Thomas Becket's murder is one of the most thoroughly documented political killings of the entire medieval period, recorded by multiple eyewitnesses including Edward Grim, a clerk who was present in the cathedral and was himself wounded trying to shield the archbishop, giving this entry a level of contemporary corroboration for its underlying event that few others in this register can match. Becket, having clashed repeatedly with Henry II over the rights and independence of the Church, was confronted by four knights who had taken the king's exasperated words, said in a fit of anger rather than as a formal order, as licence to act. They cut him down inside his own cathedral on 29 December 1170, a sacrilege so severe by the standards of the age that it produced an immediate and overwhelming public reaction across Christian Europe.
Becket was canonised within three years of his death, and Canterbury rapidly became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in England, a status later given its own permanent place in English literature through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. His reported ghost is most consistently seen near the site of his former tomb in the cathedral's eastern crypt, appearing in full archbishop's regalia, a sighting reported with particular frequency on 29 December, the anniversary of his murder, in keeping with this register's recurring pattern of anniversary-specific hauntings tied to a precisely dated violent death.
More unusually, Becket's ghost is also credited with an entirely separate haunting: tradition holds that his was the first apparition ever reported at the Tower of London, seen there in 1241, some seventy-one years after his death and long before the Tower's own now-extensive roster of royal ghosts, recorded at length elsewhere in this register, had begun to accumulate. Whether any genuine connection between Becket and the Tower explains this early sighting, beyond his general status as England's most famous murdered churchman, is not addressed in the sources consulted for this entry, but it gives Becket the distinction of being one of the very few figures in this entire register reported haunting two entirely separate and equally significant historic sites.
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