The life and martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket . walls of the choiraisles, the eastern transepts with their beautifultowers, and the chapels of St. Andrew and St. the grand crypt under the choir, built between1096 and 1100 by Prior Ernulf, when St. Anselmwas Archbishop, and the sculptures of its piers andcapitals, added between 1135 and 1165, remainsubstantially what they were when St. Thomas wasArchbishop. I THE HEAD OF ST. THOMAS, 597 NOTE M (page 475). THE HEAD OF ST. THOMAS. Mr. Gough Nichols in his Erasmus (p. 118) refersto a sketch of the coffer containing the relics ofSt. Thom
The life and martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket . walls of the choiraisles, the eastern transepts with their beautifultowers, and the chapels of St. Andrew and St. the grand crypt under the choir, built between1096 and 1100 by Prior Ernulf, when St. Anselmwas Archbishop, and the sculptures of its piers andcapitals, added between 1135 and 1165, remainsubstantially what they were when St. Thomas wasArchbishop. I THE HEAD OF ST. THOMAS, 597 NOTE M (page 475). THE HEAD OF ST. THOMAS. Mr. Gough Nichols in his Erasmus (p. 118) refersto a sketch of the coffer containing the relics ofSt. Thomas, given on the same page of the CottonianMS. (Tib. E. viii. fol. 269) as the sketch of the shrinealready given {Supra, p. 478). He reproduces thesketch very unfaithfully, and describes it as if thehead of the Saint had been exhibited on a squaretable, together with bones. This error is very properly corrected by DeanStanley (p. 232), who rightly calls it, not a table,but the identical iron chest deposited by Langtonwithin the golden The inscription, which was injured by the Cottonianfire, is thus restored by Dean Stanley from Dugdale. This chest of iron contained the hones of Thomas Beckef,skull and all, ii>ith the ivounde of his death and the pececut out of his skull laid in the same wound. Dean Stanley further says (p. 254), that inHenry time the reputed skull in thegolden Head was treated as an imposture, fromits being so much larger than the portion that wasfound in the shrine with the rest of the , in truth, no such assertion was made of the 598 OF CANTERBURY. skull or of the crown in the golden head. Thepassage from the Royal Declaration of 1539 isgiven by Mr. Albert Way in his note to DeanStanleys work (p. 285), that Beckets head almostwhole was found with the rest of the bones closedwithin the shrine, and that there was in that churcha great skull of another head, but much greater bythree quarter parts than that part which was lack
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