its first appearance in writing, but that it was an extract copied out of some previously existing work. Such a legend is perhaps more likely to have been invented in Palestine than in Europe. Its invention at a date so near the lifetime of its subject, and its unquestioned acceptance during more than five hundred years, are curious tokens of the extent to which the imaginations of men, alike in east and west, were fired by the character and career of Thomas of London.
[The primary Latin authorities for the life of Thomas are the biographies by William of Canterbury, John of Salisbury, Alan of Tewkesbury, Edward Grim, William FitzStephen, Herbert of Bosham, and two anonymous writers (one of whom was formerly, but without sufficient evidence, called Roger of Pontigny, while the other was styled Anonymous Lambethensis), several shorter pieces of various kinds, and a vast collection of letters; all these have been published, and the letters arranged in chronological order, by the Rev. J. C. Robertson and Dr. J. B. Sheppard, in seven volumes of Materials for the History of Archbishop Becket (Rolls Ser.), which have entirely superseded the edition of Dr. J. A. Giles (S. Thomas Cantuariensis, 8 vols. 1845). The Vie de St. Thomas, in French verse, by Garnier de Pont Sainte-Maxence (ed. C. Hippeau), is also contemporary. The Icelandic Thomas Saga Erkibyskups is a fourteenth-century compilation based on earlier materials, especially on two twelfth-century lives, now lost, by Benedict of Peterborough and Robert of Cricklade. On the authors, dates of composition, and value of all these, see the prefaces of Canon Robertson to his Materials, vols. i–iv., that of Mr. E. Magnusson to his edition of Thomas Saga (Rolls Ser.), vol. ii., and Mr. Radford's appendix to his Thomas of London (see below). Gervase of Canterbury and Ralph de Diceto (Rolls Ser.) were also contemporaries, and supply a few details and dates. The later literature of the subject is overwhelming in quantity, but most of it is of little historical worth. A composite biography of St. Thomas, made up of extracts from four of the earlier lives, was put together in 1198–9. This was edited by Christian Wolf (Lupus), printed at Brussels in 1682, and reprinted in Robertson's Materials, vol. iv. It is usually called the Second Quadrilogus. The First Quadrilogus—so called because first printed—seems to have been compiled in the thirteenth century, and was printed in Paris in 1495. From this Dr. Giles reprinted in his second volume the legend of Thomas's ‘Saracen’ mother. This legend occurs, in almost exactly the same words, in some late manuscripts of the life by Grim (from one of which it is printed in Robertson's Materials, vol. ii.), in the chronicle known as John Brompton's (Twysden's Decem Scriptores, cols. 1052–5), and in Harleian MS. 978, of which Mr. C. L. Kingsford has given a full account in the introduction to his edition of the Song of Lewes (Clarendon Press Ser. 1890). The modern works dealing with Thomas's life as a whole are F. J. Buss's Der heilige Thomas, 1856; J. Morris's Life and Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, 1859; 2nd edit., much enlarged, 1885; J. C. Robertson's Becket, a Biography, 1859; Hook's Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. ii. 1862; R. A. Thompson's Thomas Becket, Martyr Patriot, 1889. Of these Canon Morris's book, in its later form, is by far the best. The history of Thomas of London before his Consecration has been worked out by the Rev. L. B. Radford (Cambridge Historical Essays, No. vii., Prince Consort Dissertation, 1894). The fourth volume of R. H. Froude's Remains, 1839, contains a History of the Contest between Thomas Becket and Henry II, carefully compiled from such materials as were then accessible, i.e. the Quadrilogus and a comparatively small collection of letters, of which Froude was the first to attempt a chronological arrangement and a systematic use. Thomas's last days, death, and posthumous history are dealt with in Dean Stanley's Memorials of Canterbury Cathedral. There is an essay on St. Thomas of Canterbury and his Biographers in Freeman's Historical Essays, 1st ser. Freeman's articles on the Life and Times of Thomas Becket, in the Contemporary Review, 1878, were called forth by those published under the same title by J. A. Froude in the Nineteenth Century, 1877. These latter were reprinted, with modifications, in Froude's Short Studies, vol. iv. On the constitutional and legal aspects of the strife between Thomas and Henry, see Stubbs's Constitutional Hist. vol. i., Pollock and Maitland's Hist. of English Law, i. 430–40, and Professor Maitland's article on Henry II and the Criminous Clerks, in English Historical Review, April 1892. The controversy as to the fate of the relics is summed up in Canon Morris's pamphlet on the Relics of St. Thomas (Canterbury, 1888). An article by Mr. F. J. Baigent, in the Journal of the Archæological Association, vol. x. (1855), on the Martyrdom of St. Thomas, &c., contains descriptions of some of the few remaining English mediæval pictures of the saint, with reproductions of two of them, and of his archiepiscopal seal, the latter from an engraving in J. G. Nichols's Pilgrimages of Erasmus. Other pictures (thirteenth century) of Thomas are reproduced in Archæologia, vol. xxiii., in the Rev. W. H. Hutton's St. Thomas of Canterbury (English Hist. from Contemporary Writers, 1889), and in Green's Short History, illustrated edition, vol. i. The best, as well as the earliest, extant English representation of the martyrdom is an illumination in fol. 32 of Harleian MS. 5102 (British Museum), a Psalter written in Normandy and illustrated by an English hand early in the thirteenth century. The Monreale mosaic is reproduced in Gravina's Il Duomo di Monreale (Palermo, 1859), pl. 14 D. St. Thomas of Canterbury is the subject of a dramatic poem
