The first reaction to Thomas Becket's murder on 29 December 1170 was shock, but well before the shock had faded another emotion had come to the fore: the desire to make sense of the most remarkable episode in recent history. ‘Where shall I begin?’, wrote John of Salisbury to a friend in its immediate aftermath. ‘One can hardly speak for the abundant, overflowing, tide of the theme.’ Around the same time another of Thomas's clerks, Herbert of Bosham, began his report, ‘In writing this I stopped and hesitated, wondering what kind of expression I could use to bring before you the horrifying and savage murder of the Lord's anointed.’ Both writers are employing a literary convention, but they also express certain truths. Thomas's life and death presented a new theme and posed new questions: What did the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury in his own cathedral by agents of the king mean? If Thomas was a saint, as strikingly suggested by the nature of his death and his prodigious posthumous miracles, how was his controversial life to be explained? And if Thomas was the greatest saint of his time, what was his place in Christian history? This theme found expression in literary productions as remarkable for their historical and literary value as they are for their volume. An unusually large number of biographical works about Thomas were written in the twelfth century, though the exact number is difficult to gauge: some are lost, including one written by a woman; others survive in fragmentary form; a few do not easily fit any literary category.