ST. Thomas à Becket and English Identity in the South English Legendary

Abstract

The legend of St. Thomas a Becket in the Middle English South English Legendary offers succinct reflection on the ongoing debates about the validity or possibility of talking about perceptions of the nation or expressions of national identity in the Middle Ages. As a vernacular work featuring the process of Englishing, the South English Legendary positions itself in the tradition of anti-Norman/foreign discourse and embeds its national impulses in the substantial proportion of English saints amidst the frame of saints' lives and events of the church. The climactic inclusion of the long legend of St. Thomas Becket not only addresses the tension and intersection of national and religious identities but also exposes the implications of Englishness and foreignness by reconfiguring a complex English identity beyond the rigid ethnic divide. While both Becket and Henry testify to the fact that the idea of Englishness is subject to change and redefinition, the fatal conflict between king and archbishop maps out different conceptions of English identity that paradoxically conjoin to envision a multivalent configuration of the English nation. Moreover, the legend's valorization of the element of foreignness in the positive accounts of the French king and the Roman pope promises the imagination of a progressive national identity transcending stiff xenophobia. The legend of St. Thomas Becket thus proves to be a double narrative of English identity, for it reinvests the tradition of Englishness with potential inclusiveness and dramatizes the growing sense of a new English nation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.