Thomas Becket’s First Miracles: Oral Stories and the Origins of Medieval Saints’ Cults

Constructing a chronology of the growth of a medieval cult tends to be quite difficult.  How a cult began is often the murkiest subject of all.   The beginnings of Thomas Becket’s cult, like many other medieval cults, are usually described simply as “spontaneous” or “popular,” but a careful examination of the late twelfth-century sources suggests that the engine behind the growth of Becket’s cult was the creation and exchange of oral stories of Becket’s dramatic martyrdom and his first miracles.  The circulation of one miracle story in particular, that of William, a priest from London, appears to have played a central role in the cult’s earliest development.  This paper will examine the impact of William of London’s story and what writers termed Thomas Becket’s “first days of miracles” more generally.  I will argue that even medieval contemporaries were not able to untangle all the oral threads that created medieval cults, and we must treat any accounts of “first” miracles very delicately.  On the other hand, it does seem clear that there were “first days of miracles” not just in Becket’s cult but in others, and that some stories could sweep through conversational networks very quickly, so playing a major role in the creation of a cult.  To sharpen our thinking about the historical beginnings of saints’ cults, I will suggest, we would do well to seek out evidence of the transmission of early miracle stories.