The Becket Leaves consist of four double-sided pages with scenes from the life of Thomas Becket, accompanied by rhyming French couplets telling the story of the conflict between Becket and Henry II.  The rest of the manuscript, which dates to the thirteenth century, has been lost, and the pages are not all sequential.  From what I've seen, the leaves seem to have been appreciated mostly for their art, not for what they say.  Until now.
 

No one knows for sure who wrote the Becket Leaves, but the strongest candidate for authorship is Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Albans.  His handwriting is known from other books, and it has been determined that he didn't personally write the text in the surviving copy of the Becket Leaves, but their style, with pictures across the tops of the pages, is similar to other lives of saints that he is known to have composed.  Also, there are a couple of medieval references to an illustrated book on Becket made by Matthew Paris.  The records of St. Albans abbey praise Matthew who "wrote and most elegantly illustrated the Lives of ... the archbishops of Canterbury Thomas and Edmund."  A personal memorandum jotted in a book that Matthew Paris himself owned notes that the Countess of Arundel had the book on St. Thomas the Martyr which "transtuli et protraxi" - apparently, "I translated and designed."  The copy of the Becket Leaves that we have may be a copy made from his design.
 

It started when I had to read parts of Victor Turner's work on pilgrimages for my class on anthropological theory.  He kept mentioning Canterbury as a popular destination, and I started to think about it.  I had always been fascinated by the drama of the Becket story, and I'd gone through a period my freshman year of college when I read everything I could find on him.  Now I found my interest returning.

I had seen the pictures from the Becket Leaves before, but I had never really known what the leaves were.  Then I discovered that there was a book called, appropriately enough, The Becket Leaves, which contained color reproductions of the pages.  However, there was no translation or even transcription of the text, and while I was willing to tackle the Old French, I couldn't make out what the cramped medieval writing said.  The "Suggestions for Further Reading" in the back of the book listed Fragments d'une vie de Saint Thomas de Cantorbéry and said, "This remains the only edition of the French verse text that appears on the Becket Leaves."  Although the book had been published in 1885, I managed to track down a reprint edition in the local college library.  And, since my searches had turned up no evidence that an English translation of the text even existed, I decided to do my own.

I'll admit that I've never officially studied Old French and I probably don't have any of the qualifications a professional translator would have.  However, I do have a talent for languages, a good knowledge of modern French, and a lexicon of Old French.  My translation may not be perfect, but I'm satisfied that the English matches the original as closely as possible.  The captions for the pictures, which are in Latin in the original, were a little more trouble.  I hadn't studied Latin for six or seven years and was pretty rusty.  With help from my Latin dictionary, though, I was able to produce loose translations.

My reason for devoting a web page to such an obscure topic was the chance, however slim, that someone else might be looking for the Becket Leaves, and that person might not have access to a copy of the text, or might not be able to read what it said.  So here it is; I'm sharing it with the world.