‘The Becket dispute’ is an appropriate name for the crisis which dominated relations between the Church and the Crown in England between 1163 and 1170, because it was Becket himself who gave it its unity. Clearly identifiable political issues were involved, certainly, but personalities drove events and gave them their shape. Thomas's biographers make little attempt to distinguish the political from the personal. Although, as we have seen, many writers provide incisive analyses of the issues at stake, this is seldom divorced from the theme of Thomas's sanctity, or parallels with earlier exemplars. Some of the most impressive sections of the Lives, in terms of both detailed reporting and elaborate reflection, concern these occasions where the political and the personal came into contact most closely: the various public encounters between Thomas and his opponents from Westminster in October 1163 to Montmartre in November 1169. These were events of great moment in the dispute, but they also served to develop the impression of Thomas as a stubborn and arrogant recalcitrant in the eyes of his contemporary critics, or as an embattled defender of truth and justice to his posthumous biographers.

In the Lives these confrontations are often presented as trials in which Thomas and his cause were proved, but, more generally, his life from his consecration onwards is characterized as a test of endurance in which he was purified and justified.