Undergraduate students of the Becket conflict will be familiar with an examination question of this kind: ‘“The Becket conflict was primarily a clash of personalities”. Discuss.’ The word ‘personalities’ may be replaced by ‘jurisdictions’ or even ‘ideologies’, but the question remains essentially the same: What was the Becket dispute about? A thoughtful answer will usually acknowledge the participation of all these elements in the dispute to varying degrees, and might also discuss the role of Canterbury rights. Such a question recurs because no matter how many times it is asked, a definitive answer will never be given. But a question much less frequently asked is: What did the participants in the Becket dispute think it was about? That this question is not asked more often is surprising, first, in that there is a wealth of material to draw on from letters written in the thick of it, and from posthumous reflection on the dispute in the Lives, but also in that a central feature of the dispute was the very fact that its participants disagreed as to what the dispute was about.

In many ways, of course, the twelfth-century perspective is more limited than ours. It was less easy for contemporaries to place the dispute within the context of the legal and administrative developments of the Angevin era, or the simultaneous expansion of papal power. The king's refusal of the kiss of peace to his archbishop or his usurpation of Canterbury's right to crown a king seem more trivial to us.