On 29 December 1170, Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury was brutally murdered in his cathedral by four knights from the household of his former friend and patron, King Henry II. The horror that the killing inspired and the miraculous cures performed at Thomas's tomb transfigured him into one of the most popular saints in Western Christendom, and Canterbury became one of the greatest pilgrim shrines in the West.

Yet these were unexpected results. Thomas's extraordinary career had been, and remains, controversial. The transformation of a handsome, attractive, and worldly courtier into a zealous prelate, a bitter exile and finally a martyr was for many hard to understand. In this brilliant new biography, based on the original sources and informed by the most recent scholarship, Frank Barlow reconstructs Thomas's physical environment and entourage at various stages of his career, exploring the nuances and irregularities in the story that have been ignored in other studies.

Frank Barlow is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.

"Every serious student of twelfth-century English history will find occasion to use this book and will be grateful for Barlow's painstaking labor in illuminating details of the Becket controversy."—Richard Fraher, Speculum

"[A] superb book. . . . The career of Thomas Becket is presented with a freshness that one would not have thought possible."—London Review of Books

"A comprehensive biography of Becket that dazzles from its complexity and the dexterous way it weighs and juggles each twelfth-century account over and against the others. . . . A standard for future Becket studies."—W. Trent Foley, Journal of Religion