Notwithstanding Lord Campbell's researches, and the admirable word-painting of Sir Francis Palgrave, we can no more recognise the chancellor, assisted by the masters in chancery, sitting in the Witteneagemot, as "law lords," than modern travellers can discern Jove and his attendant deities assembled on mount Olympus.
To begin, then, with Lord Campbell's Life of Thomas à Becket, first in point of eminence of the chancellors after the Conquest, respecting whose career and acts we possess most authentic and minute information. In the account of his parentage and birth in the city of London, we are not told that the locality of the house in which he was born is to this day very accurately marked by the hall of the Mercers' company in Cheapside, once the site of a hospital dedicated to his memory:—on that spot stood his paternal home, as we know from the will of Agnes, the martyr's sister; his father, Gilbert à Becket, was a parishioner of St. Mary Colechurch; and in the font of that church the future chancellor was baptized, as tradition asserted St. Edmund the king and martyr had been before him.
Speaking of the council of Northampton, by which Becket was sentenced, Lord Campbell remarks "it lasted a good many days, the court sitting on Sundays as well as week-days." Not so many days. That assembly was opened on Tuesday the 13th of October, 1164, and on the evening of Tuesday the 20th, at the latest, the chancellor fled, in disguise, to Sandwich[1], whence he sailed for Gravelines, landing there on the 2nd of November; but if the latter date be correct, his sentence must have been given on Sunday the 18th of October, and such is the opinion of Dr. Lingard. However, the dates of the Quadrilogus, with which Fitz-Stephen here agrees, are inconsistent; yet under any circumstances the council did not last more than a week, and its sittings, perhaps, did not exceed five days; so the laborious Sundays of Lord Campbell's narrative are reduced to one. This vagueness of statement is a remarkable feature of the author's style, and cannot be sufficiently reprehended. Another instance of it is the observation, that the archbishop suffered in the fifty-third year of his age; yet according to the dates supplied by Lord Campbell, he was born in 1119, and slain on the 29th of December, 1170, and therefore could not have been in more than his fifty-first year. But his lordship's dates are, in general, as loosely ascertained as his facts; thus he ascribes the coronation of King Henry the younger to the year 1169, whereas it took place on the 14th of June, 1170; and in the same manner refers the reconciliatory interview between Henry and Becket to "a meadow near the town of Fereitville, on the borders of Touraine." Freteval is the proper orthography of the name, but that is unimportant, since it was not there, but at Mont-Louis, between Amboise and Tours, that the king met the archbishop. Lord Campbell must have been thinking of the treaty of Freteval between Henry and Louis of
- ↑ Taking a circuitous route, by Lincoln and Boston.
