The Becket Casket
Unknown, Limoges · about 1180 to 1190
A small house-shaped box of gilded copper covered in brilliant blue enamel tells the story of the most famous murder in medieval England. On the front, four knights with drawn swords attack Archbishop Thomas Becket at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral while a monk raises his hands in horror. Above, on the sloping lid, Becket is laid in his tomb and then lifted to heaven by angels. The scene on the end panels shows a figure that may be Becket at prayer. The whole is crowned by a crest pierced with keyholes and decorated with a row of studded roundels.
The casket was made in Limoges in central France, the great centre of enamel work in medieval Europe, within twenty years of the murder in 1170 and perhaps within ten. It is the largest and earliest of some fifty surviving Becket reliquaries from the Limoges workshops. Look at the technique: the copper was hollowed out in cells, filled with powdered glass in blue, turquoise, green, red and white, fired, polished and gilded, and the faces and hands were then engraved into the metal and left bright. The vivid blue background against gold was a Limoges signature.
Such boxes held relics, and this one may have contained a fragment of Becket's bloodstained clothing sent abroad soon after his canonisation in 1173. It was in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth for nearly three centuries, and when it was sold in 1996 there was a public campaign to keep it in Britain. The museum bought it the following year with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The killers' swords and the falling archbishop are as clear today as when a pilgrim first saw them.
Did You Know? Becket's tomb at Canterbury was destroyed on Henry the Eighth's orders in 1538, so this small enamelled box is one of the earliest surviving images of the saint's murder.
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