramental or jurisdictional compromise. This typology belongs to a long Christian memory of martyr‑bishops, but its imposition on the complex political story of 1164–70 is historically distorting. The back‑projection of a stable “martyr‑bishop against a persecuting prince” schema tends to homogenise Henry II with genuinely persecuting emperors of Late Antiquity and to erase the specifically Angevin logics of kingship, itinerant justice, and royal lordship over clerks. In this sense the vitae commit a kind of typological anachronism, interpreting a very recent Angevin controversy in the idiom of late antique persecution narratives.
3. Idealised monastic/ascetic Becket and the erasure of his administrative past
Several hagiographers sharply juxtapose a worldly, courtly Becket with an almost instantaneously perfected ascetic once he becomes archbishop, sometimes exaggerating his withdrawal into monastic habits, vigils, flagellation, and manual service of the poor in ways that align more closely with older Benedictine and Cistercian ideals than with what we can reconstruct of a 1160s archbishop’s daily routine. The strong alignment of Becket’s self‑presentation with contemporary ascetic ideals risks anachronistically importing monastic stereotypes into the life of a secular metropolitan with a large judicial and administrative apparatus. For historians, this is a reminder that “conversion” topoi in the vitae are less a record of practice than of what late 12th‑century ecclesiastical readers thought sanctity ought to look like.
4. Legal and procedural simplification of the Clarendon and Northampton crises
Narrative accounts of the councils of Clarendon (1164) and Northampton regularly compress complex procedural wrangling, written instruments, and back‑channel negotiations into single, dramatic confrontations: king versus bishop, right versus wrong. The retrojected clarity of the charges against Becket and the staged, almost theatrical opposition between royal “law” and ecclesiastical “liberty” obscure the hybrid procedural landscape in which customary, feudal, and written norms interacted. From the perspective of legal history, this is a form of anachronism: the hagiographers write as if there were already a well‑defined and mutually exclusive opposition between “secular” and “ecclesiastical” fora, closer to later decretalist abstractions than to the mid‑1160s practice of mixed and negotiated jurisdiction.
5. Miracles that presuppose a fully developed, post‑1173 cultic infrastructure
Miracle collections associated with Becket often present as if the fully elaborated cult—relics, shrines, established pilgrimage routes, liturgical observances—sprang up almost immediately and in a complete form around the martyr’s tomb. Yet archaeological, liturgical, and narrative evidence shows a process of development and institutionalisation over the 1170s and 1180s, including experimentation with liturgical formularies and the gradual spread of Becket’s feast through different diocesan calendars. Treating a later, stabilised cultic infrastructure as present in nuce at the moment of Becket’s martyrdom is anachronistic in terms of both institutional and devotional history, even if it is hagiographically functional: the saint’s virtus is shown as instantly efficacious and universally recognised.[stjohnscollegelibraryoxford]
6. Universalising Becket’s significance beyond the immediate Anglo‑Angevin context
By the time the cult was fully established, Becket was celebrated far beyond England, and later accounts can make it appear as though his martyrdom was immediately perceived as an event of universal ecclesial significance, on a par with the great patristic martyrs of orthodoxy. Modern work on the cultus shows that the international diffusion of Becket’s cult—through relic translation, diplomatic networks, and liturgy—was rapid but still a process over several decades. Casting Becket from the start as a saint of the whole Latin Church, rather than as initially the focal point of a more local Canterbury and Anglo‑Norman devotional landscape, amounts to a temporal compression that anachronistically projects later universality back into the very first narrative stratum.academia+1
7. Reading Becket through later confessional and political lenses
Already in late medieval and especially early modern reception, Becket’s vitae were re‑read, excerpted, and sometimes re‑written to serve new confessional agendas, presenting him, for example, as a proto‑Tridentine defender of papal monarchy or, conversely, as a traitorous ecclesiastical agitator in Protestant polemic. When those re‑readings seep back into editorial choices or popular presentations of the 12th‑century vitae, they introduce a second‑order anachronism: the 12th‑century texts are tacitly interpreted as if they already participated in the confessional binaries of the 16th century. For an academic audience, this is a useful case of how the historiography and transmission of hagiography can overlay later categories onto the original narratives, complicating the task of identifying anachronism purely within the 12th‑century horizon.reviews.history.ac+1
For a seminar or paper, you could take each of these as a heading and juxtapose one of the major vitae (e.g. William of Canterbury) with near‑contemporary documentary or annalistic material in order to show, in a concrete way, how hagiographical narrative time diverges from juridical and political time.etheses.bham+1
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)
Appendix: Note on Primary Sources - Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/13271/13/Connolly2023PhD.pdf
There’s the Rub: Thomas Becket in Medieval Manuscripts – St John's College Library, Oxford
Book | Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint | ID: 861f3796-3786-4ea5-8712-e463c5c88a9f | Hyku
Cyprian - Wikipedia
Ambrose - Wikipedia
Time, Change and History in Herbert of Bosham's Historia (Chapter 6) - Herbert of Bosham
John Howden (bishop) - Wikipedia
The Cult of Thomas Becket - Google Books
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