Ever since the evening of 29 December 1170 perceptions of Thomas Becket's life have been coloured by his image in death. No matter how vivid or significant are the pictures we have of Thomas in his various roles – as the king's servant, archbishop, exile – the image of the murder victim and triumphant saint loom over them. Thomas the martyr can detract from Thomas the chancellor and archbishop and can distort our perception of his life. But this is understandable if we consider the extraordinary nature of his death. The familiarity of the image of Thomas's murder has dimmed the shock of the event. In reading the biographers' accounts we need to be reminded that this was the leader of the English Church at the height of his fame, murdered in his own cathedral by agents of the king in a place and time where such martyrs must have seemed an exotic reminder of a distant past. For the five biographers who witnessed it – John, Edward Grim, Benedict, William of Canterbury and William Fitzstephen – no occurrence in their lives could have compared, and for those who did not witness it with their own eyes, it still represented the most momentous event of their age.

Benedict's work deals only with the murder and its aftermath, and Alan does not cover it. The treatment of the murder is most markedly different from what went before in Grim's Life, where he provides both detailed description and subtle reflection not found elsewhere in his work.