Life of Saint Thomas
A life of Thomas Becket by a clerk who was standing beside him in Canterbury cathedral on 29 December 1170 and was wounded by the first blow. Its account of the murder is that of an eyewitness.
Edward Grim tells the murder in the third person but identifies himself in it: the first sword stroke, he says, cut the arm of “the writer”, who had stayed with the archbishop and held him when the monks and other clerks fled. The chronicler Roger of Hoveden also names the wounded clerk as Edward Grim.
He wrote as a devoted admirer of a man already venerated as a martyr, and his narrative is shaped to show Thomas Becket dying like Christ, with the words of the Passion in his mouth. The sequence of events he gives, and the words exchanged, are those of someone who was within arm’s reach.
Cited in
- 29 December 1170, firm date