1 April 2025

There are no relics of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Various locations in the Cathedral are associated with him in particular the place where he was slain, his first resting place in the crypt and his shrine behind the High Altar. Nothing remains of the shrine but a lit candle.

Curiously, in the nearby Roman Catholic Church of St. Thomas, there are two relics of the saint. The one is a finger bone and the other is a piece of his vestment. They are displayed in a beautiful reliquary. Nearby, there are relics of another saint – Archbishop Oscar Romero’s alb and colourful stole.

Oscar Romero was shot whilst celebrating the Sacrament in San Salvador on 24 March 1980. He is one of our most recent saints, canonised by Pope Francis in 2018. His last words were reputedly, ‘May God have mercy on the assassin.’

Shortly after the  murder of St. Thomas Becket, miraculous things began to happen and people began to make their pilgrimage to Canterbury. At the Reformation, the shrine was destroyed and King Henry VIII forbade any reference to be made to the saint.

Afterall, Becket had stood up to King Henry II and the dictatorial King with the six wives did not want to plant ideas of insubordination in the minds of the clergy. His feast day was only restored to the Calendar in the twentieth century after Pope John Paul and Archbishop Runcie knelt to pray at the place of his martyrdom.

One of the most interesting pieces of art in the Cathedral is some surviving medieval stained glass. It depicts some pilgrims on the way to Canterbury and venerating Becket’s shrine. It is the earliest evidence we have to validate the cast of characters who are celebrated in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales!