Birds, Beasts and Becket: Falconry and Hawking in the Lives And Miracles of St Thomas Becket

In the late twelfth century, the practice of hawking and falconry was symbolically ambiguous, associated powerfully with the secular life yet also open to mystical interpretation. This paper suggests that the authors of St Thomas Becket’s miracle collections, as well as his contemporary biographers, appropriated this ambiguity as a means of reconciling some of the contradictions of Becket’s career. Henry II was himself an avid enthusiast for hunting with birds, and records show a marked increase in the number of transactions involving birds of prey, and the number of falconers employed to handle them, during his reign (1154–1189).