When Henry II was king of England in the 1100s, he began to curb the clergy’s power and pull away from the Pope’s influence and Rome’s. He held a conference called the Constitutions of Clarendon on 16 articles that set forth these restrictions on the church. He got all the English clergy to agree except one: The Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket. Archbishop Becket and the king had been compatriots until this time, and Becket hid in France. King Henry played nice for a while, but on November 30, 1170, Becket crossed the English Channel only to be assassinated by Henry’s henchmen four weeks later. Annual pilgrimages to Becket’s grave are the setting for Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and an Oscar-award-winning movie starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton.
